Free Web NovelChapter 26: Second Summon
The two Tier-9 enforcers moved first, because that was what they were for.
They came at Aidan from two angles without a word between them, fast and clean and lethal, the way men move when killing is just the shape their work takes. One went low with a curved blade. The other came high, palm wreathed in grey killing intent.
They were Tier-9. SSS-rank.
Aidan was Tier-10 across the board, with Power Bond stacked on top of that like a second body.
It wasn’t a fight. It was a category error, the same one the three Epic Terrors had walked into that morning.
He caught the low blade between two fingers.
Just two fingers, the edge stopping dead against skin it couldn’t part, and the enforcer’s eyes went wide above his mask in the half-second before Aidan flicked his wrist and the man’s whole body left the ground sideways, slammed into the quarry wall, and slid down it.
The high one’s palm strike landed square on Aidan’s chest.
Aidan didn’t move. Didn’t rock back. Didn’t blink.
The enforcer stared at his own hand against the plain coat, at the complete and total nothing his full-power Tier-9 blow had accomplished, and for the first time in a very long career, something like fear crossed his settled face.
"Negligible," Aidan said, almost apologetic. "Not my words, but yeah."
He tapped the man once on the sternum.
Just a tap.
The enforcer folded over it and went down and stayed down, wheezing, alive only because Aidan had decided in that instant that he didn’t need to be otherwise yet.
It was over in under three seconds.
Barten’s smile was gone.
He stood alone now in the orange light at the mouth of the quarry, both his quiet professionals crumpled on the dirt, and Aidan watched the exact moment the young lord’s whole understanding of the world stopped loading.
"That’s, that’s not possible." Barten backed up a step. "You, those are guild enforcers, those are Tier-9—"
"I killed three Epic-rank Terrors before lunch." Aidan started walking toward him, slow, hands in his pockets. "I told you that part already. You thought I was bluffing. That’s the thing about people like you. You’ve spent so long with a name doing your fighting that you forgot names don’t actually weigh anything."
Barten’s hand scrabbled at his side and came up with the ornate sword, his own Tier-7 aura flaring desperate and bright.
Aidan let a sliver of his real pressure off the leash.
Just a sliver.
Barten’s knees hit the dirt like the strings had been cut. The sword dropped from a hand that wouldn’t close. He knelt there gasping under a weight with no source, sweat sheeting off him, his Tier-7 strength meaning exactly as much out here as his name did.
"There it is." Aidan crouched in front of him, unhurried. "That’s the floor you’ve been standing on your whole life without knowing it. Everyone you ever threatened, everyone you ever took because you could, this is how it felt for them. Heavy. Helpless. And nobody coming."
"P-please." Barten’s voice broke into something small and young and ugly. "My, my mother, the family, I’ll give you anything, money, the guild, anything you—"
"You planted a tracer on her." Aidan’s voice didn’t rise, and somehow that was worse. "You called for muscle. You came all the way out here to a place with no cameras so you could do whatever you were going to do to her, to us, and walk away clean. You planned all of that on the walk to the elevator." He tilted his head. "And now you want to negotiate."
"I’m sorry—"
"I believe you." Aidan stood. "Doesn’t change anything. People like you are only ever sorry about the part where it stopped working."
He felt Arthur stir at the far end of the bond, a hundred and twenty kilometers away, deep in the cocoon and still patient, still endlessly hungry.
’Buddy. Got three more. The famous kind.’
A low warm pulse answered, eager even half-asleep.
"You’re the trash I promised him," Aidan said quietly. "You and your two quiet friends. He’s been waiting a while. He’s not picky."
Barten opened his mouth to say the family name one final time.
A ribbon of exotic space yawned open behind him, and the patient vast thing on the other side reached through, and the young lord and both his enforcers were gone, swept clean off the quarry floor along with the dropped sword and the contact crystal and the little hair-thin tracer, every trace of them folded away into the dark and the hunger.
The quarry was empty.
[Your translated anger has decreased by another 0.4%, Player Aidan.]
’Slow and steady.’ Aidan exhaled, rolled his shoulders, and the heat at the back of his skull sank back down where it lived. ’Therapeutic, even.’
He turned. Solenne was watching him, the orange light catching the new amber of her eyes.
"That’s the last problem for today," he said. "Eat, home, problems. We did them out of order, but we did them."
She looked at the empty patch of dirt where the man who’d called her a thing to be collected had been kneeling a moment ago.
"...Thank you," she said.
"Don’t thank me. I needed to vent anyway." Aidan jerked his head back toward the city lights. "Come on. Let’s go buy a house properly this time." ƒгeewebnovёl.com
...
It was easy, in the end.
The remote estate had been listed across half a dozen agencies in H City, all of them working as middlemen for the same property, the way premium listings always were. Barten had only poisoned one of them.
So Aidan and Solenne walked into a different agency a few blocks from the first, a calmer office with a nervous, delighted agent who had no famous name leaning on him, and bought the property outright.
A pouch of Tier-10 Spirit Stones. A stunned silence. A transfer of ownership processed with trembling, grateful efficiency.
"Congratulations on the purchase, sir," the agent managed. "The name for the deed?"
Aidan didn’t even pause this time.
"Solenne," he said. "Put it in her name. It’s hers."
Beside him, the girl with the new face went very still, and said nothing, and the still water in her moved again, deeper this time, the way water moves when something breaks the surface from far below.
...
The estate was everything the listing had promised.
Walled wilderness, untouched forest climbing low hills, and at its heart a clear pond that drank the ambient Tier-7 Spirit Energy out of the air and pooled it into a faint visible shimmer above the water. The instant Aidan stepped through the gate, he felt it, a soft constant pressure tempering his body just by standing in it, day and night, asking nothing.
"It’s quiet," Solenne said, looking at the trees and the water and the hush, like it was the only word she had for what she was feeling and the nearest one she could reach.
"Yeah." Aidan stretched until his joints popped. "Finally."
The main house was large and clean and empty. He picked a room with a view of the pond, dropped onto the bed without ceremony, and let his eyes fall shut.
It had been a long day. Three Epic-rank kills, a level jump, a fortune, a face-slap, a quarry, and a girl pulled back from the edge of becoming a monster.
He slept.
...
When he woke, the light through the window had shifted, and a soft chime was waiting at the corner of his mind.
[Exotic Summoner is ready. You may manifest an Exotic Portal once more.]
Aidan sat up.
’...Already?’
[Twenty-four hours have passed since you summoned Argon Bloodsun Cyber Dragon. Your talent has refreshed. You may open another portal to a random Exotic Being.]
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and a slow grin spread across his face.
Arthur was still in his cocoon, becoming something new. His own stats sat at Tier-10 across the board. He had a fortune in his pocket and a home that made him stronger while he slept in it.
And now his talent, the X-rank one, the one with no ceiling at all, was offering him a second pact.
A second exotic being, pulled at random from somewhere across the Nine Realms Tree.
’Well.’ Aidan swung his legs off the bed, eyes bright. ’Let’s see who answers this time.’
