Chương 71: Chapter 70 - Andy Part Two

Nobody moved for a second. Not even the water. Then Duncan said, "Come again?" at the same time Rowan said, "You want to run that past us slower," and Hazel just stood there with her arms folded, watching Andy the way she watched a blade she didn't trust yet. Ant found his voice before anyone else managed to shape theirs into a proper question.

"How did you know." He wasn't asking about the fight anymore, wasn't thinking about the "fight me" Andy had tossed out like it was the most reasonable request in the world.

"What Mahkir is. I haven't seen you touch a reader. Haven't seen you look at anything but him." Andy raised two fingers to his own face, tapped once beneath each eye, and they lit — not the soft flicker Ant remembered off Claire's lenses on a road years ago, nothing borrowed or worn. This came from somewhere behind the eye itself, pale and steady, like it had been built into the socket rather than strapped over it.

"Contact reader," Andy said.

"Direct feed. You think in the middle of a real fight anyone's got time to dig glasses out of a coat pocket and squint through them at whatever's coming for their throat?" He let that sit, unhurried, the glow already fading back to grey.

"Clearly none of you have been in the kind of fight where that question gets answered for you." Duncan's mouth opened, closed, opened again without finding a word to put in it. Hazel's arms stayed folded, but her eyes narrowed and didn't unnarrow. Even Rowan, who rarely had an edge to spare for anyone, looked like he was chewing on something he'd decided not to say out loud. Andy didn't seem to notice, or didn't care.

"Your chip says Flaming Lynx," he went on, easy, like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened at all.

"I've been around Kithren my whole life. More of them than most people meet in three. I can read an aura the way you'd read a face — not the numbers, not the level, just what's actually underneath it. And I've never met a Lynx, not one, that puts off what he's putting off." He tipped his chin at Mahkir.

"So either you've found the single strongest Lynx that's ever drawn breath, or your chip's lying to you." A pause, small and deliberate.

"Your face already answered that one for me." Sam's eyes had gone to Mahkir and stayed there. Duncan's too, half a second behind, doing the same fast arithmetic Ant had watched him do at the tavern the night before, redone now for a smaller, stranger target. Ray had gone quiet in a way that didn't suit him at all, studying Mahkir like a man realizing he'd walked past something valuable for days without once looking down.

All three of them had sized each other's Kithren up already, somewhere on the road or back at the tavern — Ant had caught the glances, quick and appraising, the kind people who fought for a living traded without thinking twice about it. Kalsar's Xylock had earned a second look, once, from Duncan, and that had been the end of it. Mahkir never had. He was just the small red shape riding the leader's shoulder, unremarkable enough that nobody had bothered to ask. Nobody was making that mistake twice.

Ant felt the idea arrive whole, the way the good ones sometimes did, and had to work to keep it off his face. Didn't quite manage it.

"Interesting theory," he said.

"Unfortunately that's clan business. Not for strangers on a pier."

"But you're curious," he added, before Andy could answer.

"I can see it eating you alive, not knowing." He let it sit a moment.

"Join us. I'll tell you myself." Andy's mouth curved, dry and thin, the look of a man who'd expected exactly this and was almost disappointed at how little it had cost him to predict it.

"Thought you might say that," he said.

"Which is why I already had the next part ready." His chin tipped toward Mahkir, eyes staying on Ant the whole time.

"Your Kithren beats mine, I join. No more games. Mine beats yours, you tell me what he actually is. Either way I walk off this pier knowing." Ant looked away first. Not from anything Andy had said — from the sudden, ugly weight of realizing what he'd just agreed to almost by accident. He had no idea what Andy's Kithren was. No idea what it could do, whether fight meant a handshake and a bruise or a body carried off this pier instead of walking off it.

And even if Mahkir lost — even if Ant told him everything, the bond, the wasteland, all of it — would Andy even believe a word of it? Or would it just be one more thing this strange, patient man noted and never brought up again? We have nothing to lose, really. Mahkir's voice cut through it clean, steadier than Ant felt. Besides. It's been a while since I properly stretched my legs. Xylock doesn't count — man pulls him back before it gets interesting. A low sound worked through the bond, more growl than laugh.

If beating on his Kithren is what gets us a recruit, I'll gladly oblige him. Ant looked down at him a moment. Ash-orange fur, half of Xylock's size, entirely unbothered by any of it. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Okay," Ant said, and turned back to Andy before he could talk himself out of it.

"You're on." He glanced past the pier, toward the willows, the empty shoreline.

"Do we need to go fetch it? Whatever it is?" Andy looked at him a second too long, one corner of his mouth pulling up thin and quick, gone before it had the chance to turn into anything friendlier.

"No need," he said.

"She's already here." The lake answered him. It didn't rise so much as arrive — the surface bulging outward first in slow rings, then breaking apart into shapes that took Ant's mind a full second longer than it should have to sort into anything coherent. A serpent. Then two.

He kept losing the count the way you lose count of stairs in the dark, and kept climbing past it — three necks, four, five — until the sixth broke the surface and he understood, all at once, that he hadn't been looking at six separate creatures at all. One body, massive, dark-scaled, water sheeting off it in long curtains as it rose. Six necks branching off a single trunk of muscle, six heads turning independently, six sets of pale eyes that all landed on Mahkir in the same instant.

Ant pulled Appraisal up out of habit, and it gave him less than he wanted and more than he expected. [Hexa — Epic Grade. Hydra. Level: unresolved.] No number. Same flat wall the system had always thrown up against anything too far above him — but this time it hadn't refused entirely. It had given him a grade, the same way it had once given him nothing but Anomaly on a Wraithkin regardless of how strong that particular Wraithkin actually was. A category, not a measurement.

Enough to know what he was looking at without knowing exactly how far past him it sat. Epic. Mahkir was Level 6. Base stage. Common. Whatever ceiling that put on him, Hexa had already cleared it by a distance Ant didn't have the numbers to properly picture. He felt Mahkir go still against his leg — not the readiness kind of still. The other kind. A small, involuntary retreat, half a step, gone almost before it registered, like his body had made the decision before the rest of him agreed to it.

"This is Hexa," Andy said, and his voice had dropped a register, the particular quiet of a man introducing a thing he was proud of and didn't need to raise a hand to prove it.

"Epic grade, if your system's told you that much already. I can see it has, from your face." He watched the group take her in — Duncan's mouth open and staying that way, Rowan's hand drifting toward his bag out of pure reflex, Sam gone very quiet in the specific way that meant he was already recalculating everyone's odds.

"I don't do small talk well. Shall we begin?" Nobody answered him. The group was already moving, boots finding the mud, giving the pier and the stretch of shoreline beyond it the room a fight like this clearly needed. Mahkir went first. He came off the ground faster than his size had any right to allow, a blur of orange low across the grass, and got one clean pass in before the Hydra had fully settled — claws raking down the nearest neck, a thin dark line opening across scale that hadn't expected to be touched yet.

He tried to press it, angling for a second neck already curving toward him. The water moved first this time. Two heads struck from either side at once, and a third came up from below, and Ant didn't see the impact so much as its aftermath — Mahkir leaving the ground entirely, spinning, hitting the bank hard enough that the sound of it carried out over the lake. [Mahkir: HP 25/50.] Half. Gone in one exchange. He got up anyway.

Shook himself once, growled low in his chest, and answered with Flame Breath — a full blast, controlled, catching all six heads at once in a wash of orange that should have counted for something. Hexa simply folded herself back into the lake. The water swallowed the fire whole, and when she surfaced again a moment later, steam rolling off scales gone dark and slick, there wasn't a mark on her that hadn't already been there. Six mouths opened together.

Ant watched Mahkir throw himself sideways, twist, drop low — dodging the first blast, the second, a third that clipped past close enough to soak his flank without landing. Four down. Two more coming, too fast and too close together for anything but luck to answer both. The first caught his back legs. The second caught his side. He didn't fall so much as fold, a sound coming out of him Ant had never heard before and never wanted to hear again — small, raw, nothing proud left in it at all. [Mahkir: HP 5/50.]"We can still do this." Ant heard his own voice come out thinner than he meant, already moving toward the edge of the fight, already reaching for the skill sitting coiled in his own chest.

"Just a bit more speed — use mine—" NO. It hit harder than anything Hexa had thrown, a fear in it Ant had never once felt off the bond before, sharp enough to stop him mid-stride. It's too strong. You share with me now, whatever hits me next hits you too, and that thing is not pulling its strikes. Mahkir was already dragging himself back onto four unsteady legs, refusing to stay down even as his whole frame shook with the effort of it. I would rather lose than watch you die proving I could still stand.

Six mouths began filling with water again, slow and deliberate, no hurry in it at all — the flat confidence of a creature that had already decided how this ended and was simply waiting for the room to catch up. Ant didn't think. He was moving before the thought finished forming, putting himself between Mahkir and the lake, arms spread wide, nothing between his own chest and six mouths full of water except the words he forced out as fast as he could get them.

"Stop! We yield!" For a moment nothing happened. Kalsar had already started forward, one hand out flat toward Duncan like he expected somebody to need holding back, and Rowan had his bag half open before anyone had said a word to him. Then Andy's hand came up, small and slow, and Hexa's heads lowered as one, water draining back off scale as she turned and slid beneath the surface without a ripple to mark where she'd gone.

Rowan was already moving, boots slapping wet ground, dropping to his knees beside Mahkir before the water had finished closing over her.

"Don't move him yet. Let me look first."

"He's fine," Ant said, though his voice didn't sound entirely sure of that, and Mahkir's only answer was a low, exhausted sound that could have meant anything. Andy watched all of it happen without moving from where he stood, then looked back at Ant with the same unblinking, patient interest he'd worn since the pier.

"Well," he said.

"Time for my prize."