Free Web NovelChapter 42: Aurenfall Xll
Lena stared at him for a full second.
Then she turned and fell into step beside him, moving back into the forest.
"How did you do that," she said.
"Do what," Leon said.
"Don’t give me that Leon, you were flying, I wanna fly too."
"Ah."
He shrugged.
Lena looked at him.
He looked back at her with the expression of someone who genuinely felt that a shrug was a complete and sufficient answer to the question.
"That’s it?" she said. "That’s all I get?"
"It’s not that complicated," he said.
"Look at this" she said showing him the aftermath of his massacr— no battle.
"They weren’t that strong," he said.
Lena opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Looked at the forest ahead of them.
"You know what," she said. "Fine."
Leon nodded like that settled it.
They walked in silence for a moment, the sounds of the festival continuing around them in the distance.
Then quietly, without looking at him, Lena said.
"It was cool though."
Leon said nothing.
But the corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly.
"Come on," she said, already moving. "Don’t fall behind this time."
...
At Arlott’s seat the silence had a different texture now.
Selene hadn’t said anything since the leaderboard moved. She was still looking at the screen, or rather she kept looking between the screen and the spot where the replay was running on a smaller monitor nearby. The blue comet. The C rank clearing. The numbers climbing.
Her brain kept replaying it and kept arriving at the same place.
Unbelievable.
That word wasn’t sufficient but it was the only one available.
Cedric had dwarfed the other S ranks by two thousand points and the continent had called it dominance. Called it proof of a different league entirely.
And then Leon had dwarfed Cedric by three thousand.
In minutes.
From zero.
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Looked at the leaderboard again.
---
RANK 1 — LEONIS SILFORD — 6,240 pts
RANK 2 — CEDRIC ARDEN — 3,200 pts
RANK 3 — LENA SILFORD — 1,400 pts
---
Arlott sat beside her and said absolutely nothing, which was somehow the most infuriating part of all of it.
... ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
On the royal platform the atmosphere was considerably less composed.
Theodric stared at the leaderboard.
Then at the replay.
Then at the leaderboard again.
"Impossible," he said. The word came out quieter than he intended, almost to himself. "An E rank."
Cassian beside him hadn’t moved.
"He’s not just leading," the king continued, as if still working through it. "He’s dominating. The gap between him and Cedric is larger than the gap between Cedric and everyone else." He shook his head slightly. "His abilities are far beyond anyone in that forest. Even..."
He stopped himself.
But the rest of the sentence was obvious to everyone on the platform.
Even Cedric.
Queen Iseult looked at her husband carefully.
The king of the human continent, the man who had ruled for decades without once being described as someone who stammered, was currently doing exactly that.
It was a very bitter pill to swallow for him, for everyone, but they had to, he had to admit it.
"An E rank," he said again. Like saying it twice might make it make more sense.
It didn’t.
...
From Leon’s perspective the last five minutes had been surprisingly decent.
Lena talked while they moved, updating him on quests she’d completed, a particularly annoying B rank beast she’d encountered two weeks ago near the outer districts, the new footwork combination she’d been working on. He listened, responded where it was worth responding, ate chips.
It was a good five minutes.
The forest had gotten denser around them as they pushed deeper, the canopy thicker, the light coming through in narrower strips. Other participants had clearly had the same idea, moving inward where the higher ranked monsters spawned, because twice they’d passed the aftermath of recent fights, dead beasts and disturbed undergrowth, points already claimed.
The smart ones were thinking the same way.
Then the trees thinned slightly into a wide natural clearing.
And the Blazeclaw Titans were there.
Four of them.
Leon stopped.
They were large. That was the first thing. Twice the size of a normal bear, easily, with the broad heavy frame of something that had been built specifically to be difficult to deal with. The fur was thick and dark with an orange tint along the spine, and the claws that gave them their name were long and slightly luminescent with residual heat. Their faces were wrong in the specific way that mixed predators always were, too flat, too wide, the jaw sitting forward like a cat’s but scaled up to something that had no business existing.
The nearest one opened its mouth.
A fireball rolled out lazily and hit a tree twenty meters to their left. The tree didn’t survive the experience.
They’d spotted Leon and Lena.
The lead one roared.
The sound hit like a physical thing.
"I can’t handle these on my own," Lena said beside him, hand already on her rapier. Her voice was steady. Just stating a fact.
Leon reached into the bag.
Pulled out a chip.
Ate it thoughtfully while looking at the four B rank fire breathing bear cats staring them down from across the clearing.
"Could be worse," he said.
Lena looked at him.
"Could be worse," she repeated.
"Yeah." He brushed his hand off and slowly raised his right hand. The temperature around them dropped by several degrees in an instant, frost threading outward across the grass from his feet, and an ice blade formed in his grip, long and clean, catching the narrow forest light.
He looked at his sister.
She looked at him.
He extended his fist.
She bumped it with her own, the small familiar motion they’d had since they were old enough to have anything.
"I’m going a bit hard," he said.
"You’ll see. Try to keep up."
She smiled, rapier coming up into her stance, dragon eye flickering to life with a soft green glow.
"Hmph"
"Don’t leave me too far behind," she said.
The Blazeclaw Titans charged.
They moved.
