Free Web NovelChapter 17: Fight!!
"It’s no wonder."
Ethan said it quietly, more to himself than anyone else.
He looked between the two of them and the picture assembled itself cleanly. The salamander standing beside Eric, the particular quality of the light catching its scales now that the blood and grime of the fight had shifted, the way it oriented toward its summoner with the specific ease of a creature that had just found the person it was connected to.
He pulled up what he remembered from the ritual courtyard.
[Lesser Drake — Rank A, Tier 9, 100% chance to evolve]
He had watched Eric summon it. Everyone had. The elders had practically fallen over themselves. A draconic bloodline summon was the kind of result that got talked about for years, and Eric had produced it on his first attempt with the confidence of someone who had expected nothing less.
The coloring had thrown him. Out here in the forest, covered in the residue of whatever the drake had been hunting through, it hadn’t looked like what he had seen in the courtyard. Now, standing next to its summoner in the low light of the pit, it was obvious.
Ethan gave the command and Vlad stepped back, putting distance between himself and the drake without taking his eyes off it.
"You both have a death wish." Eric’s voice came sharp and hot, the disdain in it sitting right at the surface. "Do you think I won’t dare kill you? Going after my dragon?"
He had been eating a few kilometers away when he released the drake to hunt on its own. The evolution requirement, even with a hundred percent guarantee, still needed volume. Kills. The drake working through its own progression while Eric didn’t have to be present for it. A practical arrangement.
He had not expected to come back to find two strangers in a pit running suppressive fire on it while an armored giant tried to drive a spear through its throat.
"This is not good."
Ethan kept his voice low enough that it didn’t carry.
Jacob was one problem. The fifth elder had reach, real reach, and destroying his grandson’s summon had guaranteed a response that Ethan was still going to have to deal with. But Jacob’s family operated within a specific band of influence. There were limits to what they could do and how far they could push before other structures in the clan pushed back.
Eric was a different category entirely.
The clan leader’s son. The drake summoner. The future the entire stronghold had already decided it was investing in. Causing serious trouble with Eric didn’t bring one family’s weight down on him. It brought the whole structure.
He had worked too carefully to let that happen over a misidentified summon.
"I apologize for the misunderstanding." Ethan lowered his head slightly, hands coming together in a respectful gesture. "I thought it was a stray beast."
He meant the bow to close the matter. Acknowledge the mistake, absorb the embarrassment, walk away with everything intact. It was the cleanest path and the most rational one.
"Stray?"
The word landed badly.
Eric’s expression shifted in a way that said the apology had made things worse, not better. His jaw tightened and the disdain that had been sitting on his face sharpened into something that had moved past offense into a place where offense had already been decided and catalogued.
"You call my dragon a stray?" His voice rose slightly, not from volume but from the pressure behind it. "What gall. You don’t deserve to live. Kneel, and let me take the life of your summons. Both of you"
He swung his sword around and leveled it at Ethan.
In his life he had not faced this. Someone attacking his summon, coming within a breath of killing it, and then standing in front of him and describing the drake as a stray animal. The insult and the injury sitting together, neither one forgivable on its own, both of them compounded.
’Why are all the Algar clan members always so unreasonable?’
Ethan looked at the sword pointed at him and exhaled slowly.
The situation had moved past the point where walking away was still an option. He could see that clearly. Eric wasn’t going to let him bow and leave. Eric was going to make an example of the person who had attacked his summon, because not making an example would mean accepting that it had happened and that was something a person in Eric’s position couldn’t do in front of anyone watching.
Which meant Ethan had one option.
He activated White Transit before Eric finished the sentence.
The white light took him across the distance in an instant and he came out of it directly in front of Eric, the moon blade already summoned and swinging downward with the full momentum of the transit behind it.
—vcling
Eric’s sword came up mid-air, the block solid, his eyes finding Ethan’s position with a speed that said his reflexes hadn’t needed to think about it. The blades met and the force pushed against both of them.
Then the exchange began.
It moved fast. Blow and counter, each one pressing for an angle the other closed before it fully opened. Eric was technically trained, the kind of foundation that came from years of structured instruction with people whose only job was to make him better. His footwork was clean. His guard recovered quickly. freeweɓnøvel.com
Ethan had none of that.
What he had was different. Hunting in a previous life that had taken him into situations that didn’t have rules. Sparring in the markets of the stronghold when he was young and had nothing else to do. And several days in the forest where every engagement had been against something that would kill him if he made a mistake, which had a particular way of accelerating the parts of the mind that handled improvisation.
He didn’t fight cleanly. He fought in ways that didn’t follow the expected lines, angles that formal training didn’t account for because formal training assumed the other person also had formal training. He moved into spaces that should have been closing, changed the timing on attacks that were already committed, forced Eric to adjust to a rhythm that kept shifting.
"This..."
Eric pulled back half a step, not from being driven back, but from the confusion that had started building behind his eyes.
He knew the talent pool of the Algar clan. He made it his business to know. There was no one in the summoner trials who fought like this. No one whose name came attached to this kind of close-quarters instinct.
Who was this person.
The thought that he might lose hadn’t arrived yet. It wasn’t in his vocabulary in any real way. But the fight wasn’t resolving the way it was supposed to, and that fact was doing something unpleasant to the space behind his sternum.
"Catch this blade!!"
He pushed the words out like punctuation and cast the spell simultaneously, the effect spreading through his eyes first, a visible shift in the quality of light behind them, then flooding down through his arms and into the sword in his hand.
