Free Web NovelChapter 12: Attracting trouble
Ethan looked at the group surrounding him and said nothing for a moment.
The dead wolf was somewhere behind him in the forest, its core already harvested and stored. Without the core radiating energy the carcass was just meat and fur. There was nothing left in it that would announce what it had been to anyone passing by. No glow. No pulse. No signature that could be read from a distance.
Jacob couldn’t know with certainty what he had killed. freewebnoveℓ.com
’They want to silence me.’
The thought settled without drama. He didn’t need to work through the logic carefully. The girl they had been chasing, Araria, he had recognized the name the moment she appeared. She was under an elder’s protection. Harming her or pushing the situation further than it had already gone would create consequences that Jacob’s family name might not be able to absorb cleanly. The smart move, the only move that kept everything contained, was to make sure no witnesses remained to describe what had happened in this stretch of forest.
Ethan was the witness.
He understood his position completely.
"Since that’s the case."
He sighed, the sound carrying just enough resignation to be convincing, and reached into his coat.
His fingers closed around the core.
He pulled it out and tossed it toward Jacob in a single unhurried motion, the sphere catching the morning light as it turned in the air between them.
Jacob’s eyes went wide. His hand came up immediately, reaching forward, the calculation of value already running behind his eyes.
He didn’t reach it.
Ethan had the crossbow out before the core cleared the midpoint between them. Three bolts left the mechanism in rapid succession, each one driving directly into the sphere.
The impact was immediate.
A core wasn’t only a record of what a beast had been. It was compressed energy, life force and elemental power reduced to a dense stable mass and held there by the shell. When the shell broke, what was inside didn’t disappear.
It released.
—boom!!
The explosion tore outward from the point of impact, a concussive wave that caught Jacob and the riders closest to him and threw them sideways off their mounts. Bodies hit the ground. Summons scattered. The bull staggered hard to one side, its footing gone, its rider already airborne.
In the same moment Vlad came through the smoke from the left.
He hadn’t been visible. He hadn’t made a sound. He simply appeared, the way he always did when the moment required it, moving at a speed that didn’t match his size, spear already extended and leveled as he closed the distance to the bull in three strides.
The tip drove through the animal’s throat and didn’t stop. It punched upward through the skull and came out the other side, the drilling edge doing its work, and the bull dropped without another sound.
[+1 impaled Tier 9]
The notification rang clean in Ethan’s mind.
His eyes sharpened.
He looked across the chaos in front of him. Riders down. Summons scattered and disoriented. The group that had spread around him to cut off his angles was broken, their formation dissolved by the explosion, some of them still trying to get back to their feet. freewēbnoveℓ.com
And every summon here was classified as a tier 9 being.
He hadn’t considered that when he read the evolution requirements. He had been thinking about beasts in the forest, creatures he would have to track and hunt one by one through difficult terrain over days. He hadn’t considered that the requirement didn’t specify where the tier 9 came from.
They had come to him.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a second core.
He threw it into the densest cluster of summons still standing and shot it before it reached the peak of its arc.
—boom!!
The second explosion was larger than the first. The energy inside the core had been building against the shell since the moment of extraction, and the release tore through the clearing in a wide radius, throwing everything in its path outward. Two more summons went down. A third stumbled and collapsed against a tree, its legs failing beneath it.
Vlad was already moving before the smoke settled, spear finding the ones that were down and finishing what the explosion had started.
By the time the third core detonated the count had shifted entirely. Six tier 9 summons destroyed. Vlad had impaled them all. The clearing was unrecognizable from what it had been two minutes ago.
Ethan didn’t pause to study the results.
He activated White Transit and moved, the white light swallowing him as he cut through the gap in the encirclement before anyone in the group had fully recovered their footing. The spell carried him past the outer edge of where they had spread and deposited him into the treeline at speed.
He was already running when the light faded.
Behind him, a voice broke through the noise.
"Don’t let him get away!!"
Jacob was on his feet. His armor was scorched and his hair was disarranged from the blast, but what sat on his face had nothing to do with pain. It was something rawer than that, the particular expression of someone who had just felt their summon die.
The bond between a summoner and their summon wasn’t a contract written on paper. It was seated in the soul. When the connection broke by force, the backlash traveled the same path that bond had used, returning through the summoner in a wave that damaged more than the body. Failed summonings in the weeks that followed. A ritual that needed to be rebuilt from the beginning. And the summon itself, if it could be recovered at all, returned one tier lower than it had been.
A tier 9 bull, killed before its prime, meant Jacob was starting from nothing.
Everything he had built in that summon. The time. The resources. The fights and the growth. Gone.
Because of a nobody from a brothel house with no family name worth speaking.
"I’m going to kill you!!!"
The words tore out of him and followed Ethan into the trees, all pretense of composure dissolved, leaving only the raw sound of someone who had just lost something they couldn’t replace and knew it.
Ethan didn’t look back.
He ran.
