Chapter 27 - Two Stars

Chapter 27: 27 - Two Stars

The man came across the frozen ground without slipping once, which told Adrien most of what he needed to know before either of them had said a word.

Absolute Mana Sense told him the rest. Everything he had killed tonight had been a candle. This was a fire with a shape.

’Three Stars... And whatever’s under that coat, he’s been carrying it a long time.’

"You’ve cost me some men," the man said, and he sounded genuinely inconvenienced rather than angry. "And a camp. Do you have any idea what it costs to move an operation this size?"

"I’d love to hear the figure."

"You’ll hear it in a moment."

He came in at a speed no forty-year-old with a buttoned coat had any business managing.

Adrien put a wedge of ice under his front foot and the man went over it without breaking stride, sword already coming down, and Adrien got Umbral Root up in both hands and took the blow across the shaft.

It nearly folded him.

He went backward six paces on ground he had frozen himself, kept his feet by luck, and threw four [Frost Lances] as fast as his hands would work.

The first two came apart on a manifested guard the man raised without looking. The third took him in the shoulder and went in a finger’s depth before the coat stopped it. The fourth missed entirely because he had already moved.

’Fifty percent extra damage inside my own domain and I’m scratching him.’

"Adrien!"

Ariane came in from his left with frost already boiling off her hands.

[Ice Wall]

The slab went up between them at an angle rather than flat, and the man’s next swing came off it and skidded wide, and in the corner of Adrien’s vision a window opened.

[Ice Wall]

[Absolute Comprehension active]

[Comprehension: +2 = 9%]

He shoved it out of his head and went right while his sister went left.

They had never trained together. Not once in this life or the last. What they had instead was that Ariane had spent four years learning to hold a line and Adrien had spent a night learning that he never had to stop, and inside thirty seconds they had worked out the arrangement without either of them saying it out loud.

She made walls. He made holes.

Ariane put ice up wherever the man wanted to be and Adrien filled every gap with lances, and for about a minute it worked, because a man fighting two people on frozen ground has to choose which one is more urgent and he chose wrong twice.

The second time cost him. A lance went through his forearm and out the other side, and Ariane’s follow-up caught his knee and took him down onto it.

He came back up.

"Two of you." He looked between them, and his eyes stopped on Ariane’s face and moved to Adrien’s hood and stayed there. "The girl from the cage, and somebody wearing my man’s coat. So the Clairmonts do come this far up the mountain."

Adrien did not answer.

"You should have stayed at the bottom of it."

He went for Ariane.

That was the correct decision and Adrien understood it about half a second too late. She was the one holding the ground in place, she was tired, she had spent time in a cage that ate her mana, and the man crossed to her faster than either of them could do anything useful about it.

Ariane got a wall up. He came through the edge of it.

Adrien threw everything he had at his back and the coat ate most of it.

The blade caught her across the ribs and put her into the frozen dirt, and she did not get up, and the man raised his arm for the second one.

Something in Adrien’s chest went quiet. He had walked up a mountain on somebody else’s food. He had watched three men beside a fire argue about which of the prisoners they were allowed to touch.

And he was watching a man decide to finish his sister on the ground.

’No.’

He reached for mana that was not there, because there was no more room in him to reach into, and instead of finding a wall he found the shape of the wall itself.

And leaned on it.

The core under his sternum came apart.

It came apart the way ice comes apart, all at once and along lines that had always been there, and every part of it that had been pressed against the inside of that shape stopped being pressed and started expanding, and the pain arrived a full second later than it should have.

It went through his ribs and up into his teeth. His knees hit the ground. Whatever sound he made came out of him without permission and he had no memory of it afterward.

[Core rank increased: One Star → Two Stars]

He was on his hands for perhaps three seconds, and came up on the fourth.

The change was smaller than he expected and it was not nothing. A quarter more space, maybe, filled the moment it existed. Mana moved through his arms with less friction than it had a minute ago. Winter’s Reach, which had been sitting in the back of his head all night like a held breath, suddenly took considerably less of him to hold.

’Twenty-five percent. That’s it? Two Stars and I get a quarter.’

’Fine I guess. A quarter is still a quarter.’

The man had turned around at the noise.

Adrien straightened up and let the hood fall back off his head.

"Come here."

He threw a [Frost Lance] and it was not the lance he had been throwing all night. It was longer, it went faster, and it took the man through the outside of the thigh where the coat was thinnest and put him down on the same knee he had gone down on before.

The second one broke the sword.

The third would have finished it, and he never threw the third, because a sound came from behind him that he had never heard in this world.

A flat, hard crack, like a door slamming underwater.

Something went past his shoulder close enough to move the air and hit a slaver who had been coming at his back, and the man went off his feet and did not land anywhere near where he had been standing.

Adrien turned his head.

The older prisoner was down on one knee about twenty paces back with something long braced across his shoulder, and it was not a bow. Dark wood, a metal barrel, and a chamber near the grip glowing pale where the mana had finally gone into it.

He had been sitting with that thing empty across his lap for most of the fight, waiting on a core that had spent months inside a cage to give him enough for a single shot.

He had spent it on Adrien’s back.

The man worked the action and the chamber lit again, slower this time, and he put a second round through the chest of somebody trying to reach the treeline.

’That is a rifle. That is a mana rifle. Nobody told me this world had those.’

He swung the barrel around, found Adrien standing in the middle of the burning camp with his hood down, and every part of his face changed at once.

"Young master?"

He said it the way people say things they know are not possible.

"Young master, how in God’s name are you here?"

"Later." Adrien pointed at the treeline with the staff. "Can you hold that side?"

The man looked at the eight or nine slavers left on their feet, and back at the boy he had last seen in a sickbed.

"Give me a minute between shots, my lord, and yes."

He got himself down behind an upturned crate, because standing was clearly not on the table, and started working. He was slow. Every round took him longer to load than the one before it, and none of them missed, and after the third the men trying to reach the trees stopped trying to reach the trees.

Adrien turned back around.

The blue-haired elf was already on her knees beside Ariane with both hands flat over the wound in her side. Light was coming out from between her fingers, steady and unhurried, and Ariane’s colour was coming back into her face while Adrien watched.

Ten paces past them, the blond elf had put himself between the two women and the rest of the camp with an arrow on the string and his weight forward.

Adrien caught the elf girl’s eye for half a second.

"Thank you."

She gave him a short nod without breaking whatever she was doing.

That was enough.

The boss of the camp had got his feet under him again with a broken sword and a hole through his leg, and he was looking at the treeline and doing arithmetic.

"Don’t," Adrien said.

The man went for it anyway.

He made four paces before Adrien caught him with a wedge under the good foot, and he came down on the frozen ground hard, and by the time he had rolled onto his back Adrien was standing over him.

Umbral Root came down and the crystal touched the man’s chest.

"Wait. Wait. I can tell you who pays for this. There’s a name, boy, and it isn’t mine, and you’re going to want it."

"Wait."

The man lifted one hand from the ice.

"We can make a deal."

Adrien looked down at him.

"Money. Whatever you want. There’s plenty here, and I can get you more."

"You really think this is about money?"

The man’s eyes flicked past him.

Toward Ariane.

That was enough.

Adrien’s expression changed.

"You cut my sister open on the ground."

The crystal at the end of Umbral Root lowered until it almost touched the man’s chest.

"Wait, I..."

[Frost Lance]

At four inches, there was nowhere for it to miss.

The spell punched through his chest and buried itself in the frozen earth beneath him. His back lifted once from the ice before dropping again, and whatever he had been about to say disappeared with him.

Adrien stayed there for a moment, Umbral Root hanging loosely from one hand.

He had killed his first man less than an hour ago.

’Getting easier disturbingly fast.’

Behind him the mana rifle cracked once more, a long while after the shot before it, and after that it stopped.

Adrien turned.

The last of the fighting had ended.

Tents burned across the camp, orange flame pushing through canvas while [Winter’s Reach] kept the ground beneath them frozen white. Bodies lay between the cages and fires, and the few prisoners who could still stand were staring around as though they had not quite realised the doors were open yet.

Forty against one had turned into something considerably less impressive once the cages opened.

Adrien looked toward Ariane.

The blue-haired elf was still kneeling beside her.

He started walking.

...

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