Free Web NovelChapter 35: Untitled
"What’s going on here?"
Ethan came through the gate with Savors a step behind him, his eyes already moving across the yard as he asked it. freewёbnoνel.com
The fight was still going in the middle of the compound, the two summoners circling each other in tempered and measured steps.
Hela turned when she heard him.
Her eyes moved over him once, quick and thorough, the kind of look that was checking for something specific rather than just registering his presence.
"Fighting for room allocations," she said.
Her gaze stayed on him a moment longer than the words required.
"How did it go?"
She said it with her eyes blinking once, slow and level, the question carrying two layers in the way she asked it.
"Well."
Ethan nodded.
He didn’t add anything to it.
The truth was that the summoning ritual had not been his only purpose going down.
The disruptor on the turtle’s back had cut Hela’s signal the moment they climbed up. Whatever she had managed to push through during the window between the caravan and the compound, it wasn’t holding. White Tower had a location marker, but a marker that couldn’t be sustained was only marginally better than nothing.
Going back down into the horde had given him a window.
He had used it.
Broadcasting from within range of the disruptor’s blind spot while Savors was occupied with the lizard, keeping the transmission brief, keeping it clean. Just enough to leave a trail that competent people could follow.
Hela didn’t need the details spoken aloud. The single word answer had told her what she needed.
"Good."
She turned back to the yard without leaving a trace of anything in her expression.
The people at White Tower were not slow. If the signal had gone through at any point with enough consistency to triangulate, they were already moving. She trusted that in the way she trusted the institution she had grown up watching her mother build her life inside.
They were coming.
The only question was time.
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In the yard, the fight closed.
Kena stood over his opponent, breathing slightly harder than before, his sickle back at his side. The young man on the ground looked up at him from a position that made it clear getting up quickly wasn’t going to happen.
"I’ve always been better than you at this."
Kena said it quietly, not with heat, just with the flatness of something stated because it was true.
"You keep deluding yourself."
They had grown up together. Trained near each other, fought beside each other, shared the particular closeness that came from being inseparable across years of the same circumstances. The outcome between them had never genuinely been in doubt. Both of them had known that. One of them had kept pretending otherwise, for reasons that probably had more to do with the friendship than with actual belief.
"Something like that."
The young man on the ground smiled.
It was not a happy expression.
He understood what sunrise meant for him. He understood it clearly, and the smile was the only response left that didn’t require energy he didn’t have.
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"Who’s that guy?"
One of the eight new arrivals had stopped watching the fight.
His attention had shifted to Ethan, standing near the entrance with Savors, arms loose, expression carrying nothing in particular.
He raised an eyebrow.
Tier 8. That much was readable from a look. Unlike everyone else in the yard, this one sat at the bottom of the power distribution in this compound, the only tier 8 among people who had moved past it.
"Can I challenge that guy?"
He directed it toward Davos without looking away from Ethan.
The logic was simple and he wasn’t bothering to conceal it. If Ethan held a room, and Ethan was the weakest individual present by tier, then Ethan was the most accessible target in the yard. The math pointed in one direction and he was following it.
"Quite shameless."
Davos smiled.
The mockery in it sat right at the surface, directed at the transparency of the approach rather than the approach itself.
"Trying to beat up a tier 8 summoner."
He said it as if he found it genuinely amusing.
He was not, however, inclined to stop it.
He leaned forward slightly in his chair, his eyes moving between the new arrival and Ethan with the particular attention of someone who had already decided he was interested in the outcome.
"You are allowed a maximum of one summon."
His voice settled into something more deliberate.
"Anything more than one and I’ll throw you into the eye of the horde tomorrow."
He let that sit for a beat.
"Also, no skills from any summon apart from the one you bring out at the beginning."
He turned his head toward Ethan.
The smile that followed was a different kind from the one he had directed at the new arrival. This one had something colder in it. The specific expression of someone who knew exactly what they were setting in motion and had already accounted for the result.
"As for you."
He held Ethan’s gaze.
"You can go crazy."
The yard had gone quiet.
The people standing in it had not missed the exchange, and most of them had enough experience reading situations to understand what Davos had just done. He had handed the new arrival a restricted fight and handed Ethan no restrictions at all. freewebnøvel.com
That was not generosity.
That was Davos running a test he had already designed, using a challenger who had volunteered himself without realizing he was the instrument rather than the participant.
Ethan looked across the yard at the man who had raised his hand.
He said nothing.
His expression didn’t shift, rather he held on tight to his cross bow and knelt opening its upper compartment as he hurriedly loaded a few bolts.
Clearly he wasn’t moved by the whole arrangement, fight a level 7 summoner? Why not? It was just a matter of winning or losing.
Of course, he did not plan to lose.
