I Can Summon Legendary Figuress

Chapter 23: Captured

The stench hit before anything else.

Blood and iron, thick in the back of the throat, the particular weight of it that only came when the source wasn’t one body but many. It sat over the ground like a second layer of air, pressed down by the stillness that followed a fight that had gone too long and ended badly.

The stronghold was behind them now.

In the final minutes before the walls fell entirely, a stray strike from the High Regent had torn a gap in the horde’s formation along the eastern flank, thinning the press of bodies enough that the side gate could be forced open. The civilians had moved through it in a crush, pushing against each other, the ones at the front not always making choices but just moving with whatever the mass behind them demanded.

A lot had made it out.

More had not.

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Far from the stronghold, across the open wasteland where the ground turned pale and flat and the air carried nothing green in it, a line of caravans moved at a steady pace.

Long vehicles, each one heavy, the wheels cutting deep tracks into the dry soil. Demi-humans rode alongside them on mounts that didn’t share the bored irritation of their riders, eyes forward, built for long distances across open terrain.

Behind the steel bars running the length of each caravan, humans sat in rows.

"Quiet, you sons of bitches. This is natural habitat."

One of the riders swung a look toward the nearest cage without slowing.

"If I hear another word I’ll whip you rabbits to the bone."

"Is something wrong with your eyes? I can fix that for you."

The words came from different riders without coordination, each one a separate expression of the same basic contempt. None of them were particularly invested in being obeyed. The threats were maintenance, the kind of thing you said to keep a manageable situation from becoming an inconvenient one.

Attacks on human settlements were not always about territory or resources in the direct sense. Humans were weak in raw combat terms. Even the talented ones required years and specific conditions to close the gap with races that were simply built differently from birth. But weakness in a fight was not the only metric.

Humans were good at labor. Patient at technical work. Adaptable in ways that other races had stopped being centuries ago because they had never needed to be. And for certain Demi-human groups, they were valued for reasons that didn’t get discussed openly but drove the demand behind most of these operations.

This attack had not been different from that pattern in any meaningful way.

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"Huuuu."

Air rushed in hard and Ethan’s body jerked upright, his eyes opening on nothing familiar.

He looked around.

Steel bars. Stone ground. The smell of the wasteland coming through the gaps, dry and mineral, mixing with the blood that was still on his clothes from before. His hands were in front of him and his first instinct was to check what was in them, which was nothing.

He steadied his breathing and took stock.

During the first wave, when the beasts came through the forest in a wall of bodies and noise, he and Hela had moved. The Black-Eyed Bat Evasion had bought them seconds at a time, dissolving through things that would have connected and reforming past them, threading through gaps in the horde that no human body could have navigated intact. It had not been clean. It had barely been survival.

They had come out of the forest’s edge and hit the ground behind a stand of trees on the outskirts, and the last thing Ethan had registered before his vision went was a column of dust rising from somewhere behind the walls, the sound of something enormous hitting the earth, and then nothing.

"You’re awake."

The voice came from the corner of the cell.

Ethan turned his head.

An older man sat against the far wall with his hands resting on his knees, watching him. The gaze was calm, but the quality behind it was not passive. This was someone who looked at things carefully and had been doing it long enough that it didn’t show on the surface anymore.

Ethan didn’t know the name.

But the face reached something at the edge of his memory.

The summoning ritual. The courtyard. When Vlad had appeared and the stat screen had vanished before any of the elders could process it, there had been one figure on the podium who had noticed anyway. Who had gone quiet in a way that was different from the others going quiet. Who had tracked Ethan through the crowd with a look that wasn’t confusion.

This was that man.

Zack.

Ethan had learned later, through fragments, that this elder had followed up after the ritual. Had used contacts to track him. Had gone to a house that turned out to be empty by the time he arrived. Whatever he had been trying to determine about the brothel boy with the impossible summon, he hadn’t gotten the answer.

Ethan looked away from him and counted the cell.

Four people total.

Zack in the corner. Hela at the bars, standing, her back to the interior, her gaze moving across the rubble and flat wasteland visible beyond the caravan’s path. And beside her, an older man with a pipe clamped between his teeth, smoke rising in a thin unhurried line.

Ethan looked at the other cages within view.

Ten to fifteen people each. Packed close, the way you packed something you were moving in volume rather than handling with care. By comparison, four people in a cell this size looked less like a prison and more like an oversight.

A drop of blood landed on his forehead.

He looked up.

A figure sat atop the cage, legs hanging loose over the edge, dressed in a way that had nothing to do with the Demi-humans riding alongside the caravan. Burns across most of the visible skin, gashes running in irregular lines from shoulder to forearm, the marks of someone who had been in a serious exchange recently and was still in the middle of dealing with the results. A damp cloth moved across one of the flame wounds in slow, irritated pats.

The figure noticed him looking.

Neither of them said anything.

Ethan held the look for a moment and then felt it.

Not sound. Not movement. Something underneath those, a pressure that arrived at the edge of awareness and pushed inward from there, the specific discomfort that came when something in the body recognized a level of power it had no framework for processing comfortably.

He had felt it once before.

Standing in a room at the top of the White Tower, in front of a woman with white hair and an ice-cold manner who had handed him a ring like it cost her nothing.

This was the same quality.

Maybe heavier.

’A Demi-God?’

The thought landed and stayed there.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​