Chương 29: Chapter 26 — The Cutty Sark Farm

The cknoll came off the ceiling. This was the problem with cknolls. They were gecko-kin — small, pale, those unsettling eyes that moved independently of each other, tracking two directions at once. Their toe pads found purchase on surfaces that nothing else could climb. They had been using the cave ceiling as a road for probably weeks, and the sheep farmers had never thought to look up. Max looked up. He had been looking up since they entered the cave, his new perception cataloging everything in the space.

When the first cknoll detached from the ceiling and dropped, Max was already moving. His left foot came forward. The two-handed sword rose. This was not the loose drag of something being lifted. A motion with direction behind it, the blade coming up and back over the right shoulder to a position it apparently remembered, the body settling into a weight distribution that had nothing to do with zombie physics and everything to do with something older. The right foot planted firmly behind, anchoring the rotation.

The cknoll hit the ground two steps away from Max. The Zornhau came down. Diagonal. 45 degrees from the right shoulder. A passing step forward with the right foot as the blade descended, carrying through the target and continuing its arc to the left side, ending in the Wechsel position. The cknoll split in two with an explosion of force and blood. That morning, Max had stood in the palace armory for four minutes before setting aside the one-handed sword Fenwick had provided and reaching past it.

The two-handed blade was plain iron — just over a meter in length, the blade alone running close to ninety centimeters, with a grip sized for two hands and long enough to accommodate them both without crowding. Heavy. Balanced at about 12 centimeters in front of the pommel to give it more power with his swings. He had lifted it, settled his right hand at the base of the grip and his left near the pommel, and held it. Fenwick went very still on the shoulder.

Max reached for the back sheath on the rack beside it — a simple leather rig, cross-body carry, the hilt rising over the right shoulder for a right-hand draw. He strapped it on without asking for help. The sword went across his back where it belonged. He said nothing. The small guinea pig now knew why. Max was practiced with two-handed swords. The screen above Max's head shifted. ⟨ Notification ⟩ ──────────────────────────── COMBAT ARTS — ACTIVE Zornhau — recognized. This fighter has done this before.

Three more cknolls came off the walls simultaneously. Max was already turning. The speed was what Fenwick kept having to adjust to. Zombie agility, even after the leveling-up additions, had been a shuffle, a drift, slow-motion movements with eventual landing of the hit, grab, or bite. The ghoul's agility, even as a starting stat, was better than that of an average human. In comparison, it was the difference between watching a turtle and a ballerina dance.

Max covered the space between himself and the nearest cknoll in the time it should have taken him to register it was there, the sword coming around in a Mittelhau — a horizontal arc that found the cknoll in mid-lunge, and the head and body landing separately, feet away from Max. The second cknoll tried for the shoulder. Fenwick's paw came up. ⟨ [Spell Cast] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── Grayson's Sparkly Hands. Pink smoke. Glitter. Tiny crackling lightning.

The second cknoll started to stand up, but a backhanded swing cut its throat as Max positioned the longsword. Max focused on the third. His body shifted to Pflug without instruction — hilt low at the right hip, point angled up and forward, threatening. When the cknoll attacked, he deflected the swipe with a quick corkscrew motion to the left, took a step, and drove the thrust into the eye and straight into the brain before the cknoll had finished deciding what it was looking at.

⟨ [NOTIFICATION] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── +100 XP — NEW CREATURE TYPE: x2 BONUS APPLIED — TOTAL: +200 XP +100 XP +100 XP Current XP: 400 / 10000 A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Four more cknolls dropped from the ceiling. Max turned toward them, his HEMA skills second nature in his new body. He was good at this, and his skills showed. It took eleven minutes for the that group and 7 minutes for the next group of three.

Fenwick spent most of that time watching Max move and thinking about things he had watched for sixty days without understanding what he was seeing. The way Max had always turned toward trouble before it arrived. The way the bite had always gone for the neck was specific and deliberate in its imprecision. The way he had smashed the twig blight into a club because his hands knew what a club was supposed to feel like. The body had known. The body had always known.

Whatever Max had been before the apartment and the outbreak and the four years alone and the wound at his throat — whatever he had practiced until the forms lived in the muscle and the bone and the parts of a person that survived even the worst things — it was here. The system had unlocked a door that had been waiting for the right key. Fenwick filed this carefully alongside everything else. The last cknoll went down.

⟨ [NOTIFICATION] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── +100 XP x7 Current XP: 1100 / 10000 Max stood in the cave in the aftermath, sword at his side. His breathing was present and deliberate, the body registering effort without complaint. His eyes moved across the cave with systematic thoroughness. He stopped.

"Fenwick," he said. The pronunciation was still rough, the consonants assembled with care, but it was the name, aimed correctly, and it meant something specific. Fenwick followed Max's gaze. The cave went back further than the cknolls had used. A second chamber, deeper, the floor worn smooth in a way that had nothing to do with gecko feet. Drag marks in the stone, old and regular, leading inward. Along one wall, a row of large containers, the kind used for silkworm cultivation, sitting empty and clean.

Whatever had been in them had been removed carefully and not eaten. Taken. Fenwick looked at the drag marks. He looked at the containers. He looked into the darkness farther and listened to its quality, the still silence of something very deep and very old.

"Yes," said Fenwick, quietly.

"I see it." He took out his notes. They found the child twenty feet further in. She was a lamb — perhaps six years old, small even for that, curled in a corner of the deeper chamber with her knees drawn up and her eyes very wide. She was not hurt. She was not cknoll-marked. She had been placed there with some care, which was the detail that sat wrong in every part of Fenwick's thinking. Cknolls did not place things with care. Max crouched down to her level, which was a thing he did now.

With his increased intelligence, he saw a very scared creature, and with his new empathy, which had no stats behind it but now very much existed, he saw a scared little child. He looked at her with the dark eyes that were still learning what expressions meant and searched his limited vocabulary for the right word.

"Safe," said Max. It was one of his seventeen words. He had used it correctly. The lamb looked at him for a long moment. Then she uncurled, slightly. Fenwick asked his questions carefully. He got incomplete answers. She remembered darkness. She remembered a smell that was not the cknolls — something older, something underground. She did not remember being moved, which meant she had been unconscious for that part. He noted everything. The settlement was called Millbrook.

Forty-three sheep, a silkworm operation that had been running for three generations, a small Guild-affiliated hall where they filed their questing requests and kept their records. Max waited at the treeline. This had been established before they left — Fenwick's clear, specific instruction, and Max had understood. He stood at the edge of the Thornwood with his sword at his side and watched Fenwick cross the open ground toward the settlement alone. The farmers came out to meet him.

An older ewe near the front squared her shoulders.

"You found her," she said. Not a question.

"She's unharmed," said Fenwick.

"The cknolls are cleared." The ewe looked past him toward the treeline for a moment. Max was in the shadow of the oaks, still and dark, visible if you knew where to look. She looked back at Fenwick.

"The hero," she said.

"Is nearby," said Fenwick.

"Yes." She nodded.

"The silkworms," she said.

"Gone," said Fenwick.

"All of them. Not destroyed — taken. I'm making inquiries." The ewe looked at the empty cultivation frames along the wall of the processing building. Three generations of careful work. Gone overnight without a trace of where.

"Will you find them?" she said. Fenwick looked at the frames. Remembering the drag marks he had noted in the cave. At the old dreadful silence of the deeper chamber that they had decided, this time, not to investigate further without more information.

"I'll make inquiries," he said. It was the most honest answer he had. The farmer accepted this with the exhausted pragmatism of someone who understood farming losses and understood the value of a life in the little girl. Dinner this winter would be lean, but all the seats would be full. They walked home in the late afternoon, the quest complete, the payment in Fenwick's bag, and the child back with her extended family, who had not been informed of the precise manner of her rescue and did not need to be.

Max walked with the sword strapped to his back and said nothing for a long time. Then: "The moves." Fenwick looked at him.

"Sword." Max's hand moved slightly, a fragment of the Zornhau in the air, the body demonstrating what the vocabulary couldn't yet carry.

"Max know." Fenwick sat on the shoulder and thought about what to say to that.

"Yes," he said finally.

"You do." Max looked at his hand.

"Before," he said.

"Yes," said Fenwick.

"Before." They walked the rest of the way home in the kind of quiet that didn't need to be filled. ⟨ [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── [Sindy — Private Log — Day 62] First quest complete. 1, 100 XP. Combat Arts fired. The Zornhau. The body remembered. He asked about it on the way home. He said "before." There are things in him we haven't found yet. A child was found alive. The cknolls don't hurt her. The missing silkworms are strange; the monsters should have eaten them.

The drag marks on the cave floor have been used before, leading somewhere I flagged but did not follow. There are things in the cave we didn't follow either. Filed. ▌ Becca, if you're reading this: ▌ He looked at the girl with empathy. ▌ I think he is closer than ever. ▌ He said "before." ▌ Does he remember his prior life? I filed it.