Chapter 74. If the Alarm Rings When I Make a Plan, Stop Making Plans Where It Can Hear

Chapter 74: 74. If the Alarm Rings When I Make a Plan, Stop Making Plans Where It Can Hear

I forced myself upright. I made myself take slow, shallow breaths, and I let the pain wash through me and out.

And while I did it... I started counting.

I was a logistics clerk in my first life. It’s not glamorous, but it teaches you to find patterns.

If you stare at enough shipping manifests, you start to see the lies hidden in the numbers.

Something about the last few exchanges had been nagging at me, and now I stopped and went back over them one by one... the way you’d go back over a ledger.

Every time I’d pushed Aether into my sword, he’d parried early.

Not on time... but early.

He’d started moving his blade before mine did.

I thought about the feint to the left, where I’d put a little Aether into my left foot to make the step quicker. He’d shifted his weight to cover that side before my foot had even left the ground.

I thought about the high cut, where I’d channeled power into my right shoulder... His guard had moved up to meet it a good half second before the strike began.

It wasn’t speed. And it wasn’t skill.

He was reacting to something that happened before the movement.

’Before the movement,’ I thought. ’What comes before the movement?’

I looked at the crystal on his chest, at the slow... rippling pulse, and I felt something cold slide into place.

’He’s not reading me,’ I thought. ’He’s reading the Aether.’

It was so obvious that I wanted to scream. The crystal didn’t only drink power.

It felt it...

Every time I moved a thread of Aether into a limb, the crystal sensed the flow, the way you’d feel a vibration through the floor, and it told him exactly where I was going to strike.

It was an alarm that went off in his chest the moment I made a plan.

I needed to test it.

I took a deep breath, steadied my grip, and let a heavy flood of Aether run into my left hand.

And so... I made a show of it. I felt the energy gather, and I clenched my fist, and I let the light blaze out between my fingers, exactly like a man about to throw a punch.

Then I attacked with my ’right.’

I stepped in, and I swung the kingsteel in a flat horizontal arc, with no Aether at all. It was a plain, clean cut at the level of his elbow. Corvane’s left arm had already come up to block my fist.

His crystal pulsed... with his sword hand at the wrong angle. And for the first time that night, he made a mistake.

My blade touched the edge of his armor, the plate at the elbow, and slid across it with a bright, hard scrape.

It didn’t cut through. But he flinched.

He actually flinched...! Like a tiny, startled twitch, and he took a half step back.

"Ah," he said softly.

I stood with my sword raised and my heart hammering, and I felt a fierce, stupid grin spread across my face.

"You can’t see me unless I use Aether, huh?" I said.

"That’s an... interesting conclusion."

"It’s the right one, though, isn’t it?"

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had a new note in it... something almost like respect.

"I see how it is... You learn quickly," he said. "That’s why they sent me."

I should’ve known better than to feel clever.

I’d been standing there with my shiny new theory and my smug little grin for about one second when Corvane stepped forward, and I discovered the difference between understanding a problem and being able to solve it.

He stopped looking at my Aether and started looking at me.

His sword came up. And I noticed instantly that his stance changed.

And when he swung... the stroke came so fast and so heavy that I barely got the king steel in front of my face.

The impact threw me backward like a rag doll. I skidded across the road, caught my heel on a rut, and landed on my back with all the air knocked out of me.

"Roland...!" Alicia’s voice cracked across the dark.

I rolled onto my side, coughing, and saw her coming at full speed. She’d left the wagon in Holt’s hands, and she hit the road like an arrow from a bow, with her braid streaming and her sword in both fists.

She came at Corvane from the left, in a long, low curve, using the speed that the Bond had given her to cut the angle.

I’d never seen her so fast... She was a golden streak, there and then somewhere else.

Corvane didn’t move. He just lifted his blade and turned it in a small circle, and Alicia’s sword skated off it with a screech of metal.

She spun away, came back from the other side, and tried again. He batted her away like a man shooing a fly.

"Left!" Laura called.

She’d come out of the river at a run, with her wet armor flashing, and she crossed the road in a dozen strides.

She raised her sword in both hands, aimed for his side, and drove forward in a perfect, merciless thrust.

He tilted his body, barely an inch. The point passed through the space where his ribs had been, and he brought his elbow down across her wrists.

A flash of blue light burst from the crystal plate on his arm, and Laura grunted and stumbled back with her sword dragging.

I got to my feet. I don’t remember deciding to.

I was simply upright, with the sword in my fist and my legs under me, and I ran in with everything I had left.

I didn’t use any Aether. I’d learned that by now.

I went in with plain muscle and a stubborn heart, aiming at the gap between his helmet and his collar.

He read me anyway.

I don’t know how, but... maybe it wasn’t only the Aether.

Maybe he was just that good.

His left foot snapped out and caught me in the knee, and my leg folded under me like a cheap chair.

A second later, a hand the size of a shovel closed on my collar and flung me sideways across the road.

I crashed into the ditch and lay there, seeing stars.

"That’s enough," Corvane said calmly. "I’d rather not hurt any of you more than necessary!"

"I have no quarrel with the Order!"

Alicia hit him again, and he slapped her sword hilt with the flat of his own blade, hard enough to make her stagger.

He drove the pommel into her ribs, and she folded, gasping. Laura swung at his head, and he caught her blade in the crook of his arm, held it there like a man holding a branch, and shoved her backward so hard that she hit the ground and slid twenty feet on the gravel.

I was still trying to breathe. But then... the panel flashed.

[Warning: Lust consumption elevated.]

[Consider alternative strategies.]

’No kidding,’ I thought.

Alicia pushed herself to her feet. Her lip was bleeding, and one of her sleeves had been cut to ribbons.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at Corvane with an expression that I’d seen only a handful of times in my life.

It was a quiet, sweet, and deeply terrifying smile.

"I’m going to be honest," she said. "I’m not impressed..."

"I’m sorry to hear that," said Corvane.

"You don’t want to kill anyone tonight... That’s very generous." Alicia starts to do some little stretching. "But you’ll notice that we don’t particularly want to be left alive on your terms."

"I do see that."

"That’s adorable," said Alicia, and raised her sword.

I lay in the ditch with my head spinning and a taste of copper in my mouth, and I thought hard.

I’d been looking at it wrong... That was the problem.

All night, my solution to every difficulty had been ’do something clever with my power.’ But the whole point of Corvane... the thing that made him dangerous was that cleverness with power was precisely what he’d been built to eat.

His crystal could drink my Aether, it could track my Aether, and it could read the fine thread of intent that ran along every ounce of energy I used.

’So stop giving him anything to read,’ I thought.

It was a very simple idea, and it came to me all at once. I couldn’t beat him by using Aether on my own body.

But I didn’t have to... and I realize that... I wasn’t alone.

There were two people on that road who were bound to me by something deeper than any spell.

If the crystal tracked power that left the body... then I had to find a way to put the power inside people, where it couldn’t be seen.

I scrambled out of the ditch.

My ribs were on fire. And my knee shook.

I limped across the road as fast as I could, and I caught Alicia’s hand as she was pulling back for another strike.

At the same moment, I grabbed Laura’s forearm, where she’d just dragged herself upright with her sword in her fist.

They both looked at me in surprise.

"Trust me," I said.

"Always," said Alicia, without the slightest hesitation.

Laura’s pale eyes searched my face. She was breathing hard, with a smear of mud across one cheek, and she looked exhausted and furious and completely ready to bury somebody.

"Don’t make me regret it," she said.

"I’ll try."

"That’s not a promise."

"It’s the best I’ve got."

She tightened her grip on my wrist. "Then do it."