Chương 21: Chapter 22: Bren's Brother

The heat began two days after Iron (late) settled. At first I thought it was simply exhaustion lingering from the Greywash marsh retrieval. The rank advancement had hit harder than Iron (mid) had, deeper somehow, as though the strength had settled not only into muscle and bone but somewhere beneath them. Yet by the second morning inside the eastern camp, the sensation no longer resembled ordinary soreness. It felt like something beneath my skin was awake.

The trench fires burned low against the pale dawn while workers shifted through another miserable rotation beside the unfinished Ironbark walls. Rain drifted softly through the camp in thin cold sheets that turned the earth permanently slick beneath boots and wagon wheels alike. Beyond the palisades, the Greywash forests waited in silence broken only by distant beast calls and the endless movement of unseen riverwater. I sat beside one of the fire pits tightening the wrappings around my forearm.

The Greywash Stalker bite had mostly sealed now, though not healed. The flesh still looked wrong beneath the bandages. Torn muscle remained visible through parts of the wound, yet the edges had drawn together unnaturally fast over the previous forty-eight hours. The injury should have crippled the arm entirely. Instead it merely ached constantly beneath the heat now spreading slowly through my body. My veins looked darker too. More visible.

Thin branching lines showed faintly beneath the skin near the old ritual marks along my chest and shoulder whenever the firelight caught them properly. I had noticed them while changing bandages during the night and immediately hidden the arm again before anyone else could look too closely. Unfortunately, Bren Maddock noticed everything.

"You're staring at it again." I glanced up. The older guard sat opposite me sharpening spearheads beside the coals while the camp slowly woke around us. Bren looked as exhausted as ever, though after weeks on the frontier I had begun to suspect that was simply his natural expression.

"At what?" I asked. Bren drew the whetstone along the spearhead edge.

"Your arm." I looked down at the wrappings.

"It got bitten."

"That usually happens after being bitten." I kept looking at the bandages anyway. The heat beneath the skin pulsed faintly in time with my heartbeat, and the wrongness of it made silence feel safer than explanation. Bren's whetstone scraped steadily along the spearhead edge before the older guard finally spoke again.

"You feeling anything strange?" I hesitated too long. That answered enough by itself. Bren grunted softly.

"Rank-ups do funny things to bodies." The words sounded casual. His eyes did not. I noticed the way the older guard's gaze lingered briefly on the darkened veins near the edge of the bandages before deliberately shifting away again.

"Funny how?" I asked quietly.

"Depends on the person." Bren rotated the spear slightly beneath the whetstone.

"Some people get headaches after breakthroughs. Some shake for days. Copper transitions can make your bones feel loose." His mouth twitched slightly.

"Saw one bloke cry every time he smelled onions after Iron (mid)." I almost laughed, but the sound never quite formed.

"And the healing?" Bren's hand paused briefly.

"Energy surges happen near threshold growth sometimes," he said.

"Especially when multiple skills move together."

"But?" The older guard looked toward the eastern palisades rather than answering immediately. Workers moved through the muddy perimeter carrying fresh braces and sharpened poles while the smell of smoke and beast hide drifted steadily from the southern processing pits.

"But that arm should still be worse." Silence settled briefly between us while rain tapped softly against the Ironbark stakes surrounding the camp. Finally Bren looked back toward me.

"How's the heat?" I frowned slightly.

"What?"

"Chest." That startled me enough that Bren noticed immediately.

"There it is," the older guard muttered. I stared for several seconds.

"You've seen this before?"

"Something similar." Bren leaned back slightly beside the fire pit while the whetstone rested idle in his hand.

"My younger brother hit Copper (early) at nineteen." I blinked once. Bren rarely spoke about himself at all. The older guard's expression remained flat, though the lines around his eyes hardened slightly as he continued.

"Fast advancement. Faster than most commoners manage. Thought it meant he was special." He gave a dry humourless laugh.

"Maybe he was." Rain drifted harder through the camp while Bren stared somewhere beyond the firelight.

"He chased progression constantly after that. Took every dangerous patrol. Every hunt. Every chance to advance faster." The older guard shrugged once.

"Started treating skills like ladders instead of tools."

"What happened?" Bren was quiet long enough that I almost thought he would not answer.

"He rushed Copper." The words landed heavily.

"He had one evolved skill and thought that was enough because it let him win fights he should have lost. Should've waited until he had three evolved Copper skills if he wanted to do it properly, or at least two if war left him no cleaner choice. But definitely not the first one. Never the first one." I looked down at my bandaged arm, and the heat beneath the wrappings seemed to pulse harder in answer. Bren's voice lowered slightly.

"Commoners hear stories about prodigies and think early advancement means destiny. Most of the time it just means nobody around them knows enough to stop them." I kept my eyes on the fire.

"What happened to him?"

"Bad merge path." I frowned.

"Broke how?" Bren's jaw tightened slightly.

"He forced compatibility that wasn't there. Tried to evolve too quickly chasing Silver-tier concepts he didn't understand." I said nothing. Bren's gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond the fire, not on the camp and not on me.

"Something broke during the transition." The trench fires crackled softly between us. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

"He stopped thinking clearly afterward," Bren continued.

"People think failed merges kill you dramatically. Most don't. Most just ruin you slowly." His voice flattened further.

"His skills stopped stabilising properly. Mood swings. Blackouts. Memory gaps." Bren looked away again.

"Then he vanished during a Greywash patrol six years later." I asked quietly, "You never found him?" Bren barked a short laugh without humour.

"We found enough." Neither of us spoke after that. The conversation lingered unpleasantly through the morning work rotation while the eastern camp resumed its endless cycle of repairs, patrols, and beast processing. I spent most of the early hours beside Wade Corbett reinforcing hauling braces using Greywash Stalker tendon bindings while labour crews deepened trench sections nearby. Iron (late) changed everything subtly. Not dramatically stronger. Sharper. I noticed strain fractures in timber faster now.

Movement patterns. Weak points in structures and people alike. Even carrying heavy Ironbark braces felt different beneath the new density settling through my body, as though the rank had made me more certain of where force should sit. Yet the heat remained constant. By midday, sweat soaked through my shirt despite the winter cold. Wade observed this while hammering support pegs into the mud.

"You look terrible."

"Thank you." Wade nodded.

"You're welcome." He stepped back from the brace line while studying me more carefully.

"Actually, no, I mean properly terrible." I frowned slightly. Wade pointed vaguely toward my face.

"Your eyes look strange." That immediately made the heat worse.

"What's wrong with them?"

"No idea." Wade shrugged.

"You just look like you haven't slept in a week." I wiped rain from my jaw.

"That's because none of us have." Wade considered this.

"Fair." The carpenter returned to the support braces while muttering quietly about incompetent trench angles and collapsing load distribution. Wade increasingly seemed to treat the entire war as a personal insult against proper engineering. The afternoon patrol rotation brought us beyond the outer eastern line again. The forests surrounding the Greywash camp had changed noticeably after the Greywash Stalker died.

Smaller predators returned in larger numbers now that the apex beast no longer controlled the territory, yet the attacks themselves felt less coordinated than before. Messier. Hungrier. Jory Pike immediately decided this was somehow worse.

"I preferred the intelligent killer beast." Wade stared at him flatly while we crossed the trench line.

"That is the stupidest thing you've ever said." Jory raised one finger.

"No, listen. The big one had standards."

"It stored people in trees." Jory nodded.

"Yes, but professionally." Bren sighed heavily.

"If something kills you today, I'm leaving the body out of spite." The ferryman grinned immediately.

"That's leadership." Despite the joking, tension lingered heavily through the patrol. The forests felt crowded now. Movement flickered constantly between the pines beyond the roads while distant beast cries echoed far too close to the unfinished wall sections. I increasingly found myself resting one hand against the axe haft unconsciously while scanning the mist. Axe Strike and Guarded Blade still felt separate, but less distant from one another than they had before.

One wanted commitment, impact, a clean brutal end. The other wanted spacing, restraint, the shape of survival before the blow arrived. They did not yet merge inside me, but during the longest watches I sometimes felt them leaning toward the same question from opposite sides, as though each had begun to notice the other in the dark. The patrol encountered the first attack near dusk.

Three Iron stalkers burst from the fog beside a collapsed supply wagon along the eastern road while scavengers circled behind them through the brush. Bren reacted instantly, spear driving through the nearest predator before the beast fully reached the road.

"Left side!" Wade intercepted another with shield and hatchet while Jory nearly stumbled into a ditch trying to draw his sword too quickly. I moved automatically. Axe Strike surged through me the moment the axe cleared my back, and heat flooded my chest again. The first strike landed cleanly through an Iron stalker's shoulder and kept going, the edge carving deeper through flesh and bone than it should have before a brief line of dull orange traced along the cut and vanished almost before the eye could trust it.

The beast screamed. Another lunged immediately from the side. Guarded Blade caught my body before panic did. I turned into the attack with a shorter step, axe haft shifting across my centre line as though it were trying to remember it could guard as well as kill. The edge slammed upward through the second beast's jaw hard enough to launch blood across the wagon wheels behind it. The fight ended quickly after that. Too quickly.

Jory lowered his sword slowly afterward while staring openly at the smoking cut along the dead stalker's neck.

"Did your axe just burn that thing?" I answered immediately.

"No." Nobody looked convinced. Bren especially. The older guard cleaned blood from the spearhead while studying me silently across the muddy road. Again, his eyes lingered too long on the darkened veins visible near my throat where the collar had shifted during the fight. Then, deliberately, Bren ignored it.

"Move the carcasses," he ordered instead. The patrol resumed afterward beneath deepening dusk. Yet the heat beneath my chest continued growing stronger, and the more I tried not to think about Bren's brother, the more the story worked into the spaces between my thoughts. One evolved skill. Rushed Copper. Blackouts. Memory gaps. Found enough. That night the camp barely slept at all.

Beast attacks hammered the outer trenches twice before midnight while workers scrambled constantly between collapsing brace lines and emergency repairs. I spent most of the darkness hauling Ironbark supports beside Wade while Bren rotated perimeter patrols through the rain. Near dawn, exhaustion finally drove most of the camp into brief uneasy sleep. I dreamed of fire. Not ordinary fire. Something deeper and hotter moved beneath black scales while enormous shadows shifted through smoke-filled skies.

I heard roaring somewhere beyond the flames. Not one throat, but many, layered across a sky I could not see properly. Stone cracked somewhere beneath me. Something vast moved through the smoke with the slow certainty of a mountain deciding to breathe. For one terrible moment I felt wings, not on my back exactly, but remembered by my bones as if my body had been built around the absence of them. Then a voice whispered from inside the heat. Not words. Recognition.

I woke abruptly with my chest burning hot enough to steam faintly in the cold air. For several terrifying seconds I did not recognise where I was. Then the eastern camp slowly returned around me: rain, mud, fire pits, snoring workers, and the unfinished Ironbark walls standing against a forest that seemed closer every morning. I pressed one hand against my chest while breathing hard.

Heat pulsed steadily beneath the skin, wrong and patient, as though something inside me had woken and merely waited for the rest of me to catch up. Beside the nearest fire pit, Bren watched me silently. The older guard said nothing. That was worse than asking. I lowered my hand slowly and pulled my cloak tighter around my throat, hiding the faint dark lines crawling up from beneath my collar. Across the camp, the first workers began stirring for another day of mud, blood, timber, and fear.

Beyond the palisade, something howled once in the mist, and this time the sound did not seem distant at all.