Chương 59: Ace the undying

Anyone watching would have said Ace was losing, and for most of the fight they'd have been right. She was covered in her own blood. That was the first thing, the thing that would have stopped a stranger's heart, a woman drenched red from a dozen wounds while the thing across from her had a few bruises on one cheek and nothing else.

The embermole was squat and black-skinned and built like something that had spent its life hitting rock, and its claws opened her every time they landed, deep into her stomach, across her forearm, along her ribs, and its claws landed often, because it was faster than her and stronger than her and better at this than her in every measurable way. The armor she'd worn hadn't survived the first minute.

A few strikes had torn it apart, and now it was just Ace and her iron-dust knuckles and the green light that would not stop pouring out of her. Because every time the mole opened her, the wound closed. That was the fight, once she'd stopped trying to fight it the mole's way. She couldn't out-hit the thing and she couldn't out-speed it, so she'd stopped trying, and settled into the one contest she could win, which was the ugliest possible one. Attrition. The mole cut her and she healed.

It cut her again and she healed again. Five strikes from it for every one from her, and every one of its five cost it a little stamina and did her damage she simply erased, and every one of her ones landed iron-dusted and runed on a body that was, slowly, starting to feel them. She was learning what her healing could do when she stopped rationing it, and the answer was frightening, and it was costing her something she was only beginning to understand. Her hair was going.

She'd noticed it three exchanges in, a wrongness she couldn't place at first, and then she'd caught it happening, her locs shortening, the length of them reducing by a fraction every time she took a serious wound and the green light rushed to close it.

She'd worn her hair long for years, locked, not vanity exactly but hers, a thing she'd tended through medical school and pregnancy and the end of the world, and it was feeding into her body a little at a time, converted into speed, into the difference between a wound that lingered and a wound that vanished. She didn't fully understand it. It wasn't a skill. There was no notification, no name, nothing on her sheet that explained it.

It came from the bloodline, the thing the system had put where her affinity should have been, the Emerald Dragon that had sat inert and mysterious for weeks, and it had woken up somewhere in the blood and the pressure of this fight and started offering her a trade she hadn't known was on the table. Give me part of yourself, it said, in no words at all, and I will keep you standing. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. So she gave it.

Her hair, and the blood she lost, all of it fed back into the healing, and the healing got faster, and she stayed on her feet in a fight she had no business surviving. The mole did not understand what it was looking at. It was a good fighter. Ace could tell that much, could feel the experience in every strike, the economy of a thing that had done this a long time.

She didn't know it had been a pit fighter in the lower depths of some ruined city, a brawler that survived where the light didn't reach, an E-rank killer before the abyss took it and long before the system dragged it here. She didn't need to know. She could feel it in the way it moved, that it was better than her, that it should have won this ten times over, and that it was slowly, visibly, starting to panic. Because it kept winning every exchange and getting nowhere.

"Stay down," it snarled, opening her shoulder again, and the shoulder closed.

"Why won't you stay down. I'm stronger than you. I've killed things stronger than you." It hit her across the face and her head rang and the ring faded as the green rushed up.

"Why dont you die already!." Ace didn't waste breath answering. She'd never been much of a talker in a fight either, whatever else she was, and there was a cold furious focus in her now that had been buried under a decade of medicine and motherhood and was, out here, exactly where it had always belonged. She hit the mole with her iron fist, once, hard, and it rocked the thing's head, and she followed it, relentless, taking three claws to give one hammer-blow, wearing it down the only way she could.

The mole wanted to run. She saw the moment it decided, the flicker of a creature that had done the honest read and concluded it couldn't win a fight it was winning, and it tried to break off, tried to put distance between itself and this bleeding woman who would not fall. Ace did not let it. She grabbed it, both hands, dragged it back into range, and went to work.

Iron Fist, over and over, the most visceral thing on the whole battlefield, a doctor beating an underground killer to death with her bare runed hands while her own blood sheeted off her and her hair fed itself into her body to keep her upright. It was primal in a way that nothing else in the fight was, no elegant kinetic trap, no lightning gamble, no clever sand, just a woman who refused to lose hitting a thing until it stopped moving.

Five of its strikes for one of hers, and its strikes healed and hers didn't, and that arithmetic only ended one way once she'd decided to spend everything. The mole went down under her fists, and stayed down, and Ace stood over it, swaying, drenched, her hair half the length it had been that morning, and let the green light finally slow. She'd won.

She looked at her own hands, red to the wrist, and at the ruin of the thing beneath her, and felt the fight drain out of her and the doctor come back, the part of her that catalogued damage, and the catalogue of her own body was long. She'd taken more punishment than anyone should survive and survived it by turning herself into fuel, and she understood now, dimly, what the bloodline was, or part of what it was.

It let her trade pieces of herself for the power to save herself, and it had no limit she'd found yet, and that was a thought she'd have to sit with when there was time to sit. There was no time now. She could hear the other fights still going, could hear Alex somewhere in the roar of the army, and she was the healer, and healers didn't get to rest while their people bled. She wiped the blood out of her eyes, took one breath that hurt going in, and turned to find whoever needed her most.