Free Web NovelChapter 38: Physco Fin ve The Consuming Serpent
Night fell on the compound the way it always did, without announcement, the light simply pulling back until the torches along the walls were doing all the work.
Of the four who had gone down into the horde, three came back up.
Aizin did not.
His injuries had been too deep and the horde floor was not a place that offered time to rest in. There had been no one willing to spend themselves keeping him alive when their own survival was the more pressing concern. He had gone down and simply stopped being part of the accounting.
On a different note, five new prisoners had arrived at the compound, bringing the total without rooms back to eight.
The cycle continued.
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The gathering that night had the particular quality of a crowd that was keeping itself very still.
The yard. The sand pit at the center. Davos in his usual position with Servos beside him, the remaining compound occupants arranged around the edges in the loose non-formation of people who had not agreed to be a group but found themselves in the same space.
The eight without rooms stood among them.
The first voice to break the quiet was Hela’s.
"Lordship." Her eyes swept the gathered crowd, slow and unhurried, the particular kind of sweep that didn’t look for anything specific but made every person it passed over feel located. "I would like to test myself against the newly arrived prisoners. I don’t mind losing my position in a two-on-one."
The response was immediate and physical.
Every person in the group she had been looking at took several steps back.
Not one or two. Several. A collective movement that happened without coordination, because no coordination was needed. Everyone present had already reached the same conclusion on their own.
Who didn’t know what this woman was.
Among human summoners, killing a fellow summoner’s contracted beast was considered one of the more serious transgressions a person could commit. It wasn’t simply an act of violence. It was an attack on a bond seated in the soul, a destruction of something that couldn’t be replaced by going back to the market. It cut off futures. It set back years of development in a single act and left the damage running through the summoner long after the fight ended.
That was the condemned version.
Hela’s summon didn’t kill opposing summons.
It swallowed them.
The distinction was not one that made the action more acceptable. It made it worse, because it left even less. No body. No core. No trace. Just an absence where something had been.
No sane person with a functioning sense of self-preservation wanted to be on the wrong side of that.
"You cowards."
Servos’s voice cut through the yard, the disdain in it sitting right at the surface without apology. He looked at the men who had stepped back and seemed to find the sight personally offensive.
"Grown men, and you’re afraid of a girl? The human clan males don’t have an inkling of dignity?"
In the Maqaue clan the hierarchy was simple and physical. The strongest males held supreme position, and even the weakest of their males were considered formidable measured against most. The sight of men falling back from a woman, any woman, registered to Servos as something close to an insult against the natural order.
"Servos."
Davos spoke without raising his voice.
"Don’t underestimate the might of a woman."
His gaze had moved to Hela when she spoke and hadn’t fully left her since. There was something there that he was still running down, a hunch that hadn’t resolved into certainty no matter how long he sat with it.
She carried the same smell as the one who had wounded him back at the wilderness stronghold. That particular quality of bloodline, faint but present. He had brought her here specifically because of it, and in the time since he had pulled information from every high-ranking human prisoner he could access.
None of them knew anything useful.
He was working from instinct and the instinct might be wrong. But it hadn’t told him to let go of it yet.
"Especially the scheming type," he added, and allowed himself a small smile.
"But sir." Servos had not finished. "We best them in strength. They bear children when we require it. How can they be compared to us? This view has held in our clan forever. It cannot simply be washed away."
The conviction behind it wasn’t personal. It was older than Servos. It had been in their line longer than he had been alive and it sat in him the way things did when they had been there since before memory.
Davos looked at him.
"Can you beat her mother?"
Servos opened his mouth.
Then stopped.
The confusion lasted exactly one moment before something shifted behind his eyes. Wide. The particular widening that came when a piece of information landed and rearranged everything around it.
Davos had not stopped speaking about the fight with Arian since it ended. Not because he had lost, but because of what the fight had shown him about where she sat. Women in Davos’s calculations were generally not worth extended thought. Arian had earned extended thought. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
Servos looked up at Hela.
Hela did not react.
She couldn’t confirm it. Giving away her connection to the High Regent inside Davos’s compound was not a move she had any intention of making, and Davos himself hadn’t arrived at certainty either, only proximity to it. She held her expression exactly where it was and let the speculation sit in the yard without her help.
The tension that had gathered around the exchange hadn’t dispersed.
"I can indulge her in a fight."
The voice came from the side of the gathering, unhurried, belonging to a figure with a completely shaved head who had been watching the whole exchange with the specific quality of someone who had already decided before it started.
Psycho Fin.
"You already have a room," Davos said, looking at him with something that landed closer to amusement than surprise.
Davos had taken Psycho Fin’s measure a long time ago. The reputation was deliberate. The behavior that made people give him space, the playing with opponents’ blood on the stage, the particular theatrics that followed his fights, none of it was what it looked like. It was management. A person who was both strong and fundamentally uninterested in fighting more than necessary, using the performance to reduce the number of fights he was required to have.
Smart. And lazy in the specific way that smart people sometimes were.
"What’s wrong with having two spaces?" Psycho Fin shrugged, the movement loose and unbothered. "I can take a piss in one and sleep in the other."
Davos said nothing for a moment.
’I wonder what they are plotting.’
These two had not exchanged a visible word since arriving at the compound. Not in the yard. Not at the pit. Not in any of the windows between matches where people talked because there was nothing else to do.
And yet here was this coordination, clean and timed, as though it had been arranged in advance through a channel no one else had access to.
The fact that it made no visible sense was precisely what made it make complete sense.
"Sure." Davos smiled. "Why not?"
He let his gaze move between the two of them.
"Psycho Fin versus The Consuming Serpent."
