Chương 158: Chapter 157- The Border

The notification hit like a slap. [PACT ALERT - EMERGENCY] Nathaniel Hix. Position: Ring 2, outer boundary. Status: engaged, multiple hostiles. Check-in: overdue. Finn was moving before he'd finished reading it twice. He didn't remember crossing the headquarters floor.

He remembered Lira's voice, already sharp, already asking Kai for the last known coordinates, and he remembered his own hands strapping his blades on faster than he'd ever strapped them on in his life, and he remembered thinking, with a clarity that felt like it belonged to someone else, that panic was a luxury he could not currently afford.

"Ridgeline," Kai said, reading off the map.

"Past it. He's inside the boundary."

"How far inside?"

"Signal puts him two hundred meters past the line." Unauthorized. Alone. Two hundred meters into Ring 2 territory with no backup and no approval, which meant Hix had gone in to confirm something with his own eyes rather than wait for someone else to do it for him, which was exactly the kind of decision Finn would have expected from him on a bad day and hoped never to actually see him make.

"I'm closest," Finn said.

"You're not going alone."

"I'm the fastest option we have right now, and every second we spend arguing about it is a second he doesn't have." Finn was already running.

"Send Higgs. Send Tomas. Send everyone. I'm not waiting for them to catch up before I start." Lira didn't argue further. She didn't have time to, and she knew it as well as he did.

"Go," she said.

"I'll get them moving behind you." He ran. Thirty minutes felt longer than thirty minutes had any right to feel. Finn ran the terrain the way he'd run it a hundred times in his head during training patrols, except now every choice carried weight it had never carried before, every shortcut a gamble against a clock he couldn't see. His lungs burned somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark and he ignored it. His legs told him to slow down somewhere around the twenty-minute mark and he ignored that too.

Sweat stung his eyes and he blinked it away without breaking stride. Underneath the running, underneath the tactical assessment his mind kept generating without being asked to, distances and threat radii and worst-case timelines running on a loop he couldn't shut off, a single thought kept cutting through everything else, quiet and relentless: don't be too late, don't be too late, don't be too late.

He kept his voice level when he checked in with Lira along the way, kept his breathing steady enough to sound steady, because panic broadcast over an open channel helped nobody and cost time nobody had. Inside, underneath the level voice, something was screaming, had been screaming since the first notification hit, cataloguing every terrible outcome in vivid, unwanted detail while the rest of him kept moving forward regardless. The boundary marker passed in a blur. He didn't slow down for it.

Whatever consequence came from an unsanctioned Ring 2 crossing could be dealt with later, filed under problems that only mattered if there was a later to file them in. He heard the fight before he saw it, low growls and Hix's voice, ragged, still throwing out commands to nothing and no one, the sound of a man refusing to stop fighting even with nothing left to fight with. He came over the last rise at a dead sprint. Five Shadow Panthers. Level 24, sleek and black, built for exactly this kind of ambush.

Two were already down, Hix's arrows still standing out of their flanks, clean, precise kills even under pressure. The other three had him backed against a rock face, and Hix was still standing, barely, one arm hanging wrong, blood soaking through his side, an arrow nocked with hands that weren't holding steady anymore. He was still trying to fight. That was the part that stayed with Finn longest, later, when he had time to think about it. Even like this, Hix was still trying to fight. Finn didn't think. He moved.

The nearest panther turned at the sound of him and never finished the turn. Finn's blade caught it mid-motion, and something in him that had been building for weeks, learning, failing, learning again, answered all at once, no hesitation, no moment between intention and effect. The strike went through resistance that should have stopped it and didn't, and the panther dropped before it understood it was already dead.

The second one came from the side, faster than the first, already wounded and fighting on instinct alone. He felt it more than saw it, some sense sharpened past conscious thought, and he turned into the strike instead of away from it, blade meeting muscle and bone with the same effortless certainty as the first, gold light tracing up the steel bright enough that even Hix, swaying against the rock face, seemed to notice it through the haze he was clearly fighting to stay above.

The panther's own claws caught his forearm on the way down, a shallow tear that he didn't register as pain until much later, noted somewhere in the back of his mind and set aside without waiting for permission. The third panther hesitated. Predators that hunted in packs understood, on some level, when the math had stopped working in their favor, when the pack that had been theirs a minute ago had become a threat instead of an advantage.

It hesitated one second too long, weight shifting back rather than forward, the first real flicker of something like fear in an animal that had spent its whole life being the thing other animals feared. Finn didn't give it a second chance. He closed the distance before it finished deciding whether to run, and the fight ended the way the others had, fast and complete, no room left for the animal to reconsider. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Then it was over, and the only sound left in the clearing was his own breathing, ragged now that there was nothing left to hold it steady for, and Hix, sliding slowly down the rock face because his legs had finally stopped agreeing to hold him up.

"Hey," Hix said, voice thin.

"Took you long enough."

"Don't talk. Save it."

"Rude. I was being brave."

"You were being reckless, and we're going to have a whole conversation about that once you're not actively dying." Finn was already at his side, hands moving over the wound at his ribs, trying to remember anything, anything at all, from the handful of times Yuki had walked him through basic field treatment. It wasn't enough. He knew that within seconds.

He knew how to stop a minor bleed, how to splint a break well enough to move someone, how to recognize shock without knowing what to actually do about it beyond keeping someone talking and warm. He did not know how to manage a wound this deep, this ragged, bleeding faster than the pressure he was applying could account for. He pressed harder, watched blood well up around his fingers anyway, and felt something close to panic try to surface through the calm he was holding together by sheer force of will.

He'd spent months building a mental model of nearly everything else in this world, terrain and threat patterns and the mechanics of his own developing magic, and none of it had prepared him for the plain, physical helplessness of not knowing how to keep a person's body from failing in front of him.

"Stay with me," he said, more command than request.

"Hix. Eyes on me."

"They're on you. Very handsome, very concerned. Ten out of ten."

"Keep talking. Whatever you've got. Just keep talking." Hix kept talking, thinner and thinner, less and less coherent, and Finn kept his hands on the wound and his voice level and felt, for the first time in longer than he could remember, genuinely, completely out of his depth. He catalogued it anyway, even here, even now, some part of him that never fully switched off noting the gap for later: everyone in this Pact could fight.

Almost nobody, himself included, could actually keep a badly wounded person alive long enough for a fight to matter. That was a hole in everything they'd built, and it had taken watching Hix bleed out under his hands to make it fully, undeniably real instead of a theoretical weakness he'd have gotten around to eventually. The next twenty minutes lasted longer than the run had. Finn tracked every change in Hix's breathing like it was the only data that mattered, because it was.

He kept pressure on the wound until his hands ached from it. He knew he couldn't move him, not without removing the pressure and that wouldn't work. He knew that there were more people on the way. He's have to wait and hope. He talked, steady and constant, about nothing important, about the moss and the glider and the plant they'd found that Yuki still hadn't identified, anything that gave Hix something to hold onto besides the pain.

"You're doing the report voice," Hix mumbled, at one point.

"The very calm one. I know that voice. That's your scared voice."

"I don't have a scared voice."

"You do. It's this one." His eyes were losing focus, finding Finn's face again with visible effort.

"S'okay. I'd rather have the scared voice than no voice."

"You're not losing anything today. And this is absolutely my normal voice." He didn't know if that was true. He said it anyway, because saying it was the only thing he had left to give, and somewhere underneath the calm he was holding together by force of will alone, the storm he wasn't letting himself feel yet kept building, waiting for permission he wasn't going to give it until this was over. Tomas reached them first, Higgs close behind, both of them running the last stretch flat out.

"Move," Tomas said, already dropping to his knees on Hix's other side, hands finding the wound with a speed and certainty that told Finn immediately how far out of his depth he'd actually been.

"Pressure here, not there. You're missing the artery line."

"I didn't know there was an artery line."

"Most people don't. That's what I'm here for." Tomas worked fast, hands sure, packing the wound properly, wrapping it tight enough to actually slow the bleeding instead of just managing it.

"But this worked for now, good job."

"Is he going to make it?"

"He's going to make it if we move now instead of asking me more questions." Tomas was already rigging a way to carry him, efficient, practiced.

"Higgs. Take his other side." They moved. Yuki was waiting at the clinic doors before they'd even fully cleared the gate, drawn by whatever instinct told her when something worth her whole attention had come through. She took one look at Hix and didn't waste time on questions either, just started working, hands moving fast and sure, practiced past the point of needing to think about it. It took a while. Nobody in the waiting room said much during it.

Finn spent most of it with his back against the wall, still feeling the ghost of blood on his hands even after he'd washed it off twice, his clothes were another story, they'd need a full wash when he got back, for now he looked like he had also claws across his torso, and when Higgs finally sat down next to him, he said the thing that had been sitting in his chest since the moment Tomas took over the pressure on the wound.

"I didn't know what I was doing out there. Any of it, past the fighting part."

"None of us do, really. Not properly." Higgs didn't offer it as comfort so much as fact.

"Tomas does, because he had to learn it the hard way before any of this started. The rest of us have been running on luck and good coordination."

"That's not a strategy. That's a countdown."

"Yeah." Higgs was quiet for a moment.

"We fix it. Real training, not just the basics Yuki's had time to hand out between everything else she does."

"Agreed. Whatever it costs in time, we make the time." When Yuki finally came out, wiping her hands, the look on her face was tired rather than grim, which told Finn everything he needed to know before she said a word.

"He'll live," she said.

"It was closer than I'd like, but he'll live." Something in Finn's chest, held rigid since the first notification, finally let go. Hix was sitting up by the time they let people back in to see him, pale and bandaged and considerably less talkative than usual, though the talkative part came back the moment he saw them in the doorway.

"I checked in on the way back," he said, to Higgs, before anyone else could say anything.

"Yes," Higgs said.

"You did."

"I should have checked in before."

"Yes." A pause, longer than the conversation strictly needed.

"Get some rest," Higgs said.

"We'll talk about it tomorrow." Hix nodded, and for a moment nobody said anything else, the whole room settling into a quiet. Now that he knew Hix wasn't on deaths door, the anger at his recklessness started to creep in. The entire thing could've gone much worse.

"Three," Hix said eventually, quieter than before.

"Still on three Echoes. Died twice before this. If you'd been any slower, I'd be down to two." He looked at Finn, something underneath the usual deflection actually showing through for once.

"So. Thanks. Genuinely."

"You're welcome. Genuinely. Don't ever do that again."

"I won't. Lesson learned." And he laughed half-heatedly.

"Three's not nothing," Tomas said, from the corner.

"Some margin left."

"Three's not nothing," Hix agreed.

"Three's the difference between a bad day and a story I get to tell later." He leaned his head back against the pillow, eyes closing, exhaustion finally winning out over talk.

"Ask me again tomorrow if I still think it was worth it."