Chương 16: 07-1: Hunt、Raven and Stranger

"What exactly are the Ravens?" I kept my voice low, barely above a whisper. Erina Eckhaus lifted her head, lips parting as if she were about to reveal some long-buried secret— But before a single syllable could escape, the night itself seemed to split open with a sound that had no business existing in our world. Fweeee—— Thin. Impossibly long. Eldritch. The whistle drove through the back of my neck like a needle of abyssal ice, shattering against my spine and sending tendrils of dread crawling down my vertebrae.

In the next heartbeat, Jessi slammed into me with the force of a coiled spring snapping loose.

"Get down!" I didn't even have time to process the command before her entire body knocked me sideways. Almost simultaneously, something black and vicious tore through the air where my head had been, burying itself in the carriage's wooden panel with the finality of a judge's gavel. Thunk. Not an arrow. A crossbow bolt. Worse—the iron tip gleamed with something dark and viscous in the firelight. The kind of sheen that promised a slow, agonizing death. Poison.

"Damn it," I cursed under my breath, drawing my sword in one fluid motion that sang against the leather sheath.

"Lucas! Kill the lights!"

"I—I'm already on it!" Lucas Ponti's voice cracked from somewhere near the carriage door. A heartbeat later, both mana lamps hanging from the eaves blinked out in unison. The carriage's polished surface—which had been throwing firelight around like an advertisement for 'please shoot here'—went dark, swallowed by what looked like dirty fog. Erina immediately clutched her holy seal, lips moving in rapid, whispered prayer.

A gossamer membrane of pale light, thin as pressed moonlight, sealed itself across the carriage's exterior. The second volley arrived before her ward had even finished settling. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Three bolts bit deep—one into rocky ground, one beside the wheel, and the third close enough to Bruce's saddle that our old horse threw his head back with an indignant snort that somehow managed to sound personally offended.

"Two on the left slope," Jessi said, half-crouched beside me with both daggers already drawn. Her voice was clipped, precise—the tone of someone cataloguing threats like items on a shopping list.

"At least three on the right. The whistler's hanging back." I shot her a sideways look.

"And you know this how, exactly?" She tugged one corner of her mouth up in a smile that was entirely too comfortable with the current situation.

"Because I've done more or less the same thing to people before."... Of course you have. Why did I even bother asking? Even in a life-or-death situation, this woman could state her criminal résumé with breathtaking casualness. Peak Jessi behavior.

"Erina, get inside the carriage."

"No." The refusal came immediately—soft, but carrying the kind of weight that suggested the conversation was over.

"They're here for me." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"I know that." I gritted my teeth.

"Which is exactly why you shouldn't be standing out here acting as a walking target." She opened her mouth to argue, but a third whistle cut through the darkness—closer this time, carrying an altogether more blasphemous urgency. This wasn't a warning anymore. This was the howl that preceded slaughter.

"Here they come!" Jessi's voice dropped to something that was barely human. From the stygian darkness on the left, a figure launched itself down the slope with the frenzied speed of something that had forgotten it was supposed to be mortal. I didn't think—just raised my blade and charged to meet him head-on. The attacker clearly hadn't expected me to be stupid enough to rush a downhill ambush. His short sword was only halfway raised when my blade crashed into his wrist with the sound of steel meeting bone. Clang!

The impact sent numbing shockwaves up my arm, but he had it infinitely worse—his weapon twisted completely out of alignment, useless. I was already pivoting for the killing blow when movement sliced into my peripheral vision from the right—another shadow cutting in from the edge of the firelight. Too fast. My body couldn't turn in time. But something else got there first. A lithe, frustratingly familiar silhouette peeled out of the flickering light like it had always been part of the shadows.

Footsteps that defied physics in their silence. In the next breath, she was already at the attacker's flank. Jessi. One flash of cruel silver. The man's wrist erupted in a geyser of crimson before his brain could catch up enough to scream.

"Hey, hey." Her voice was sing-song sweet, like a child asking for candy—while her dagger pressed with gentle precision against his exposed ribs.

"Ambushing people's camps in the dead of night? That's terribly rude, you know. Didn't your mother teach you proper etiquette?"

"That line sounds absolutely unhinged coming from you specifically," I shot back, using a wide sword sweep to force back the man on my left.

"That's just your bias talking, little young master." The words had barely left her lips when she suddenly threw herself at me again. Again?! Before I could even form the curse, a black bolt shrieked through the exact space she'd just vacated, burying itself in the tree behind us with a vicious thud. Her hand slammed down on my shoulder, pinning me low—and suddenly the distance between us was the kind that made the air feel different.

Close enough that I could smell the scent caught in her hair: cold wind, woodsmoke, and something underneath that I was absolutely not cataloguing right now.

"Don't get all sentimental just yet," she murmured, eyes half-lidded, voice dropping to barely above a whisper.

"The one on the right is the real headache."

"You have time to narrate in the middle of this?!"

"Mm-hmm." Her gaze flicked to my face with obvious amusement.

"You're blushing. It's very noticeable."

"Jessi."

"Alright, alright, I hear you." She laughed—actually laughed—rolled off me in one fluid motion, and dissolved back into the darkness. This woman is going to kill me. Not with a blade—with my own cardiovascular system giving up in sheer exasperation.

"Lucas!" I pulled back toward the front of the carriage.

"Can you trace the crossbowman?"

"I—I'll try!" Lucas was half-kneeling by the carriage door, his short staff trembling with roughly the same energy as his knees. He rattled off a string of incantation syllables at breakneck speed, and thin lines of pale violet light bloomed across the ground, racing outward along the trajectories of the bolts already fired. A muffled grunt echoed from the darkness on the right.

"Got one!" Lucas brightened for exactly one second before immediately ducking back down, arms over his head.

"But there are more!" Almost perfectly timed with his warning, a shadow vaulted up from behind the carriage. Not over it. Onto it—one foot on the rear wheel, using momentum to haul himself toward the roof, angling to drop straight down through the gap above the door. Erina went pale as parchment. The light on her holy seal flared white-hot. I spun to intercept—and the bastard I'd driven back earlier wrapped himself around my sword arm like a drowning man who'd found something to drag down with him.

He knew he couldn't win a straight fight, so he'd resorted to the desperate tactics of a rabid dog determined to take someone to hell with him.

"Let go!" I drove my knee into his gut. But that half-second of delay— The figure on the roof raised his crossbow. Aimed directly at Erina's heart. Time stretched like heated glass, each moment taking slightly longer than it should. I saw Erina bite her lower lip. I saw Lucas go chalk-white trying to redirect his spell. I saw Jessi—two steps away, two steps too far. I felt my sword arm locked in the grip of a man who'd already made peace with dying. And then.

From somewhere higher, farther, and infinitely more cyclopean than any mortal vantage point— A sound cut the night that belonged to no crossbow made by human hands. An arrow. Heavier. Straighter. Carrying the kind of inexorable intent that spoke of someone who had never, in their entire existence, missed what they were aiming for. Thwck. The figure on the roof jerked like a marionette whose strings had been cut by an invisible giant.

His chest caved inward—not much, just enough—and he looked down at his own throat with the bewildered expression of a man trying to process information that didn't make sense.