Free Web NovelChapter 14: He’s a troublemaker
"That person is dead, I swear it!!"
The words carried across the open ground before the group even fully cleared the treeline.
"I’ll kill everyone he’s related to!!"
"Someone! Help this young master up."
The group that emerged from the forest looked nothing like the group that had entered it. They were moving wrong, several of them riding on summons that didn’t belong to them, borrowed out of necessity after losing their own.
The formation they usually kept, that easy confident spread that came with Jacob’s name attached to it, was completely gone. What replaced it was noise and heat and the specific disarray of people who had been hit harder than they knew how to process quietly.
At the gate, two elders watched them approach.
"What’s going on?"
They both knew the group. Jacob Algar, fifth elder’s grandson. These were his people. They came back from the forest the same way every time, loud and satisfied, wearing their results like a second set of clothes. It was a particular kind of return that said everything about who they thought they were before a single word was spoken.
This was not that.
A second group appeared from inside the stronghold, moving at a measured pace toward the gate. At the front walked a young man whose expression carried mild irritation, the look of someone pulled from something else by a disturbance that hadn’t yet proven itself worth the interruption.
He saw Jacob and the irritation sharpened into something more focused.
He pushed through the gathered bodies and stopped directly in front of his younger brother. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
"Your summon was destroyed."
Jacob’s jaw worked. "Yes."
"By who?"
"I don’t know his name." The words came through his teeth. "But his summon is burned into my head. Over seven feet. Armor. A long spear, humanoid."
Vincent held his gaze on Jacob for a long moment.
The family had built their stake for the hunter games around Jacob. Not because the talent ordering between the two brothers was unclear, it had never been unclear, but because Vincent had crossed into tier 8 too early for the current cycle.
The timing had pushed him outside the eligibility window and the family had shifted its position accordingly. Jacob became the vehicle. The hunter games became the path to the capital, to expanded influence, to everything the family had been positioning itself toward for years.
All of that ran through a younger brother who had just returned from the forest without his summon.
The backlash from a destroyed bond was not minor. A summoner whose contracted beast was killed by force didn’t simply lose the creature.
The connection ran through the soul, and when it broke that way the damage traveled back through the same path. Failed attempts to summon in the weeks that followed. A ritual that had to be rebuilt from the beginning. The summon itself, if it could be recovered at all, returning a full tier lower than it had been.
Jacob would be carrying this for a long time.
"Go home." Vincent kept his voice level. "Tell father exactly what happened. Everything."
Jacob nodded once and said nothing else.
Vincent turned toward the treeline.
The forest sat where it always did, its edge dark even in the morning light, indifferent to everything happening at the gate in front of it.
He looked at it for a few seconds without moving.
Then the cold settled into his eyes and stayed there.
.....
"Achoo."
Ethan pressed his left hand against his nose and held still until it passed.
Twenty meters ahead, through a gap in the undergrowth, two summoners were fully committed to each other.
Neither of them was looking anywhere else. The prize between them sat on the forest floor, a cluster of herbs growing out of a split in a large flat stone, vivid against the darker soil around it. The kind of thing that didn’t appear often and was worth stopping for.
"That’s a white lion." Ethan kept his voice below a breath. "Other one is some kind of horse creature."
Both tier 9. Both pushing hard.
The summoners were working from the edges, throwing spells and repositioning as the beasts clashed in the center of the clearing. The noise of it carried through the trees, impact and movement and the occasional sharp sound of something connecting.
Ethan watched without moving.
Fighting beasts required a specific kind of preparation. Even low grade beasts could end a fight badly if the variables lined up wrong.
Elemental affinity, range, the particular habits of a species under pressure. Observation was the work that happened before the fight, and skipping it was how people got hurt in encounters they should have controlled.
Summons were somewhat readable. A beast’s nature set the boundaries of what it would do. The instincts ran on patterns that repeated once you had seen enough of them, and those patterns could be learned.
Summoners were harder.
Magic spells didn’t announce their ranges or triggers. Weapons could carry enchantments that changed what contact meant. Poisons didn’t show themselves until the damage was already accumulating.
In any engagement the summoner was the variable that observation alone couldn’t fully resolve, and that made them the more dangerous problem.
Ethan spent fifteen minutes watching both.
The white lion was heavy on its left side, favoring the right front leg after absorbing a hit early in the fight. Its charge was fast but the recovery time between bursts was longer than the tier suggested.
The training behind it hadn’t built the base conditioning needed to sustain that output. The horse creature was better conditioned overall but lighter in frame, and it had been losing ground steadily from the third minute onward.
The end came the way it had been heading.
The white lion drove forward in a final exchange the horse creature couldn’t absorb, and the losing summoner made the call before it got worse, pulling his summon back and turning into the trees without looking behind him. Footsteps faded and didn’t return.
The winner stood in the clearing and caught his breath.
The fight had cost him. The white lion was carrying visible damage across its left shoulder, and the summoner’s movement as he crossed toward the herbs was slightly uneven, one side compensating for something the other couldn’t fully hide.
He crouched and reached for the herbs. His fingers closed around the stems.
His attention was entirely forward.
—smack
The sound was short and flat, and his vision dropped out from under him before the feeling reached his mind. His legs gave and the ground came up and that was the last thing that registered clearly.
Ethan stood behind him, expression unchanged.
Beside him, Vlad’s spear had already passed through the white lion’s skull and come out the other side, the drilling edge having done its work before the beast registered there was a threat. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
[+1 impaled Tier 9]
Ethan looked at the herbs still loosely held in the unconscious hand.
He crouched and took them.
