Free Web NovelChapter 37: Risky plan
"Vicious."
The word passed between the group of eight without a clear source, spoken low enough that no one needed to own it.
"He beat Aizin? Isn’t he tier 8?"
No one answered that directly.
"Ugh." A voice closer to the back, tight with something that wasn’t quite disgust. "Even a tier 8 can cause this much trouble. No wonder that woman let him stay."
Silent looks moved across the group.
None of them said anything further out loud, but the exchange was there in the way they held themselves, in the slight shifts of weight and the eyes that moved from Ethan’s figure back to the sand where Aizin had fallen. The image of it was still present.
A body riddled with holes at the points of impact, the armor failed and the flesh beneath it opened in ways that didn’t invite close inspection.
Gut churning was the correct description.
It was worse than what Kena had done, and Kena’s match had already settled into people’s minds like a stone dropped into still water. The fact that what Ethan had just done sat above that on the scale was not a comfortable thing to sit with.
They stopped looking at Ethan.
Their attention shifted instead toward Kena’s roommate, which was the easier problem, the more manageable calculation. A problem that had boundaries. The other two occupied rooms sat at the edge of everyone’s awareness, noted and then deliberately not pursued.
There was already a hierarchy among the eight.
No one said it. No one had to. It was visible in which directions people looked when they spoke, in who angled their body toward the center of the group and who stayed at the edge.
The hierarchy was there, and it made the math on challenging for a room simple enough that most of them had already finished doing it.
No one moved.
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Day came with the particular flatness of a morning that arrived without ceremony.
Davos didn’t announce it. He simply had Aizin and four others removed and deposited off the side of the turtle, down into the horde below, where surviving the landing was only the beginning of what they would have to manage.
The compound yard received that information and did nothing visible with it.
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"What do you think?"
Ethan sat inside the room and looked across at Hela.
The signal he had broadcast during the North Coal Lizard hunt had carried as far as it could before the disruptor on the turtle cut it. The White Tower had a general area from their previous position, nothing current, nothing precise. The turtle had been moving since then, which meant the area they had on record was already behind them.
Finding the compound in a moving horde was still hard.
He had just finished laying out his suggestion. Lose the next round of matches. Create the window needed to attach a signal circle to one of the beasts below the turtle, something large enough and mobile enough to carry the signal further and hold it longer than anything they could broadcast from inside the compound.
Hela looked at him from the corner of her eyes.
"It’s not a bad idea." A pause. "Risky, however."
"We’ve gone into the horde before and survived," Ethan said.
He wasn’t trying to convince her away from the risk. He was locating it honestly. Entering the eye of the horde looked like a death sentence from the outside, but the North Coal Lizard hunt had already happened. They had both come back from it. Whether they could do it again depended on the four beasts below performing the way they had before, and today’s earlier movements had suggested they would.
It wasn’t certainty. It was a chance.
Hela considered it without rushing.
"We can take turns," she said, her voice carrying the same calm it always did, as though she was discussing the order of a morning meal rather than a run into a controlled beast horde. "One person’s death shouldn’t block the mission. I’ll go first."
She was stronger. That was simply true. The risk should go to the person most likely to survive it.
"No." Ethan’s answer came without hesitation. "I’ve been inside the horde. I have more experience with how it moves. We go together."
It wasn’t sentiment.
He believed it. Two people who had already navigated that environment once, moving with coordination, covered more ground and created more options than one person moving alone through the same space. The logic held, and the logic was the reason he said it.
Hela didn’t respond immediately.
Her gaze settled on him and stayed there, steady and without hurry, reading something in his expression that she took her time with. The quiet in the room stretched for a few seconds.
Then, softly.
"You still owe me a debt."
Ethan’s expression shifted.
The evolution requirement for Vlad had specified the blood of a virgin. Three samples. He had collected the first from Ella at the brothel, careful and silent. The second had come later, in the dark forest, from Hela herself, given without fuss when he needed it.
She had given it.
She hadn’t forgotten.
"Since we might die tomorrow," she said, standing from the edge of her bed and straightening to her full height, "I would like to collect."
She crossed the room toward him. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
There was nothing rushed in it. The particular patience of someone who had already decided and was simply moving through the steps that followed a decision. Her eyes didn’t leave his face.
Instinct moved before calculation.
Ethan stepped back, putting distance between them, his back finding the wall faster than he intended.
It didn’t help.
She closed the remaining gap without adjusting her pace, and the space he had created disappeared as though it had never existed. Her hand came up and settled against the wall beside his shoulder. The other stayed at her side.
She pressed a kiss to his lips.
Brief. Precise. Leaving no room for interpretation about whether it had happened.
Then she stepped back.
"Hmm." She looked at him for a moment, something quiet moving behind her eyes. "Not yet."
She turned and walked back toward her bed.
"Since you insist," she added, settling onto the edge of it and drawing her legs up, her voice already returning to the tone it used for practical matters, "we will find a way to lose tomorrow. However hard that is."
She lay back and closed her eyes.
Ethan stood where she had left him for a moment before exhaling.
The night ahead was carrying two very different possibilities. Either the White Tower would close the distance and find them, which would mean one kind of ending to this. Or the plan would run the way they had discussed, which would mean going back into the horde and hoping the variables held. freёwebnoѵel.com
Either way, they would know by morning.
There was nothing left to do but wait.
