Free Web NovelChapter 32: Head on
The group was separated into three rooms.
Hela and Ethan in one. The two new summoners in another. Psycho Fin in the last.
It was already late by the time they finished the tour, the day having moved further along than most of them had noticed. The warmth of an actual bed was not something any of them were inclined to refuse. After the cage, after the fights, after the long hours of sitting on hard floor with bars on all sides, the rooms were something close to absurd.
Most of them went straight to rest.
Ethan had his eyes on the courtyard.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Night came fully before Savors appeared there.
He looked Ethan over when he saw him, taking in the crossbow before anything else.
"You’re here."
There had been a weapons room on the tour. Ethan had made his request quietly, using his wins as the basis, and walked out with what he asked for.
The Elderan Crossbow.
It carried a splinter damage enchantment. Each bolt fired from it shattered on impact, the fragments dispersing in a spread pattern, turning a single shot into a simultaneous strike across a wide area. A remnant of a force long since gone, most likely pulled from a raid by Davos and his horde at some point. It had the particular quality of equipment that had seen actual use rather than being built for display.
Savors looked at it for a moment without comment.
"Let’s go."
They stepped out of the complex and onto the turtle’s back.
Around them in every direction, the horde was settling. Thousands of bodies spread across the ground in loose heaps, the noise of them reduced to the ambient sound of breathing and the occasional shift of weight. Something about seeing it at rest was different from seeing it in motion. Less like a force and more like a landscape.
To the left, Ethan caught lights in the distance. The caravan camp, stopped for the night, its torches visible as a thin line of orange against the dark.
For the first time since the capture, he wasn’t there.
He noted that once and moved on.
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They rode into the horde on a beast the size of two horses, its body moving between the sleeping masses with a practiced ease that suggested it had done this before.
Savors kept his eyes forward. Ethan kept his on the surrounding terrain.
The last ingredient for the second ritual was the heart of a dragonoid creature.
Rare by any standard. Not the kind of thing that appeared in a market or got listed among the materials a camp supplier stocked. The bloodline itself was the requirement, which meant that anything descending from the draconic line with enough concentration in its blood would serve. Lizard creatures carried that lineage in diluted form, and the stronger the individual, the more useful what was inside it.
They needed something strong enough to activate what was there.
"There it is!!"
Savors raised a hand and pointed.
In the distance, coiled against the dark ground, a shape sat apart from the sleeping horde around it. Large. Still. Giving off the particular quality of something that had never needed to pay attention to what was near it because nothing near it had ever been a problem.
North Coal Lizard.
These creatures made their territory in the outskirts of giant mountainous mines, the same locations where wyverns had made theirs for generations. Years of proximity and interbreeding had left their mark. The draconic DNA ran through their blood in concentrations high enough to matter for a ritual with these specifications.
"Hold tight, kid."
Savors summoned a spear to his side in one motion.
He didn’t wait.
He pushed the beast beneath them from a standstill into a full rush, covering the distance before the North Coal Lizard had fully registered the approach. The spear came forward and drove into its hind limb, catching it mid-coil, and Savors dragged it sideways across the ground with a force that made the size difference between them immediately clear.
"Roar!!"
The lizard thrashed, its body twisting, its head swinging back and around, snapping toward the riders on the beast behind it. fгeewebnovёl.com
A tier 7 creature.
Savors and his stead were tier 6 and tier 7 respectively. Dragging it was an exercise in patience, not effort. The lizard was fighting with everything it had and moving precisely as far as it was allowed to.
Ethan was a different matter.
He was still tier 8. One summon. The friction of the ride, the beast bucking and twisting beneath them, the snapping head coming back around at irregular intervals, all of it was enough to make holding position a constant active task rather than a background one.
He didn’t stop firing.
—Shuuu
—Shuu
—Shuuu
Each bolt left the Elderan Crossbow and shattered across the lizard’s face and maw on impact, the splinter enchantment doing its work, fragments scattering and embedding themselves into skin and scale and the soft tissue around the eyes. The bleeding started quickly and didn’t stop.
"Brace yourself!!"
Savors’ voice carried the specific quality of someone who was enjoying this more than the situation strictly required. His eyes were bright when he hit the brake on the beast and swung the spear in a wide arc.
The North Coal Lizard left the ground.
It rolled across the open field in a long, helpless arc, its mass working against it, momentum carrying it through several rotations before it landed on four feet with the labored weight of something that had just been introduced to a new kind of problem.
It stood.
Barely.
Its breathing came heavy and uneven. Blood ran freely from its eyelids, the left eye already dark, the right operating at a fraction of what it had been. The bolts had done more than Savors had been tracking. He looked at the creature now and then looked back at Ethan with a slightly different expression than he’d had a moment ago.
Ethan had done a number on it without him even noticing.
"You want to do the honors?"
The beast was diminished. Torn limb, compromised vision, the fight already mostly gone from its body. But tier 8 was tier 8, and one summon was one summon. Closing this out would still cost something.
"Yes."
No hesitation.
Ethan dropped from the stead and began loading the crossbow with a measured hand, fitting several bolts in sequence.
Beside him, Vlad appeared.
After the evolution, Vlad had received four skills. The Black-Eyed Bat Evasion was shared with Ethan. Blood Lust had shown itself in the fight with Wuna. The third was different in kind from both.
Before their eyes, Vlad’s frame expanded.
Several meters of additional height in the span of a breath, his skin darkening into a deep hue, his features shifting as bat-like characteristics emerged across his frame. Claws. A pair of wings that spread wide enough to displace the air around them. An expression that no longer carried any of the neutral flatness of his resting state.
Something older and hungrier had come forward instead.
"Maximum effort."
Ethan said it quietly as he moved forward, crossbow level, his eyes fixed on the creature ahead.
