Chapter 8: East Wind

The first thing Kren noticed was the system notification hovering in front of his eyes. Even with danger closing in on every side, he couldn’t help but read it before it vanished from his sight.

[Summoning Aura Spell Acquired: Spirits of the Four Winds]

[You have been blessed and chosen by the spirits of the four winds. The North Wind of the frozen skies, that shields you from harm. The South Wind of the rejuvenating seas, that heals and restores you. The fierce East Wind, to cut your enemies down and make your blade bite deeper. And the West Wind, ever fleeting, to keep you from the clutches of your enemies. Summon them to aid you in battle, O prince of mane and claw.]

That was all the time Kren got before he ducked to the side, more shots cracking through the night. This was why the dragons had been so hard to beat — technology. Their soldiers didn’t just wield Aura; they had the tools to weaponize it a dozen different ways. But this was not the time for a history lesson.

Kren broke into a sprint for the carriage. Aki reached him first, boots pounding the earth as he threw himself bodily between Kren and the next shot. The crack rang out — Aki grunted, the bullet punching into his back — but it didn’t so much as slow his stride. He hauled Kren the rest of the way, wrenched the carriage door open, and shoved him inside with more strength than Kren would have thought the diminutive cat kin capable of.

Kren spun around. There was no way he was staying in here, waiting to be protected. He moved to get up, but Bernice placed a hand on his shoulder and shook her head. She had a book in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.

"Let Aki handle this. It’s been more than ten years since he’s had a proper fight. Let the cat stretch his claws a little."

"Huh?"

It took Kren a moment to remember that both Bernice and Aki had regained access to their inner beasts as well. Their cultivation might have stalled, even regressed a little over the last decade, but both of them still stood at the third realm — Beast Manifestation — the same as Princess Elyvara. That said everything about how powerful they must have been before the crest was stripped from them.

The earth shook as something slammed into the side of the carriage. The impact made Kren flinch — one whole wall had caved inward, wood splintering like kindling. Bernice surveyed the damage with a bored look.

"We really should look into getting an automotive. It’s beneath a king to travel in something so archaic and unsafe." Kren rolled his eyes, then noticed the seam in the floorboards — an escape hatch. He yanked it open, ignoring Bernice’s raised eyebrow. Firelight still flickered somewhere out in the dark, but the night was thick now with hisses and yowls. Kren turned to her.

"Selvin came to kill me." He said it as fact, not question. Bernice shook her head.

"The snake prince wouldn’t dirty his own hands — he’s far too arrogant for that. And of the six assassins outside... sorry, four now... none of them carry his aura signature. We’re fine for the moment." She turned another page in her book as she said it.

Kren ignored her, prying up the seat’s upholstery, eyes still fixed on the trapdoor beneath. Underneath, a gleaming black Aura musket lay hidden, along with a case of Aura cartridges. He grabbed both.

"What are you going to do with that? Poke holes in their clothes?" Kren shot her a glare. "Please, Your Majesty. There are beast-manifestation-ranked killers out there. Your musket won’t so much as dent them. Stay put."

"I can’t just sit here doing nothing!"

He was cut off by a hiss. Both of them looked down as a purple snake, easily two meters long, slithered beneath the carriage floor. Seeing the beast confirmed exactly what Bernice had said — every assassin outside was at the Beast Manifestation realm, because this was one of their inner beasts made flesh. The snake surged upward, jaws stretching wide to snap Kren in half.

*CRACK!*

The musket’s report filled the carriage as an Aura round tore into the roof of the snake’s mouth. The impact hurled it backward, and somewhere out in the dark, a man screamed. Bernice raised an eyebrow and peered through the trapdoor. The snake writhed on the ground, dragging itself in a slow, wounded retreat back toward its handler.

"If you let it go, it’ll heal the moment it returns to the assassin’s inner world. Haven’t you learned an art or a spell from the crest yet? Sounds like a good time to try it." She went back to her book, leaving Kren staring at her, eyes wide. How was she this relaxed with people trying to kill them? The snake let out a low hiss, still dragging itself toward the gap beneath the carriage.

Kren surged to his feet, slinging the musket over his shoulder, and thrust a hand toward the fleeing snake. He closed his eyes. The crest lay outside somewhere on the ground, but he could still feel it — he really needed to get a necklace made for the thing. The Aura connecting him to it blazed to life regardless, the spell he’d just learned unspooling through his mind as though it had always lived there.

"Summon: Spirit of the East Wind!"

Aura flared around him — a halo of green and white as the wind surged upward from nothing. A corona of it spun to life around his wrist, blazing bright, and he knew instantly what he was looking at: the spirit of the EastWind herself. He wasn’t strong enough yet to see her as anything more than that spinning ring of light and wind.

"That’s going to take some getting used to," Kren muttered, caught off guard by how aware he suddenly was of her presence.

"Aren’t you forgetting something?" Bernice said, flicking her eyes down toward the snake — nearly free now, most of its body already through the gap.

Kren’s expression hardened. He thrust his right hand forward, and crescent blades of wind tore free of his palm, screaming through the air and slamming into the snake with the fury of an apex predator that had just been provoked. It shrieked, the sound echoed a half-second later by its owner’s cry of pain somewhere in the trees. Then someone bellowed.

"Fuck it!"

Every hair on Kren’s body stood on end. Instinct screamed at him that something far worse was coming. He turned to run, but Bernice only snorted and flicked her wrist. Darkness swallowed his vision, the floor dropped out from under him, and then he was on his knees in the dirt, twigs and dead grass biting into his palms.

He raised his head just in time to see a massive snake rear back and spit a stream of purple-tinged acid across what remained of the carriage. It struck wood and steel alike, hissing and bubbling like butter dropped onto a hot skillet. The carriage sagged, then slumped, then dissolved into a smoking ruin before his eyes.

Kren raised an eyebrow. "Damn!"

"Language, Your Majesty." Aki appeared out of nowhere, hauling Kren up by the arm and pressing the crest back into his hand. "And don’t lose that crest again. I’d hate to lose access to my beast right after getting it back." Kren gaped at him — Aki was drenched red from head to toe, and beside him a massive white cat sat calmly licking blood from its paws.

Kren turned left. Bernice stood there, a panther flanking her — six feet at the shoulder, dwarfing Aki’s cat, which looked almost dog-sized by comparison. He turned his attention back to the wreck of the carriage, wincing at the pained shrieks of the horses as they dissolved into sludge, and at the snake still coiled in the clearing, very much alive.

"Surrender the prince, and I’ll let the rest of you leave here alive." Kren raised an eyebrow, shrugged, then glanced sideways at Bernice and Aki — both standing utterly relaxed, utterly unbothered.

"I’m guessing we’re either running, or we’re killing this guy." Neither answered — just the faint, coiled shift of muscle as they readied themselves to move. Kren nodded to himself, cracked his neck side to side, and hefted the musket to his shoulder. He gave the assassins a smile that had no warmth in it at all.

"Guess we’re killing you, then."

The assassins didn’t care for that answer. As they surged forward, Kren caught the flash of orange and green at their collars — the colors of the Ale kingdom. That bastard prince Selvin hadn’t even bothered to hide his hand in this. As far as Selvin was concerned, the game had already begun, and removing the weakest piece from the board first would tilt everything firmly in his favor. If it were possible, Kren hated him even more now. The great snake reared to strike — and Bernice’s hand closed around his shoulder again.

The world lurched. They reappeared in the air above a tree limb, right beside the serpent’s coiled length. From up here Kren could finally see its true size — twenty feet if it was an inch, nearly a meter thick at the widest coil, muscle sliding under scales like oiled rope. The snake and its handler both turned at the disturbance, but it was already too late. Bernice’s hand cut downward through the air.

"Aura Spell: Dark Horizon."

For a single heartbeat, the night itself seemed to darken further, the stars dimming as if a shadow had passed in front of them. A thin line of absolute black, rimmed in pale light, split the air like a blade drawn across silk. There was no dodging it, no outrunning it — the line swept through the assassin and his snake both, cutting them apart as easily as parting water. The spell didn’t stop there; it carried on into the treeline beyond, where a single cry of pain cut off into silence.

Aki strolled up to the base of the tree a moment later, a dead snake draped around his neck like a trophy scarf and its owner’s severed head held loosely in one clawed hand.

"I’d say that went rather well, don’t you think?"