Chapter 240: Farmer’s Might

Chapter 240: Chapter 240: Farmer’s Might

The blood came first.

It surged across the floor in a single crimson wave, rising ankle-high and rushing toward the squad’s line with a sound like a river in flood. Cassian Redmourne did not follow it. He let it go ahead of him, and then, in the half-second the tide hid his movement, he vanished.

"Left!" Mirei shouted from the pillar.

Caelen’s shield came up just in time. The sword struck it with a shriek of tortured metal, and a spray of red scattered across the rim. Cassian had crossed forty paces in less than a breath, and he stood now at the point of the line, blade locked against the shield, his pale eyes only inches from Caelen’s.

"Quick," said Cassian, almost pleasantly. "Quicker than the last party."

"I’ll take that as praise," Caelen grunted, and shoved.

[Skill: Bloodlet Edge]

The sword flickered, turned, and slid sideways across the shield’s face, nicking Caelen’s forearm through a gap in the plate. It was barely a scratch. But the wound did not close. Blood welled up and kept welling, a thin, bright ribbon, and on Caelen’s face a flicker of surprise gave way to tight, controlled concentration.

"Bleeding," he said, flatly. "Seraphina."

"Seeing to it." A vial arced across the hall and burst against his arm in a pale gold mist. The ribbon of red thinned, slowed, and stopped. "It resists clotting. It is the blade, not the wound. Do not let him cut you twice."

"Noted."

Barney was already moving. He swung his shield wide, driving the rim into Cassian’s ribs, and the guardian slid back with a gliding, unhurried grace, his boots leaving two dark furrows in the slick floor. He tilted his head and regarded Barney with the same detached courtesy.

"A smith," he observed. "I can smell the forge on you. Your armor is very fine. It will rust like any other."

"Talk is cheap," said Barney, and hefted his hammer.

Rowan moved last, and he moved quietly.

He had drawn the tool from Eden’s storehouse in the moment the fighting began: a long-hafted harvest scythe, its curved blade dark green and silver-edged, its handle worn smooth by years of use. It was not a weapon in the way Caelen’s sword was. It had been made for fields, not for fights. But in his hands, in this room, the blade hummed with a patient, waiting power.

He stayed to the edge of the engagement and watched the pattern of the fight. The squad had always been a machine, and his place in it had never been at the front. It was in the gaps. The half-second before an opening. The step to the side that made the whole line breathe.

There, he thought.

Cassian had committed. He had driven off Barney’s shield, turned on Caelen, and left his back half-turned to the floor, where the blood was gathering again around his boots. He was about to strike with the glittering crimson blade at the next gap in the formation, and when he did, it would cost the squad a limb.

Rowan sprang.

He crossed the distance in three long strides, boots sure on the slick stone, and swung the scythe in a wide horizontal arc.

[Scythe of the Harvester]

The blade came alive. A shimmer of green earth-light poured down its edge, wrapped in a thin spiral of wind, and the strike swept across the hall in a pale crescent that cut the air with a rising whistle. Cassian turned at the last moment, raising his sword in a parry, but the arc was too wide, too fast. It caught him across the ribs and the thigh, and the guardian’s coat split open in a spray of crimson.

"Ah," he said, and his voice held genuine interest. "A reaper."

The wounds did not close. A dark, bruise-colored thread crept out from each cut and began to bleed in a slow, ugly stream.

[Reap applied.]

Cassian glanced at his own side, then at Rowan, and the faint smile returned.

"Clever. You turn my own trade against me." He flicked his blade, and the blood on the floor leaped to his side, wrapping the wounds in thin, shimmering skeins. The bleeding slowed. Not stopped, but slowed. "Come, then. Let us see how many times you can do that."

The fight became a dance.

Cassian moved through the hall like a drop of ink in water, flowing from one target to the next, every step light and exact. He had no wasted motion. When Barney’s hammer came down, he was not there. When Mirei’s arrow flew, his sword turned it in mid-air with a flick of the wrist. And always, the blood followed him, in coils and ribbons and slow, spinning rings, lifting off the floor at his command to guard his flanks and sharpen his edge.

[Skill: Sanguine Surge]

He blurred. Between one heartbeat and the next, the guardian was behind Seraphina, sword raised, and she had time only to throw herself sideways and shatter a vial at her own feet. A cloud of silver smoke burst up between them. Cassian’s blade passed through it and found nothing, and a heartbeat later Barney’s shield slammed into his shoulder from behind, driving him forward onto one knee.

"Down," said Barney, with grim satisfaction.

"Not quite." Cassian rose, and the floor rose with him.

[Skill: Red Tide]

The blood swelled. It lifted in a single, vast wave, taller than a man, and rolled across the hall toward the squad in a glittering, foaming crest. Mirei dropped from her pillar with a startled yelp. Barney braced his shield. Caelen grabbed Seraphina by the collar and hauled her back.

Rowan was already stamping his boot.

[Terra Tilling]

The earth heaved. A frontal cone of dark stone dissolved into sucking mud, spreading outward from his feet in a widening fan. The great wave of blood crashed into it, slowed, sagged, and sprawled across the churned ground like spilled wine, sinking into the soft earth before it could reach them. And Cassian, riding the crest of it, found his boots suddenly caught.

"What..." he began.

His speed dropped. His stride stuttered. A fine spray of mud flicked into his face, and he blinked, startled, and swiped a hand across his eyes.

"Now," Caelen said.

The squad moved as one. Mirei’s arrows struck three at a time, pinning Cassian’s sleeve and shoulder to the muddy floor. Barney’s hammer thundered against the guardian’s guard, driving him back another step. Caelen cut in low and fast, and the guardian was forced to block, parry, and block again.

Rowan swung the scythe, spun the haft in his grip, and drove the butt of it into Cassian’s raised blade.

[Threshing Strike]

The gravity of the blow rolled down the handle like a falling mountain. Cassian’s sword, shield-bright and crimson-edged, rang like a struck bell and shuddered in his hand. A thin web of cracks spread across the flat of the blade, and his guard collapsed. For one startled instant, he staggered.

"Armor-break," Seraphina murmured, almost to herself. "Twenty-five percent."

"Then hit him harder," said Barney, and did.

For a long moment, the tide turned entirely.

The guardian fought on with fierce, almost joyful precision, but each exchange cost him a little more. Caelen’s sword found his shoulder. Mirei’s arrows found his knees. Seraphina’s vials burst in his face, dulling his reflexes, slowing his stride. Rowan darted in and out of the gaps, scything at the openings, striking the places where others had already cut. Twice he wove between Caelen and Barney to cover a stumble. Once he slid under a sweeping blow and tipped the scythe’s heel into the back of Cassian’s knee. They moved around the guardian like a closing net.

But Cassian was not finished.

"Impressive," he said. His coat hung in ribbons. His chest heaved, and the blood dripping from his hair had thinned to a trickle. He wiped a streak of mud from his cheek with the back of his sword hand and lifted the blade again, and the cracks in its steel glowed a deep, furious red. "Truly. I had begun to think no one would reach me again. But a duelist does not yield to the first bruise."

He drove the sword into the floor.

[Skill: Crimson Tithe - Overflow]

Every drop of blood in the hall lifted at once.

It rose around him in a vast, spiraling storm, hundreds of thousands of drops, hanging in the air like red rain. The torches flared white. The walls trembled. Cassian’s wounds closed in a rush, the flesh knitting, the blood on his coat soaking back into his body, and his eyes blazed with a pale, terrible fire. The pressure that had hit them at the start of the fight returned tenfold.

"He’s healing," Mirei gasped. "He’s healing all of it!"

"He’s gathering it," said Rowan. His voice was very calm. "He’s about to throw it all at once."

The storm began to turn, faster and faster, a thousand crimson blades forming and aligning in the air, every point turning toward them.

Think, he told himself. You have one chance.

He looked at the squad. Caelen was bleeding from a dozen small cuts. Barney’s shield was dented almost in half. Mirei was out of breath, Seraphina out of vials. They could not outrun it, and they could not block it.

But the floor was still soft with mud, and Cassian’s boots were still caught in it, and he was standing at the center of his own storm.

"Everyone back," Rowan said. "Behind me. Now."

They obeyed without a word. He stepped forward alone, into the open, and planted the scythe’s haft in the ground with both hands.

[Chaff in the Wind]

A burst of dust and golden husks exploded from his feet, billowing outward in a dense, glittering cloud. The air went thick and bright and dry. The storm of blades lurched, blinded, searching. Inside the cloud, Cassian’s head whipped from side to side, and he opened his mouth to speak a command, and found, to his astonishment, that no sound came out.

Rowan was gone.

He had vanished into the chaff, a shadow within a shadow, moving fast and silent across the soft mud. He circled once. He crossed the guardian’s blind side. And then, in the heart of the cloud, with his heart pounding and his hands steady, he stopped and planted the scythe’s blade deep in the earth.

[Earthbreaker Plough: Celestial Furrow]

The channeling took a second and a half.

It felt like a lifetime. The ground drank his mana through the haft, a deep, endless pull that rattled his bones, and the whole hall seemed to hold its breath. Beneath his boots, the floor of the Tower trembled. Far below, something ancient answered.

He tore the scythe free and charged.

The world broke.

A wedge of earth erupted in front of him, thirty meters wide, a surging wall of black stone and churning mud that ripped the flagstones from their beds and hurled them skyward. Boulders the size of carts wheeled through the air. The pillars cracked. The great wave of broken ground swept down the length of the hall like a giant plough, and it carried Rowan with it, riding the crest, the scythe held low and the dust streaming behind him like a banner.

Cassian turned, in the last moment, and saw it coming.

He did not raise his sword. He did not shout. He only straightened, with the blood still hanging around him in a ruined, shining cloud, and met Rowan’s eyes through the dust, and nodded.

The Furrow struck him full on.

The sound was enormous, and then it was gone.

When the dust cleared, the hall was a ruin. The floor had been churned to rubble from end to end, a wide, ragged lane cut through the stone from where Rowan had started to the far wall. The columns lay in pieces. The torches had gone out. And in the center of the wreckage, half-buried in a drift of broken earth, lay Cassian Redmourne, on his back, with his sword beside him in two bright, silent halves.

Rowan came to a halt a few paces away, breathing hard. His hands shook on the scythe. The squad gathered behind him, one by one, limping and winded, and no one spoke.

The guardian was still alive. His chest rose and fell, shallow and slow. His pale eyes had turned to the ceiling, and when Rowan stepped closer, they moved, with great effort, to meet his.

"A farmer," said Cassian, in a thin, cracked whisper. A ghost of the old, polite smile crossed his face. "I would never have guessed it. Thirty floors of blood, and I am felled by the plough."

"I’m sorry," Rowan said, and found he meant it.

"Do not be." The swordsman closed his eyes. "I have waited a long time for someone who would not simply hack. You fought like a man who loves what he protects." His breath caught. "Whatever lies above, it is stranger than I. Go carefully, reaper. And do not let it teach you to hate."

His hand opened. The broken sword turned to red mist and drifted up into the dark, and the rest of him went with it, thinning, fading, until only a faint, dry smell of iron remained on the air.

The silence stretched.

"Well," said Barney finally, and his voice cracked, just slightly. "That was not a normal boss."

"No," said Rowan. "It wasn’t."

At the far end of the hall, where the Furrow had torn the wall open, a doorway of pale light was slowly unfolding, its edges rippling like water. Floor 31 waited beyond it.

Rowan wiped the dust from his face and lowered the scythe, and for a long moment, he simply stood in the quiet, listening to the ground beneath him settle.