Free Web NovelChapter 40: Untitled
"She’s going overboard."
Ethan muttered it without looking away from the pit.
The commitment Hela was putting into the fight was too much for what the fight was supposed to be. The strength behind each exchange, the way she was pressing Fin rather than managing the distance, the energy she was burning through. Anyone watching who knew what a thrown match looked like would see that this wasn’t one yet.
He shook his head once and coughed, his expression staying loose and unconcerned.
Then Fin’s mana slash connected. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
Hela took it head on, the impact catching her full across the frame and throwing her backward, the force carrying her dozens of meters before she cleared the boundary of the circular pit entirely.
The courtyard went silent.
The silence had a specific texture. Not the quiet of a crowd holding its breath before something happened. The quiet of a crowd that had just watched something and couldn’t immediately locate a framework for it.
What kind of mistake was that.
She had seen it coming. Everyone watching had seen it coming. The angle of the attack had been readable from the moment Fin committed his weight forward, and Hela had demonstrated across the entire fight that her reaction speed was not the problem. She had redirected faster than that on four separate occasions in the previous two minutes.
She had stood there and taken it.
"Haha!!"
Davos’s laugh broke across the yard and the silence came apart around it.
"What a way to throw a match." He was already smiling, the amusement sitting on his face without any attempt to contain it. "I wonder which treasure is down below."
He spread his hands, the gesture open and relaxed, the smile behind it carrying something knowing that he didn’t bother to conceal.
"Anyway. Kids will be kids." He looked between the pit and the space around it without his expression shifting. "If it’s really worth risking your life for, then risk it."
The truth was he didn’t know exactly what they were after.
His assumption was a treasure, something the horde had swept up from the ground during its movement and absorbed into the mass the way it absorbed everything that couldn’t outrun it. Something old, possibly significant, the kind of thing that got buried in a horde and stayed there because no one wanted to go in after it. If two captured summoners were willing to throw their room positions to go looking for it, it was probably worth looking for.
He wasn’t particularly concerned about whether they found it.
"Next."
Ethan didn’t move.
He was still the only Tier 8 summoner in the compound, and the new arrivals shifted the composition of the group in ways that made the next step predictable. He had run the numbers before the gathering started.
Like clockwork, a challenge came.
He lost the room without much of a fuss, the match handled and concluded without the kind of energy that drew attention. By the time it was over the yard had already moved on to the next calculation.
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The sun was still rising when Davos personally walked them to the foot of the giant turtle.
He stopped there and looked at both of them.
"I will be watching you." The words came out even and unhurried. "Don’t try anything funny."
He raised one hand.
A wave of energy spread outward from the top of the turtle in a slow expanding pulse, covering the range between the foot of the creature and the outer edge of the gap between it and the horde. It moved through the air without sound and settled.
Hela’s expression shifted before she caught it.
The signal jammer had just extended to full capacity.
She ran the possibility through quickly. Did Davos know about the signal circle? Did he know what they were actually attempting?
He couldn’t. If he knew, the response wouldn’t be this. Demi-humans operated on a superiority complex that ran deep enough to be structural. If Davos had identified what they were doing, she would be in a locked room already, not standing at the foot of the turtle being waved off with a knowing smile. That wasn’t how he handled threats. He didn’t play games with things he considered beneath him.
The jammer extension was about something else.
Davos watched the two of them without expression and kept his own reasoning where he kept everything else. He didn’t know about any signal. What he knew was that two summoners were about to go into his horde looking for something they had noticed from inside the compound, and he didn’t know what it was. For all he could determine, it was some earth-shattering artifact that a beast had grabbed off the ground during the advance and swallowed into the mass. ƒrēewebnovel.com
He wasn’t going to let outside eyes watch them retrieve it.
The jammer was about controlling the perimeter of his own information. Nothing more.
"Good luck."
He kicked them out.
The gap between the turtle’s foot and the horde rose to meet them, and he turned back without watching them land, not knowing that the extension he had just activated had cut off precisely the thing they had come down here to do.
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"It cut off again?"
The technician’s voice came from the monitoring station at the far end of the warship, his eyes fixed on the panel in front of him, brow pulled tight.
The bleep had been enough. A single pulse of location data, brief and then gone, cut off before it could carry anything beyond the coordinates. No trajectory. No heading. No indication of what path the source was following or how fast it was moving.
"Hela is resourceful." Arian’s voice came across the deck with the weight of someone who had already decided what she believed and was operating from that conviction. "It will come up again."
Her eyes moved across the crew around her, the flash behind them quick and clear.
"But right now we move to that location. As fast as we can get there."
The warship climbed.
It left the altitude it had been holding and pushed upward into the higher current, the speed of its ascent pressing against everyone on deck before the hull adjusted for it. Then it leveled and shot forward, the distance between its position and the coordinates shrinking with the kind of speed that only came from a vessel built for exactly this kind of pursuit.
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At the foot of the turtle, Ethan and Hela stood at the edge of the gap and looked out at the horde moving around them.
The jammer signal sat between them and every option they had planned for.
The choice in front of them was simple in its shape and complicated in everything underneath it. Wait for another window, which meant time they didn’t control and an opportunity that might not reopen cleanly. Or go into the eye of the horde regardless, broadcast from inside it, and hope the jammer’s range had a ceiling they could push through from deep enough in.
Neither option was clean.
They looked at the horde and said nothing yet.
