Free Web NovelChapter 24: Opportunity
"Argh!! That stupid bitch and her dragon fire."
Atop the cage, the man with flowing green hair pressed the cloth against a burn running along his collarbone and hissed through his teeth.
He was not complaining from weakness. That was important to understand.
He sat comfortably above the tier that the High Regent occupied, his power was somewhere in the narrow boundary between level 5 and level 4, a position that most humans would not reach across an entire lifetime of training regardless of their talent or resources.
But a noble beast was its own category of problem.
The Red Fire Dragon was not simply strong. Its lineage carried a particular quality that was hard to describe, a depth of power that compressed into each attack making every last one incredibly powerful. Arian was weaker than him by any honest accounting.
But She had still made him pay for every exchange. Several hours of sustained fighting at that level had left wounds across his body that wouldn’t close for months, some of them possibly years, the deep tissue damage running under the skin in ways that the cloth and the careful dabbing couldn’t do anything meaningful about.
He was not in a good mood.
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Below, Ethan’s eyes stayed on the figure above.
He reached inward toward Vlad on instinct, the reflex of someone who had spent enough time operating with a summon that reaching for the connection had become automatic under pressure.
The collar closed around the attempt like a fist.
The pain came from everywhere at once, searing outward from his neck in a wave that dropped him to his knees and then to the floor of the cage, with a bang
Bang!!
his hand gripping at the metal band as his vision contracted to a narrow point and then slowly expanded back.
He stayed on the ground for a moment.
"Silly human."
The man with green hair had turned his head, watching through the bars with the particular expression of someone observing something predictable play out exactly as predicted.
"Did you think we wouldn’t take precautions against the Mad God’s gifts?"
Every prisoner in the convoy was wearing one. The collar didn’t discriminate between summons and spells, it cut the connection to both, wrapping around whatever internal channel a magic user relied on and blocking it at the source. Simple in design. Comprehensive in effect.
Ethan pushed himself off the floor slowly, burn marks rising on the skin of his neck where the collar had discharged.
"Be good," the Demi-human said, already turning back to his wounds. "Soon you’ll be in the civilized world."
Ethan pressed his back against the wall of the cage and breathed.
He knew what the collar was without needing it explained. He knew what it was used for and what population it had been designed to manage and what the end of this caravan route looked like for the people in it.
He had a doctorate’s worth of historical pattern recognition sitting in the back of his mind and every piece of it was pointing in the same direction.
The Demi-human tribes didn’t view humans the way humans viewed them. freēwēbnovel.com
Humans feared the Demi-humans as monsters, as an existential threat, as the thing beyond the walls that wanted them gone. The Demi-humans were more specific than that. They didn’t want humans gone.
They wanted humans useful. A monster you killed. A commodity you processed and sold and replaced when it wore out.
That was the life waiting at the end of this road. freewēbnoveℓ.com
’Get out. I have to find a way out of this place.’
His eyes moved around the cage, taking inventory without letting the movement of his head become obvious. Bars. Floor.
The other cages visible in the gaps. The riders alongside the caravan, their spacing, the rhythm of their attention.
His gaze landed on Hela’s back.
She hadn’t moved since he woke up. Still standing at the bars, still facing outward, the posture of someone who was either very calm or very far inside their own head.
’Even if it kills me.’
The thought arrived with a clarity that surprised him by how simple it was. Not dramatic. Just a fact he was settling into, the way you settled into a decision after the last alternative had been removed.
Above the cage, the Demi-human glanced down.
His eyes found Ethan’s for a moment. Something passed across his expression that wasn’t quite concern and wasn’t quite interest. He said nothing and looked away.
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The caravan stopped sometime after dark.
A camp went up in the middle of the wasteland, fires lit in a wide spread, the light from them rising into the sky in columns that had no reason to hide. They were not in Kingdom of Bark territory anymore. The border was behind them, and beyond it no rescue operation was coming. The kingdom did not send forces into Demi-human territory for a group of civilians and a handful of summoners from a fallen stronghold.
For everyone in these cages, the route forward was the only route.
Ethan crossed the cell and stopped beside Hela.
"Are you alright?"
His voice came out level, low enough that it didn’t carry past the two of them.
Since he had woken she had been standing in that same position, looking out at the same nothing. It wasn’t her usual strangeness, the focused attention she aimed at him like something she was still in the process of categorizing. This was different. Turned inward.
"I’m fine." She said it without moving. "This place is cold."
They were the first words she had spoken since the cage.
Ethan looked at her for a moment.
He understood the gravity without needing her to lay it out. The special cage, the four occupants, the separation from the general population. That wasn’t random allocation. Someone had made a decision about where to put them specifically, and that decision pointed toward a buyer who had already been identified.
The Macaque Clan.
He didn’t know enough about them to fill in every detail, but he knew enough. The direction of that knowledge was sufficient.
"Sorry," he said quietly. "The fire doesn’t reach this far."
She didn’t respond.
She didn’t need to. He could read what was in her posture the same way he could read a fight before it started. She was waiting for something. Not passively. The stillness was active, the kind that came before a move rather than after a decision not to make one.
"Let’s have some entertainment, boys!!"
The voice came from somewhere across the camp, loud and sharp, pulling the attention of several riders at once. A human summoner was dragged out of one of the far cages and thrown toward the bonfire at the center of the open ground, stumbling before finding his feet.
"Old Kai, your eye is getting dusty." Another voice followed, and a young woman was pulled from a separate cage and thrown to the same spot. "Let me show you something better."
Laughter spread through the camp.
Long transport runs created their own routines. Fighting between prisoners was one of them, a way to break the monotony and assess the cargo before it reached the market, identifying what was valuable and what wasn’t before the sale made the question irrelevant.
Hela’s eyes changed.
The inward quality left them entirely, replaced by something sharp and immediate, a focus that landed on the scene outside the bars with the particular quality of someone who had just watched exactly what they were waiting for arrive.
This was it.
This was what she had been standing there for.
