Chương 60: Chapter 61: Talia's Duel Blades

Talia was gone before I finished reading them. I had seen her fight at the Werrin Stones, but the square and the shardbacks had made everything close, broken, and strange. Here there was space, and space belonged to her in a way that made rank feel less like strength and more like law. She slipped between two charging deer where I would have seen only impact, her sword low, then high, then gone behind her shoulder as the first animal collapsed with both forelegs cut beneath it.

She stepped onto its falling side, used the body as ground, vaulted over a second rack of antlers, and opened a throat before her boots touched mud again. A third deer lunged from her left. She turned inside the antlers as if they had been offered to guide her, cut behind the jaw, and was already moving before the blood found air. Bronze was not a larger Copper. Bronze was time and space compressed into one body. Two deer reached me, and the world narrowed.

The first came straight in, head low, antlers spread wide enough to pierce my ribs if I sneezed wrong. The second angled behind it toward my right leg, smaller, darker, with one broken tine and a strip of ash rubbed down its spine. Hunter's Eye tried to hold both lines and failed because my body could not answer as fast as the ability saw. I stepped left, raised the axe, felt Ember Blade warm the edge, and caught the first deer across the antler base rather than the skull. The impact shuddered through my wrists.

The beast screamed, not in pain alone but in rage, and drove forward hard enough to push me back through the mud. Loadbearer caught some of the force. My boots slid anyway. The second deer struck my thigh with its shoulder, not full antler, but enough to twist my stance. I hit the ground on one knee and tasted blood where my teeth met my cheek. The first deer reared, hooves hammering down. I threw the axe haft across my body and took the blow on wood and forearm. Pain flashed. The haft held.

The deer's fur brushed my face, warm, rank, too thick, and beneath it Beastcraft read what I did not want: cuts hidden under the coat, old channels healed wrong, muscles fed toward aggression, nerves altered so fear returned as forward motion. I rolled under the next strike and came up badly, too close to the smaller deer. Its broken tine scraped along my coat and caught near the torn sleeve from the Shardback fight. It shook its head, trying to drag me off balance.

I slammed my shoulder into its neck, which was a stupid thing to do to an animal heavier than me, but Loadbearer kept my feet under me for half a breath, and half a breath was all I needed. Ironwood Strike stirred in my grip, not because the deer was wood, but because the antler, bone, and altered muscle offered resistance with a structure.

I drove the axe down behind the shoulder where Beastcraft and Hunter's Eye agreed the body had been made strong in all the wrong places and left one seam too human in its making. The blade bit deep. I activated Ember Blade on my weapon and it hissed through wet fur and altered flesh. The deer collapsed against me, shoving me sideways as it died. The larger one charged again. There was no room to think of Talia, Halden, Longreach, Dunmere, Araluen, or the Derwold.

There was only breath, mud, antlers, my left arm aching, the axe slick in my hands, and the line Hunter's Eye showed between the lowered rack and the throat beneath it. I let the deer come closer than instinct allowed, then stepped into the narrow gap beside its head, turning my hip so the antlers passed along my coat instead of through my ribs. The movement was ugly, late, and almost failed. One tine punched through the leather and grazed skin.

I brought the axe around with both hands and cut under the jaw with all the heat Ember Blade would give me. The deer stumbled three steps past, pouring blood into the road, then fell. I stood over it, breathing too hard, one leg trembling, axe raised against a third attack that did not come. The road was quiet again. Not empty. Quiet. I looked up. The field around us was covered in bodies. ABILITY ADVANCED Ironwood Strike has advanced from Iron (early) to Iron (mid). This story originates from Royal Road.

Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. You can now drive focused cutting force into dense timber, antler, bone, and resistant organic structure with improved angle control. Effect improves when grain reading, stance, and measured impact align. Poor tools still suffer accelerated wear under use. Twenty, perhaps more, lay across the road, the ditches, the broken walls, and the silver grass. Some had fallen with tendons cut before they knew they were falling. Some had opened throats.

Some had been hamstrung and finished with a second stroke so clean it seemed almost merciful until I understood how quickly it must have happened. Talia stood near the far wall among the last of them, one boot on a stone, sword angled down, not breathing hard. A deer larger than the others twitched beside her, antlers black with ash and blood. She flicked her blade once, sending a line of red across the grass, then wiped the steel on the winter-thick flank of the dead animal.

Halden had killed one near the right ditch with his hammer and a fence stake, though from the look of the broken ground around him, the deer looked like it had lost a fight with a stone wall. He was breathing hard enough to make his beard move. Talia looked across the field at me.

"Blood-mouth," she said, wiping the last blood from her blade, "get skinning. If Araluen's been hit, the town will need these pelts to keep warm." For a moment, I could not answer. My hands still expected antlers. My eyes still saw too many lines of attack. Hunter's Eye had advanced, but what filled me was not triumph. It was scale. Two deer had nearly taken all my attention and most of my breath. Talia had crossed a field of them like a knife passing through cloth.

She saw the thought on my face and smiled, but not unkindly.

"You spotted them first."

"I killed two."

"Yes."

"You killed the field."

"Someone had to keep the road tidy." Halden limped toward us, wiping mud from his hammer.

"This was not a natural herd."

"No," I said, kneeling beside the smaller deer I had killed. I pushed fur aside and found the hidden cuts beneath, thin and deliberate, healed badly under the dense coat. The flesh around them was warm in the wrong places and cold in others.

"They were changed."

"Crimson touched" Talia asked as she looked at the mountains in the distance. We did not skin them there in full. There were too many, and the road had already taught me that quiet could be a held breath. Halden marked the place on Mairi's map, not as salvage first, but as a shaped hazard. His charcoal lines were short and angry: herd driven, ash marked, road funnel, west pressure. He underlined west twice, then folded the map as if folding could make the fact behave.

Talia chose the best pelts with a glance and a command, practical and cold now that Araluen had become more than a name ahead of us.

"That one. That one. The flank on the big one if you can take it clean. Leave the torn belly. Leave anything too blood-soaked unless you enjoy carrying rot."

"Trade goods?" I asked.

"Blankets first. Trade later." That told me more than she meant it to. Merris would have priced the pelts before the warmth left them. Mairi would have classified them by route danger, alteration, and emergency use. Arra would have known what could become coat lining, boot guard, or winter collar. Talia looked at them and saw a town where someone was already cold. I cut enough to bind the first hides for carrying and to prove the value of the herd.

Beastcraft pressed through my hands, Copper mid and sharper now after the Werrin fox, reading where the skin had thickened against cold and where the hidden wounds had spoiled clean use. These were not good pelts in the way a hunter would want. They were damaged, altered, too heavy in places and strangely thin in others. But the winter coat was dense, and the outer hair shed water well enough. Careful trimming could turn horror into warmth. That seemed to be the kind of bargain the road preferred.

We took three partial pelts and enough antler to show what had been done to the herd. I wanted to take more because leaving value behind felt wrong in the bone. Halden looked at my pack, then at the field, then at me.

"The road is not a warehouse."

"I know."

"No. You are learning." Talia wiped her hands on wet grass.

"Leave the rest for Araluen if it still has hands to send. If it does not, we will have larger grievances than wasted deer." The bodies remained behind us in the field, ash-marked and wrong, antlers tangled against broken walls. No birds came down. By late afternoon, the road began to climb. The first smoke appeared beyond a fold in the hills, a dark smear leaning east under a wind that smelled of wet pine, ash, and opened stone. Talia stopped at the top of the rise.

Below us, the road fell toward outer farms, broken paddocks, and the first low roofs of a settlement tucked beneath the shadow of the Derwold's climbing edge. Alarm fires burned on two watch posts. One had already gone out. She stood very still. For the first time since I had known her, Talia did not seem to be choosing where to place herself. She was simply looking at the place that had made her and deciding what shape of ruin it had become while she was gone.

Halden came up beside us and said nothing, which was perhaps the kindest thing he had done all day.

"That is Araluen," Talia said. She drew her sword before the road began to descend.