Free Web NovelChapter 73: Cheering
The cheering hit him twenty meters before the barrier, and it was not the cheering he was used to. This was the whole city, all shouting in glee after weeks of dealing with deaths and dungeon failures.
Now there was nothing left holding them back.
He came through the barrier line, and the crowd did not part for him so much as fold him in. Hands on his shoulders. People he had never met were saying his name as they knew him. Someone pressed a paper cup into his hand and was gone before he could see who.
Sera found him in the middle of it. Her armor was off, her hair was a mess, and she was grinning in a way he had not seen in weeks.
"We did it," she said.
"We did it."
"No." She grabbed his arm. "You’re not standing here doing the quiet thing. Not tonight. Come on."
She pulled him into the crowd.
...
Across the city, in a small apartment, Leo had not stopped yelling.
He had been yelling since the moment on the screen when his brother stepped off a platform onto nothing, crossed the open air to the thing on the throne, and put the blade through the center of it. The whole building had heard the city outside go off at the same instant, every window in every direction making the same sound.
"DID YOU SEE IT?!" He was not asking. He was standing on the couch, phone in one hand, pointing at the television with the other. "MINA! DID YOU SEE WHAT HE DID?!"
"I saw it." Mina was sitting very still at the other end of the couch with one hand over her mouth.
She had watched the level forty-nine come up on the broadcast and felt her stomach drop, because she knew what those numbers had been doing to people. She had watched the thing nearly kill one of the other hunters, and watched her brother hurl his sword across the room to knock the man clear of it.
She had watched Kai walk up a flight of empty air as the rules had quietly stopped applying to him. She had not breathed the entire time.
Now the gate was gone from the skyline. He was alive. The city was screaming, and Leo was screaming, and she still could not make her hand come down from her mouth.
"He’s okay," she said, mostly to herself. "He’s okay."
"He’s better than okay, he’s number one in CONTRIBUTION, did you see the board, did you SEE it?!"
She pulled Leo down off the couch and into her. He kept talking into her shoulder while she just laughed and listened.
...
The gate district had turned into something between a street fair and a riot, with nobody fighting.
Someone had wheeled a cart out of a shop and was handing out ice cream to anyone who walked past, not selling it, just giving it away, an older woman scooping as fast as she could into a line that had stopped being a line.
Further down, a bar had dragged crates onto the pavement and was pouring for free into whatever people held up. The whole district smelled like sugar, spilled beer, and too many people packed into one place.
For the first time in weeks, nobody seemed to care what the ranking board said anymore.
Sera got them both cones from the ice cream woman, who refused payment so firmly that Sera gave up and just thanked her twice.
"Eat," Sera said, pushing one at him.
"I don’t actually."
"Eat it before it melts. That’s an order. I outrank you."
"You do not outrank me."
"I’m a higher level."
"Barely."
"Higher is higher." She bit into hers and pointed the cone at him until he ate.
It was very good ice cream.
He could not remember the last time he had eaten any, because ice cream was a thing you bought with money you were not putting toward a debt, and for a long time, there had been none of that kind of money.
A kid tore past, being chased by two others, all three of them shrieking, and the first one clipped Kai’s elbow hard enough to nearly knock the cone out of his hand. The kid froze, looked up, recognized him, and his whole face changed.
"You’re."
"Go," Kai said, smiling. "They’re catching up."
The kid went.
Sera was watching him. "You’re smiling."
"I’m aware."
"I don’t see it much. That’s all." She said it lightly, but she meant it, and he knew she meant it.
He laughed then, at nothing, at the ice cream and the kid and the woman scooping like the world depended on it. Then Sera laughed too, and the two of them just stood there in the middle of the celebration, laughing.
...
Three blocks over, a convenience store was still open because the kid working the counter had not thought to close it.
He was eighteen. He had been on shift since the afternoon. He stood behind the register watching the small wall-mounted screen run the ranking board, the final number sitting on it, zero, and he was crying, openly, not bothering to wipe it.
A customer set a drink on the counter, saw his face, and said nothing. The customer was a little wet around the eyes, too.
"On the house," the kid said.
"You sure?"
"Everything’s on the house tonight." He laughed, surprised by it. "I’ll figure it out tomorrow. There’s tomorrow now."
Somewhere deeper in the district, an ambulance still pushed slowly through the crowd.
...
At a crosswalk near the fountain, two men who had never met were arguing loudly about which guild had carried the city hardest.
One of them said GaleWing had cleared more total gates, and the numbers were right there if you cared to look. The other said numbers were not the same as the hard ones, and the hard ones had gone to the independents and that null-class kid, and anyone who watched the actual footage knew it. Neither of them sounded angry, and neither was trying to win.
A third stranger passed and said GaleWing, obviously, without stopping, and both men turned to yell after him at the same time.
...
On a bench at the edge of the district, two women sat with their shoes off, and one of them was talking about her daughter’s school.
It would reopen now, she was saying.
The schools had been running half-days for weeks but that would change now. There would be a full term again.
She was already working out whether her daughter could still make up the year.
...
Kai finished the cone.
Sera had drifted half a step away to let a group of streamers get a clip of her while the crowd moved around him.
Nobody wanted to leave.
The woman from the barrier was still there, the one who had had both hands pressed over her mouth. She had taken them down. She was laughing now, fully, the man beside her laughing with her, and Kai was glad he had gotten to see which one it turned into.
He was happy.
More than clearing the debt and taking Mina and Leo out to eat for the first time. Kai realized he’d spent so long preparing for disaster that a celebration like this felt almost unfamiliar.
...
Then the distortion shifted once.
Small.
Just enough to interrupt the best moment he’d had in years.
It was not the pull he knew from combat. It was quieter than that, a single movement in a sense that had been still all night, and it was gone almost before he caught it.
The clouds above the city center had begun rotating around a single point. It was like a storm was going to appear above the city.
He glanced around but saw nobody else was looking up. The screen across the street still ran the ranking board. His phone, when he checked it, showed nothing new. The ice cream woman was still scooping. The two men were still arguing.
The clouds kept turning. Nobody else seemed to notice and Kai couldn’t stop looking. His first thought was Sera and he turned to find her in the crowd.
But then the sky cracked.
The fracture ran blue-white from one edge of it to the other, and the sound came two seconds behind the light, and every screen in the city changed at the same instant. Behind him, the celebration ran through the whole sequence in about four seconds, cheering to confusion to silence.
The celebration disappeared in a single breath.
Somewhere, an ice cream cone hit the pavement. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
Kai stood in the middle of the celebration that had just stopped being one, and looked up at what was coming through the crack.
The crack did not stop where the city did. It ran out past the skyline in both directions, further than Mythal reached. Whatever was coming, it was not only coming for Mythal.
