Chapter 85: Battle Evolution

Chapter 85: Battle Evolution

Alden kept the blade lightly reinforced as he raised it. This time, he gathered the force of the blow through his legs and hips instead of trying to supply everything with his arms. His grip shifted, bringing the edge into line with the fracture his first strike had helped him understand.

He struck down and outward, away from Silas. At contact, he concentrated the attack’s mana at the point where steel met stone. The timing came with the movement; he didn’t have to stop and work it out.

The stone broke.

The crack opened under the edge. The projecting corner broke free and tipped outward, sliding down the rubble into the empty lane. The larger section jolted against its supports, but its weight stayed on the carriage frame and the floor. Silas’s hip and thigh were uncovered.

Alden dropped the sword. He got his hands under Silas’s arms and pulled.

Silas came free with a scrape of cloth on stone. Alden dragged him backward, out from under the slab Ferrow held, three steps, four, five, until they were both clear of the lane and sprawled on the open floor.

"Clear!" Alden shouted. "He’s clear!"

"Stay there!" Ferrow called.

He eased the guide junction down, lowering the linked partitions toward the now-empty lane. The upper slab slipped from its tangle of iron. Ferrow shoved it away from himself and stepped clear as it crashed onto the rubble. Dust shook from the skylights, and a final length of guide rail clattered across the stone.

Nothing else moved.

Alden was on his knees beside Silas. He had both hands on Silas’s shoulders, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with them.

"Your leg," Alden said. "Your leg was—I saw the blood, there was so much, are you—can you feel your feet? Silas. Can you feel your—"

"I can feel my feet," Silas said. His voice was hoarse. "Regeneration. It’s fine. It’s fixing it."

Alden looked down. Silas’s trouser leg was torn open and soaked dark from the knee to the hip. Under the blood, the skin was whole. As Alden watched, Silas bent the knee, slowly, and straightened it again.

Alden made a sound that was halfway to a laugh and halfway to something else, and sat back hard on the stone.

The urgent clarity was easing. He could look at the broken stone without his mind immediately finding something to correct. But he remembered how he had made that strike, how his feet and hips had worked with the sword instead of leaving his arms to do everything.

Alden flexed his fingers. His hands were still trembling. He rested them on his knees and looked back at Silas, who was breathing steadily and picking at a flap of torn cloth on his ruined trousers.

Only then did Alden let himself believe they were out.

Silas lay on his back on the cold floor and looked up at the dusty skylights while his hip finished putting itself back together.

Battle Evolution.

He’d seen it. The way Alden’s feet had moved before the second strike, the angle, the moment the mana had gone in. It was the thing he remembered from the game, the thing that had made a D-Rank scholarship student into someone who could stand in front of a guardian and get stronger every time it knocked him down. Only now it had happened in a training hall, because a partition had broken, and because Silas had stayed under a slab for a few seconds longer than he’d needed to.

He hadn’t caused the accident. He had chosen to stay, though, and Alden had been terrified for him. Silas couldn’t pretend that part had happened by itself.

The relief was so strong it made him lightheaded. He let himself feel it.

Ferrow came round the wreckage, rolling his shoulders and breathing hard. He looked at Silas’s leg, at the blood, and at the skin underneath. He crouched beside Alden and looked into his face.

"What did you feel?" Ferrow asked. "Just now. On the second strike."

Alden swallowed. "A name," he said. "Like when I was fifteen. It came into my head. Battle Evolution."

Ferrow was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once, briskly. "Don’t move, either of you. I’m calling medics and the registry."

The medics came first and found nothing wrong with Silas except a ruined pair of trousers and a great deal of drying blood. The medic checked the regeneration entry on his record, then made him stand and put weight on the leg before accepting that the damage was gone. She didn’t ask him to name the Trait. Alden had a bruised shoulder from the fall and a scuff on his cheek from the narrow turn.

The maintenance engineer came next, with two assistants. They pulled the broken carriage out of its track and laid it on a cloth on the floor, and the engineer cut through the casing of the mounting bracket with a small hissing tool while Ferrow stood over her.

Inside, the iron was cracked. The fracture ran through the middle of the casting, old and dark with rust along most of its length, bright and fresh only where it had finally given way.

"It was inside," the engineer said. "You couldn’t have seen it from outside. It passed its last check." She looked up at Ferrow, and her face was grim. "Every carriage in this hall comes out before anyone walks this floor again."

"Agreed," Ferrow said.

The duty appraiser from the registry arrived last: a thin, tired man with a reading plate tucked under his arm. He looked faintly irritated to have been called out until he held the plate up in front of Alden. Then he stopped looking irritated.

He looked at the plate for a long time.

"Cross, Alden," he said. "Soul Talent: Battle Evolution. S-Rank." He looked up. "It used to read Second Attempt. D-Rank."

"Yes," Alden said faintly.

"Not anymore." The appraiser wrote something down and looked at Ferrow. "I’ll file it. Somebody higher up will want to talk to him."

Alden stared at the plate as if it might change its mind.

It was nearly dark when they finally came out onto the steps. The air smelled of cut grass and someone’s dinner. Alden stopped on the bottom step and stood there, sword back across his shoulders, looking at nothing.

"Thank you," he said.

Silas looked over.

"For finding this place," Alden said. "For asking me. For pulling me out of the way." He glanced back at the closed hall doors. "You went looking for something that suited my Talent. You thought it could be useful before any of this happened."

Silas thought about the shadow in the striker bay, eight paces away. About the few seconds he’d chosen to lie there.

"You did it," he said. "Not me. I just pointed at a building." He put out his hand, and Alden took it. "Congratulations, Alden. I mean it."

He did mean it. Under it, quieter, was the other thing: the relief of a man watching the hero of the story take a step he’d been afraid was lost. A strong Alden meant a world that might not need Silas Rooke to save it.

He kept that to himself, along with the rest.

"S-Rank," Alden said, as if trying the word out. "I don’t even know what that means yet."

"You’ll find out," Silas said. "Come on. You owe me dinner."

"I owe you?" Alden asked. "I pulled you out from under a wall."

"I pulled you out first," Silas said.

Alden laughed properly this time, and they went down the steps together.