Chapter 41: There’s a signal!
Chapter 41: There’s a signal!
Two days later.
Gray wind blew across the ruins, sweeping along dust and ash. On a high outcrop of rock, Ethan stood in silence, wearing a tattered cloak scavenged from an unnamed corpse. The coarse fabric covered the stump of his left forearm, and covered as well the red veins that still flared up beneath his skin from time to time.
Below, nearly a hundred meters away, a pack of monsters was charging in.
Laira stood alone in the middle of the valley, waiting for them.
Ethan said nothing. Gave no signal. He only opened his eye.
[Eye of Truth.]
The world before him faded into black and white. On the bodies of seventeen monsters, seventeen red points lit up all at once. Neck. Knee joint. Crystal core in the ribcage.
Only an instant.
Down in the valley, Laira blinked faintly.
In her mind, the entire battlefield appeared all at once. Seventeen targets. Seventeen death points. The order of priority already arranged.
Ethan closed his eyes. The pain behind his eyeball passed through, then died out.
Two days ago, he’d had to hold the eye open through the whole battle, locking them one by one, paying the price in blood running from the corners of his eyes. Now, a single beat was enough.
Laira raised her head. The corner of her mouth curved up.
She swung her arm.
Not a jet of flame. Not a swipe of claws. Countless arrows of fire shot out from her palm, splitting into separate clusters, tearing through the wind along entirely different trajectories.
Each arrow sought out a red point.
The lead monster fell first, an arrow driving straight into its crystal core. Two more on either flank collapsed after it, their knee joints ablaze. The one behind hadn’t even lunged forward before an arrow punched through its neck.
Seventeen monsters.
Less than four seconds.
Not a single arrow off the mark.
Laira stood amid the ashes, dusted off her hands, and turned her head to look up at the outcrop.
Ethan only gave a faint nod.
"You two coordinate a lot better than you did two days ago," Mira said.
She stood behind Ethan, arms holding a cloth bundle of freshly gathered medicinal herbs. Her complexion had grown rosier, though her hair was still tangled and her healer’s outfit torn in several places.
Ethan turned his head, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly.
"Thanks to your teaching," he said.
Mira was briefly startled by that smile. It was the first time she had seen him smile.
"I only talked about some theory," Mira replied, a little flustered.
"It wasn’t theory," Ethan shook his head. "You said the Partner link isn’t a one-way cord. You said if I forced Laira to receive information, she’d slow down half a beat to process it. But if I let her actively pull it, the speed would be completely different."
He looked down into the valley, where Laira was flying back up.
"You were right."
Mira was silent for a moment.
She was a healer. In the eyes of most people, her job was to bandage wounds and stop bleeding. No one had ever asked her about Partners. No one had ever considered what she knew to be of any value.
"I’ve treated a lot of Partners," Mira said softly.
Ethan turned to look at her.
"Do you know why?" She smiled, but the smile was very faint. "Because most of the people who manage to open a Partner Blind Box see them as tools. A sword that walks. A shield made of flesh. When they go into dungeons, they push the Partner out front to eat the blows while they stand behind."
She tightened her grip on the cloth bundle.
"When the Partner gets hurt, they bring it to me. Once it’s healed, they push it out front again. Some people brought their Partner to me three times in one month. By the fourth time they didn’t bring it, because that Partner was already dead. They just shrugged and said its grade had been low to begin with."
Mira raised her head.
"Nobody researches Partners, Ethan. Because in their eyes, what is there to research about a consumable item? So I researched on my own. Alone. For six years."
The air went still.
Ethan remembered the arena at Aurora Academy. Remembered the moment Laira stepped out of the Blind Box, and all Ryan, Selene, and Lionel Hart saw was the word "Mythical." No one asked who she was. No one asked whether she wanted to be there.
He also remembered Laira holding him in her arms through the whole Abyss Tower, wings spread wide, shielding him from every single attack.
Nobody saw her as a tool, except for everyone but him.
"So that’s why you’ve been teaching me these two days," Ethan said.
Mira nodded. Then she laughed, and this time the laugh was far lighter.
"But honestly, it’s also partly because the power you two have is too special. I’ve never seen a Partner link like this. Not master and servant. Not user and tool."
She watched Laira descending beside Ethan.
"It’s like the two of you are one."
Laira landed and folded her wings.
The right wing opened normally. The left wing, with the tear running long from the middle of the membrane down to the lower edge, was still that way. She could no longer fold it neatly, only let it droop slightly off to one side. The wound had dried, no longer bleeding, but it hadn’t healed either.
The power of the Abyss had healed nearly everything else on her body.
Everything except exactly that.
But Laira’s face was far brighter than two days ago. She held out a small cloth pouch, inside it glittering energy crystals.
"Yours," she said.
Ethan took it. The pouch was fairly heavy.
"We’ll find shelter," he said. "I need to absorb all of this."
Laira frowned. "You just reached Bronze Tier 4 this morning."
"I know."
"Four tiers in two days."
"I know." Ethan gripped the crystal pouch tight.
That was exactly why he didn’t dare stop.
Four days ago, he’d still been a twenty-year-old trainee who had never awakened, a cargo hauler at the eastern warehouse. Now he was Bronze Tier 4. Even the people standing at the very top of a Safe Zone didn’t have this kind of speed. No one did.
A speed like this, in this world, meant only two possibilities.
Either it was a blessing.
Or it was a debt, and someone would come to collect.
Ethan didn’t know what the red stream of energy in the crystals truly was. Didn’t know why his body was so familiar with it. Didn’t know why the Void Eye was angry enough to bend an entire coordinate just to stop him from absorbing it.
He didn’t know anything.
That was exactly why he had to get stronger.
"The stronger the better," Ethan said softly, almost to himself. "At the very least, in this world, I want to feel safe just once."
Laira looked at him for a long time. Then she reached out and brushed a strand of hair caked with dried blood away from his forehead.
"All right," she said. "I’ll find more."
The three of them followed the edge of the ruins. Mira walked in the middle, her steps nimble, occasionally bending down to pick up some kind of moss or a shard of crystal, cooing over it as if she’d just found a treasure.
Laira watched her, and the more she watched, the less she understood.
Finally she couldn’t hold it in.
"Mira," Laira called.
Mira looked up. "What is it?"
"Why are you so happy?"
Mira blinked.
Laira continued, her voice as blunt as ever. "You’re trapped in an Anomalous Coordinate. You don’t know what day you’ll get out. It’s full of monsters out here. This place could collapse at any moment. For you, isn’t this the most terrible thing imaginable?"
Mira stopped walking.
She looked around. The gray sky. The ruins drifting along the horizon. The air carrying the smell of ash and blood.
Then she smiled.
"It’s true this place is very dangerous," Mira said. "But here, I feel free."
Laira tilted her head, her red-orange eyes showing genuine confusion.
Mira opened her mouth to explain.
But she didn’t get the chance.
Inside Mira’s pack, a crackle of static sounded.
Very faint. But in the stillness of the Anomalous Coordinate, it rang out like a thunderclap.
All three of them stopped at once.
Mira hurriedly rummaged through the pack and pulled out a military-issue radio. The signal light on its body was blinking green, a light she hadn’t seen in four days.
Her eyes lit up.
"There’s a signal!" Mira exclaimed. "There are people nearby! If I just connect, I can..."
She moved her finger toward the button.
"Don’t."
Ethan’s hand seized her wrist.
Mira froze.
Ethan wasn’t looking at her. He was staring hard at that blinking green light, his brows knitted tight.
"What does this radio do?" he asked.
"It picks up rescue frequencies," Mira answered right away. "Any rescue radio within a thirty-kilometer radius. It’s standard equipment for elite teams. If it’s catching a signal, it means a rescue team has entered the Anomalous Coordinate. Ethan, this is our chance to get out."
Ethan didn’t let go of her hand.
He was silent for a long time.
Mira watched his expression, and the joy in her heart cooled. "Is something wrong?"
"I feel uneasy," Ethan said.
He released Mira’s hand and stepped back half a pace, his gaze still fixed on the radio.
"I don’t have any evidence," he continued, his voice strangely calm. "It’s just that I lived twenty years in the Ashford clan. In those twenty years, every time something good unexpectedly fell in front of me, there was always a trap behind it."
Mira pressed her lips together.
"Lab equipment got broken, and they said I broke it. Ryan’s documents went missing, and they said I took them. I never did any of it, but I never won a single time." Ethan looked at her. "Because the one who speaks first is always the one who’s believed."
He paused a beat.
"And two days ago, two of your teammates almost killed me. Not because I did anything to them. Just because they wanted Laira."
Mira lowered her head.
She couldn’t argue. Because she had been there.
And she understood one thing. Victor and Nolan had returned to the real world, their tongues intact, their clans fully behind them. Those two knew exactly what they had done. They knew Mira was still alive. They knew Ethan was still alive.
People like that, after a failed attempt, had only one option.
Silence the witnesses.
"Nolan won’t let us come back in peace," Mira said quietly. Her voice trembled slightly. "He’ll hold a grudge. He’ll find a way."
Ethan nodded.
"I don’t know whether this signal can be trusted," he said. "Maybe it really is a rescue team. Maybe I’m being paranoid for no reason, and I hope that’s what it is."
He turned his head, looking toward Laira.
She was standing a few steps away, the torn wing drooping off to one side, the thing she would carry with her for the rest of the road.
Ethan clenched his right fist, where the scars Mira had stitched back together were still etched across every knuckle.
"But I already let her suffer once," he said, his voice dropping low. "Just because I wasn’t careful enough. Just because I believed people had no reason to harm me."
He looked straight at Mira.
"Not this time."
Laira said nothing. But she stepped forward and stood close behind his back.
Ethan brooded for a long while.
The radio kept blinking in Mira’s hand, patient, harmless, waiting to be pressed.
Then Ethan’s eyes suddenly changed.
He stepped closer to Mira, leaned down, brought his mouth to her ear, and spoke very softly. Word by word, not letting even a single syllable slip out.
Mira listened.
Her eyes gradually widened.
She lifted her head to look at him, her lips parting as if to ask again, but then closing tight.
She understood.
If that signal really was a rescue team, this plan cost nothing.
And if it wasn’t...
Mira looked down at the radio in her hand.
Then she pressed her lips together, and nodded, resolute.
"All right," Mira said. "I’ll do it."
Outside, the gray wind blew across the ruins.
The signal light on the radio kept blinking, steady, like a beating heart.
Thirty kilometers to the west, beneath the gray mist, twenty-three armored figures were quietly advancing in this direction.
And at the end of the line, a young man with a rank S flame emblem on his chest was gripping the weapon in his hands tight.