Free Web NovelChapter 30: Conspiracy
—woosh
—woosh
—woosh
[Bloodlight Flash (Tier 8): This spell allows the user to take blood from opponents, add light magic, and create an explosive effect that marks the target and tracks them down.]
Ethan watched.
He exhaled slowly.
On the stage, Vlad was finishing what the fight had started, and the crowd that had been loud a moment ago had gone somewhere between silence and paralysis. They had seen summons kill summoners before. That was not a novelty in a place like this.
But not like this.
Not this methodically. Not with that particular quality of stillness in the one doing it, as if the brutality required no special effort and therefore warranted no special expression.
The crowd could only stare.
No one moved to intervene. No one stood up from their seat or called for it to stop. They simply watched, absorbing the scene, the horror of it settling into their expressions and staying there.
In that silence, something was being decided about Ethan. ƒrēewebnovel.com
Not by any one person specifically. By all of them, at once, without discussion.
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"Winner!!"
Savors’ voice rang out across the camp and cut through whatever the crowd had been sitting inside.
Ethan stepped down from the stage without looking back.
Behind him, the whispers had already started. They moved through the crowd the way that kind of thing always moved, picking up shape as they passed from one mouth to the next, attaching themselves to details and carrying those details forward until they reached people who hadn’t been watching at all.
Blood Bat.
Ethan’s first title.
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A few rows back, Davos rose from his seat.
He spoke once, quietly, to the old wrinkled man behind him.
"After a few more fights, make sure he’s sent to the special camp."
He didn’t look at the stage when he said it.
"He will be of use to the clan."
He turned and walked away without waiting for a response, his pace unhurried, his attention already somewhere else.
His assessment wasn’t limited to Ethan. The girl had shown him something as well, fight after fight, that quiet dominance that didn’t advertise itself but accumulated. His read on both of them was already formed.
It was accurate.
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"Hehe."
Savors materialized at Ethan’s side with the speed of someone who had been waiting for the moment to arrive.
"Kid."
He was grinning.
"Very good job. You managed to end that pretty quickly."
He had staked his entire fortune on this fight. Everything he had accumulated across the past several days, moved onto one outcome. To say he wasn’t thrilled about having won would be a significant understatement.
He was elated. frёeωebɳovel.com
It showed in every part of him.
"I’ll go to the horde right now and get you that heart."
He grabbed Ethan by the arm and started moving, pulling him along through the camp with the energy of someone who needed to be in motion or he would burst.
"When you’re next out in the open, you’ll have a second summon leveling the playing field."
He said it like a promise, firm and upward, accompanying each word with the kind of enthusiasm that didn’t need agreement to sustain itself.
He was also, clearly, making use of the proximity.
As they moved through the camp, his hand stayed on Ethan’s arm, guiding him past faces and clusters of people, announcing through body language alone that this one was under him.
Eventually they stopped.
In front of a stage where two fighters were still going, an old board was mounted to one side, names scratched into it in rough lines.
Savors leaned forward and added a name to it without ceremony.
Ethan looked at the board.
Wuna had been ranked tenth among the tier 8 summoners in the camp. By beating him, that slot now belonged to Ethan. With one summon no less.
’Vicious.’
He looked at it for one more second.
Then his attention moved.
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On the large stage ahead, Hela sat atop a massive serpent.
Its skin was black, a deep and total black that caught the ambient light without reflecting it. Miasma rose from its maw in slow heavy rolls, drifting outward and downward, settling across the stage floor in a layer that swallowed the lower legs of anything standing in it.
Its body was wrapped around a bull creature, tightening with a patient and structural force
The bull had stopped struggling.
Ranked first in the tier 7 division.
Hela. The Consuming Serpent.
From her first fight she had not lost a match. She had not come close to losing a match. Her summons dismantled the opposition with a consistency that had moved past impressive into something that made organizing her bouts difficult.
The Demi-humans had stopped waiting for volunteers and were assigning her opponents directly.
"She’s close to the hundred match mark, from what I heard."
Savors said it beside him, calm now, the earlier energy settled into something more even.
He was watching the same stage.
For talents that crossed a certain threshold in the tournament, the Maqaue clan had something prepared. A different path from the general pool. Savors knew what it was, at least in outline.
"Work hard."
He patted Ethan once on the shoulder.
"You’ll get there sooner than you think."
He moved off without further comment.
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That same night, the camp quieted into the kind of stillness that settled over an enclosed place when most of the bodies in it had stopped moving.
Ethan lay in the cage with his eyes open.
Then the sound of footsteps.
Savors appeared outside the bars, the Demi-god a step behind him, standing in the space between the torchlight without entering it.
Savors came inside.
"About your lizard heart."
He kept his voice at a level that carried to the cage but not much further.
"I’ve got it. But the boss wants you to make the kill yourself, so we’re taking a detour."
He said it plainly, without decoration, the way he delivered most things.
Ethan nodded once to show he had understood.
Then he looked around the cage.
Zack and the other older man were being guided out by two figures Ethan didn’t recognize. In their place, two younger summoners were being moved in, the exchange happening without announcement or explanation, as if it were routine.
It wasn’t routine.
Ethan held that fact for a moment without showing that he had.
His gaze moved to Hela.
She was watching the same thing he was, from her position along the cage wall, her expression giving nothing away.
The shape of it was clear enough without discussion.
They were being taken somewhere. Separately from the others. For reasons that hadn’t been explained but one he clearly knew.
