Chương 82: Chapter 81 — Return to Sender

The light went out of the yard all at once, the way a struck bell stops being sound, and what stood where Xylock had been standing was not Xylock. It was, and it wasn't. The frame was his — the planted stance, the forward hunch of a creature built to take hits and keep its feet — but everything about the frame had grown. He stood half again his old height, shoulders broadened to match, and beneath the four arms Ant knew, two more flexed and opened long-fingered hands as though testing that they were real.

The runes hadn't gone dark this time. They'd stopped being marks that lit and guttered and become part of him, standing lines of pale fire laid into his hide from wrist to throat, steady as a held breath. The smell reached Ant a second later — ozone and hot stone and under it a sweetness like rain hitting summer dirt, rolling off the evolved Kithren in waves. Appraisal. The screen came back clean this time, no stutter, no rewriting. [Xylock — Rare Grade. Level — unreadable.]"Kalsar." Ant's voice came out cracked.

He tried again.

"Kalsar. My system's reading him. He's not Common anymore. It says Rare. He — the grade changed. He upgraded." Kalsar didn't answer. He was still standing where the light had left him, sword loose in his fist, looking up at a creature he'd shared his life with since he was seventeen years old, and whatever was moving through him didn't reach his face and didn't need to. Xylock turned one of his six hands over, studied the palm, and then looked down at his partner across a distance of ten feet and forty-three years.

"You stubborn old fool," Kalsar said. Quiet. It carried anyway.

"I told you to disperse it." Xylock's answer was to step over the three fallen Kithren he'd been shielding, place himself between them and the snakes, and roll all six shoulders at once.

"Kalsar." Andy's voice came across the yard strange and flattened, a man reporting numbers he didn't trust.

"His aura. I read him at the river camp when I joined — solid, banked, nothing unusual for his age. What's standing there now is four times that. Five. It's still climbing while I'm talking." A pause, and then, quieter, mostly to himself: "Forty years bonded and it was in him the whole time. How many of them are walking around like that. How many of them never get pushed far enough to find out." Nobody had an answer, and the snakes weren't going to wait for one. They did the only thing they knew.

Both rattles wound up together, the whine of charge climbed until Ant's teeth ached with it, and twin forks came down on Xylock in the same heartbeat — the combined strike, the one that had put six Kithren in the dirt, everything both serpents had. It landed. The runes brightened, barely, the way a fire brightens when you breathe on it. And nothing else happened.

Xylock stood in the middle of a column of lightning like a man standing in warm rain, and Ant watched the understanding travel down the length of both snakes at the same speed it traveled through him: the ceiling had moved. Whatever those runes could hold, it sat above what two Rare serpents could pour out, and every second they kept pouring, they were feeding him. The snakes cut off the strike. Too late.

Xylock raised one arm — a new one, the joint moving with a fluency that said it had always been meant to be there — and gave the lightning back. The bolt that left his open palm made the snakes' forks look like sparks off a whetstone. It took the nearer serpent below the head, and the plating that had shrugged off fangs and arrows and Flame Breath all night burst outward in a spray of shattered scale, the creature slamming sideways into the dirt with a crater of exposed meat where its armour had been. There it is.

Mahkir was moving before the snake finished falling, a red line across the yard. Keep breaking them open. I'll do the rest. He hit the wound at full speed and poured fire directly into it, past the armour, into the animal underneath, and the snake's shriek came out at a pitch that made every human in the yard flinch. It thrashed, tail scything blind, and Mahkir was already gone, out of reach, circling for the next opening before the tail finished its arc.

The second snake struck at Xylock again — reflex, or panic, there was no way to know — and Xylock caught the fork on two crossed forearms, drank it, and returned it with interest through the serpent's midsection. Rebekah's arrow was in the air before the scales finished scattering. It went into the broken place up to the fletching, and the snake folded around the wound like a snapped branch. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Again!" Ant was shouting and running at the same time, sword up, no plan beyond forward, and for once forward was the right answer.

"It's working — break them and hit the breaks!" The yard turned. Ant felt it turn, the same tide that had been running out all night suddenly running in, and the people still standing threw everything they had left into it. Rebekah loosed until Ant lost count. Kalsar came in low against the first snake's blind side, his wound forgotten or ignored, and opened a second-hand gash along its belly with a two-handed cut that would have taken a smaller creature in half.

Mahkir went in and out of the lightning that still came — weaker now, wilder, the rattles losing their rhythm — and everywhere the plating had burst, he left fire behind. The second snake stopped fighting the creatures killing it and went for the ones who couldn't fight back. It happened fast — a full-body surge toward the churned patch of ground where the turtle and the panther and Bramble lay, mouth open, and Ant's shout came out with no words in it because there was no time to build any. He needn't have shouted.

Xylock crossed the distance in three strides that shook dust from the burning storehouse, met the snake's charge with all six hands, and stopped it — stopped forty feet of Rare-grade serpent dead in its own length, heels carving trenches, and then lifted the front third of it clear off the ground and drove it down across his own raised knee. The sound the plating made was the sound of a frozen lake giving up in spring. The snake did not go for the wounded again.

The snake did not go anywhere again under its own strength. The handlers broke from the leader's side at a dead run. Ant marked them coming and understood it without having to think — the snakes were dying, and the two men would rather die with them than watch. There was no speech in them, no last words offered across the yard. The taller one went for Mahkir with a war pick already swinging.

The other put himself between Rebekah and his serpent and started walking her arrows down with a shield raised, closing the distance with the flat patience of a man who had done this before and expected to do it again. He'd expected wrong. Kalsar met him at the halfway point.

Ant didn't see all of it — the tall one was on him and Mahkir both, and the pick came faster than a weapon that size had any right to — but he heard the end of it, the short ugly sound of Kalsar's sword finishing an argument, and by the time Ant had put his own opponent down, Kalsar-ryu carrying his arms through the forms while his mind caught up, both handlers were in the dirt and neither was getting up. His opponent.

He looked down at the man at his feet and made himself hold the look, the way he'd promised himself he would every time. Second one. It cost him. Kalsar had told him to worry the day it stopped costing him. The first snake died with Mahkir's fire in its skull. The second took three more of Rebekah's arrows through the crater Xylock had opened and stopped moving a piece at a time, tail last, the bone segments giving one final dry shiver in the dirt before going still.

The chime landed behind Ant's eyes before the rattle finished dying. Encounter concluded. Experience awarded: 5, 000. Level up. User: Ant. Level: 9. He pulled the bar up on instinct — the newest instinct he owned, minutes old — and watched it in real time: the count climbing, spilling over the threshold, the level turning over, the remainder settling into a fresh bar. 2, 935 / 6, 500. For eight levels the system had handed him level-ups like weather, arriving from nowhere. This one he'd watched come.

There was a difference, and he didn't have a word for it yet, and there was no time to find one. 5, 460 on mine, Mahkir reported, trotting back with his sides heaving and his muzzle scorched. Out of sixteen thousand. Don't say it.

"I wasn't going to say anything." You were going to say it with your face. Somewhere off to the left, from the ground, came Ray's voice, cracked and delighted and pointed at nobody.

"Now that — that was positively cataclysmic, that was."

"You mean cata—" Maren stopped, ran the word back through her head from under Axel's arm, and gave up.

"No. Actually, you got that one right.""' Course I did," Ray said, deeply offended, from flat on his back. Ant was already turning to count his people. It had become the thing he did now, he noticed, the first motion after any fight — Maren upright, Hazel upright, Ray down but talking, which for Ray were nearly the same thing. Thomas hadn't left Bramble and wasn't going to. Sam had crawled to his panther and had a hand on its ribs, feeling them rise.

Duncan knelt between the turtle and the yard with half a shield, guarding a creature that couldn't wake to know it. Hurt everywhere. Dead nowhere. He let himself have one breath of that. The yard gave him one breath exactly. The sound that ended it wasn't loud. That was the worst thing about it. It was a footfall — one single footfall, from the far side of the yard, and the ground carried it to Ant through the soles of his boots. He turned. Everyone turned. The mammoth had stopped fighting Hexa.

It stood with its back to her, a thing no creature does to an enemy it respects, and Hexa — six heads low, scales torn, sides working like bellows — did not make it regret the insult, because she had spent everything she had just holding it this long, and holding it was all she'd done. Not one of her strikes had put a mark on it that Ant could see from here. The mammoth had simply finished being patient.

It had watched its clan's serpents die, and its handlers die, and somewhere in that great scarred skull it had reordered the night's priorities, and now it was facing the yard, and the man beside it — the one who had not moved, not once, through all of it — finally walked forward to stand at its shoulder.

"Andy," Kalsar called, low, not taking his eyes off it.

"Talk to me." Andy's lenses were lit and his voice, when it came, had nothing left of the yard's brief victory in it.

"The aura hasn't dropped." He said it like he was reading his own death warrant aloud and checking the spelling.

"Everything Hexa's thrown at it, everything it spent holding her off — the aura hasn't dropped at all. It hasn't started fighting yet." Xylock stepped forward, runes burning steady, six arms opening, a Rare-grade creature minutes old and carrying two snakes' worth of stolen lightning in his hide. Mahkir moved up beside him, low to the ground, flame building in his throat. Ant, he said. Stay behind me for this one. The mammoth lowered its tusks.