I Can Summon Legendary Figuress

Chapter 41: Engage

"Unfortunately my miasma skill doesn’t allow me to constantly move while using it."

Hela exhaled the words more than spoke them.

She stood at the foot of the turtle and watched the horde move around them like an ocean finding its shape against a fixed point. The mass of it rolled forward in waves, beast pressing against beast, the sound of it a constant low pressure that sat in the chest rather than the ears.

The turtle continued its slow forward movement, pulling the compound further from where they stood with every second they didn’t act.

Standing here accomplished nothing.

Going back up repeatedly would draw the kind of attention that closed options rather than opened them.

"Just throw me into the eye of the horde," Ethan said. "I can take it."

No hesitation behind it. No performance of bravery. Just a statement about what he was willing to do and a readiness to do it immediately.

He couldn’t process most feelings with any real clarity. They moved through him and he filed them away or discarded them without much ceremony. But the feeling of being caged was different. That one landed somewhere deeper than the rest, in a place that didn’t respond to calculation or reasoning. It simply moved him.

Why he was risking his life had never been as clear as it was standing here.

"I’m sure you can." Hela looked at him as the horde rushed toward them from the outer edge. "But I’ll go with you." free𝑤ebnovel.com

She raised one hand.

Something descended from above them, dropping out of the air with a speed that compressed the moment between its appearance and its arrival into almost nothing. A creature made from pure light, its skin radiating holy mana in steady visible pulses, the glow of it filling the space around them and pushing back the dark edges of the horde’s mass.

Ethan had seen Barthalamew.

That was the only summon of Hela’s he had a full picture of. What was in front of him now had never appeared in the fights he had watched, which meant his read of her capabilities had been operating on incomplete information.

Davos, watching from his position above, was in the same situation.

Before either of them could process the adjustment fully—

—feeeee

The light creature moved.

It took them from the ground in the same motion and flashed through the sky in a single arc, its body threading between the rising mass of beasts below with a speed that turned the horde into a blur beneath them. They were inside it before the distance had registered as something that needed to be crossed.

Around them, beasts raged and pushed forward, the movement of the horde continuing its pattern, indifferent to the three figures now moving through it.

"We have to distract him." Hela’s voice came out even as they moved, her eyes ahead, reading the terrain of the horde the way a navigator read water. "The old man. You can handle that?"

Escape wasn’t on the table.

Whatever speed they could generate inside the horde, a demi-god’s reaction covered the same distance faster. Running wasn’t the option and they both understood that. But they also couldn’t leave. The prisoners in the compound were still human, and that fact carried weight neither of them had set down.

"Sure." Ethan’s eyes moved through the horde in a slow sweep, already looking. "I can think of something."

The idea had come from Davos himself, which had a particular kind of usefulness to it.

Davos had assumed there was a treasure somewhere in the horde. He had been confident enough in that assumption to say it out loud, which meant he believed it. When someone at Davos’s level believed something with that kind of confidence, the most efficient move was to use the belief rather than argue with it.

In the first moments after entering the horde, Ethan had been looking.

He found it.

A species sitting close to the dragon bloodline, moving through the mass several tiers above where he currently operated. Tier 6. A dragon wyvern, its body cutting through the surrounding beasts with the authority of something that nothing in the horde was willing to press against directly.

Out of his league. That was simply true and he didn’t dress it otherwise.

But everyone who had spent any time with the lore of the dragon race knew one consistent thing about them.

They kept treasures.

Harassing one wouldn’t require killing it. It would require enough of a disturbance to pull Davos’s attention and hold it, which was a different problem with a different threshold.

Ethan raised the crossbow and activated White Transit and Black-Eyed Bat Evasion in the same motion.

—woosh

The transit took him forward and the bat form carried him through the gap between, closing the distance to the wyvern in a burst that covered ground faster than anything moving on foot through the horde could track. He came out of it at close range with the crossbow already leveled.

From his high seat above the horde, Davos caught the movement.

His eyes followed it to its destination and he looked at the wyvern for a moment.

’Tier 6 wyvern.’

He turned the conclusion over and felt the satisfaction of having been correct settle in without fanfare. Of course. A dragon-adjacent species holding a treasure in the deep mass of the horde. That was exactly the kind of thing two summoners would risk their room positions to retrieve.

He watched them move toward it and allowed himself a quiet contempt for the predictability of it.

Did they really believe he was benevolent enough to let them seize something from under his nose?

The horde was his. Every beast moving through it operated under his direction. If those beasts were carrying treasures, those treasures were his as well. The idea that two human prisoners could descend into his horde and walk out with something that belonged to him was a thought he hadn’t extended enough respect to in order to find it threatening.

He understood beasts.

What he hadn’t fully accounted for was how vicious humans could be when they had decided on a thing.

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"The signal is back up. And it’s close!!"

The voice came from the monitoring station at the front of the warship, sharp and immediate, the excitement behind it breaking through the controlled register the crew usually maintained.

The panel was live.

Location data was transmitting, consistent and readable, the coordinates resolving cleanly on the display without the fragmentation that had cut the previous signals short. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com

"Ready yourselves."

Arian’s hand gripped the arm of her chair and her voice went across the deck without needing to rise above the noise the warship was already generating.

"We are about to engage."

The warship responded to the command before the words had finished landing, the crew moving into the positions they had been holding themselves ready for since the first signal came through. The vessel pushed forward, closing the distance between its current position and the coordinates at an increased speed.