Chapter 66: The Siege of Genesis (5)

Then the smell returned. Blood, burnt wood, rot, and open flesh.

It hit her all at once, thick, hot and strong. Her stomach lurched so hard she thought she might vomit on the spot.

Misha pushed herself up on trembling arms and froze. She was no longer near the breach, she had been thrown clear of it.

The world felt half-broken around her, its pieces arranged incorrectly. Goblin corpses lay sprawled across the street with human bodies between them, defenders and students and things that had once been people but no longer looked shaped for living. One academy student lay face-down three steps away, unmoving, one hand still stretched toward a sword he never got to reach again.

For a moment, Misha only stared as the world around her crawled in horrible clarity.

A goblin staggered past with one leg dragging uselessly behind it, only to take a spear through the mouth from a defender who looked too tired to celebrate. Two Wargs tore into something just beyond her line of sight, jaws working, wet and eager. Farther off, a Hobgoblin drove its blade down into a man pinned beneath fallen rubble, again and again, like it was too stupid to understand that he was already dead.

Misha turned her head. Everything felt slower than it should have. Wrongly slow.

The Hobgoblin that had been charging toward her looked as though it had been trapped inside water. Its body moved a little at a time, each step dragging itself forward in broken fractions. Dust hung in the air around it. Even the blood trailing from a goblin’s open throat nearby seemed suspended in place, the droplets stretching downward one impossible inch at a time.

But farther away, beyond a certain invisible line, time moved almost normally.

She saw goblins pouring through a smashed side streets toward the inner district. She saw a Chieftain fighting three defenders at once, killing one, aiming another, then taking a sword to the ribs and roaring as if pain itself had insulted it.

Misha blinked slowly a few times, her head throbbed.

Was she hallucinating?

No. She knew this feeling. It was like back then, whenever she hovered too close to the edge, whenever her body had more pain in it than time. Only this time she was not supposed to be at death’s door.

Or maybe she was. Maybe the body just had not told her yet.

Then a black blur shot right in front of her face.

She flinched so hard her shoulders screamed.

A pair of golden eyes glared at her, huge and furious.

[Hey you! Stop looking around nya!]

Misha stared blankly as she tried to register the floating cat in her mind.

The black cat hovered there in front of her nose, tails lashing through the air with enough irritation to count as violence.

King?

Her lips parted but no sound came out first.

The cat’s ears flattened.

[Yes, me! Who else did you think it was nya? A divine hallucination? Get up! Master won’t be able to stop that big guy over there for long!]

The words hit her like cold water.

Her gaze snapped back toward the Hobgoblin moving toward her in its slowed, terrible crawl.

Oh. Right. She was still on a battlefield.

Her rapier and daggers were gone. She looked for it automatically and found only broken stone, goblin limbs, and blood that did not belong to her. Her heart kicked once, hard.

"I can’t find my daggers."

King rolled his eyes so hard it felt personal. Then he flicked one paw.

Two silver blurs ripped out from the rubble nearby and flew straight back into her hands.

Misha stared with eyes wide. "You can do that?"

[Do you think those Twinfang are rewards that came from a Goblin King nya?] He huffed. [Master had to switch the rewards. If you pour your blood into them, they will never get lost nya!]

Once again, Caleb interfered. Even with the rewards.

A laugh almost rose in her throat, but it got tangled in the ache there instead.

She was already bleeding from smaller cuts, so she dragged one thumb across the edge of the blade, then smeared the fresh blood along both daggers.

The metal flashed faintly.

「 SYSTEM NOTICE

Hidden Effect Unlocked.

Twinfang has accepted its rightful owner.

Bloodbound has been activated.

Upon command, either or both daggers instantly return to the user’s grasp.

The blood pact cannot be replicated or transferred while the owner lives. 」

Misha stared at the notice.

So all this time, she had been killing goblins with a dagger that could have been stolen like any ordinary weapon if she failed to bind it with blood?

King stared at her flatly. [Are you done nya?]

"Almost." She pushed herself fully upright. Her knees nearly folded at once but she caught herself against a cracked wall. The Hobgoblin was still coming, even slowed, carrying enough strength in its shoulders to pulp her if it reached her.

Her breath sharpened.

「 Hand tremor suppressed. 」

The shaking in her fingers eased just enough.

Misha exhaled once, narrowed her eyes, and threw. The dagger cut across the slowed air in a silver blur. For one maddening heartbeat it seemed to move no faster than anything else around her.

Then it punched into the Hobgoblin’s eye. The monster gave a thick, wet sound and collapsed sideways into the rubble.

「 You have killed a Hobgoblin!

EXP +25 」

Misha swayed for a moment before she managed to stand still.

King floated lower, glaring at her. [See? Was that so hard nya?]

She ignored him and instead, she looked past the dead Hobgoblin. Her breath caught upon witnessing the sight before her.

A huge hand, green and ugly and wrapped in scraps of iron and leather, gripped the edge of the broken wall.

The Goblin King stepped in. Below him were the Hobgoblin Commanders, pushing through the breach like wolves following a larger beast into an open house.

Stone cracked under its weight. Dust rained loose from the shattered battlements as the massive creature hauled itself into the city like something too large for the world had finally decided doors were beneath it. Its crude crown caught the firelight. Its tusked mouth split in what might have been a grin.

Misha felt her pulse turn cold.

If that thing got into the inner district–

Then she saw him.

In the middle of the street ahead, walking toward the advancing goblins with a cane in one hand and his back no longer quite as bent as before, stood Tobias.

The old man moved without hurry. That was the strangest part. He walked like a man late to an appointment he had hoped not to keep.

His shoulders seemed broader now somehow. His spine had straightened by degrees she would not have noticed if she had not seen him hunched over whenever they met. Even the hand on his cane looked different, less like support and more like restraint.