Free Web NovelChapter 18: Cleared Out
"Hold on a minute, folks." Aidan’s voice rang, attracting all eyes to him.
"Fighting chaotically like this is not a good idea." Aidan wryly smiled. "I might accidentally kill some of you, and nobody would want that, right?"
The team captain of Blazing Wings Guild uttered a loud, "Huh?"
"Accidentally kill us? Who do you think you are, pretty boy?" freeweɓnovel.cøm
Aidan smiled.
In the next moment, he vanished, bursting into full speed using a technique called Blitz Strider, made using Wind, Lightning, and Attraction aspects.
He appeared next to the team captain of Blazing Wings with a single spiraling spear made of wind and blood already in Aidan’s hand that went straight into the captain’s stomach, piercing his Tier-3 armor without any resistance.
PUCCHII!
Everyone was shocked.
Even Aidan’s teammates.
"Hurry up and leave if you don’t want to die, big guy." Aidan patted the captain’s head with a smile.
Sweating, trembling, and in disbelief, he looked at Aidan with wide eyes before activating the wristband and disappearing.
There was a simple reason why Aidan was significantly more powerful than others when everyone’s lifeform stats were capped at D-10 after entering this Tier-3 terrorized dimension.
Some talents had effects that gave a bonus stat boost.
Aidan’s Power Bond talent did that.
From Blood Hunter Knuckle Duster bond, he got +80% Atttack, and +75% attack speed boost.
From the Spiral Fan Blade bond, he got +100% speed and +90% control.
From Blitzer Burst bond, he got +100% move speed.
So his foundational stats were at D-10, but those stats got the boosts mentioned above, making him significantly stronger in raw terms compared to others.
BOOOM!
Suddenly, one of the team members of Blazing Wings launched a volley of Green Flame Blades at Aidan.
Aidan vanished from his spot and appeared next to the girl who attacked him, his spear already piercing her stomach.
"Hurry up, or you’ll bleed to death," Aidan whispered.
The girl instantly vanished, exiting the dimension.
"Damn it! Let’s attack him together, or we won’t stand a chance! Make him exit this dimension!"
"Eliminate his other teammates as well! We vastly outnumber them!"
A chaotic battle unfolded. But Aidan only cared about one thing. Eliminating everyone except for Mira, the girl in despair. He wanted to have a solo talk with her.
So he moved.
Blitz Strider snapped him across the cavern in a streak of crimson and white, and he started picking the room apart.
He didn’t bother with defense. He didn’t bother with restraint either, not the kind that mattered. He just made sure every strike landed somewhere that bled and never somewhere that killed, and let the safety bands do the rest.
A Leonus Arten swordsman swung at where Aidan had been. Aidan was already behind him, spear through the gilded backplate.
PUCCHII!
"Eject or bleed."
The man triggered his band and vanished.
A Jadeblade teen lunged at his flank. Aidan caught the boy’s wrist, spun him, and tapped a spear-point to his ribs. free𝑤ebnovel.com
"Go home, kid."
Gone.
It wasn’t a fight, not for Aidan. The others were capped at D-10. So was he, on paper. But his Power Bond stacking sat on top of that cap like a second body, and against Hunters who only had the cap, he simply moved in a different gear.
His teammates held their own behind him.
Marvin had thrown himself into the thick of it, grinning wider with every hit he took, his Frenzied Warrior talent feeding on his own dropping health until each punch came down like a boulder. A Whispering Light Hunter clipped his shoulder, and Marvin laughed with blood on his teeth and flattened the man into the wall.
Carol stayed back, flowers blooming across her teammates, sealing cuts and lifting tired legs. Whenever an enemy broke through, a vine of glowing petals caught an ankle long enough for someone else to punish it.
Regis and Bella worked as one. Fire and ice.
Regis loosed dark-orange arrows that flushed the last Jadeblade twins out of cover, and Bella was already there, her ice puppets surging up to ring them in. Two bands lit at once.
"Behind you, Bel."
"I see them."
A wall of ice rose. A Whispering Light spell broke against it, and Bella’s puppets answered with a spray of spikes that emptied two more bands in a blink.
The Leonus Arten line collapsed next. Their golden armor was built for show, and show didn’t stop a wind-blood spear. Aidan went down their ranks one flicker at a time, and one by one their wristbands flared, and they were gone.
"He’s not even slowing down!"
"Where’s our captain?! Somebody hit him together!"
They tried. They massed up, fire and steel and light converging on the spot where Aidan stood.
He simply wasn’t there when it landed.
Blitz Strider. A streak. And the loudest of them folded over a spear-point and triggered his band on reflex.
The numbers bled out fast after that.
Whispering Light’s bell-girl was the last of the outside guilds left. She rang her chime, and the world went quiet, footsteps swallowed, sound bending around her as she stepped backward into the hush.
Aidan closed his eyes.
He didn’t need to hear her.
He could feel exactly where she wasn’t.
A flicker, and his spear stopped a hair from her throat out of the empty air. Her bell froze mid-swing.
"Loud room," Aidan said. "You did well staying quiet. But I’ve spent a long time somewhere with no sound at all."
The girl’s hand shook.
She triggered her band and was gone.
Silence rolled back into the cavern.
Aidan turned.
Only Blue Vortex was left standing now, loosely ringed around the pulsing core, breathing hard, splattered with frost and ash and black monster blood that wasn’t theirs.
And one other.
Mira Halden stood exactly where she’d started, at the back of where her team used to be, short spear still loose in her grip. She hadn’t moved through any of it. Hadn’t raised the spear once. Her teammates had been ejected around her one by one, and she’d watched it happen with those same flat, unfeeling eyes, like none of it had anything to do with her.
"...That’s it?" Marvin wiped his mouth and looked around at the emptied cavern, then back at Aidan. "You did more than half of that yourself, easy."
"You all did great." Aidan rolled his shoulder. "Bel, Regis, Carol, Marvin. Catch your breath and start setting up to purify the core. Beatrix gave us the procedure before we came in."
"And her?" Bella’s eyes cut to Mira, frost still hissing off her fingertips. "She’s the only one left. Want me to clear her out?"
"No." It came out flatter than Aidan meant it.
He eased it. "No. Leave her to me. Go on, give me a minute."
His team traded glances. Nobody pushed. Marvin grunted and steered them toward the core, and the four of them set to work, putting distance and noise between themselves and the two figures by the cavern wall.
Then it was just them.
Aidan and Mira.
The core throbbed its slow blue heartbeat behind him. The river roared far above. And in the space between the two of them, that thin grinding hum pressed against Aidan’s chest, the despair, dense now that he was close, no longer a beep at the back of his skull but a weight with a shape to it.
He looked at her properly.
Up close, he’d had it wrong from across the room. The flatness in her eyes wasn’t emptiness. It wasn’t a girl who’d run out of feeling.
It was a girl carrying so much of it that she’d gone still under the weight, the way deep water sits motionless because everything is happening too far down to reach the surface.
He knew that look. He’d worn it.
’Not hollow,’ Aidan thought. ’Loaded.’
He let his spear dissolve into nothing and kept his hands open and easy at his sides.
"Relax. I’m not going to skewer you like the rest." He nodded at the spear hanging in her grip. "You didn’t even lift that thing. You’ve been standing here the whole fight, waiting on something. I’d like to know what."
Mira looked at him for a long moment.
The hum between them thickened, and underneath it, Aidan felt the thing riding her shift, like a passenger sitting up to listen.
Then she spoke, calm and even.
"You should’ve let one of them finish me. It would’ve been simpler for everyone."
