Chương 18: The Showman's Intermission

The screaming carried on, layering on top of itself in the dark until she couldn't tell one voice from the next. Slowly, it started to thin. One voice dropped out, then another, the noise losing layers the way a fire loses height once the wood underneath it runs low. She tried to move. Her own legs refused her, locked tight, the fear pressing down on her from somewhere she couldn't see and had no way to fight. She lost track of how long the dark lasted after that.

Time blurred together, one stretch of screaming bleeding into the next with nothing to measure it against. Blazing sunlight cracked back all at once, sudden as a slap, and her eyes ached hard against it, pupils still blown wide from all that darkness with nowhere to hide from the glare now flooding straight into them. She squeezed them shut, then forced them open again in narrow slits, the world coming back to her in a painful white blur before it finally settled into something she could actually see.

[SYSTEM] Pseudo Domain: Swallow the Sun. Effect ended. [SYSTEM] Debuff lifted: Fear. The grip on her legs loosened, but not all the way. A shiver kept running through them underneath it, leftover and unwilling to settle, the kind of tremor that outlasted whatever had caused it in the first place. Blood reached her before anything else did, thick and everywhere at once, the smell of the whole road at once rather than any one thing in particular. The road came into view a beat behind it.

Then the bodies scattered across it. Then the masked man. He was worse than she'd caught in glimpses between strikes during the fight. Cuts stood open along one arm, dust ground into his coat and blood still wet beneath it. Half the mask still sat fixed in place, the same bright, painted smile it had worn all day. Behind that bare half of his face, his eye stayed open, present, and completely empty, the same look she'd learned to recognize in every one of the still bodies scattered across the road.

He crossed the last stretch to where she sat and reached down, patting her head once, gentle, unhurried, every bit as composed as he'd been at the very start of the day. Something came out of him then, low and slurred.

"You're free... to go." Then his knees buckled, all at once, without any warning at all. He went down hard beside her, a broken arrow still lodged in his shoulder, blood soaking dark through the fabric around it and pooling fast against the broken road beneath him. Her head swung between the open road behind her and him, over and over, ears swiveling with each turn like they could pick something useful out of either direction if she just gave them enough time.

Her weight shifted from paw to paw, low and unsettled, same as whenever she couldn't decide whether something was worth approaching or worth leaving alone. She could run from him, right now, easily. The fear was mostly gone. Nothing physically stood in her way at all. Running toward anything in particular, though, that was a different problem. There was nowhere to go.

Home could have sat behind her or ahead of her or off to either side, with no scent trail this far out to tell her which, just rolling hills stretching out past the edge of the road in every direction she looked. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. His breathing had gone shallow since he'd gone down, faster than it should have been for someone lying still. The warmth coming off him felt thinner than a moment ago, fading fast.

She'd smelled this before, blood gone thick and slow instead of fresh, in every body already still on the road around them. If she left him lying here, he'd be one more of them soon enough. [SYSTEM] Conflict concluded. Determining host allegiance. Host aligned with: non-hostile party. Hostile faction annihilated. No survivors remaining among the attacking force. [SYSTEM] Calculating host contribution. Reward determined. Sufficient mana absorbed from Orcs. Skill Extraction available.

Select target skill: War Roar Enlarge Thick Hide She heard every word of it, plain and clear the moment it reached her. One of them stood out from the rest. Enlarge. Bigger, she thought, turning the shape of the word over once. If it did what it sounded like it did, bigger was exactly the thing she'd always wanted most. [SYSTEM] Skill Acquired: Enlarge. Effect: host physical size increased. Warning: this change is permanent. Cannot be reversed through this skill.

A separate skill capable of reducing host size will be required to undo this effect. She didn't finish reading the last part before it happened. Pain lit up through every bone at once, sharp and grinding, like something was pulling her whole skeleton apart from the inside just to make room. Her legs lengthened under her, her chest and shoulders widening right along with them, muscle tearing itself wider across a frame straining at its own edges with every heartbeat.

By the time it stopped, her own body felt like something else entirely, long and dense with muscle in places that had never carried any weight worth mentioning before. She took a step and nearly toppled with it, her legs carrying her farther and faster than she'd meant. Her paw came down hard and too far out, overshooting the spot she'd aimed for by half again as much. Her head lowered toward him, working it out step by step, mouth closing around the loose fabric bunched thick at the back of his collar.

Her jaw closed harder than she meant it to. She felt it the instant it happened, teeth finding skin instead of stopping at cloth, and a fresh line of blood welled up dark against his neck where there hadn't been one before. She let go at once, backing off half a step. A moment passed, then she started licking one paw with great interest, the same unbothered performance any cat gave when it wanted the rest of the world to believe nothing had just gone wrong.

She tried again slower this time, lips pulled back off her teeth as far as they'd go, taking only cloth into her mouth and nothing underneath it. She lifted, and his whole weight came up off the road easier than she'd braced herself for. She could have set him back down right there. Nothing about holding him this way cost her anything she couldn't afford to walk off from. She could still go anywhere she wanted, the same as a moment ago.

She started walking instead, picking a direction more or less at random, since one unfamiliar stretch of hills looked exactly as promising as the next. Time passed the way it always did when there was nothing marking it. The sun crossed further than she bothered tracking, his weight dragging steady the whole way, her new muscles stopping their complaints about it somewhere along the way, less a burden with every mile than it had been at the start.

A line of movement caught her eye near the top of a rise, carts and animals strung out along a road that met hers at an angle up ahead. People. More of them than she'd seen gathered in one place since the gate. A single shout went up when she was still too far off to make out words, sharp and startled. A few figures broke from the rest almost immediately, mismatched armor and drawn steel, cutting toward her at an angle, fast and sure-footed in a way that meant they'd moved like this before.

Then one of them got close enough to see what she actually was. Huge, unfamiliar, blood dried dark down her chin and throat from carrying him the whole way, and hanging from her mouth by the collar, limp and bleeding, an actual man. The shout that went up next was worse than the first one. The armed ones didn't slow down either, if anything they came on faster, weapons already raised for something a lot worse than a wild animal now that they'd seen exactly what it was carrying.

An arrow grazed her across the shoulder before she'd fully worked out what was happening. Confusion hit her almost as hard as the arrow had. None of the shapes closing in on her right now looked like they cared to sort out why any of this had happened before deciding how to end it. Everything in her still wanted to reach them, the same pull that had carried her this whole way, except the place she'd been running toward had just turned into the danger itself. She set him down. It wasn't a decision that felt clean.

It felt like the only option the situation had actually left her. Humans took care of their own. She'd watched that happen for as long as she'd been alive, watched Bram feed strangers and Ren carry the whole guild on her own back and Garr clap a hand on shoulders before every single door. Whatever these people were right now, arrows and shouting and none of it gentle, somewhere underneath that they were still the same as the rest. They'd figure out what to do.

She backed off two full strides, then turned and ran, putting distance between herself and all of it as fast as her new legs could carry her, and didn't let herself look back to see whether she'd guessed right.