Chương 60: Chapter 59 - Nothing Left To Hide

The blow was already falling when Ant reached the edge of the yard, and there wasn't time to wonder how strange it still felt, covering that much ground without a single set of eyes finding him doing it. Kalsar's Kithren was down on one knee, trying and failing to get all four arms up in time. Whatever strength it had left wasn't going where it needed to — the ruined shoulder dragging the others down with it every time it tried, like the whole limb had forgotten how to answer on its own.

The axe coming down was aimed at the gap that left behind, and there wasn't a single arm free to close it. Ant got there first. Soul Render came up and caught the axe head-on, and the moment steel met steel his mana gave out on its own — Concealment wasn't built to survive contact, not real contact, and the light bent back into place around him all at once, dumping him back into the world in the same half-second as the block itself.

The man swinging the axe stared, and kept staring, at the person who'd simply appeared out of empty air to stop him.

"Mahkir." One word. It was all Mahkir needed. He came off Ant's shoulder mid-leap, twisting with a snarl that peeled back off his teeth, and hit the man square in the chest with both front paws. The impact sent him backward off his feet entirely — not stumbling, leaving the ground — and he landed hard enough, ten feet off, that he didn't get up again right away.

The man's Kithren turned on Mahkir a half-second slow — some low, wolfish thing with mottled brown fur, still catching up to the fact that its handler was already down. It came in low, snapping for the leg rather than the throat, and Mahkir didn't have room to dodge clean — took the graze along one flank instead of avoiding it, the same way Kalsar's beam frame had taught him to take a hit rather than waste effort chasing an angle he didn't have time for.

A small piece of him noted the number drop and dismissed it in the same breath — nothing worth stopping for. He rode the impact, let it spin him half around, and came out of the turn already swinging. The wolfish thing lunged again. Mahkir met it low this time, claws catching under the jaw, and it took three more exchanges — snap, dodge, a raked shoulder, a return bite that never quite landed — before it finally folded sideways into the dirt and stayed there.

The world had already caught up with Ant by then — sound rushing back in louder than it had any right to be, smoke thick in his throat, the copper reek of blood under it, sharp and everywhere. He'd been a shape nobody could focus on for exactly as long as it took to close the distance. Not a second longer. For one long second, nobody moved. Kalsar's head came up first, still down on the ground where the fighting had put him, one arm braced under himself like standing wasn't an option yet.

Whatever had been sitting behind his eyes a moment ago — the flat, grinding calculation of a man counting how many hits he had left in him — cracked open into plain disbelief, unguarded in a way Ant had never once seen on him.

"Ant—" Kalsar got that far and stopped there, like the rest of the sentence hadn't survived the shock of needing it at all.

"Later." Ant didn't look at him. Couldn't, not yet, not with the rest of the yard still churning around them.

"Where's Rowan."

"Inside." Kalsar's voice came out rough, half-swallowed by his own breathing.

"Threw him through the door myself. He's not coming back out unless I tell him to." That would have to be enough for now. One of the attackers — closest, weapon already half-raised — found his voice before the others did.

"Where did he—" He didn't finish it. Mahkir hit him from the side before the words were fully out, but this one kept his feet, staggering rather than falling, and came back swinging with the kind of ragged fury that made him harder to predict rather than easier. Mahkir circled instead of closing again, giving ground he didn't need to give, waiting for the man's weight to commit to a strike before darting in under it. It took two passes.

On the second, claws found the wrist holding the weapon, and it clattered away into the dirt for good. The man didn't chase it. He backed off instead, favoring one leg, eyes darting past Mahkir toward whatever else was happening across the yard. Somewhere behind Ant, off to the south, a bird screamed. He didn't need to turn to know what it meant.

"Shrike — down, NOW." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The osprey dropped on the command like it had been waiting for exactly that word, low and fast over the collapsed stretch of wall, talons already reaching, and Raven was right behind it — vaulting the broken stone with a dagger in each hand, moving like she'd walked this exact ground a hundred times even though she hadn't, not really, not with people trying to kill her on it.

Axel came through the gap half a second later, all four arms already swinging, and two of the attackers who'd been holding position near Kalsar peeled off to meet him instead — turning away from the ground they'd spent the last hour so carefully holding. That was the whole point.

That had been the whole point of splitting up in the first place, except Ant hadn't planned this part of it, hadn't planned any of it beyond get there and don't let them see me coming, and here it was anyway, working exactly the way it needed to. Maren came through last, well behind Raven and Axel both. She had a short blade in one hand, held wrong, held like someone who'd read about how to hold a blade rather than ever needing to use one, and she wasn't heading toward the fighting at all.

She cut wide around the worst of it, angling straight for Kalsar's Kithren and the ground where Hazel had gone down on one knee, breath coming in short, careful pulls.

"Stay put," Maren said to the Kithren, dropping beside it, hands already moving over the ruined shoulder without quite touching it.

"Stay down, you've done enough, just—" She didn't finish. There wasn't time to finish anything out here. She'd read enough about field wounds in the Cerlan archives to know the shoulder needed binding before it needed anything else, and none of that reading had prepared her for how much worse it looked up close, the fur matted dark and the muscle underneath twitching in small, involuntary pulses every time the Kithren tried and failed to move it.

She pressed her sleeve against the worst of it anyway, because doing something felt marginally less useless than doing nothing, and kept talking the whole time in a low, steady stream that had nothing useful in it at all — just words, just noise, the same tone she'd have used on a frightened animal because that was, in the end, exactly what this was.

Ant caught a second axe swing on Soul Render before he'd fully turned back around, the impact ringing up through his arm the way the target frame used to, except there was no post behind this one to absorb the follow-through — just another man, already resetting his grip for the next strike. Ant gave ground half a step, let the next swing pass wide instead of meeting it dead-on, and answered with a cut of his own that the man twisted away from at the last possible moment.

It went on like that for longer than Ant wanted to think about — swing, block, a step traded for a step, neither of them finding the opening the other was leaving — until the man overextended on a wide arc and Ant planted himself directly in front of the Kithren still bleeding into the dirt behind him rather than chase the opening at all.

"Stay down," he said, not sure the Kithren could understand him, not sure it mattered.

"You've done enough." The man in front of him — young, younger than Ant had expected, sweat cutting tracks through the dust on his face — didn't answer. He just swung again, and again, each one a fraction slower than the last, and Ant blocked every single one without moving his feet, the way the beam gauntlet had taught his body to hold a line rather than chase one.

The yard around them had stopped being one fight and become five or six smaller ones, none of them lining up with each other, none of them close enough to help.

Raven and Shrike worked a tight, ugly rhythm near the wall gap, dagger and talon trading off in a pattern that looked less like a plan and more like two creatures who'd simply learned each other's timing over years of not needing to speak it aloud — she'd duck under a swing, Shrike would come in over the top of it a half-second later, and the man between them never seemed to know which one to watch.

Axel took a hit across one raised forearm and didn't so much as stagger, driving his attacker back a full stride with the follow-through alone, then had to plant himself again almost immediately as a second attacker circled in from the side. Mahkir was a blur of orange and black somewhere off to the left, snarling low every time he broke contact to reset.

Kalsar was still down, one arm braced under himself, breathing in short, controlled pulls against whatever it was costing him just to hold that position, and every few seconds his eyes cut sideways toward his Kithren rather than toward the fight he couldn't yet stand up to join. Smoke drifted low across all of it, catching in Ant's throat — scorched wood, and under that, hair, and beneath both of those the plain copper stink of blood that hadn't stopped being spilled since before he'd gotten here.

Somewhere behind him a section of the storehouse roof gave way with a groan and a crash, sending a fresh column of sparks up into the dark, and nobody so much as turned to look at it. The man in front of him swung again, wider this time, sloppier, and Ant stepped inside it instead of blocking, driving his shoulder into the man's chest hard enough to put him flat on his back in the dirt. He stayed down for a moment, stunned, before starting to push himself back up.

Ant stood over him with Soul Render level, waiting to see which way this went. The man got a hand under himself, found his sword in the dirt an arm's length away, and looked at it, and then at Ant, and made the calculation men made when the fight had already told them everything they needed to know. He left the sword where it was and ran instead, favoring one leg, not looking back. Ant let him go.

There wasn't time to chase him down and there wasn't a real reason to — the yard still had plenty of men in it who wanted to be here, and this one clearly hadn't, not once the numbers stopped running in his favor. Ant filed the thought away with everything else tonight that didn't fit neatly into fighting or not fighting, and turned back toward the noise.

Around him, the yard was still going — Raven and Shrike locked into their rhythm, Axel taking hit after hit and giving twice as many back, Mahkir circling his second opponent, patient, unhurried, waiting for the exact moment he needed. Kalsar was still down. Still bracing. Still watching his Kithren more than he was watching the fight.