Chương 63: Chapter 62 - Borrowed Time

The voice carried across the yard again, unhurried, almost pleased with itself, and this time three heads turned toward it at once.

"That's—" Kalsar started, still down on one knee, and didn't finish the name. He didn't need to. Ant had already placed it, the same way Maren's whole body had gone rigid twenty feet away, blade forgotten in her hand, staring at the man closing the distance on her like she'd seen a ghost wearing a mask. Calvin. It clicked further the longer Ant looked — not just the voice, but every piece of the fight around it lining up at once.

The heavyset plated creature Mahkir had been grinding against for what felt like an hour now. The lean, quick-eyed thing that had ambushed Hazel and Vulcan. Kithren Ant had seen once before, barely a week ago, standing at the edge of a registration hall crowd while their handlers waited their turn at a Light Smash panel. He'd wondered, distantly, back then, whether Calvin's group would simply vanish after losing everything. Apparently they hadn't.

Apparently they'd found new colours to hide behind and a story that made them the wronged party instead of the ones who'd lost a rigged wager fair and square. Axel didn't make it to Maren in time to matter. Two of them converged on him at once — a man and a Kithren working in tandem, one drawing his guard high while the other went low, and Axel simply didn't have four arms free to answer both directions cleanly.

A strike caught his knee from the side and he went down hard, rolling once before a second blow found his ribs and kept him there, gasping, too far from Maren now to do anything but watch. He tried to push himself up anyway, got as far as one arm under his own weight, and the man standing over him planted a boot squarely on his back and put him down again. She was alone now. Nobody left standing close enough to reach her in time. Ant tried to move and couldn't.

The attacker in front of him pressed harder the instant he felt Ant's attention slip, forcing him back into the exchange with a strike that would have opened his shoulder if he'd been a half-second slower meeting it. Mahkir — Busy, Mahkir sent back, tight and furious, still locked against the plated creature that hadn't given him a single clean opening in longer than either of them wanted to admit.

The bond changed then, sudden and total, a pressure building on Ant's side of the connection like a held breath about to break. A notification bloomed across his vision, unbidden, cutting straight through the noise of the fight. Emotional Control triggered — Kithren entering berserk state. All attributes +20%. Ant felt it land on Mahkir's end even without looking, heat rolling down the bond in a solid wave with no shape to it, no words, just fury given somewhere to go.

When he did glance over, Mahkir's fur had begun to smoke faintly at the edges, his amber eyes gone dark red, breath coming out in a low, constant growl unlike anything Ant had heard out of him before. It helped. Mahkir's next exchange landed harder, faster, the plated creature actually giving ground for the first time all fight instead of simply absorbing whatever came at it. But it wasn't enough. Twenty percent bought speed and force.

It didn't buy a clean opening against a creature built specifically not to give one, and Maren was still thirty feet away with a killer walking toward her at an unhurried pace that said, clearer than anything, that he didn't expect to be stopped. Attribute Sharing. The thought arrived whole, the same way it had once before in a registration hall. This time he understood exactly what it cost. He didn't care what happened to himself. He'd made peace with that risk a long time ago, sitting in worse places than this.

But if he got this wrong — if he activated it and one wrong hit caught him wide open, a hit that wouldn't have touched Mahkir at all on his own — that wasn't a risk to himself anymore. That was a risk to Mahkir, and there wasn't a version of that Ant could make peace with, not even here, not even now. Just fucking do it already.

Mahkir's voice cut through the hesitation like a blade through cloth, raw and furious, pushing against the plated creature with everything the berserk state had given him and still not breaking through. Stop weighing it. She doesn't have three minutes for you to weigh it. Ant activated it. The bond went incandescent. He felt Mahkir's strength pour across the link the same way it had once before — except this time it wasn't just Agility, wasn't just one number borrowed to solve one problem.

Everything came through at once, stacking on top of what Ant already carried, and for one disorienting second the world tilted sideways before settling into a sharper, faster place neither of them had ever stood inside alone. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Str: 44. End: 45. Magic: 53. Agi: 66. He didn't have time to marvel at the numbers.

He barely had time to see them before the fight demanded his attention back, but even that glance was enough to understand what had just happened to both of them. He intended to use every last piece of it before the three minutes ran out. Something moved behind him, fast and low, a Kithren he hadn't seen and hadn't heard until it was already closing — no warning at all, no chance to turn in time. It never reached him.

Another shape hit it broadside, sending it tumbling end over end into the dirt hard enough that neither of them got back up right away. Ant caught the barest glimpse of what had done it — Kalsar's Kithren, hurling one of the enemy's own creatures bodily into the thing that had been about to take Ant apart from behind, both of them going down together in a tangle of limbs and dust. Kalsar's Kithren didn't follow up. It couldn't.

The runes along its arms, still faintly lit a moment ago, had gone completely dark, the last of whatever Mahkir's fire had given it spent on that single desperate throw. It stood there swaying, empty, done, and Ant understood without needing to be told that it had used the very last of itself to buy him that one extra second. He didn't waste it.

Attribute Sharing's stolen agility took over completely, and Ant crossed thirty feet of battlefield in a handful of strides that shouldn't have been physically possible, planting himself directly in front of Maren at a speed that felt less like running and more like simply arriving. Behind him, a roar tore through the yard loud enough to still everything else for half a second. Mahkir had found his opening.

He didn't need finesse anymore, not with the berserk state and the shared strength both burning through him at once — he tore through the plated creature's guard in a single motion and went straight for its throat, claws and teeth working together in a way that had nothing careful left in it at all. The creature thrashed once, twice, and then didn't.

Somewhere on the enemy side, a voice broke — not a shout, not a battle cry, just a raw, horrified sound as someone watched what had been their strongest asset drop lifeless into the dirt. The numbers were closing. Not fast enough. Not yet. Ant put himself between Maren and Calvin properly now, Soul Render raised, and the fight around them didn't stop just because this one piece of it had resolved.

Two more attackers pressed in from either side, and Ant met them both — faster than he should have been able to, hitting harder than his own body had any right to hit, cutting one down before he'd even fully processed the exchange and turning immediately into the next.

Mahkir was somewhere behind him doing the same, a blur of orange and red tearing through whatever stood between him and the rest of the yard, but even with everything Attribute Sharing had given them, the sheer number of bodies still standing was starting to tell. Ant took a graze across one forearm he wouldn't have taken a minute ago, the number dropping somewhere he didn't have room to look at. Took another to the ribs a moment after that, breath punching out of him. Shared HP: 78/120.

The two of them, linked, and both diminished for it. He kept moving anyway because stopping wasn't an option anymore. A shape darted past his guard — small, quick, aimed straight at Maren while Ant's attention was split between Calvin and the two he'd just put down. Mahkir got there first.

He came off the drake's corpse already moving, blood still slick along his jaw, and cut the smaller Kithren off before it closed the last few feet — not a clean kill, just a body slammed into it hard enough to send it rolling clear of Maren entirely. It scrambled back up and didn't come again, more interested now in finding its own handler than finishing what it had started. One minute left, the system told him, urgent and precise, the countdown he hadn't known he could feel until it started running out.

He used every second of it. Calvin's smile was already faltering by the time Ant reached him, unhurried confidence draining out of his face in real time as he registered exactly what was closing on him now. But he didn't run, and he didn't fold — he'd clearly held something back this whole fight, letting his people do the dying while he watched, and whatever was left in him now came out fast.

He caught Ant's first strike on a parry that shouldn't have been possible against that much force, redirected it wide, and answered with a cut that opened a line across Ant's forearm before Ant had fully recovered his footing. Shared HP: 41/120. Somewhere behind that number was Mahkir too, feeling every point of it land the same as Ant did. For one second, with three minutes' worth of borrowed strength burning through him, Ant still had to work for it. It wasn't enough.

Calvin got one more strike in — a decent one, the kind that would have hurt under any other circumstances — and Ant took it without slowing, Soul Render already coming around in an arc powered by strength that belonged to both of them at once. Calvin's Kithren tried to intervene and met the same blade a half-second later, and then it was over, both of them down, the fight's one clear architect finally spent in the dirt with everyone else he'd sent here to die.

The remaining attackers didn't need to be told the numbers had turned. They broke almost as one, and the retreat wasn't clean — two of them stopped just long enough to haul a groggy, half-conscious ally up between them, dragging him along rather than leave him behind, while a third staggered upright on his own, one hand pressed to his skull, blinking hard against whatever Kalsar's Kithren had done to him earlier in the fight. Whatever had knocked them down clearly hadn't finished the job.

They limped for the wall gap regardless, no formation left between them at all. The man who'd screamed when the drake went down was among them, moving fastest of all, not once looking back toward the shape he'd left cooling in the dirt. Their Kithren didn't all go with them.

The wolfish thing Mahkir had killed in the opening minutes stayed exactly where it had fallen, and one more — the lean, quick-eyed creature that had gone for Vulcan — didn't come when its handler whistled for it, too badly hurt to do more than drag itself toward the wall on its own. The man didn't wait for it. He was gone through the gap a step ahead of the rest, and whatever loyalty existed between them clearly didn't run in both directions tonight.

The few Kithren still capable of moving followed their people out. The ones that weren't got left where they lay, the same as their handlers had left the man near Kalsar.