Chương 236: Chapter : 236

Ira lowered her water serpent, which dissolved into a gentle mist around her feet. She looked at the pile of bones that had been the skeleton warrior. Then she looked at Ken. Her pale, emotionless eyes held on him for two full seconds. That was a lifetime for Ira. Ken felt her gaze and gave her his best goofy smile.

"Nice water snake," he said.

"Very shiny. Ten out of ten." Ira turned away without a word. But the corner of her lip twitched. Just barely. It might have been amusement. It might have been suspicion. With Ira, it was impossible to tell. The 13th Unit stood in the quiet clearing, surrounded by unconscious but freed villagers. The battle was over. The Thousand Tree Prison was broken. And somewhere in the back of the village, past the ruined huts and the scorched earth, the path to the waterfall and the Glayin deer lay open.

Ken yawned enormously.

"Can we eat now?" he asked.

"I have been starving since approximately forever. Also, my shoes are still ruined. I just wanted to remind everyone about that." Naomi threw a piece of dried meat at his face. He caught it without looking, which was either very lucky or very suspicious, and shoved it into his mouth with a happy groan.

"Idiot," Naomi said. But she was smiling. Just barely.

The village was quiet. The kind of quiet that comes after a storm, when the wind has finally stopped howling and the rain has stopped falling and all that is left is the slow drip of water from the leaves and the heavy, exhausted breathing of survivors. The freed Dimitri tribesmen lay scattered across the clearing. Some were unconscious. Others were awake but dazed, their eyes blank and confused, like people waking from a long and terrible dream. The purple glow was completely gone from their eyes. They were free.

But freedom had come at a cost. Their bodies were thin and weak from days of forced labor without rest or proper food. Their hands were calloused and bleeding from handling rough stone and wood. Their faces were hollow with the memory of things they had done while under the skeleton's control. The shame in their eyes was almost worse than the purple glow had been. Princess Iris moved among them with gentle hands and a warm voice.

She knelt beside a young mother who was clutching two small children, all three of them trembling. She helped an old man sit up and gave him water from the unit's limited supply. She held the hand of a teenage boy who was staring at his own palms with horror, remembering the axe he had swung at the strange girls who had come to save him.

"You were not yourself," Iris told the boy softly.

"None of this was your choice. You have nothing to be ashamed of." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. The boy did not look convinced, but he nodded anyway. The princess's violet eyes were kind and steady, and for a moment, just a moment, the weight on his shoulders seemed a little lighter. Sayma sat on a fallen log near the center of the village, her notebook open in her lap, her glasses reflecting the fading light of the sunset.

She was cataloguing everything. The altar. The destroyed skeleton. The anchor trees. The dark mana residue that still lingered in the air like the smell of smoke after a fire. Her trained mind was already assembling a report, organizing the data, preparing the analysis.

"The Black Magic used here was sophisticated," Sayma said to no one in particular. She pushed her glasses up and wrote another note.

"The control spell had multiple redundant layers. If one anchor tree was destroyed, the others would compensate. The skeleton warrior served as both enforcer and mana relay. And the altar was the heart of the entire network." She looked toward the far side of the village, where the scorched clearing still smoldered. The altar that Vorath had been building was cracked and dark, the purple flames extinguished forever. But the original altar, the one the cultists had built, still stood in the jungle clearing.

Someone would need to destroy it properly, with purifying magic, or the dark mana would seep back into the ground and poison this place for generations. Laxmi and Zinia had returned from destroying the anchor trees and were resting near the fire pit in the center of the village. Laxmi was nursing her bruised shoulder with a makeshift ice pack that Ira had created from condensed moisture. Zinia was stretching her sore arms and wincing.

"I have punched a lot of things in my life," Laxmi said, rotating her shoulder carefully.

"But those trees were the worst. They screamed at me. Trees should not scream."

"They were not really trees," Zinia replied.

"They were magical constructs wrapped around tree trunks. The wood was just a frame for the dark mana."

"Still screamed though." Ira stood apart from the group, as she always did. Her water mana was fully replenished now that the battle was over and she had time to absorb moisture from the humid jungle air. She was watching the freed villagers with her usual blank expression, but there was something in the way she held herself, a slight softening of her rigid posture, that suggested she was not entirely unmoved by the sight of families reuniting. Naomi sat near Ken, cleaning her daggers with a piece of cloth.

She had removed her jacket and rolled up her sleeves, revealing the three shallow cuts on her arms. The wounds were not deep, but they were still bleeding slightly. She ignored them with the practiced indifference of a warrior who had suffered far worse. Ken was lying on the ground next to her, staring up at the darkening sky through the canopy. His cheap suit was even more ruined than before, torn at the shoulder and caked with mud and ash.

He looked like he had been dragged through a swamp backwards, which was approximately what had happened.

"That was intense," Ken said to the sky.

"I think I used up my lifetime supply of adrenaline. I am going to need to sleep for a week. Minimum."

"You hid behind me the entire time," Naomi said without looking up from her daggers.

"That does not require adrenaline."

"Hiding is extremely stressful," Ken said seriously.

"You try crouching behind someone while spears fly over your head. It takes a toll on the nervous system." Naomi's mouth twitched. She wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that she had seen him move, just for a second, right before the skeleton fell apart. She wanted to ask how a lazy, useless commoner had happened to be standing in exactly the right spot at exactly the right moment. But she said none of those things. Because the skeleton was destroyed, the villagers were free, and Ken was still Ken.

Annoying, lazy, useless Ken. Whatever she thought she had seen, it was probably just the battle playing tricks on her tired eyes.

"Just rest," Naomi said quietly.

"We still have work to do tomorrow."