Free Web NovelChapter 15: The Fleshweaver (1): I Thought I Was Ready
Somehow, I’d managed to sleep. The few hours pressed against Alice, lulled by her breathing, had been enough. Not a deep sleep, but enough to get me back on my feet.
We ate without appetite, and we left. Alice walked at my side, her hand in mine — and whenever I drifted too far into my own head, her fingers tightened around mine, like she always knew exactly when to pull me back.
Half an hour later, we were pushing open the doors of the war room.
A long table beneath a map of the region, a dozen officers around it, a mage in dark robes, and at the far end, the lord of the place. Lord Brennac, heavyset, in his fifties, the kind of man used to the world stepping aside when he entered it. But when his eyes landed on Elsa, I read something I hadn’t expected — caution, almost deference.
"Lady Elsa." He inclined his head, and from a man like him, that meant a great deal. "I had no idea the rank-S passing through my city was you." His gaze slid toward us. "And... your companions?"
"My students — the summoned heroes."
The silence dropped all at once.
"The heroes..." Brennac stopped on Alice, on the white hair, the red eyes. I saw the exact moment he understood — the breath catching, the blood leaving his face. "Then she... is the Saint." freewēbnoveℓ.com
He didn’t answer. He lowered himself to one knee.
And behind him, the whole room followed. No order, not a word — a wave of iron and steel that bent as one, foreheads down, before a girl of twenty I happened to watch steal the covers every single night.
At the capital, I’d seen the court treat Alice with regard. But this was something else. A room full of fighting men on their knees, spontaneously, at the single word "Saint" — pure faith. And I think I truly grasped, right then, what she was to this world.
In the middle of it all, over the sea of bowed necks, her red eyes found mine. The mask slipped — just for me — and she smiled, the real one, the one that reached her eyes. Then it faded, and the Saint returned.
"Please, rise." Her voice carried to the back of the room. "Your respect touches me, but this is no hour for kneeling. There is, not far from here, a demon devouring your children. It’s him who should be on his knees."
The men rose, and there was something in their eyes the king’s speeches had never once lit in me.
"Good. Here’s what we know." Brennac took his seat again.
Months of disappearances in the poor quarters, never a single lead. Two patrols sent toward the old castle weeks earlier, none returned.
"We knew there was something out there. We didn’t know it was a demon. Without your heroes, who tore apart his network last night, we still wouldn’t."
Elsa leaned over the map.
"Then we kill it tonight, before it realizes we’ve found it." She traced a circle around the castle. "We ring the ruin, your whole company in a cordon. A small team goes in to flush it out, and while we do, we raise a magic barrier over the ring. If it runs, it goes nowhere — a lion in a cage."
The mage — a lean man, scarred, who went by Corvin — frowned.
"A barrier that can hold a demon, we can keep up for an hour, maybe two if there are enough of us feeding it, but no longer than that, or it gives."
"An hour will do," said Elsa. "If we can’t kill it in that time, we never will."
An officer raised a hand — Captain Doras, a veteran with a face hewn from rock.
"The plan holds, but one thing troubles me." He turned to Alice. "Saint, you mean to go in with this team. That’s madness. You’re irreplaceable. If we lost you, it wouldn’t be a battle we’d lose, but three centuries of hope. Let us go in your place."
"Your concern honors me, Captain. But none of your healing will keep a man on his feet against a demon, where mine will. Without me inside, you send your team to its death. And I don’t stay behind while others fall in my place — that isn’t how I see my role."
It was perfect — noble, just. And I alone knew there wasn’t an ounce of duty in it. Alice didn’t care about this team, these men, their war. The only reason she’d step through that door was that I was stepping through it.
Doras turned his gaze on me.
"And him? A hero summoned a few weeks ago at most, and a demon is no bandit. Are you certain he’s ready?"
"I trained him myself, Captain. I’ve watched him fall and get back up more times than I can count. Believe me — in this room, he isn’t the one you should be worrying about."
I said nothing. But something deep in me whispered she was right. Level twenty, a blade that moved on its own now. The kid who’d landed in this world no longer existed, and no one here could have guessed it.
"I still need a guide. Someone who knows this castle."
An awkward silence. Then a young soldier at the back made up his mind.
"Me. I grew up around here, we played in those ruins as kids. I know the corridors by heart." He swallowed. "Well... I used to."
"Your name?"
"Eric, ma’am."
"You lead us, Eric. You stay behind me, and at the first sign of danger you take cover — I’m not in the habit of losing my guides."
Eric nodded, and seemed to stand a little straighter.
"And the demon itself? Its name, its powers?" Brennac asked.
"Unknown. The man we made talk had never seen his master. We go in blind — all the more reason not to take a single needless risk."
Brennac gestured toward his champion: a giant in heavy armor, a tower shield taller than a man strapped across his back. Anthonius. The wall that would open the way.
The plan closed shut piece by piece, and a part of me followed it — the part that, for four years, had dissected a thousand battles for a thousand novels. A question came to me.
"The barrier keeps the demon from getting out. Does it keep anything from getting in? If it has reinforcements outside, do we trap them with us, or not?"
Corvin looked at me differently. "Good question. It only filters one way: nothing comes in. You’ll be alone in there with it — but at least, truly alone."
"Perfect."
Elsa gave me a sidelong glance. Something in it looked like approval.
"If we’re all clear, we move. I want the ring in place before nightfall."
The road was long. A question had been gnawing at me since the night before; I nudged my horse up alongside hers.
"Last night, you didn’t even want us risking our necks for a cellar full of bandits. And now you’re taking us against a demon nobody knows the strength of. What changed?"
"Nothing. Last night it was bandits, and risking your life in the dark, alone and exhausted, for kids we pulled out anyway — that was throwing your life away for next to nothing." She looked at me. "Because here’s what you still don’t get, Kuro. The day you became a hero, your life stopped being yours. It’s worth too much now for you to spend it on a whim. The only question left isn’t whether you take risks — it’s what you take them for."
Behind us, Alice shifted sharply in her saddle. Her smile was gone, and there was something on her face, just for an instant, that looked like disgust — as if the very idea that my life might belong to anything other than her turned her stomach. Then she caught my eye, and the mask came back.
"And tonight is the right use of that life," Elsa went on, having seen none of it. "A demon cornered, surrounded, with a rank-S in front of you and an army to catch you if it goes wrong. You don’t turn that down. That’s how you spend a hero’s life without wasting it."
She fell quiet, then spoke again, lower.
"And tonight you’ll see with your own eyes what they’re asking you to fight. Your books can go on about demons all they like, they never showed you what one actually is. No written word can do it for you; you have to see it. And once you’ve seen it, you never tell those stories the same way again."
She said nothing more. Neither did I. The night before, I’d taken a life with my own hands, and tonight I was promised the true face of evil. I didn’t yet know what it would do to me, to set the two side by side.
The castle came into view at dusk: a black stone carcass on a spur of rock, half-eaten by ivy, its towers broken like rotten teeth. Nothing about it, from below, betrayed what lived inside. Maybe that was the worst part.
The company spread out without a sound, shadows slipping into a ring around the ruin, while at the rear Corvin’s mages wove something into the air, a low hum, like the moment before a storm. Slowly, a translucent wall rose around the castle. The cage was shut.
We waited, crouched in the wet grass. Eric was breathing fast, Anthonius praying under his breath. Me, I felt nothing — just that flat, empty calm that hadn’t left me since the night before, almost worse than fear. Doras noticed it — that kid of a few weeks, calmer than his veterans on the threshold of a demon’s lair. He said nothing, but I knew he’d never look at me quite the same way again.
A mage raised his fist: the barrier was holding. Elsa drew her blade.
"Let’s go."
We crossed the broken portcullis six abreast. Up front, Anthonius and his shield. Behind him, me, then Elsa, the pivot. Eric glued to her for the corridors, and bringing up the rear, beside Alice, a silent scout whose name I’d forgotten. Alice in the center, against me — the healer you keep alive at all costs.
We sank into the dark.
The inside was freezing, black, our footsteps too loud. I opened the Eye on reflex and closed it again at once: the mana seeped from the walls like stagnant water gone rust-colored, nothing like the dungeon. Every instinct screamed at me not to look too closely.
We descended, Anthonius’s shield scraping the stone. Collapsed corridors, empty rooms, stairs always sinking lower.
And then the smell started, faint at first, like distant carrion. Then heavier with every step, sickening — meat, old blood, and under it something chemical and acrid that caught in the throat. Anthonius was breathing harder. Eric had pressed a sleeve over his nose.
"...It’s here. The great hall, at the end," he whispered.
No one wanted to go in. We went in anyway.
The door stood ajar, a sickly green glow filtering through the gap. Anthonius shouldered it open.
The smell hit us like a wall, so thick my eyes watered on their own. And behind it, the hall.
Vast, vaulted, drowned in a green light that gave everything the cast of the drowned. Rows of stone tables as far as I could see. And on the tables, between the tables, hung from the walls — bodies.
Not corpses. Far worse. Bodies cut open, held gaping by hooks, with pieces taken out and others sewn in their place — an arm grafted on backward, a ribcage closed over something that wasn’t a heart. Along the walls, hundreds of jars, where organs and limbs and whole faces peeled from their skulls floated in murky fluid, some of them still twitching. At the center, machines of metal and bone driven into flesh like leeches.
The floor was black and sticky. We were walking in blood, crusted dry along channels cut into the stone on purpose, for drainage.
Behind me, the scout vomited. Anthonius had dropped to his knees, gray-faced. Eric had frozen against the wall, silent tears running down his cheeks — maybe he recognized someone there.
And me, who’d seen Alexia’s body, who’d opened a man’s throat the night before, who thought himself past being shaken by anything — I doubled over and threw up. Because this wasn’t death. Death, I was starting to know. This was something else — something with no name in any language.
When I looked up, I saw Alice. Motionless in the middle of the hall, her face drained of all color. Normally, nothing reached her — not even the morning I’d fallen apart over Alexia’s body. Now her composure had cracked. Lips parted, eyes wide on the horror, she wasn’t the Saint anymore, just a girl of twenty staring hell in the face with no idea what to do with it.
If even she wavered, I had no idea how deep the pit was that we’d just walked into.
Only Elsa stood straight, her face shut, her hand white on the grip of her blade.
"Forbidden magic." Each word weighed years. "This is what a demon is, Kuro. This is what they do to the people we hand them." She swept the hall with her eyes. "The kids we pulled out last night, the ones we didn’t pull out in time, my patrols, everything this city has lost for months... it became this."
The true evil of this world, Elsa had said. On the road, I’d nodded like I understood. I’d understood nothing.
The man I’d killed the night before — his blood, his eyes, the weight I’d been carrying — all of it suddenly seemed tiny. Almost clean. He, at least, had died in an instant, whole, a man. Here, they didn’t kill people. They unmade them.
And it was then, just as I thought I’d hit the bottom of the horror, that I heard it.
At the far end of the hall, where the dark was thickest: breathing, slow and deep, far too vast for a man — for anything that should have been alive. With each exhale, the air of the hall shifted against my face.
Anthonius raised his shield. The scout drew his blade. Everyone had turned toward the dark.
I opened the Eye, and this time I didn’t close it.
At the back of the hall, a massive shape took form: a mountain of stitched flesh, folded in on itself, arms and legs and hands jutting out by the dozen. And planted everywhere across that mass, human faces, sleeping.
One of them opened its eyes.
Then all the others opened at once.
And the thing rose up, screaming.
