Free Web NovelChapter 17: The Fleshweaver (3): I Swore She’d Walk Out of Here, I Never Promised I Would
Three of them against us. And Elsa already gone, somewhere beyond the broken wall.
The beast had started to circle, low on its four legs, the man’s torso buried in its chest twisting to keep us in sight. The winged one slowly unfolded its great membranous wings and rose with a single beat to the vaults. And the mass, at the back, heaved itself forward, dragging its heap of fused bodies across the floor with a long, wet scrape.
Anthonius stepped up and planted his shield between them and us.
"Stay behind me. I’ll keep the big one in the center — it’ll soak up anything you throw at it anyway, so leave it to me and deal with the fast one and the flyer while I hold it."
I opened the Eye. Beneath the mass, a thick current of mana turned over on itself in a loop: it was stitching itself back together, endlessly. No point hitting it before the other two were down.
"Sacred Dawn."
White light exploded behind me, total, and the three chimeras reared back snarling — the beast wrenching its head aside, the winged one wavering in the air. Alice’s hand found my back.
"Sacred Surge."
Warmth ran through me, the air seemed to part ahead of me, and I threw myself into the fading light, straight at the beast.
It didn’t run at me: it came in bounds, angle to angle, claws cracking the stone at every push, the human torso shrieking a rage that wasn’t its own. My Eye drew each of its leaps in clean lines, but my legs stayed a fraction behind — I slipped each one by a hair, the Dance throwing me aside, again and again, without ever touching it.
Behind me, a crash: the mass had just slammed into Anthonius’s shield with its full weight. He roared, heels gouging the stone, and shoved it back with a heave of his shoulder.
"Hurry up with the fast one, I can’t hold this thing all day!"
Beating it on speed was impossible. So I stopped running. I planted myself, guard low, and opened my flank to it — an invitation, just wide enough that it wouldn’t resist.
It took the bait. Its whole momentum gathered into a single leap, jaws first, claws spread, and launched like that, it couldn’t change course an inch.
"Dash."
I slid out of its path. It passed through where I’d been standing, carried by its own speed, and I reappeared against its flank in the same instant, my blade already moving, opening the throat of the man caught in its chest. The beast crashed down in a last shudder, skidded across the stone, and went still.
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Above us, the winged one finished its turn and folded its wings. But it wasn’t me it dove for: it dropped toward Alice, straight as a spear, an orange glow already swelling at the back of its throat.
I was too far, still crouched by the beast, and Anthonius had the mass pinned against his shield — letting go meant turning it loose on all of us. I saw him hesitate for a fraction of a second, then make the call.
"Taunt!"
A wave went out from him, and the winged one, mid-dive, was wrenched off its line as if by an invisible hook. It veered toward Anthonius and spat its fire full in his face. He got his shield up just in time; the sheet of flame set the air alight around him, licked his arms, blackened his breastplate, and he dropped back to one knee, teeth clenched.
But the mass, freed of his pressure, surged at once toward Alice, its arms of flesh lashing the floor ahead of it.
"Alice, get behind me!"
She didn’t move. She set her feet, raised her palm toward the flood of bodies bearing down on her, and lightning leapt from her hand with a sharp crack. It struck the mass head-on; the flesh sizzled, split, sealed itself in the same breath — but the shock stopped its charge dead and forced it back a step.
"Dash."
I tore across the space and landed in front of Alice, blade raised, just as the mass renewed its charge.
Higher up, the winged one was climbing again to make a second dive at Anthonius, who wouldn’t survive another breath of fire.
"Alice, same as down below earlier — I fill the air, you put the fire in it."
"Got it — the second your mist is up, I’ll make it crack."
I threw the water skyward, not as a jet but as a cloud, a fine mist scattered through the whole channel of air the winged one was about to plunge into. It folded its wings and dove straight into it.
"Lightning!"
The bolt left Alice’s hand, caught the mist, and all the suspended water ignited at once into a crackling web. The winged one passed through it in mid-flight, and the discharge ran it through from end to end. Its wings curled in, acrid smoke rose off its body, and it crashed at Anthonius’s feet, lifeless.
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> Level 24 — +1 to all stats, +1 free point
That left the mass.
It turned toward us, dragging its mountain of flesh, and I dealt it a blow to test it — a long gash across its flank. The lips of the wound drew together and stitched closed before my eyes, as if water had folded back over a blade.
"No wound holds on it, cutting it won’t do a thing. Anthonius, we have to drown the whole thing at once and let the lightning finish it — hold it just long enough for me to wrap it up, and drop flat the second I say."
"Make it fast, I won’t take another hit," he breathed, hauling himself up, his back black with burns, before driving his shield back into the stone. "Taunt!"
The mass hurled itself at him one last time and crashed against his shield. He braced under it, soles scraping the floor, arms shaking with the weight, and held it there, shouting, while I gathered everything in.
I called back every drop of water from the fight — the spilled pool, the splashes, the fallen mist — and ran it up the length of the mass, sheathing it, gorging every fold of it from base to top.
"Now — flat!"
Anthonius let himself drop face-down, out of reach.
"Alice, lightning, everything you’ve got!"
The bolt struck the water, and the whole mass lit from within, threaded with white fire where no blade could ever have reached all of it at once. The flesh sizzled across its entire surface at the same moment, faster than it could stitch itself back, and at its center, the heart that kept it alive gave way with a dull burst.
The mountain of bodies sagged, and stayed down.
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> Level 25 — +1 to all stats, +1 free point
And in the flesh as it settled, all those faces seemed, at last, to rest.
Silence fell again in the hall. But not outside.
The rumble hadn’t stopped — it had grown. The stone shuddered underfoot in jolts, harder and harder, and every shock came from the same direction: the breach Elsa had carried the demon through.
I wiped my mouth, my flank on fire. Alice laid a hand on the gash, then on Anthonius’s back, and the warmth of the Garden closed each in turn as we got moving again.
"We’re going to help her," I said.
"You can barely stand."
"And she’s been fighting that thing alone this whole time. We’re not going to stand here and watch her die."
We followed the trail. Caved-in walls, corridors split open, whole sections of castle torn away — the wake of a fight that bore no resemblance to anything I’d just lived through. The further we went, the more the rumble became a roar, and a grey light, the light of outside, began to filter through at the end.
The corridor stopped dead, blown out. Beyond it, no more castle: just empty air, and a wide breach opening onto the outside, high up, overlooking the courtyard.
We stopped at the edge. And below, I saw.
At first I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at. Two figures, down in a courtyard strewn with armored corpses — dozens of soldiers, cut down, scattered like dolls. And in the middle of it, everything moved too fast.
I caught Elsa in flashes. One arm hanging, broken, swinging at her side; the other still holding a blade. She moved in bursts, struck and vanished and surfaced somewhere else — and across from her, the demon did worse. Lazaüs sank into the courtyard’s shadows like into black water, dissolved, surfaced again at Elsa’s back, and each time she felt it at the last fraction and turned just in time. Around him, dark things rose from the ground, shapes of shadow with pale eyes that threw themselves at her. The soldiers, I understood. That’s what killed the soldiers.
Even my Eye struggled to follow. I caught only fragments, and their sheer speed told me everything.
This wasn’t my level — it wasn’t even the one above it. Stepping in there meant only one thing, and I knew it in my gut before I’d thought it: instant death.
Further off, above the courtyard, the great dome of the barrier shimmered in the air — torn open. A whole section of it flickered, breached, on the verge of giving. The cage was about to fail.
But to my right, Alice was already at work. She had both hands stretched toward the empty air, toward the courtyard, her face drawn with a concentration I’d never seen on her. The light gathered around her, denser than anything she’d ever shown me, and I felt her well of mana open like a chasm.
"Garden of Salvation."
Down below, in the very middle of the fight, grass burst up. White flowers opened in a ring around Elsa, in a courtyard of stone and corpses, bathed in a light that came from nowhere. And Elsa’s broken body began to knit: her broken arm straightened, the bones settling back into place, the gashes on her sides closed, and her bloodless face took on color again.
"Sacred Surge," Alice breathed, and a second light wrapped around Elsa from above.
I saw the exact instant it tipped. Elsa, who’d been giving ground step by step, stopped dead. And she came forward.
Suddenly she was the one advancing, faster than before, carried by the buff. Her blade found the demon once, twice, drove him back, forced him out of his shadows — and on the third pass, it found his shoulder and took his arm clean off.
He didn’t like that.
He sprang back, out of Elsa’s reach, gripping the top of his freshly severed arm, and raised his head. Straight at us. At Alice.
His gaze met mine across all that distance, and his smile hadn’t shifted by a hair — serene, gentle, the same as in the throne room. Only his remaining hand had risen.
Something formed in his palm: a sphere of black fire, dense, malignant, ringed with bands that whirled around it at blinding speed. It swelled in a heartbeat, then shot straight at the breach — at us.
I had no time to think. My body didn’t wait.
My feet moved on their own. I threw myself at Alice and shoved her with all my strength out of the line of it — far, somewhere the spell wouldn’t find her.
She went over backward, off balance, and caught herself a few meters away. She turned toward me, and I saw the understanding hit her all at once, her face coming apart. frёewebηovel.cѳm
"KURO—"
She screamed my name. And the black sphere already filled my whole field of vision.
I didn’t understand myself what came over me. But something in me wanted her to keep something other than a scream. So, in the fraction of an instant I had left, I smiled at her. So she’d keep that.
And then—
Boom.
Nothing.
Black.
