Chương 109: Chapter 108 – Petra's Grief

"Yes," Ant said, before he could talk himself out of it a second time. The prompt blinked once and vanished. For a breath, nothing happened — the gem just sat there in his palm, warm and stupid-looking, like it hadn't understood him. Then the light went out of it all at once, and everything it had been holding came out at the same time. It wasn't like the first one. The first one had been a haze he could half-convince himself, afterward, that he'd exaggerated in the retelling.

This was a rope of violet-white mana as thick as his forearm, pouring out of a stone the size of a fist and pouring into him through the hand that held it, and it didn't stop building the way he expected it to. It kept building. His skin lit from beneath, veins standing out gold-white under it, and somewhere in the middle of the room somebody swore.

"Ant!" Maren's voice, already moving. He couldn't have answered if he'd wanted to. The mana had found some register past pain, somewhere closer to pressure — his whole body one closed fist, every part of him clenched around the thing pouring into it. He heard Mahkir's voice, or felt it, the two not quite distinguishable anymore, and couldn't make sense of the words.

"Back up. All of you, back up, give him room." Kalsar's voice cut clean through the noise the way it always did, already between Ant and the crowd before the sentence finished.

"Maren, you know how this goes?"

"I know how this goes." She was at Ant's other side now, close but not touching, hands out like she might need to catch something.

"It looks worse than it is. It looked worse than this the first time too."

"Whatever that is," Andy said, flat, not moving from where he stood, eyes on the light pouring off Ant rather than on Ant himself, "it's not natural. Not for a person." Nobody answered him. Nobody had the room to. It went on. Longer than the first one had, though Ant had no way to measure it from inside — no sense of seconds passing, just the pressure building past every point he'd have called a limit and finding another one past it.

The barrier around him this time wasn't a wall so much as a second skin, mana clinging so close it might have been coming out of his pores rather than the gem, catching every scrap of torchlight in the chamber and throwing it back gold. Somewhere outside it, Bastian had gone very still, Coil coiled tight around his ankle. Nadia had a hand half-raised toward her bow and nowhere to point it.

Garrick just watched, arms crossed, mouth pressed into a flat line — not confused, cataloguing, the way a man watches a fire to see which direction it's about to jump. Then it stopped. Not faded — stopped, all of it drawn back into him in under a second, gone so completely that the sudden absence felt like its own kind of blow. Ant's knees found the stone floor without his say-so. Somebody — Kalsar, from the size of the hand — caught his shoulder before he went all the way down.

"There." Maren, crouched at his other side now, voice pitched low, for him alone.

"That part's over. Breathe." He breathed. The chamber came back into focus a piece at a time — the smell first, old rust and older dust and that thin sweetness underneath he still hadn't fully placed, then the ring of faces around him, then the text sitting where it always sat, patient, waiting for him to be ready to read it. [Magic Gem successfully absorbed.] [Magic +15. Mana +100.] [New Skill Unlocked — Restore: fully restores the HP and Mana of a selected bonded Kithren. Cooldown: 24 hours.] [New Skill Unlocked — Water Element: apply water-based damage to attacks, for User or bonded Kithren.] [New Skill Unlocked — Group Buff: while three or more friendly Kithren are engaged in battle, apply a +10% bonus to all their stats.] He read that last one twice. Friendly. How did it even know what that meant. He hadn't told it who was friendly. Nobody had told it anything.

It just — knew, or claimed to, the same easy confidence it had about everything else, and he had no idea where the line sat between the two. He didn't get long to sit with the question. The text hadn't finished. [System evolution in progress. Upgrading to Level 3.] The second wave hit before he'd braced for it, and this one wasn't outside him at all.

No light this time, nothing anyone else could see — just his own skull, from the inside, feeling like something was being taken apart in there with more urgency than the first time and less care about putting it back the same way. He heard himself make a sound he wasn't proud of. It lasted, by every clock that mattered to a body in that state, somewhere close to an hour. It was ten seconds. Maybe twelve. [System is now Level 3.] He waited for the rest of it — a new tab, a stat bump laid out plain, anything to focus on while the ringing in his skull settled. Nothing came. No Magic tab this time, no fresh skill sitting under it waiting to be read. Just the flat confirmation and then silence, like the system had said everything it planned to say and considered the matter closed. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Interesting, he thought, distantly, in the same part of his mind that was still trying to remember how his own hands worked. You okay? Mahkir's voice arrived close and careful, none of the usual needling in it. That looked worse this time. Sounded worse too, if it matters.

"Yeah." His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

"Don't think I'll ever get used to that." Good. Means you're still capable of noticing it hurts. He got his feet back under him with Kalsar's hand still on one shoulder and Maren's steadying his other arm, and only once he was upright did he actually look around at who'd gathered. His own people, mostly — Kalsar close on one side, Maren on the other, Andy a few steps back with his arms still crossed, watching Ant now instead of Mahkir for once.

Behind them, Nadia and Bastian and Garrick stood in a loose knot, and none of them were bothering to hide what was on their faces. Not fear exactly. Something closer to the look people got standing too near a fire that had just decided, on its own, to burn a different color.

"You want to explain that," Nadia said. Not a question, quite. Faster than she meant it, the way her words usually got when something rattled her.

"I'm fine." He heard how thin it sounded even as it left him.

"Fight took more out of me than I thought. That's all that was." Nobody in the room believed him. He could see it land and slide right off — Kalsar's mouth twitching like he wanted to say something and deciding against it, Maren's eyes flicking to his and away again. Nobody called him on it out loud. That would come later, once there weren't strangers standing close enough to hear it. Not here, not now, with a dead Kithren still lying against the wall and Petra somewhere above them not able to look at anyone.

"Let's get out of here," Ant said, and started for the passage.

"Wait." Garrick hadn't moved. He was crouched at Anvil's side, one broad hand resting against the plating along its flank, and when he stood it was with the slow, deliberate care of a man lifting a weight he intended to carry a long way. Ashclaw came in low behind him, and between them they got the body settled across the Epic's back, Garrick's hand staying flat against it the whole time like he could hold it steady through sheer will.

"We leave no one behind. Certainly not a Kithren who deserves better than being left to rot in a hole because it's inconvenient to carry." Nobody argued with that either. They went single file back up through the passage, Garrick and Ashclaw at the front now instead of the rear, the weight of what they carried setting the pace for everyone behind them.

Ant fell in beside Mahkir, one hand resting light against the fur at his shoulder, feeling the too-fast rhythm of his breathing settle by degrees the farther they walked from the chamber. A dead Kithren is never a good thing, the thought came, quiet, almost gentle. He looked down at Mahkir without really meaning to.

"No," he said.

"I can't imagine how I'd feel if it was you." Mahkir's ears flattened, just slightly. It's not. So focus on the task at hand.

"I am." You're not. You've got that look. He let it go. Whatever look Mahkir meant, it wasn't worth arguing about here, with Garrick's back three feet ahead of him and a dead Kithren's tail swaying with every step Ashclaw took. The passage opened out into daylight that felt too bright after the violet-lit dark, and the smell changed with it — hot metal and scorched match giving way to something drier, ash and old stone baking under a sun that hadn't noticed anything had happened underground at all.

The bowl spread out around them, dead ground in every direction, and near its rim, Natalia sat with Petra beside her. Petra hadn't moved much since Ant had last seen her. Knees drawn up, hands loose in her lap now instead of pressed to her chest, staring at a fixed point on the ground the way she had in the chamber. Natalia had one arm around her, not saying anything, just present. Andy went first.

He crossed the ground without hesitating, knelt in front of Petra so he was looking up at her rather than down, and didn't reach for her hand or her shoulder — just stayed there, steady, until she looked at him.

"She died a hero," he said. Plain, no flourish in it at all.

"That won't mean anything right now. Might not for a while. But it's true, and it'll still be true later, when you're ready to hear it." Petra didn't answer. Her throat moved once, swallowing something down, and she looked back at the ground. Nadia went next, quick and quiet, a hand on Petra's knee and three words Ant didn't catch. Bastian hung back until Kalsar's hand found his shoulder and pushed, gently, and then he managed a few sentences that came out young and unpolished and probably meant more for that.

Maren knelt and just held Petra's hand for a long moment, saying nothing at all, which seemed to land better than anything spoken had. Then it was Ant's turn, and he had no idea what he was supposed to say. He'd killed men. He'd watched Kithren die before — Shell Razor's, strangers', enemies whose deaths he'd never once lost sleep over.

This was different in a way he didn't have words ready for, and everyone was waiting, and Petra was still staring at that same patch of dirt like it owed her an answer nobody else could give. Tell her that protecting the one you're bonded to is the highest thing either of you can do for the other, the thought came, unhurried, certain of itself in a way his own thoughts rarely were. And that using the life it bought her is hers to spend now, in memory of the one who spent theirs first. He said it.

Word for word, near enough, kneeling the way Andy had, keeping his voice low. Petra's eyes came up to his for the first time since they'd left the chamber. Her mouth opened, closed again with nothing in it, and her chin dipped once instead — the fight going out of her shoulders on the exhale that followed. He stood, and looked down at Mahkir, and something in him wanted to say it out loud before he'd thought better of it.

"When did you get so insightful?" Mahkir's head came up sharp. Ant. I didn't say anything.

"You—" He stopped. Turned it over. Nothing had passed between them on the bond in the last minute, nothing he could point to — none of the warmth that always came through when Mahkir actually spoke, no sense of him leaning in from the other side of it. Just the words, arriving from somewhere, sounding for all the world like they belonged to him. Mahkir hadn't looked away. His ears were back again, further this time, and there was nothing dry in his voice at all. Ant. What's going on.

"Nothing." The lie came out before he'd thought of a better one. You keep saying that. He didn't have an answer for that either. Somewhere behind him Natalia was helping Petra to her feet, and the rest of the group was starting to sort itself for the walk back, and none of it felt as far away as it should have.

"Great," he muttered, mostly to himself.

"Now I'm going mad and hearing voices."