Free Web NovelChapter 6: A Plan
Mirielle had fought beside enough people to know what training looked like.
The economy of motion. The way a body moves when it’s been drilled past the point of thinking.
Aries looked nothing like any of that.
He was running on instinct and raw output with what appeared to be genuinely no plan, and that should have meant he was already dead. The unsettling part was that it didn’t.
The nearest Dranox went for his ribs first, fast enough that Mirielle’s mouth was already opening.
Aries dropped into a crouch that looked more like he tripped than dodged, the claws ripping clean through the air above him. The sphere in his palm came up and caught the creature in the waist.
Mana detonated from the contact point and the Dranox spun sideways with its body folding wrong before it crashed into two behind it and dragged them both down.
He didn’t stop. Planted his foot and moved forward.
Two came from opposite sides at the same time. He turned between them and fired both palms. The first sphere cracked into a skull and the Dranox dropped mid-lunge.
The second slammed a chest hard enough to shake the road, the creature folding inward and blasting back through the ones behind it.
He landed and the mana was still crackling at his hands.
Even the Dranox pulled back for a second.
"...Aries?" Mirielle heard her own voice come out quiet. She didn’t bother fixing it.
Beside her, Althea had her arm around Drelan without remembering when she’d moved there.
Her face was doing several things at once — still crying, couldn’t stop, but she wasn’t looking away either.
"Is that really our Aries?" Just above a whisper.
Drelan had been pressing his hand over the shoulder wound. He looked up.
A rough laugh came out of him.
Short and genuine and completely wrong for a man bleeding through his sleeve — and then he just kept going, a grin spreading across his face.
"You awakened." Almost to himself. Then louder. "You mastered your Arcane, didn’t you." Not a question. "I knew it. I knew my son had something in him."
Mirielle heard every word.
She didn’t respond.
Because Drelan’s explanation didn’t account for anything she was actually seeing.
’How? He failed the awakening. Sphere didn’t react once.’ She’d been there herself. ’Mage or Knight — both register through the sphere. No exceptions. So what is she looking at.’
Aries hit another Dranox and the mana that came off his hands still didn’t match any classification she knew.
She had no answer.
That was not a feeling she was used to sitting with.
Out on the road, Aries had clocked the problem several hits ago.
Every sphere cost more than the last. Arms heavier each time, the mana coming up slower, a little harder to pull.
He understood now what Mirielle had meant when she said drained.
The difference was she had technique — routing mana efficiently through a trained form.
He was just hammering raw output with zero control, which was apparently the fastest way to burn through everything available.
Good to know. He’d think about it more when he wasn’t surrounded.
The other problem was the treeline. The shapes inside it weren’t thinning. They were pulling back and regrouping, which was worse than advancing.
He drove the nearest cluster back and used the half-second it bought him to actually think.
’Drelan’s hurt. Mirielle’s empty. I’ve got maybe a few solid hits left before I hit the same wall.’
He looked at the hills through the thinning smoke at the road’s edge. Higher ground. A ridge running above the densest part of the treeline, overlooking the full stretch of road below it.
He pulled the smallest amount of mana he could manage and pushed it straight into the ground at his feet.
The burst wasn’t aimed at anything. Just force outward — dirt and air thrown hard enough to roll a thick cloud across the road in seconds. The Dranox snarled somewhere inside it.
He was already turning before it settled.
Three pairs of eyes.
Althea still deciding if any of this was real, arm around Drelan, tears that hadn’t stopped. freёwebnovel.com
Drelan more upright now, hand still pressed over his shoulder, watching with something in his expression that Aries felt somewhere he couldn’t name.
Mirielle with her blade at her side, staring at him like she’d been handed a fact with nowhere to put it.
"Aries—" Althea started.
"I know what you want to say mother." He dropped to one knee. "But not now. And more importantly" His eyes moved to the shapes shifting in the smoke behind him.
"Fighting them doesn’t work — you’ve both seen it. We drop ten and twenty fill the gap. The numbers don’t go down. Staying here is just losing slowly."
"So we run," Mirielle said.
"Not exactly." He pointed at the ridge above the treeline. "I have a plan."
She looked at the ridge. Looked back at him. "Whatever you’re about to say," she said flatly, "is going to be stupid."
"Probably." He held her eyes and didn’t look away. "Trust me."
Silence around the road.
She was looking at the same boy who had stood at that awakening platform and given the sphere nothing.
And now, while everyone else is down, that boy is standing alone against the dranoxes to protect them.
Mirielle clicked her tongue. Looked away.
"...Fine."
Aries stood and turned toward her.
"Si—" He stopped. Corrected himself, just a half-beat too deliberately. "Mirielle. Help me get them moving."
She looked at him.
Just for a second longer than she needed to. Something shifted in her chest that she had zero interest in examining right now, so she didn’t. She turned toward the smoke instead.
"They’re pulling back," she said quietly. "Getting ready for another push."
Aries moved into position beside her, eyes tracking the darkness building at the treeline’s edge.
She could feel him timing something, waiting for a threshold she couldn’t see yet.
Dranoxes surged forward again.
"EXACTLY — NOW!"
