Free Web NovelChapter 21: Demi Human Problem
The explosion climbed into the sky and Ethan saw it mid-stride.
His pace didn’t break. But something shifted behind his eyes, a contraction, the particular quality of attention that arrived when a piece of information was too significant to process quickly.
That was not a local problem.
The scale was wrong in a way that pointed outward, toward whatever was moving beyond the tree line, toward the horde the High Regent had failed to stop and the kingdom had declined to respond to.
He changed direction without slowing, angling away from the blast’s origin point.
Hela mirrored the movement in the same instant.
Her eyes were forward but something sat in them that hadn’t been there before. Contained, but present. She recognized that attack. The recognition had not settled easily.
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"What the hell was that?!!"
The voice came from behind them, and it wasn’t Eric’s.
Eric was close enough that the shockwave had passed through him at partial strength, rattling the branches around him. But he was too far inside his own anger to process it as anything other than noise.
It was Vincent who stopped.
His beast held position while his eyes tracked the fading light as it collapsed back toward the horizon, the column of fire narrowing and dimming until only the smoke remained.
’That’s at least tier 6.’
A tier 6 attack used at open range was a city-level event. The radius of what that output could flatten, the heat signature, the concussive displacement. In a populated area it was a mass death event. That someone had deployed it outside the wall meant the target warranted it.
’Should we head back?’
The question formed and sat there.
Then he looked ahead through the trees.
Eric was still moving. The Demi-human’s body was visible even at distance, wrapped around him, its arms braced across his frame.
If he brought Eric back to the council in that state, the argument wrote itself. The first elder’s position. The influence the family had accumulated across years of careful positioning. All of it transferable, if the right evidence arrived in front of the right people.
That evidence was flying through the trees ahead of him.
"Keep your eyes on the prize!!"
The others straightened. Their summons adjusted. The group moved forward.
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"We can’t outrun them."
Ethan said it without looking at Hela, his eyes still reading the terrain ahead.
"Not with what’s happening outside the walls. I need your help."
The High Regent had warned him to leave after the tournaments. He had filed it away as advice worth considering eventually. The blast behind him had converted it into something more immediate. Whatever the horde’s current position was, it was close enough that a tier 6 summoner had engaged it in open range.
West of the stronghold sat another fortified position. Larger standing army. Further from the wastelands. If he was reading the situation correctly, that was the direction that made sense.
But first.
He glanced back. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Eric was still there, his outline cutting through the upper branches, the distance between them holding steady.
"Hmm!!"
Hela nodded once.
She had been watching him since he entered the forest. The wolf. The bear group. The ambushes, the core detonations, the way he moved through situations that should have ended badly and came out the other side with the count still climbing. When he said he could handle something she found herself inclined to take it at face value.
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Several minutes later Eric lost them.
Not gradually. One moment the white streaks were visible between the trees and then they simply were not. No direction change he had caught. No trail breaking to one side. Just absence where presence had been.
His jaw tightened.
He didn’t slow.
If he couldn’t find Ethan he would find the girl, and if he had the girl Ethan would surface. That was simple enough.
He came down from the canopy and found her standing on open ground, her back to a wide hillside that rose steeply behind her, the terrain around the base cutting off clean exits on either side.
He landed and faced her.
His shirt was gone. Across his chest and arms, moving in slow visible pulses beneath the skin, liquid markings traced shifting patterns, syncing with the rhythm of the Demi-human coiled around him. The serpent’s upper half was draped across his shoulders, its energy threading into him at a depth that was becoming difficult to distinguish from his own.
He could feel the edge of what it was pulling him toward.
"You can’t escape me." His eyes had gone red at the center. "Just tell me where the boy went."
Hela looked at him.
The irritation on her face was not the kind that came from being threatened. It was the irritation of someone watching a person dismantle themselves and finding it tedious.
"You look down on me?!!" The words came out before he had finished deciding to speak. "I am the first heir of the Algar clan. A chosen of the court line." His eyes fixed on hers. "Do you still want those eyes of yours?"
"Yes," Hela said. "But you’re not my fight."
Her gaze moved past him without hurry.
"Focus more on the blade hanging over your head."
She disappeared.
Before Eric could parse the words into action, a glint of light broke from the dark to his left. The moon blade came down in a clean descending arc.
It was not angled at Eric.
The target was the Demi-human.
