Free Web NovelChapter 84: Cruoris Morning
Epoch projected the screen across his vision.
*[ KEI KURAYAMI — RACE : HALF-BLOOD RAKSHASA — LEVEL : 2*
*MUSCLE — 20/40*
*DEFTNESS — 20/40*
*APPEAL — 15/40*
*BRAINS — 20/40*
*PERCEPTION — 20/40*
*HEALTH — 180/180*
*STAMINA — 150/150*
*THRILL POINTS : 9 — FIEND POINTS : 24 (INERT)*
*DOMAIN AFFINITY :*
*SHADOW — ACTIVE, VOLUNTARILY SUPPRESSED — SENSE 2/20 — SHADOW DETACHMENT LAG 0.5s*
*MARTIAL — SUPPRESSION REMOVED — NOT YET ACCESSIBLE*
*THIRD (UNKNOWN) — SUPPRESSION REMOVED — NOT YET ACCESSIBLE*
*SKILLS (ACTIVE) : SILVER TONGUE, SUBTERFUGE, STREET FIGHTING, ACROBATICS, MECHANICAL PROFICIENCY, STEALTH ARTS*
*SKILLS (OWNED — UNTRAINED) : INFILTRATION ARTS, DISGUISE, ANGAM, DISSECTION ARTS*
*BLOODLINE : WRAITHSKIN ASSIMILATION (LIMIT 30 MIN) —
SHADOW SONG (MEMORISED)*
*NEW — AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE :
SILENT STEPS (STEALTH II) : NO BODY HEARS YOU COMING
THREE-POINT STRIKE (ANGAM II) : HIT HEART-LUNGS-LIVER IN ONE STRIKE
DISGUISE MASTERY (DISGUISE II) : ANYONE FROM OWN RACE ( FOR 10 MINS)
LIE DETECTION : A SMALL BLINK OR A SLIGHT FINGER MOVEMENT , YOU CAN NOTICE IRREGULARITIES WHEN SOMEONE IS LYING (PRIMARY CONDITION -THE OTHER PERSON MUST BE ON OR BELOW YOUR LEVEL )
HERBOLOGY 101 : BASICS OF POISONS AND TOXINS -IDENTIFICATION EXTRACTION AND HANDLING ]*
He read it once, the way he read everything once.
The ceilings had moved. The numbers he had carried at their maximum since the boundary now sat at half of a new maximum — the same twenty, the same fifteen, but measured now against a forty that had not existed an hour ago, so that what had been a wall was a floor and the climb he had thought finished went on twice as far again. The shadow line had changed too. Where it had read suppressed it now read voluntarily suppressed, and the difference in that single word was the difference between a thing done to him and a thing he did. The martial line and the third read suppression removed, not yet accessible — the locks struck off and the doors still somewhere he had not walked to. And under a heading that had not been there before sat five new manuals, waiting to be bought.
*Two points to Deftness , * he told her. *Then buy Silent Steps. And Herbology one-oh-one.*
*Allocating , * Epoch said. *Deftness to twenty-two. Silent Steps and Herbology purchased — one point each. Thrill Points remaining : five. Note both purchases require simulation training to reach proficiency. Neither is usable in its current state.*
He had known that when he bought them. A man bought a tool before he needed it, not after.
He opened his eyes.
The glade had emptied.
The Choir-Eater was gone — the long body and its restored twenty meters taken off into the Heart with the last of the apparitions consumed, leaving the glade to its wreckage. Broken trunks. Trees torn through the middle and others wrenched up by the roots, their root-mats turned to the sky like the undersides of things that should never have shown them. The Red Widow’s green blood drying in long arcs across the ground where the guillotine had thrown it, gone tacky and dark at the edges where the first light reached it. The small carcasses of the crimson brood, crushed flat where the shed segments had squeezed them, a dozen ruined points scattered across the churned earth. And the body of the Umbra High Cleric, flattened into the forest floor where the six-meter segment had come down on him, the place he had walked to and the place the cascade had walked him being the same place.
It looked like the aftermath of two storms that had passed through the same ground without noticing each other — the Widow’s and the Eater’s, the web and the molt, the cutting and the feeding, all of it spent now and gone quiet under a sky going from bloodglow to the colder crimson of the day.
The other two bodies were gone. The Noctis High Cleric and the Umbra Rite Cleric — the bodies Doctor had taken into his necro bead before he ran, for reasons that stayed with Doctor and went where Doctor went.
" Asp , " Kei said. " I am going out. "
" The glade is clear , " Asp answered through the veil. " Tula says so too. We are coming out as well. "
He had prepared for this before the pain.
He had removed his umbral carapace armor and stored it in his bead before he ever asked Epoch to begin — a body that was breaking and remaking itself did not need a shell fitted to the old shape constraining the new one. So he came out of the fissure bare-bodied, the concealment behind him drenched dark with his sweat and the blood that had run from him, and he took the bleed bark’s trunk and started down.
The descent was different.
Twenty-two Deftness moved his hands and feet to their holds before his eye had finished choosing them, the climb folding into a fraction of the time it would have cost him a day before, the new number expressing itself not as a feeling but as a fact of how fast the ground arrived. His feet touched the forest floor. He drew water from his storage bead and washed the morning’s blood from his skin, and when he was clean he drew the carapace armor back out and fitted it on, the shell finding the new body and sitting against it as if it had been made for this one.
Above him, Asp and Tula had begun their own descents, working down their mutual fissure.
Kei went to the brood first.
The spiderling carcasses lay where the segments had crushed them, a dozen small ruined bodies in the green wet of their own and their mother’s fluids. The VDU read them as he crouched.
*[ CRIMSON BROOD — immediate ordnance of the Red Widow. Not true spiderlings. A suicide squad deployed to neutralize prey. Bodies carry hallucinogenic red toxin. Samples may be collected — store with care. ]*
He took out his tool kit.
The work was precise and fast and old in his hands — the cephalothorax separated from each body at the join, the toxin gland lifted out intact, the gland set into a sealed compartment before he moved to the next. A blade angle he had not been taught in this life and had never forgotten from the last. Twelve of them. He did not hurry and he did not linger; he worked the way Mechanical Proficiency and a lifetime before this one had taught him to work with small lethal things — the same patience he had once spent on the inner mechanism of a weapon now spent on the inner chemistry of a corpse, the principle unchanged. A thing that could neutralize a creature large enough to bait a Red Widow’s hunt was a thing worth carrying carefully out of a glade. When the twelve glands were boxed and the box was back in his storage bead the VDU closed the entry.
*[ TWELVE CRIMSON BROOD TOXIN GLANDS EXTRACTED. TOXIN EXTRACTION PENDING — HERBOLOGY 101 KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED. ]*
He noted it. The glands were raw. He could not refine what they carried until he trained the manual he had just bought, and he could not train the manual here. Later, then. He had a growing list of laters, and he had learned to carry a list without letting its weight slow the thing in front of him.
He looked up. Asp and Tula were still midway down.
He looked ahead, to the body.
The Umbra High Cleric had been pressed into the ground the way nothing living was meant to be pressed. The segment’s weight had broken the skull and every bone beneath it and spread what they had held across the dirt, and the shape that remained read less like a man than like something a wheel had crossed over on a road — flattened, opened, the inside turned to the surface. Kei looked at it without the flinch a softer life would have spent on it. He had made bodies. He had seen what weight did.
And in the ruin of it, half-sunk in the flesh and the blood, something caught the first light.
A bracelet.
It sat at what had been the wrist, the band of it smeared but intact, a worked thing that had not flattened with the bone around it. That was the part that held his eye. Everything else within reach of that weight had been broken — the skull, the ribs, the long bones, all of them surrendered to the segment that had come down — and the bracelet had not. It had taken the same force and kept its shape. Kei registered it the way he registered anything that survived a force that had destroyed everything near it — with the flat, acquisitive interest of a man who had learned that the objects which outlast their owners are rarely ordinary objects. A thing that did not break when the body broke was a thing worth a closer look, and worth, very possibly, the taking. He crouched, and reached.
" Stop. "
The voice came from behind him.
" Don’t touch it. "
Kei turned. freewebnovel.cσ๓
Corvyn stood a few paces off — the Noctis Rite Cleric, the last cleric the glade had left alive, a shadow master in a Rite Cleric’s grey. He had come down from his own fissure when the glade cleared, the way they all had, and he had come down quietly enough that Kei, crouched over the dead and the thing the dead had worn, had not heard him arrive.
His eyes were on the bracelet.
Not on Kei.
On the bracelet.
