Chapter 45. Counting Heartbeats: The Only Useful Habit I Brought From My Old Life

Chapter 45: 45. Counting Heartbeats: The Only Useful Habit I Brought From My Old Life

It was a hell of an order.

I could see the Nightclaw riders struggling with it, trained fighters forced to hold back against enemies who weren’t holding back at all.

But they obeyed. They reversed their swords and fought with the flats of the blades and the hilts, and a few of them whipped out weighted nets and flung them over the charging wolves.

I dragged Gate Junior out of its scabbard and nearly dropped it.

I turned it sideways so that I’d hit people with the flat of the blade like a very fancy paddle and braced my feet the way Magnara had taught me.

A big Wolfkin with a warhammer came at me. I raised my sword to block, and the hammer slammed into it with a crash that rattled my teeth.

And then something happened that I hadn’t expected.

A faint pressure settled over my whole body, the same invisible blanket I’d been feeling for days, and the force of the blow just... dulled.

It was like being hit through a thick layer of cotton. I was still thrown backward and still skidded across the frozen ground on my back, but I didn’t break anything.

’Okay,’ I thought, staring up at the strip of sky. ’That’s the best fifty-silver-coin purchase I’ve ever made.’

hadn’t bought it with money, of course. But the joke made me feel better.

I rolled to my feet and looked around, and it was then that I noticed the strangest thing.

They weren’t fighting us...

It looks to me that they were... ignoring us...?

A Wolfkin ran straight past Velora without even glancing at her. Another one dodged around Elsbeth, who stood with her sword lowered, shouting names.

They shoved past the Nightclaw Guard and plowed straight through the riders, and every single one of them was heading in the same direction.

Toward the back of the column.

Toward... fuck! They were targeting a small figure on a gray mare. It’s Millie...!

"THEY’RE TARGETING MILLIE! "I yelled. "MILLIE! "

Bonette was already there. I don’t know how she covered the distance.

One moment she was next to Millie’s horse, and the next she was standing in front of it with a pair of silver knives in her hands, spinning like a small, furious storm.

A big Wolfkin lunged at her, and she dropped under the swing, slashed a tendon, and kicked the wolf into the one behind it.

Two more leaped at her, and she took both at once, moving with a precision that made my hair stand on end.

That tiny, dull-haired turnip seller was a nightmare indeed. I fucking knew it.

An arrow hissed past my ear and hit a Nightclaw rider in the shoulder, and she cried out and toppled from her saddle.

Another rider’s horse reared and fell, pinning its owner under its flank. Shouts and screams echoed off the walls of the gorge.

It had been an ambush, but now... it was just chaos.

I was too busy ducking a flying wolf to notice it right away.

It was the third time a Wolfkin crashed into the line near me that I finally saw it.

A faint blue light, small and bright, glowing at the base of the creature’s throat, pulsing like a heartbeat. I’d seen those little lights in a few of their chests too.

They weren’t just random sparks.

I ducked another swing and watched the next one carefully.

The light flashed. Then it dimmed, for about a second.

Then it flashed again. And I saw the one next to it flash at exactly the same moment.

I stared... I’d learned a lot of things in my previous life, mostly bad habits.

One of the few that was actually useful was how to watch a room and see when people were lying... You learn to read patterns.

Starting by counting their breaths, blinks, and tells.

And so... I started counting.

One. Two. Three. Four. Flash.

One. Two. Three. Four. Flash.

Every single one of them... in perfect sync.

"THEY PULSE EVERY FOUR SECONDS!" I bellowed.

I’d never shouted so loudly in my life. "All at once!!! They’re a single mind!!!"

"HIT THE GAP!"

For a second, nobody reacted.

Velora, in the middle of dispatching a Wolfkin with a lightning-fast slap of her sheath, turned her head and shot me a look so murderous that I nearly flinched. And this is not the fucking right time to show racism as well!

I could practically hear her thinking, ’How dare you give orders in my presence!’

Then she saw the lights too.

She closed her mouth. And then she ground her teeth.

She looked at the crystals, then at the next pulse, and I saw her count under her breath. Her jaw tightened.

"Sylvara!" she barked. "The interval! Four seconds!"

It was the first time she’d ever acted on something I said, and I think it hurt her like a bone being set. But at least she did it while lowering her ego, probably.

"I heard him!" Sylvara called.

She was already hovering above the fighting, her staff raised high, and her robe billowing around her. "Give me a moment!"

Elsbeth, meanwhile, had finally stopped calling names. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

Then she lifted her sword, and for the first time since I’d met her, I felt the temperature around her drop in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.

Ice crawled along her blade in a delicate white web. She swung it in a wide arc, and frozen chains exploded from the ground around her, wrapping the legs of a half dozen Wolfkin and pinning them in place.

They didn’t break or shatter. But I can see them held, firm and cold, without harming anyone.

I stared just to study it... I hadn’t seen her use that kind of magic before.

In the snow, in the first days, she’d been bleeding out, her mana scraped nearly to nothing. She’d fought with her sword and nothing else.

But now... I can see why she’s an SSS-Rank.

She was whole again, and I realized with a jolt that this was what her clan could actually do. It was the thing I’d almost chosen, back in that freezing shelter.

It was beautiful, and it was terrifying.

"Do not hurt them," she said, in a voice like frozen glass. "Hold them."

Velora joined in. She slid her sword into its sheath with a click, flowed into a stance, and then moved.

I didn’t see her draw. I only saw a flash of silver, and three Wolfkin dropped in a row without a drop of blood, knocked cold by the back of her blade.

It was ’iaijutsu,’ I think, though I didn’t know the word then... All I knew was that every stroke was a perfect, clean line, and that she was holding back with every single one.

I could see it in her shoulders, the strain of it... and how much it cost her to land each blow with the spine instead of the edge.

For a prideful, merciless noblewoman who despised half the people in the room, that was an extraordinary thing to watch.

Meanwhile... my eyes looked back at Sylvara, and she was using a spell that didn’t look like magic from a story.

It looked like the night itself deciding to help.

She raised her staff and held it there, her eyes closed, just so that she can focus on counting. I could see her lips moving.

One. Two. Three. Four.

On the fourth beat, when the crystals dimmed all at once, she opened her eyes and brought the staff down.

The small, scattered lights that had been drifting around her all day exploded into hundreds. They poured outward in every direction, rushing along the walls of the gorge, over the heads of the riders, down into the shadows.

They stretched and thinned and turned into long, glimmering threads of violet and silver, and the whole canyon filled with a soft, shimmering web of light.

"Nightfall Veil," she whispered.

SHIIINNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG~!

The threads dropped.

They wrapped around the wrists and ankles of every Wolfkin in the canyon, gentle as spiderwebs, and pulled.

One by one, the glowing figures slowed, stumbled, and sank to their knees. Branches of pale light unfurled from the ground like a forest growing in fast motion, winding up their arms and across their shoulders, holding them in place.

The charging wolves went still. The whole gorge fell silent.

I stood in the middle of a field of kneeling Wolfkin, with the quiet violet glow washing over everything, and for a moment I forgot to breathe.

"Holy shit," I whispered.

Sylvara swayed. Her face had gone chalk white, and her staff was shaking in her hands.

Velora caught her elbow without a word.

"I cannot hold them long," Sylvara said.

Her voice was thin. "A few minutes, perhaps..."

"There is something in those crystals that pushes back against me...! It is like pulling against a rope!!!"