Chương 128: DO YOU DREAM OF FANTASY?

The forest did not know it yet, but it had become an arena. Torvin stood in the clearing's center, chest rising and falling in controlled rhythm. Across from him, Jax leaned on his spear, weight distributed evenly, expression unreadable. Between them, the air felt wrong—charged with something that made the leaves tremble despite the stillness.

"You know," Torvin said quietly, "I thought I'd feel worse about killing you." Jax said nothing.

"I mean it. All these years. All those memories. And when the blade went through..." Torvin touched his own neck absently.

"Nothing. Just relief that it was done." Jax's grip tightened on the spear.

"I should have known when I saw the flicker." Torvin tilted his head.

"Your body. After I cut it off. It glitched—just for a second. Like a damaged reflection." Jax's voice was calm, but something bled beneath it. Jax's Trait did not merely manipulate slumber. No, 'The Moon' It imposed new perspectives in the real world. Not illusions. Not hallucinations. No, he caused reality to misinterpret itself, to dream. When the blade had fallen, Jax had created a fantasy where he died. A clean beheading. A corpse in the dirt. And they had believed it. Who wouldn't?

After all, who would dream of a fantasy? Torvin's eyes widened fractionally. Then he laughed.

"Of course. Of course you'd pull something like that." The laughter died quickly.

"So all this time I've been carrying your death, and you were just... watching?"

"Waiting."

"For what?" Jax did not answer. Behind them, deeper in the forest, the other two knights had already moved.

The sword Dishonored found SK first. The old man had barely covered fifty meters before a silver streak bisected the trunk ahead of him. He skidded, reversing direction, boots screaming against loam. The assailant emerged from shadow, condensed Flow blade humming with hungry light.

"You're slower than I expected," the man observed. SK spat onto the ground.

"And you're uglier than I expected. Guess we're both disappointed." The Dishonored lunged. SK's hand dipped into his sack and emerged with a fistful of polished stones. He hurled them like marbles. They struck the ground between them and detonated in sequence—not with force, but with light. Blinding white. The knight staggered, blade swinging wide. SK was already moving. He looped left, fingers finding another artifact—a copper disc etched with concentric rings. He slapped it against a tree trunk and kept running.

The disc activated. A shimmering wall materialized across the Dishonored's pursuit path. He smashed through it in two heartbeats. But two heartbeats was all SK needed. He emerged from behind another tree, this time holding a ball woven from what looked like silver thread and dried sinew. He threw it not at the man—but above him. It opened midair into a net, expanding into a lattice of razor-edged light. The man looked up. Too late. The net descended. It did not entangle. It bisected.

The knight's body separated into sections with surgical precision, each piece collapsing in a different direction. His blade clattered against roots, its light guttering out like a dying candle. SK stared at the remains for half a second.

"One bloody bastard down." Then pain exploded across his ribs. The tendril knight had found him. Black energy lashed from the shadows, wrapping around SK's torso and hoisting him into the air. He gasped, fingers scrabbling at the corruption-woven bonds. They burned. They bit. They fed.

"Got you," the Dishonored murmured, stepping into the clearing. SK's vision swam. He forced his hand into the sack again. The man tightened the tendrils. SK's ribs creaked. Something cracked. But his fingers found what they sought. A small glass sphere, no larger than a plum, filled with swirling amber liquid. He crushed it. The sphere exploded. Amber vapor erupted outward, engulfing both of them. The knight inhaled before he could stop himself. His eyes went wide.

The tendrils loosened instinctively as his body convulsed. SK dropped to the ground, gasping. The knight clawed at his own throat. The vapor had found his lungs. Amber light flickered beneath his skin, and blood seeped from his mouth as something seemed to be poking his insides. SK did not wait. He pushed himself upright, ribs screaming, and limped toward the treeline. A tendril grabbed his leg and threw him against a tree. The assailant, though in pain slowly rose to his feet, still grippng his torso.

SK sat up and vomited blood.

'Fuck.'

Back in the main clearing, Torvin and Jax had not moved. But their stances had shifted. Torvin's weight settled lower. Jax's spear angled slightly forward.

"You still haven't answered my question," Torvin said.

"You haven't asked one worth answering." Torvin's jaw tightened. The black veins along his neck pulsed.

"It's the girl, isn't it?" Jax's expression flickered—barely perceptible, but Torvin caught it.

"Raizelle's offspring. I saw you that day in the alley. She gave you something." Torvin's voice hardened.

"A fruit. A smile. And suddenly my oldest friend is a traitor."

"She's a child."

"She's not even our target." Jax moved. The spear thrust forward in a blur. Torvin pivoted, one disk blade rising to deflect. Steel rang against steel and Torvin took a step back. Jax pressed the advantage, driving forward with a second thrust, then a third. Torvin gave ground, disks spinning in tight arcs to keep the spear at bay. They separated. Then circled.

"You don't have to do this," Jax said quietly. Torvin laughed—a brittle, broken sound.

"Don't have to? Don't have to?" He threw one of the disks. Jax deflected it. The blade whirled past his ear, curved in a wide arc, and returned to Torvin's waiting hand.

"We've been atoning our whole lives," Torvin continued.

"Atoning to Nordhelm. Atoning from the brand. Atoning for what we did for her." He pointed the disk at Jax.

"When does our atonment end?"

"When we choose for it to end."

"Bullshit!" Torvin lunged. Their weapons met in a shower of sparks. Torvin's free hand shot forward, catching Jax's spear haft. He pulled hard, yanking Jax off balance, and drove his forehead into Jax's face. Cartilage crunched. Blood sprayed. Jax stumbled back, hand rising to his nose. It came away red. Torvin did not press the advantage. He stood where he was, breathing hard, black veins writhing beneath his skin like captive snakes.

"You think I don't feel it?" he asked, voice dropping—low, the old Torvin bleeding through.

"You think I don't lie awake remembering her smile? Her laugh? The way she called my name like I mattered?" Jax wiped blood from his lip.

"I idolized her." Torvin's voice cracked.

"More than the so called love you had for her. More than anyone. She was the first person who looked at me—a lowborn nobody—and saw someone worth knowing. Worth saving." He stepped forward. The veins pulsed darker.

"When the order came down, when they told us to let her die... I didn't hesitate. None of us did. We stood against the crown. We risked everything. We became this." He gestured at the brand on his neck.

"For her." Jax said nothing.

"And do you know what got me through the torture? The weeks of screaming in the dark for commiting treason?" Torvin's eyes glistened.

"Dreams. Dreams that she would come back. That our Prima Donna would return and make everything right. That she'd look at us and say 'well done' and we'd be f ree." His voice broke on the last word. Jax's grip on the spear trembled.

"But what did she do?" Torvin whispered.

"She ran. She married a foreigner and she was killed without achieving anything." He looked up at the sky, at the smoke drifting from distant Blackhaven.

"In the end, dreams don't come true."

"That's not fair."

"Fair?" Torvin laughed bitterly.

"You want to talk about fair? You, the highborn aristocrat... sorry, former highborn aristocrat, who knows things the rest of us never will? Is that what this is? You know something I don't?" A memory flickered through Jax's mind. Raizelle, standing in a garden, moonlight in her hair. Speaking words he couldn't quite hear. A secret meant for him alone.

"Torvin—""I've heard enough." Torvin raised his hand free hand toward his friend.

"Are you going to forget that dream and wake up to reality?" His voice hardened.

"Or are you going to choose fantasy and be cut down without achieving anything? Just like her." Jax looked at his friend. Really looked. The black veins covered his face now, pulsing with every heartbeat. His eyes held the old warmth, but it was drowning—sinking beneath something darker. The corruption had made him unstable. Irrational to the truth of their situation. He had given in to his own doubts and fears, beyond reach. Jax raised his spear. Torvin nodded once.

"So be it." The disk blade he Jax had deflected earlier accelerated from the tree stem. It whizzed past Jax's head, close enough to sever hair, and curved back toward Torvin's waiting hand. At the same moment, an explosion tore through the forest behind Jax—amber flame and black smoke rising in a pillar. SK had managed to kill his second assailant. Torvin's eyes flicked toward the flames. Just for an instant. Jax almost moved. But before either could act, a meteor crashed into the clearing.

The impact threw both men backward—Jax tumbling through undergrowth, Torvin slamming into a trunk hard enough to crack bark. Dirt and smoke billowed outward. Trees splintered. The ground itself seemed to scream. When the dust settled, a figure straightened in the crater. Roric Thorne rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and looked left. Then right.

"Only two left, huh?" He said after expanding his perception. He spun his axe once, letting the weight settle in his grip.

"No problem. I'll soon fix that error."

A mile away, Lyle stumbled through the darkness. His lungs burned. His legs shook. As a Votary he should have had superior physical stats. But he wasn't physically the best even by that standard and mostly relied on his Trait. The forest offered no comfort—only shadows that seemed to move when he wasn't looking. He collapsed against a tree, gasping. Then the shockwave hit. It tore through the forest like the breath of a god. Trees bent. Leaves stripped. Lyle's clothes flapped in the gust it created.

His fur hat tumbled end over end, disappearing into darkness. He didn't go after it. Instead, he straightened slowly. Somewhere in the distance, the forest rumbled with violence. And on Lyle's head, where there had been only bald skin, short white hair now caught the moonlight. He groaned and ran toward the rumbling.