Chương 54: Chapter 53: A Way Out

Three of his men. Gone in the time it took to blink. Hunch had seen men move that fast before, but only when they were using higher Stratums of Internal Reinforcement. He had never seen anyone move with that kind of speed on basic Internal Reinforcement alone. And the girl was clearly using nothing else. One moment she had been screaming from the floor, and the next, the room had rearranged itself around a trio of corpses, as if they had simply always belonged in those positions. And now she hung there.

Mid-leap, blades aimed at his chest, utterly, impossibly still. He circled her once, slow, studying the angle of her arm, the set of her jaw, the way not even her hair moved in whatever wind should have been carrying her forward. Her eyes had gone half-lidded. Empty behind them. Wherever she was right now, it wasn't in this room with the rest of them. An Innate Ability, then.

"We need to deal with this wretch," Clam said, already circling wide to get behind her, sword raised like the answer to everything was simply cutting the problem into smaller pieces. Something about the suggestion sat wrong in Hunch's teeth, though not because the boy was mistaken. He'd built the Yenas name out of nothing. Out of the exact kind of dirt men like Clam had been born into and never once imagined climbing out of.

He could feel it in all of them lately, the way they watched him a half-second longer than they used to, the way their eyes lingered whenever talk turned to his new position with the Bastion. He was moving up. Getting a better post, a better life, and leaving the Yenas behind him. But he wasn't about to let everything he'd built be handed to one of these lazy idiots simply because he was gone. If another family was going to rise from the Yenas' ashes, it would rise from the ground.

Someone would build it with their own hands, struggle for it, bleed for it, like he had. Why should anyone have it easier when he hadn't? His life's work wasn't a chair to be passed around to whoever happened to be sitting closest when he left. He'd deal with that particular rot come morning, once this business with the girl was finished. A house built by one man didn't get to outlive him in someone else's hands. Not unless that someone had built something of their own first. But Clam wasn't wrong about the girl.

An Innate Ability was dangerous enough on its own, coupled with whatever smouldering hatred she'd been carrying for him, and it became the sort of problem a smart man didn't leave unfinished. He spread both hands. Fire split the air between his palms, hungry and orange, throwing everyone's shadow long across the walls.

"This," he said, savoring it, "is an opportunity." A few of the men whooped, already leaning in for the show.

"To see," he drew the flame in closer, almost gentle about it, "exactly how slow a person can be made to cook." The flame between his palms didn't so much extinguish as get erased, the orange light collapsing into a green so total it seemed to swallow the shadows along with it. Every candle in the room bent the same sickly color at once, the light holding there, wrong and unrelenting, like the whole world had been dipped in something poisonous and left to stay that way.

Hunch felt it before he understood it—a pressure lifting off the back of his skull that he hadn't known was there until it was gone. His Field. Gone. That means hers too— Hunch flinched back on pure reflex, and the motion alone saved most of his face.

He felt the wind of her blade rather than the bite of it, close enough to open a thin, stinging line along his cheekbone before she was already past him, blades still carrying every ounce of speed she'd been frozen with a heartbeat ago, then slammed into the wooden wall alongside the stairs. Her blades punched deep into the wood and stuck there, holding fast above her as the rest of her body crumpled onto the steps below. Hunch tried to reignite the air around him on pure reflex and found— Nothing.

Around him, the noise shifted—confused murmurs, someone swearing, someone else slapping their own palms together and getting nothing for it either. Nobody's Field was answering. Not his. Not one of theirs. Internal Reinforcement, when he checked, was still working exactly as it should. Just not the rest of it. For the first time in a long while, Hunch felt something close to real fear settle into his chest. The creak came first.

Directly above them, slow and deliberate, the groan of old floorboards bearing weight they hadn't been built to carry. Hunch went still. Around him, one by one, so did his men. His Field was dead the moment it left his body, so he couldn't gauge whatever this was. But he knew from the weight it exerted on the beams that it was strong.

"Oi." One of the men upstairs said. His voice was thick with sleep. A pause.

"... Who're you?" Nothing answered him. The voice simply stopped. The silence afterward was so complete that Hunch heard his own pulse in his ears. Steel hissed free of scabbards all around him, a dozen men finding their stances without needing to be told. Hunch pulled his dagger from the small of his back and held it low, close to his body. The heavy footsteps started toward the stairs. Unhurried. That was the part that crawled under his skin worst of all—whatever this was, it wasn't in any rush at all.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. Something dropped from the top of the staircase and rolled. It took Hunch a full second to understand he was looking at a head. His man's head, eyes still half-open, expression caught somewhere between confusion and a question he'd never get to finish asking, bouncing once off the unconscious girl's shoulder before coming to a stop against the toe of Hunch's boot.

Carved into the forehead, deep enough to have peeled the skin back in curling strips, one word. UP. Hunch didn't have time to make sense of it. The ceiling came apart above him in a shriek of splintering timber, and something enormous dropped through the wreckage and landed directly at his back. He turned and struck on pure reflex, dagger driving for the throat with the speed of thirty years of exactly this kind of moment— —and a single hand closed around his wrist and stopped it dead. He looked up.

It had been a woman once, maybe. Dark hair was the only piece of her that still read as ordinary. Everything beneath it had gone wrong in ways his mind kept trying and failing to file into shapes that made sense—skin gone thick and dark and studded in short, glistening spines, a full head taller than he stood, shoulders too broad for the doorway she'd have needed to walk through like a person.

Her mouth split wide across her whole face, wider than a mouth had any right to go, packed edge to edge with teeth built for exactly one purpose. She was smiling at him. Her other hand drove forward, and four black hooked claws punched clean through his stomach. The pain arrived a half-second behind the sight of it, and something hot and wrong came up his throat with his next breath. He was coughing blood before he understood he'd been opened.

She threw him aside like discarding something she'd already lost interest in, and he hit the floor hard enough to lose the room for a moment. Somewhere next to her, Clam screamed a battle cry and buried his sword in her back to the hilt. She turned toward him, still smiling. After that, Hunch mostly had the sounds. Steel. Meat.

Men he'd built his whole house out of, screaming his name like it might still mean something, like he could still do anything at all from where he lay bleeding out on his own floorboards, listening to every last one of them come apart. Then his eyes flicked up. Set into the wall right above his head, a low, unlatched window swung slightly in the cold night draft. A way out.

The Other crunched the last skull between his teeth. A wet, hollow snap echoed through the ruined hall as he casually spat a mouthful of ruined bone and hair aside. He was practically vibrating with the thrill of it. He liked the sound it made, he claimed." Oh, hoho. I've missed this," he laughed. Did you really have to take this form? Elma projected the thought, her mental voice flat and thoroughly unimpressed." Of course. I told you I missed it. Admit it, you do too." Elma just sighed.

The monstrous bulk of D-66 form began to melt away, rapidly compressing and reshaping back into her own, much smaller body. A thick cord of red sinew shot from between her shoulders, darting up through the shattered ceiling. It snatched her discarded clothes from the floor above, dragging the fabric down as she quickly re-dressed and adjusted the fit of her mask. We were unstoppable, the Other purred. D-66 layered with Internal Reinforcement? I want a rematch with Fenric right now.

Elma ignored him, walking to the base of the stairs where Jorm lay crumpled on the floorboards. She knelt beside her. Jorm's breathing was a ragged, wet rattle. Elma placed a hand flat against the girl's sternum. The pulse was dangerously sluggish. Fading. No. No, we need to take her somewhere— Hold your hand there, the Other instructed, all traces of amusement gone from his voice. Elma held her position and immediately severed her Mutual Negation.

The oppressive, sickly green tint vanished from the room, allowing the natural orange glow of the surviving lanterns to flood back into the shadows. Instantly, Elma felt a violent plunge in her internal reserves. Her LR gauge plummeted—two hundred thousand units per second. What is happening? I need to override her lattice, the Other said.

"You can do that?" Elma asked aloud, watching the terrifying drain on her energy.

"I thought Resonants couldn't operate under a foreign lattice." I can, provided I maintain physical contact. Suppressing a host's Lattice is incredibly costly. Thankfully, Jorm's isn't that strong.

"Whatever you're doing, do it fast," Elma said. Beneath Elma's palm, Jorm's deep lacerations slowly began to knit together. The awful rattle in her chest cleared, her heartbeat catching pace and finding a steady, rapid rhythm. It burned through a massive chunk of Elma's LR, but it worked. Jorm gasped, shooting upright in a blind panic. Elma was already standing several paces away, her back turned, facing the ruined doorway.

"Elma? How did you?" Jorm patted her chest frantically, feeling the unbroken skin beneath her clothes.

"What happened?" Elma let the silence stretch for a long moment.

"I thought friends were supposed to tell each other things," she finally said, her voice perfectly level. Jorm stared at the bloodstained floorboards. Her eyes grew glassy, and for a moment her lips trembled. She blinked hard, forcing the tears back, and her face went rigid.

"I'm sorry."

"We need to go," Elma said, ignoring her words. She kicked the discarded snake mask across the floor.

"Wear your mask." Jorm staggered to her feet. She reached up and yanked the real Gund free from the wall, then strapped the heavy blade across her back and pulled her mask over her face. She looked around the house.

"Where's Hunch?" Elma scanned the room. She checked the spot where she'd disemboweled the leader. Empty. A trail of blood led to the small window high in the wall. He'd escaped. A man with 100, 000 Will. It was a miracle Jorm had survived him at all.

"He escaped?" Jorm asked, seeing the bloody drag marks.

"I think he did," Elma said.

"Good." Jorm's voice turned cold.

"I'll deal with him myself."

"I can—""Myself." Jorm left no room for debate. They stepped out into the hallway. On the way to the exit, Elma kicked over a few unbroken lanterns, spilling oil across the floor. The flames caught almost immediately, spreading to the wooden walls. She glanced sideways at Jorm. The girl was adamant about killing this man. But statistically, he was fifty times stronger than Jorm. Elma calculated the odds and made a silent resolution: she was not going to let Jorm march into a suicide mission.

Outside, the streets weren't empty. A crowd of locals had gathered in the dirt, armed with torches, pitchforks, and makeshift clubs.

"Backup?" Elma asked, her Field humming to life.

"No," Jorm said quietly.

"They're… my neighbors." The mob stared, paralyzed by the sight of the two masked girls emerging from the house.

"Where's Hunch?" a man near the front demanded, his grip white-knuckled on a heavy pipe. Elma didn't answer. Jorm stepped forward. The roaring fire behind her cast flickering, warm light across the cold surface of her mask.

"The Yenas family is no more," Jorm announced into the dark. The crowd stood stunned into utter silence. Elma didn't give them time to process it. She grabbed Jorm by the collar. Pitch-black wings tore from the back of Elma's cloak, unfurling to their full wingspan. With a deafening downstroke, she launched them both high into the night sky, leaving the gasping crowd far below. Tournament registration closed tomorrow. They had too much to do.