Chapter 45: Conditions

Chapter 45: Chapter 45: Conditions

"Why not kill me in the office?" Allan asked. He looked at the blood on the ground and the bodies cooling near the trees. "Why waste all these lives to get to me?"

"You’d already crossed level hundred. I felt it the second you walked in." The man didn’t lower his voice for the corpses. "Don’t trouble yourself over them. There are always more younglings who want to be adventurers."

Allan had thought of himself as cold. The man in front of him was worse.

He let go of restraint. Holding back would put him on the ground with the rest.

He hit the tree line already moving, sword out, Berserker heat rising steady in his limbs. Kael didn’t wait. Her fist caught him hard in the stomach. Every hit after landed with the same economy, someone who had studied fighters, not just fought them. His cuts kept finding her blade instead of her body, angled aside rather than met head-on.

Sparks jumped. Leaves and dirt kicked up under their boots.

Behind him, Diva froze a second too long. Her eyes went to the bodies of his comrades near the roots. The spear shook in her grip.

Now or never. She forced herself to move.

She fell in at his back, spear working the gaps Kael left when she overextended. Kael had to twist and give ground instead of press. For a stretch of heartbeats the three of them turned under the canopy, Allan pressing, Kael giving ground without panic, her eyes measuring the whole time.

Then her eyes found Diva’s. Something in her rhythm caught, half a beat. Allan felt it. He went for the opening. She used it first, slipping inside his next cut and dragging her edge across his ribs in one long, shallow line.

Pain flared bright enough to cut through the Berserker haze. The state ate most of it. It didn’t hide the warmth spreading wet under his shirt.

"Bad pattern," Kael said.

"And you talk too much." He caught her wrist mid-recovery and put his blade through the tendon instead of her throat. It bit deep just above the joint. She staggered, blood running down her fingers, and looked at the wound with something closer to interest than pain.

He’d had the angle for her throat a half-second earlier and hadn’t taken it. No time to examine why.

"The cult doesn’t need you alive." Her voice stayed level even with her hand ruined. "Not a Scoundrel like you. Remember that, next time you choose mercy over finishing it."

She stepped back into the dark between the trunks. One breath she was there, bleeding, watching him. The next the shadow had her. He held still long enough to be sure she wasn’t circling, then let the state drop.

The heat left in a rush. The cut across his ribs settled into a deep, grinding burn that pulled with every breath. He pressed a hand to it. Blood already cooling. Diva still had the spear, blood on the shaft and her knuckles. She wouldn’t look at him.

"I’m sorry. I mean it."

He’d held that blade on Kael’s tendon a beat longer than the kill required. He still didn’t have a clean answer for why.

"Sorry doesn’t cover it." Flat. Not quite accusation, not quite absolution. "Find me a horse. We’ll get to your apology once I’m not bleeding through my shirt."

They rode hard. Every strike of the hooves found the wound and made it worse. He kept his jaw locked and didn’t talk. Wind cut through the torn shirt and found the open flesh. The road ran black under the trees.

The System put lines in front of his eyes without warning.

[Investment assets, losing value.]

[Lira: critical condition.]

[Seris: critical condition.]

[Amelia: critical condition.]

He read them twice before the meaning landed.

"What—" He twisted toward Diva. "Did she hit my house too?"

Silence. Diva’s eyes dropped. Her arms, still around his waist, tightened.

That was answer enough.

Heat came up behind his eyes, nothing to do with Berserker this time. Kael could cut him, corner him, try to put him in the ground. He’d factored that in. Touching the people under his roof was a different ledger.

"If any of them are hurt, I swear to every god still listening, you and Kael go in the ground together." He ground it out.

Diva’s grip slipped. Tears came fast. Whatever she’d meant to say died before it reached her mouth.

He didn’t have room for her tears. Nothing useful to do about it from horseback. ℯℯ𝘭.

She finally got words out, low under the hooves. "Kael told me she’d report me to the Guild as losing control. That they’d put me down as a monster before I ever got the chance to prove I wasn’t one. I didn’t see a way through that didn’t cost somebody something."

He kept his eyes on the road. The sky was starting to gray at the edges. "I know what it’s like to be somebody else’s calculation. That doesn’t make tonight weigh less. Both things are true at once."

She didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer that fit.

***

At Oakwood the last of the assassins were still throwing themselves at the doors. Seris kept the remaining guards moving with short, flat orders. Hold here, reload, fall back to the pillar. Her voice stayed steady even while her hands shook every time nobody was looking. She pressed the tremor against her side and kept commanding through it.

Lira fought near the main entrance, face tight and empty. Every time she reached for the deeper power that used to answer, there was nothing. The path Allan had burned stayed shut. Each empty reach landed like another small loss. She killed with steel alone, efficient, no wasted motion, until an assassin slipped her guard and drove straight for the center of the hall.

Amelia was already there. She’d stayed close to the doorway the entire fight. When the man’s blade came for her throat, she didn’t step back.

Her eyes went full crimson. He froze mid-lunge. Something in his veins stopped. He dropped without a sound, face already gray. A thin line of blood ran from Amelia’s nose. She wiped it once and stayed standing.

"Hold, both of you. My people should already be riding." Her voice carried. "The Emperium’s guard will have been alerted too. We just need to last."

Lira felt something complicated under the adrenaline. Relief that Amelia was here at all, threaded with the plain fact that without her, she and Seris would already be dead.

The ground came apart under a sound like a struck bell, deep enough to feel in the teeth. The whole house shook.

Amelia went into the wall. Seris was thrown against the door frame. Lira, holding the entrance, found herself flat on unfamiliar stone, ears ringing, the room swimming.

"What happened?" Her own voice sounded far away.

No one answered. Even the assassins nearby were down. She got her feet under her slowly. Back aching. Blood starting at her nose.

"Where is Allan Oakwood." The voice carried through the whole hall without being raised. "Where is the player."

Seris pushed up, the back of her skull wet where she’d hit the frame, and walked toward the voice. A man stood in the wreckage of the entryway, hood up, aura pressing on the air like weather. She didn’t know his name. She knew he could end her without changing expression.

Her legs shook. She stepped forward anyway.

"He’s not here." Her blade came up, pointed at him. Arm not quite steady. "Turn around and leave."

He looked at her, really looked, and something in his face shifted toward interest. "You’re afraid. And you’re still standing in front of me anyway. That’s not nothing."

Amelia arrived from the side, one leg broken and bleeding freely, dragging herself upright against the doorframe. "Uninvited guests aren’t welcome here." Blood lifted off the floor around her, hers and the dead man’s both, snapping into a loose ring of arrows. "Leave, or don’t. I’m not particular either way."

Lira came from the other direction, feet no longer touching the floor, hovering just above them both. Eyes fully black. Dark veins spreading up through her face like ink under skin.

"Leave," she said. "Or die here."

The man laughed, short and genuine. "A blood witch, a floating assassin, and a girl who won’t put her sword down even scared out of her mind. Lord Oakwood’s built himself quite the roster."

Dust and broken stone began lifting around him as his aura climbed. He pulled the hood back. White hair, pale blue eyes, an expression that had already stopped taking any of this as a real threat.

"Shame nobody’s finished training you." He cracked his knuckles, unhurried. "I suppose that’s my job now."