Chapter 75. My Greatest Weapon Turned Out to Be Bad Habits

Chapter 75: 75. My Greatest Weapon Turned Out to Be Bad Habits

The first rider lunged. Velora met her with the flat of her blade and slapped the sword out of her hand, and then, with a flick, tapped the base of her skull with her sheath.

The rider dropped. A second came in from the side.

I caught her sword on Gate Junior, shoved her stumbling into a wall, and kicked her feet out.

We worked together without a word. I took the heavy hits on what was left of my Bulwark, and Velora slid in underneath, quick and clean, and put each one to sleep.

It took about three minutes.

By the end of it, I was shaking so hard that I could hardly stand.

Velora’s breath came in short, sharp rasps. We stood in the middle of a ring of unconscious women, and she didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at her.

"It’s the sound," I said, when I could talk. "The resonance... it comes through the ears."

"Obviously."

"So block them!"

She turned her head. "What?"

"Wax... or maybe cloth! Gah! Just anything’s fine as long as you don’t hear it!" I said while taking a deep breath. "Do it now!"

"Stuff it in their ears." I swallowed. "I’m human, so it doesn’t work on me."

"I can’t say if it’ll stop it completely... But if the sound can’t get in... then probably it wouldn’t work for you..."

Velora stared at me for a long second. Then she turned and snapped at the nearest standing rider.

"Candle wax! Cloth! Anyone who can still hear their own thoughts, plug your ears now!" She shouted. "Pass it on!"

Within minutes, there were Nightclaw riders all over the courtyard tearing strips off their cloaks. Sylvara, arriving a few steps behind me, caught the idea at once and wove it into a thin web of violet light that settled over the keep like a veil.

It wasn’t perfect.

She said later that it only halved the pull. But half was enough, and I watched dozens of glowing eyes flicker and clear as the sound dulled, and women stumbled back into their own heads, gasping.

But what the fucking fuck...

That bastard answered by turning the volume up.

I felt it in my teeth. A deep, grinding, vibrating note rolled across the courtyard, and every window in the keep rattled in its frame.

A rider near me dropped to her knees clutching her skull. But the ones with wax and cloth held on, and the ones with veils held on, and a few dozen lives that would have been lost were not.

Velora’s eyes met mine across the courtyard. She didn’t smile, because the Velora I know doesn’t. But the corner of her mouth moved, and I took it as the highest honor of my career.

I’d like to tell you the next hour was a victory... Yeah, it wasn’t.

The strongest of us held, and held, and held, and it was not enough. The SSS-Ranks stood in the courtyard like a wall, but I could see the cracks.

Velora’s hands had begun to tremble, a fine, constant shiver that she hid by gripping her sword tighter. And it was even worse when I saw Sylvara swayed on her feet.

Her violet light had turned thin and pale, and every few minutes she had to stop and press the heel of her hand against her forehead, as if the note was a nail someone was hammering into her skull.

Far off, on the opposite wall, I could see Elsbeth in a storm of ice, holding the line with a hard, white face.

Being high rank didn’t make them immune. It made them slow, and it bought us hours, not days, and every one of us knew it.

That was what frightened me most... I’d come to believe, somewhere along the way, that the women around me were unbreakable.

That nothing could stand against them just because of their ranks and abilities.

But... I’d looked at Velora and Elsbeth and Sylvara and Magnara like they were forces of nature, and I’d taken some strange comfort in being the weakest person in the room.

Now... I could see exactly how thin the ice was.

[Lust Energy: 35/100]

I was thirty-five out of a hundred. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

I had no limiter and no bulwark to speak of, and... I was running on spite and coffee I didn’t have.

But... I kept moving. I didn’t know what else to do other than that.

That was when Cassian walked out into the courtyard. He came down the steps from the great hall as if he were strolling into a garden party.

He had changed his coat. The white one had been scorched at the hem, so now he wore a clean one, ivory and gold, buttoned neatly to the throat.

His spectacles were mended. And he’d combed his hair.

He carried a slender white cane in one hand, and in the other, he held out something small and glittering, and I realized with a lurch that it was a paper bag of honey sweets.

He wasn’t alone... Behind him came a dozen Chosen in their golden plate, smiling their gentle, empty smiles.

And at their head, with two curved swords held loosely at her sides, walked a silver-haired Wolfkin girl, who had been bound in ice and sleeping only two hours earlier.

It was... Ylva.

The ice was gone. Her wrists were bare and unmarked.

The gold crystal at her throat glowed warm and bright, and she walked at Cassian’s right hand like a pet that had been taught to heel.

From across the courtyard, I heard a sound like glass breaking.

I looked up and saw Elsbeth standing on the wall with her hands clenched at her sides, staring at her sister.

"Good afternoon," Cassian said pleasantly, to everyone and nobody. "Please do not trouble yourselves because I shall be quick about this."

Then he fought us.

I want you to understand that it wasn’t a duel. It wasn’t even a fight, really.

It was more like watching a man play a very complicated game that he’d already won three times before.

He faced Velora, Sylvara, and Elsbeth, who had jumped down from the wall to join us, and a handful of the strongest Nightclaw, and he never once raised his voice.

He had chains. Long, bright, golden chains that whipped out of the air from nowhere and wrapped around a person’s limbs.

Velora cut through the first one with a single stroke, and it seemed to cost her something.

By the fourth, her arms were shaking. They could be broken, but not cheaply, and they came faster than anyone could pay.

He had the mirror trick. He would step into the surface of a puddle, a pane of glass, even a polished breastplate, and come out somewhere else entirely, behind a person’s shoulder or above her head.

I watched Elsbeth’s ice spear miss him by an inch because he simply wasn’t there.

He had something worse. He would raise his hand, and golden light would spread across a person like honey, and she would freeze in place, mid-stroke, trapped in a thin shell of gleaming amber.

Velora got caught in it. She’d been winding up for a cut, and suddenly she was a statue... glowing and still, with her blade raised and her golden eyes wide and furious.

I threw myself in front of her.

I had no business doing it. A Chosen was already swinging, a tall, blonde, laughing girl with a pair of hand axes, and I took the first blow on my crossed forearms and the second on Gate Junior.

The sword rang. And immediately, my arms went numb.

I went down on one knee in front of Velora’s frozen body, and I stayed there, catching blow after blow, until the amber shell cracked and she gasped and slashed the Chosen’s legs out from under her.

"Thank you," she said, in a rasp.

"Don’t mention it."

"No... I will... it’s in my culture as a pantherkin."

And when I looked back, Cassian was standing calmly on the steps, swallowing a small glittering fragment of glass.

Where Elsbeth’s ice spear had grazed his shoulder, and the skin closed up like a zipper.

He could heal... Goddamn it! Of course he could heal.

Here’s what I did that I’m proud of, and it isn’t much.

I stopped fighting, and I started watching.

It’s a bad habit I picked up in my old life.

When you grow up running from people who want to hit you, you learn to spot patterns very fast.

You learn that nobody is as good as they seem, that every trick has a seam, and that if you stare long enough, you can find where it splits.

I stood in the middle of that courtyard with my arms aching and my head ringing, and I watched Cassian disappear into a puddle and then into a window and then into the polished blade of an axe.

And I watched where he went out.

He never came out of a wall. He never stepped through stone, or shadow, or a plain wooden door.

Every single time... he went in and out of something shiny.

"He needs a reflection!" I yelled.

Velora’s head snapped around.

"The mirror thing! He can only do it through a reflection!"

"Take away the light!"

I’d barely finished the sentence when Sylvara understood. She raised her staff, and the violet fire at its tip swelled and flared, and a great, soft darkness rolled out across the courtyard like spilled ink.

Every torch went out. And every lantern.

The pale daylight dimmed to dusk under her veil. The whole yard fell into shadow, and I saw Cassian’s spectacles flash once, in surprise.

"The ice!" I shouted. "Break the ice!"

"And the glass as well!!!"