Chapter 44: Brother
Chapter 44: Brother
The two brothers looked at each other across the open ground.
Twenty years, shrunk down to thirty paces.
Ethan looked at his younger brother. New armor. New weapon. New insignia. Ryan had never had to work night shifts at the warehouse. Ryan had never had to count every coin to pay tuition. Ryan had never had to hear people say that the Ashford clan had never considered him the eldest son.
And Ethan suddenly realized something so absurd it hurt.
He had never hated Ryan.
For twenty years, he simply hadn’t had the time to hate.
"You heard Mira’s words," Ethan said. Not a question.
Ryan didn’t answer.
"You heard every word. Then you deleted the recording."
Damien Vale whipped around to look at Ryan.
"You’re trying to divide us," Ryan said loudly, his voice trembling perfectly. "You were always good at that. You were top of the class in theory. You know how to make people believe you."
He turned to Damien, his eyes red.
"Captain, he’s doing exactly what he’s done to our clan all these years. He’ll talk, and talk, until you no longer know what’s real."
A few Silver-tiers nodded.
This was something Ethan had never learned, even though he stood top of the class in every theoretical subject: the truth doesn’t win by logic. It loses by numbers.
And he understood something more important.
He wasn’t going to win here. Not today. Not against twenty-three guns and a story that had been written before he could even open his mouth.
So he didn’t need to win.
He only needed to leave.
Ethan had planned for this two days ago, the moment Mira’s radio caught the signal.
If the rescue team came with goodwill, he would go with them and clear his name before the Council.
If they came with guns raised, then every explanation would be meaningless, and he would not stay a single second longer.
What he needed wasn’t their acknowledgment.
What he needed was the thing attached to the hip of every person in the task force: a transfer gate device, the key to leaving the Anomalous Coordinate and returning to the city.
Snatch just one, and he and Laira could vanish.
The problem was that twenty-three people wouldn’t stand still and let him grab it.
So he needed chaos.
And he knew exactly how to create it.
"Ryan," Ethan called. His voice was still calm. "Tell me just one thing."
Ryan gripped his weapon tight.
"If I die here today, what do you get?"
No one said anything.
"You’ll be the only jewel of the Ashford clan again," Ethan answered himself. "You’ll be the brave younger brother who eliminated the monster in the family. No one will speak the word Mythical anymore."
He tilted his head.
"But you’ll know. Every morning when you wake up, you’ll know that you heard the truth at six twelve, and you chose to erase it."
Ryan’s face went white.
"Shut up," he said.
"You’ll live your whole life with that."
"SHUT UP!"
Deep red flame blazed up around Ryan’s arm, the rank S ability, the thing he had been proud of for two years.
Ethan looked at that flame.
Then he did what no one expected.
He closed his eyes.
And opened the [Eye of Truth] at full power.
Not to see.
To be seen.
Ethan’s left eye blazed a brilliant red, the light piercing through even his eyelid. The veins across his body all burned at once, and for a moment, the entire field of ruins seemed dyed red.
Damien Vale felt it first.
A coldness, deep and ancient, poured down from the gray sky. The air thickened. Pressure from somewhere very far, very high, bore down on the open ground like the gaze of something that had just turned its head.
"What..." Corin whispered, lifting his head to look at the sky.
Far off, the gray mist began to turn purple.
Ethan opened his eyes.
His red eye looked straight to the east, where the sky was tearing open.
"I’m sorry," he said quietly, to no one clear. "But I need you all to be a little busy."
They came from every direction.
Not forty of them. Not a hundred of them. An entire sea of purple-scaled monsters poured down from the slopes, from within the ruins, from the cracks in the ground, all charging toward one point.
Toward the source of red light.
Toward Ethan.
The Void Eye had recognized him, exactly as he wanted. It hated the red stream of energy inside him. It hated that glowing eye. And it hurled the entirety of its servants at him without a second thought.
Only, between him and the monster pack, stood the twenty-three people of the task force.
"FORMATION!" Damien Vale roared. "CIRCLE DEFENSE!"
In three seconds, the manhunt turned into a battle for survival.
The eight Gold-tiers turned outward, raising a ring of golden energy. The fifteen Silver-tiers switched targets, guns aimed at the sea of monsters flooding in. No one was looking at Ethan anymore.
Exactly as he had calculated.
"Laira," Ethan said. "Now."
Ryan didn’t care about the monsters.
He saw only one thing: amid the chaos, his brother was turning to run.
If Ethan escaped, if Ethan made it back to the city alive, then that deleted tape would no longer be Ryan’s secret alone. Mira would testify. The truth would surface.
No.
Ethan had to die here. Today.
Ryan screamed, lunging through the defensive ring, the rank S flame coiling around his fist, aimed straight at Ethan’s back.
"ETHAN!"
Ethan couldn’t turn in time.
But someone else could.
Laira was already there.
She threw herself in between, one arm raised, and caught Ryan’s fire-wreathed punch full-on with her palm.
The rank S flame detonated the instant it touched her skin.
And went out.
Laira gripped Ryan’s fist in her hand, and the proudest flame of his life couldn’t burn a single scale on her hand. She looked down at him, her red-orange eyes cold as two embers about to die.
"Your fire," Laira said, "is pretty warm."
Then she squeezed.
Crack.
Ryan screamed. The bones of his wrist shattered inside Laira’s palm. He crumpled, the rank S flame snuffing out completely, his face white with pain and terror.
For two years, he had believed a rank S ability made him different.
Now he understood, before a true Crimson Dragon, even sealed down to Bronze, even with one wing torn, he was still just a child playing with fire.
Laira flung him backward like tossing a bag of trash.
"Don’t ever," she said coldly, "touch his back again."
"Laira, don’t kill him." Ethan had backed up beside a Silver-tier busy fending off the monsters. "We only need a gate."
His hand snatched at the gate device on that Silver-tier’s hip.
But the very moment his fingers touched the metal, an enormous pressure crashed down on him.
Damien Vale.
"I won’t allow it," he said.
He had abandoned his defensive position. He had seen Ethan’s intent the moment the monster pack appeared, and he had chosen, between holding the defensive ring and stopping Ethan, the latter.
Because in Damien Vale’s mind, the logic was very simple: this person had summoned an entire sea of monsters with a single blink. This person was more dangerous than anything in the file. This person absolutely could not leave the Anomalous Coordinate before being interrogated by the Council.
On his two hands, a pair of rank S Gauntlets flared golden, and rank S energy coiled around them like two miniature suns.
Damien Vale didn’t draw a lethal weapon.
He wanted to take him alive.
That was what made him impossible to stop.
CRACK!!
His first punch struck Ethan’s chest, shattering ribs. The transfer gate device fell from Ethan’s hand and was then clenched tight in Damien’s grip.
He glanced at Ethan, his eyes carrying the terrible sharpness and killing intent of a warrior who had survived the harshest battlefields.
Ethan was nailed to the ground. The [Eye of Truth] screamed in his head, pointing out ten ways to dodge, but his Bronze Tier 4 body couldn’t keep up with the speed of a Gold Tier 9. The gap was too vast. This wasn’t a gap that could be filled with an eye or with cunning.
This was the gap of thirty years.
"Don’t resist," Damien said, his voice even carrying a strange gentleness. "I don’t want to kill you. If you’re innocent like the girl says, I’ll take you before the Council and make them listen with my own hands. I promise."
Ethan coughed up blood.
"You..." He gritted his teeth. "You really believe that?"
"I believe in justice," Damien said.
And Ethan looked into his eyes and realized he wasn’t lying at all.
That was the most terrifying part.
Damien Vale was not Gerald Greaves. Not Ryan. He had no purple light in his eyes, no envy, no scheme. He was a good man. A man who truly believed that all it took was bringing Ethan before the Council, and the truth would win.
But he had stood outside when his own niece was locked in a dark room for three days.
He had believed Victor and Nolan’s testimony without needing evidence.
He had heard a distorted report and immediately given the order "taking him alive is not necessary."
His justice wasn’t wrong. It was just blind. And a blind justice, in the hands of someone strong enough, was more dangerous than evil itself, because it never doubted itself.
"You’ll take me before the Council," Ethan rasped. "The Council that sentenced me before you ever set foot in here."
Damien froze.
Just half a second.
But in that half second, a flicker of hesitation passed across the depths of his eyes.
He had already asked himself that question. Since last night. Since he heard the words "taking him alive is not necessary" come out of his own mouth.
"I still have to bring you back," he said, more quietly. "It’s the only way I know."
He raised the Gauntlet, preparing to knock Ethan unconscious.
Ethan watched that pair of Gauntlets come down, and knew he couldn’t dodge.
The plan had failed. The man was too strong. His eye saw every weak point on Damien Vale’s body, but his own body wasn’t fast enough to reach a single one of them.
He had miscalculated one thing.
He hadn’t accounted for the strongest man in the team being the one who believed in justice the most.
"UNCLE!"
A scream tore through the roar of the monster pack.
Mira.
While every gaze was fixed on Ethan and Damien, no one paid attention to the small healer girl weaving through the chaos. No one saw her as a threat. She was the hostage. She was the one who needed saving.
That was exactly their mistake.
Mira lunged at a Silver-tier soldier busy shooting monsters, both hands wrenching the gate device off his hip.
The Silver-tier soldier turned, stunned. "What are you doing—"
Mira had already thrown it.
The device flew through the air, tracing an arc over Damien Vale’s head, heading straight toward Ethan.
"ETHAN!" she screamed. "CATCH IT!"
Time seemed to stop.
Damien Vale lifted his head, saw the device flying over, saw his niece, the one he had crossed an entire operation to rescue, throwing the enemy the key to escape.
In that moment, a crack tore through his conviction.
She... wasn’t forced at all.
She was helping him of her own free will.
Which meant the testimony over the radio... was true.
Ethan raised his right hand, catching the device.
His fingers touched the metal.
And in that very moment, Ryan Ashford, kneeling on the ground with a broken wrist, lifted his head and saw it all.
Saw Mira throw the device.
Saw the truth about to slip out of his hands.
If Ethan escaped, Ryan would be exposed. But if he could prove that Mira was an accomplice too, that she had been brainwashed by Ethan as well, then the lie still had a chance.
Or perhaps, in that moment, Ryan was no longer thinking coherently at all.
Perhaps all that was left was pure hatred for everyone who stood on his brother’s side.
Ryan grabbed the energy rifle lying on the ground with his uninjured hand.
And fired at Mira.
BANG!!!
Ethan saw it.
Damien Vale saw it.
Both of them were too far away.
The energy round pierced through Mira’s belly. She stopped mid-stride, her eyes wide, looking down at the wound on her body with an almost childlike surprise.
Then she fell.
"MIRA!" Damien Vale howled.
His voice was no longer the voice of a captain. No longer the voice of justice, of the Council, of orders. It was the cry of an uncle who had just watched the niece he had sworn to protect fall into a pool of blood.
And he had seen clearly who pulled the trigger.
Not Ethan.
Not the dragon.
But Ryan Ashford, the trainee who had reported to him last night, the young man who had wept and said his own brother was a monster.
The same gun, the same hand.
Firing at an unarmed girl.
Firing at his niece.
In Damien Vale’s mind, the past twenty-four hours shattered into pieces. The distorted report. The deleted recording. The line "her voice was like she was being forced." The line "taking him alive is not necessary." All of it, all of it came from one single source.
Came from the young man who had just opened fire on Mira Vale.
Damien Vale slowly turned his head, tearing his eyes away from Ethan.
And looked toward Ryan.
In the collapsing Anomalous Coordinate, amid the sea of monsters and the smell of blood, a Gold Tier 9 looked at the one who had deceived him with the eyes of a man who had just realized his own hands had nearly killed an innocent person.
Ethan gripped the gate device tight in his hand.
Mira lay on the ground, blood spreading beneath her, her lips moving without making a sound.
And Ryan Ashford, the gun still smoking in his hand, slowly lifted his head, and met Damien Vale’s gaze.
For the first time in his life, Ryan understood what real fear was.