Chapter 429: Climbing Higher

When he saw that grayish-yellow fog, Coleman had no time to think.

People don't think when they're scared; their bodies react first.

So the first thing his body did was draw in a breath until his lungs were completely full.

This was the first lesson at St. George. Back then, the instructor had stood by the ice-water pool holding a Pocket Watch.

The first lesson was that Breathing must be deep and fast, pushing every breath down to the very bottom until your fingertips went numb and your vision darkened.

Pushing until that small, unused portion of the lungs was forced wide open, filling it to the absolute limit so the tiny spark of flame in the blood could ignite.

The entry to the Path of Blood Ignition came down to a single sentence: exchange your breath before you erupt.

He had trained in it for over two years, and after being eliminated, he spent another three years practicing alone in his backyard.

This explosive system had been drilled deep into his bones.

So deep that it required no conscious permission. Without thinking, Coleman drew in twelve breaths.

After inhaling, he knew he was doomed.

His eyes burned in agony.

Coleman initially thought it was from the smoke. He raised a hand and rubbed them hard, but the harder he rubbed, the worse it hurt.

Tears immediately welled up, blurring his entire field of vision into a yellow haze.

Then, a sickly sweet taste rose in his throat.

It tasted like pineapples rotting in a ship's basket, underlaid with a choking smell of pepper. Drawing it into his chest felt like something had caught fire inside him.

"Do not go down into the pit!"

The sergeant's roar smashed over from the other end of the fire step. "Climb higher! That stuff settles! It's flooding the low ground!"

Tucker was still frozen in place, both hands resting on an ammunition crate.

The sergeant slapped him right off the crate.

The blow sent him staggering.

"Cloth! Get some cloth!"

"What cloth?"

"Whatever you've got on you, anything! Piss on it and cover your mouth and nose!"

He stared at the sergeant. "Sergeant, what did you just say?"

The sergeant was already unbuckling his own belt.

"I worked the mines for years! This is what you do when gas leaks in the shaft! You don't know shit!"

Coleman did not tear the fabric from his own uniform.

He just ripped a roll of bandages straight from his first-aid kit. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely undo his belt.

He accidentally pissed on his own hand. It was shockingly cold, a chill that crept right down to his wrist.

"Slap it on, hurry!" the sergeant roared.

Leading by example, he pressed his own soaked cloth over his mouth and nose.

The sickly sweet stench was suppressed a little, but only a little.

On the other side, when Major Baldwin emerged from the bunker entrance, his entire body was burning.

Was this an ether eruption?

Coleman had seen instructors use it at the academy, but he had never witnessed it on a real battlefield.

The air around the major was continuously thrust outward. When the wall of yellow-green poison gas surged toward him, a concave dent was smashed into it, though it only protected a very small area around his body.

Still, it was better than Coleman's situation. He was already on a countdown.

Baldwin's voice cut through. "Everyone run south! Follow the communication trench!"

Two li away to the south, a wind had already started to pick up. Coleman leaned over a broken wall and looked in that direction.

Wind spawned out of nowhere from the ground, dozens of streams merging together and constantly pushing north.

It pushed the entire wall of poison gas upward, forcing it to lift.

Someone on the fire step cheered, but the sound died halfway up their throat.

Once the wall of poison gas was pushed up, it did not disperse. Instead, it unfurled in midair, spreading out thin and wide.

It stretched its original eight-kilometer front into a full ten-li radius, then pressed back down again—even more evenly distributed than before.

"That wind just now was the work of the Branch Office."

Baldwin squeezed past him, his voice raspy. "I knew it wouldn't be handled so easily."

Someone was screaming by the entrance to the communication trench. Coleman recognized who it was.

It was the signalman who always swung his legs too wide when he ran. Just a few days ago, he had been crying right here, crossing out the unneeded lines on a field postcard one by one.

He pressed the cloth tighter against his face and began to inhale.

Coleman took out his box of Silver Needles and pierced himself with one, extending his time.

By the time he vaulted down into the communication trench, it was already flooded.

The yellow-green poison gas had pooled at the bottom, settling right around knee height without moving.

He bent over and felt around inside it, finding a boot, and only by tracing up the boot did he reach the man.

He hoisted the man up and hauled him out. By the time he reached the trench lip, the breath in his lungs burned as if nails were scraping inside them.

Tucker helped him pull the man up from above, keeping time as he did.

"1:40!" he shouted. This was Coleman's habit.

Coleman slumped over the sandbags to exchange his breath. On his third intake, he couldn't help but cough up a bit of pink.

Then, without a second thought, he turned and charged straight down again.

The second trip brought up an engineer.

The guy had always bragged about how huge the dogs were where he came from, and he had dug his foxhole deeper than anyone else's.

But having a deep pit meant it filled up fuller than anyone else's, too.

As Coleman dragged him out of the hole, he realized the body no longer possessed the softness a normal human should have, but he hauled him up anyway.

Pulling him up was a waste of effort.

"Coleman!" Baldwin grabbed him by the collar from the fire step.

"Stop saving the others! We need to retreat south first and save our own lives!"

It was exactly because he was going to lose his own life that he had to save others.

Coleman looked up at him. The ether around the major was still glowing, shielding him immaculately.

He pulled his collar out of the major's grip without offering an explanation.

"There are still people down there, sir. It's full of men."

Baldwin suppressed his emotions.

"We can't take many of them with us."

Coleman smiled.

"Then you take whoever you can, sir."

With that, he vaulted back down.

After his third, fourth, and fifth trips, he lost count.

On one trip, he got turned around. He groped along the bottom of the trench for ages, only to find a spool of telephone wire.

On another, he dragged a man halfway up, but his hands slipped, sending the soldier sliding back down. He had to go down yet again.

During one ascent, he heard Tucker shouting the time next to him, but he couldn't make out the numbers.

He did stop once. This time, he truly stopped.

He crouched on the fire step, resting both hands on his knees, his chest feeling like it was stuffed with red-hot broken glass.

His mind was incredibly clear: 'That's enough. I didn't waste these past two years. Fixing those circuits wasn't for nothing. When I get back, I can brag to the guys.'

He just crouched there, panting, planning how he would tell the story once he got back.

But after the fifth trip, Tucker wasn't the only one keeping time.

Every living person along that stretch of trench was watching.

Some counted the number of times he came up. Some lent a hand to lower him when he went back down. One out of three men who ran over from another platoon even started unbuckling his own belt, copying his method.

He recognized those looks, yet he didn't.

He had seen them once, when he was fourteen, on the drill grounds at St. George.

The instructor had led a student past the formation, and the entire squad had looked at that person exactly like this.

He had stood in the very back row, lifting his chin and staring for a long time, until his neck ached.

Later, the man testing his circuits had taken his hand off his back and simply said, "Next."

He was never looked at that way again.

His family's collie, however, had gotten that look.

When it trotted into the hallway with the newspaper in its mouth, Father would put down his knife and fork and clap twice.

Thinking of this, Coleman stood up and went back down.

By the time he came up from his final trip, he pushed the man onto the fire step, crawled onto the sandbags himself, and sat there.

The cloth slipped from his face, but he didn't have the energy to grab it.

"Tucker, how long was that trip?"

Tucker brought the Pocket Watch close to his eyes, his hands shaking so much he had to look three times before reading it. "2:11."

Coleman smiled. "I broke my breath-holding record."

Then, he didn't speak again.

Baldwin rushed over and pressed his hand onto Coleman's chest.

He pumped surge after surge of ether inside, forcing the circulation, shocking the heart and lungs, and compelling the blood to flow back.

He had performed these techniques many times.

He could do it with his eyes closed without making a mistake. He even considered using [Moon Nail: Reflection] on Coleman.

But when he was about to pierce him, he pulled back the uniform and discovered that Coleman's back was already riddled with a dense, honeycomb cluster of puncture wounds.

Baldwin's hands stopped.

He crouched there, his silence so heavy that the rescued soldiers nearby didn't dare make a sound.

Then, he reached out, removed the dog tags from the boy's neck, and stood up to leave.

"He sent a postcard a few days ago," Tucker said suddenly.

Baldwin didn't look back. "What did he write?"

"I have received your letter. My health is very good."

Seeing the highest-ranking officer on the scene leave, the routed soldiers scattered.

Someone knocked over Coleman's backpack. It rolled half a turn, and the lid of a tin box inside was jarred open.

Gingerbread scattered across the fire step, trampled into crumbs across the ground.

The sergeant picked up the cloth lying next to Coleman and found that it had dried out long ago.

...

A procession of things crossed beneath the clouds, their horns drowning out the cries of wild geese.

The shadow cradled the severed antler wrapped in reins in the palm of its hand and walked beneath the stone gate pillar on the left.

Only half a bundle of hay remained at the base of the pillar. Frost crept up from the tip of the antler, climbing to the knot in the reins to condense into a shape.

The clouds tore open, and a rope dropped down.

There was no road up there, nor was one needed.

The figures above were packed rank upon rank, stretching endlessly in both directions.

Some wore bear pelts, some were clad in chainmail, and one wore a red coat from the last century, its buttons polished brighter than anyone else's.

There was also one wearing only a thin shirt, barefoot, the tops of his feet caked with frost from six hundred years ago.

The silhouettes of most were blurry; only the objects gripped in their hands remained distinct: axes, spears, scythes, and even a small apple-paring knife.

At the very front were the hounds.

The shadow walked in bearing the name [black dog].

The pack of hounds circled it. One dog, so old its forehead was a patch of white fur, shoved its nose into the shadow's palm and sniffed for a long time.

There was also a small one with a slight limp in its hind leg, which followed along, constantly nudging the shadow's knee with its head.

On the third nudge, the shadow reached out and pushed it away.

The little guy rolled over on the spot, throwing all four legs into the air, and lay perfectly still with its belly exposed.

The shadow had no choice but to press down on its belly. Only then did it scramble up, fully satisfied, and trot back to the front with its tail wagging.

At the absolute front of the procession, the bundle of rope unraveled into dozens of strands.

Every strand was clenched in a hand. No one was willing to let go first, like a group of business partners clustered around a single coin purse.

The lord of the hunt was not here.

A cacophony of voices broke into discussion:

"It isn't here tonight."

"Where did it go?"

"Don't know."

"The last time it was absent was thirty-seven years ago."

"It was forty-one years."

"Thirty-seven."

"Forty-one! You don't even remember what you're holding in your hands."

That sentence rolled through the ranks, echoing until it faded out of hearing, only to roll right back.

Someone at the rear of the procession noticed the half-bundle of hay at the base of the pillar.

"Someone left hay."

"How many bundles?"

"Half a bundle."

This exchange passed down the ranks, traveling several li down the line.

By the time it came back, it had become: "He left an entire wagonful and even brushed the horses' backs."

"I only left half a bundle," the shadow said.

"Then you shouldn't have corrected them," someone above answered.

"Give it another two hundred years, and you'll be the one who built our stables."

Richard took advantage of the excellent atmosphere to unequip the name [black dog].

The very instant he took it off, the entire pack of hounds turned their heads in unison.

Dozens of hands gripping the ropes immediately reeled in a half-turn, snapping the ropes into dozens of taut, straight lines in midair.

But the shadow had already raised the Caduceus.

The wind stalled against the head of the staff for a moment before bypassing it, flowing away on both sides.

A young figure leaned out of the ranks and swung an axe.

The axe blade stopped on its own in midair.

"You can't hack the envoy," the person next to him said.

"I know I can't."

"Then why swing?"

"Just wanted to try."

"No fighting in the court."

This voice rose from the depths of the procession—it was more than one person speaking.

The sentence was spoken by hundreds of mouths simultaneously, no one leading and no one lagging.

"The envoy has arrived. The court must be called to order."

"Call to order!" the entire sky echoed in response.

The clattering of hooves stopped.

Tens of thousands of mounts halted upon the empty void. The procession split from the center, parting to the sides to open up a clearing.

The wind blew straight through the center of that clearing. That was the position the lord of the hunt had granted him.

"We will tell you the rules first," the multitude of voices said.

"When the person standing in the wind speaks, no one may interrupt.

Only when they finish does the next take their turn. And whatever is decided in court cannot be overturned once court is dismissed."

"Not even if the lord of the hunt returns?" the shadow asked.

The voices choked for a moment.

"...Not even if it returns."

"It will be unhappy when it gets back," someone nearby undercut them.

"It's unhappy all the time."

"The last time it was unhappy, it marched the entire army across a swamp for three nights."

"That wasn't because it was unhappy. It was because it got lost."

"It never gets lost."

"Then why did we wander that swamp for three nights?"

"To enjoy the scenery."

Laughter erupted from the rear, passing back rank by rank, echoing on even after it faded beyond hearing.