Free Web NovelChapter 31: Untitled
—Roar!!!
—Kreeee
—Hissss
The wasteland stretched out in every direction without boundary.
Beside the moving caravan, visible across a distance that should have made them feel small and remote, the horde moved.
Not a scattered mass. A force. Thousands of bodies pressing forward in a tide that threw up dust from the ground and noise from the air, the sound of it reaching the caravan as a constant low presence underneath everything else. Beasts slamming into each other without slowing. Losing footing and recovering without breaking from the flow. Moving forward regardless.
Anyone who had ever spoken about rescuing the people captured by the Demi-humans knew this place first.
"No need to be worried."
Savors turned from his position at the front to look back into the cage being dragged along behind.
"They don’t bite."
He smiled when he said it.
The caravan was moving in a straight line directly into the mass.
And yet nothing touched them.
The horde flowed around the caravan the way water moved around a stone fixed in a riverbed, not because the stone asked for it, not because any individual wave made a decision, but because something underneath the current was holding the shape in place.
"Sir Davos is a Tier 4 Beast Lord."
Savors offered it without ceremony, his tone the same easy register he used for most things.
"This whole horde is under his thumb."
He didn’t go into the particulars of how a single person managed an entire mass of unruly creatures this size. He said it the way someone stated a fact they had long since stopped finding remarkable.
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Then it came into view.
Somewhere in the center of the horde, rising above the bodies around it, a massive turtle moved.
Every beast in its proximity adjusted course without appearing to decide to. The space around it stayed clear, a moving perimeter that no creature crossed, the avoidance was instinctive the kind of deferenive instinct born from fear rather than respect.
That was where they were going.
Roughly an hour passed before they reached it.
An hour of riding through the eye of the storm, the noise and mass of the horde on all sides, nothing touching them, the compound on the turtle’s back growing steadily larger as they closed the distance.
They rode up and came to a stop in front of the gates.
"This will be your new home."
Savors leaned slightly toward the cage, his expression carrying the particular warmth of someone delivering news they expected to land well.
"Away from the noise in the camp, you can truly focus on growth."
He meant it practically. But there was also something in his delivery that knew what it was doing. Everyone responded to special treatment. Young or old, experienced or not, it didn’t matter.
The feeling of being selected from the rest was its own kind of lever, and Savors had been pulling levers long enough to know exactly when to apply one.
This was the first move to separate the diamonds from the coal.
Davos stepped forward.
His eyes moved across the group without hurry, settling briefly on each face before continuing.
"Since most of you are in the top ten, your matches will be coordinated from now on. You’ll fight when it’s time."
He let that sit for a moment before continuing.
"This is my personal residence."
His tone didn’t change, but the weight behind the next words was different.
"Which means that while you’re here, you are no longer prisoners. You’ll have your own rooms, chosen by preference. Rewards will follow based on your performance in certain tasks."
After that he turned and led them through the compound.
It was large, and deliberately so.
Rooms for sleeping, rooms for training, spaces arranged for meditation, the kind of facilities that had no reasonable explanation for existing on the back of a creature moving through a beast horde in the middle of the wasteland unless someone had built them for a specific purpose and had enough time and resources to see it done properly.
Ethan moved through it without comment, cataloguing as he went.
(Demi-humans building their own regiment of elite summoners.)
He had arrived at that conclusion before Hela said anything. The facilities confirmed it. They were being assessed. The tournament had been the first stage. This was the second.
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"Are you good?"
He kept his voice low when he said it.
Hela was beside him, and she had been somewhere else for the last several minutes.
She had looked composed when they first left the caravan. Settled into herself, the way she usually was, not warm but functional and present. Then they had come up onto the turtle’s back, and something behind her eyes had shifted.
Not gone. But interrupted.
"Something unexpected."
She said it without looking at him directly.
"But it’s fine. I just need some more time."
There was a trace of something in her voice that hadn’t been there before. Not fear exactly. The precise version of concern that came when a plan encountered a variable it hadn’t accounted for.
The disruption field in the caravan had been a known obstacle. White Tower analysis had identified it as a single device, required to remain with the caravan at all times. When they were moved from the caravan to this location, she had used a secondary technique in that window to push a signal through. ƒreewebɳovel.com
It had gone.
White Tower now had a location marker.
But the signal needed to hold for the marker to be reliable, and the moment they climbed onto the turtle’s back it had severed again.
A second disruptor.
She hadn’t accounted for that.
"Okay."
Ethan nodded once and said nothing further.
The tour continued.
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Near the end of it, Savors appeared at his side.
His arm came around Ethan’s shoulders in the loose, deliberate way he used when he wanted something to look casual while making sure the right people were positioned to notice it.
"I didn’t forget what I promised you."
His voice was pitched at a level that carried to Davos without projecting toward the others.
"This night, come to the main courtyard. We’ll get you the final ingredient for your second summoner ritual."
Ethan felt the eyes behind him before he turned to look for them.
"Hm. Thank you."
He nodded, keeping his expression even.
The envy in the room was almost structural at this point. Savors wasn’t unaware of that. He had engineered it, placing Ethan just visibly enough inside his orbit to make the others conscious of the gap. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
Not all prisons had iron bars.
Some were built from status and proximity, and Savors had been building this one since the first night Ethan stepped into the arena.
