Chương 108: Chapter 107 – The One Nobody Picked

The eight of them hit the fight without breaking stride, the way people move when they've spent the last hour running and haven't decided yet whether to stop.

"Fire!" Kalsar's voice cracked out over the noise, hoarse from the last ten minutes of shouting it.

"Anyone's got it, use it now — it doesn't like fire!"

"Lem!" Rebekah was already drawing, bow half-raised before her boots had properly found the floor.

"Fire. Now." The fox blurred at her heel, color sliding through him the way it did whenever he changed what he was — wind to fire, the shift catching the light differently, warmer now, quicker to flare. She loosed without waiting to see the change finish, and the arrow went out already burning, a thin bright line that didn't waver the way fire off an arrow had any right to waver in flight.

It caught the thing high in the shoulder, and for the first time since it had folded itself out of the crack in the wall, it made a sound that wasn't the tearing-cloth scream from before. Higher this time, thinner — a sound that had learned, in the last ten seconds, that this hurt worse than the others. Ant's mana was gone.

He knew that the way he knew his own hands — no flicker of hope reaching for a skill that wasn't there, just the flat fact of it sitting in his chest while he pulled Mahkir bodily off the stone by the scruff, careful of the shoulder, careless of everything else.

"Up. Come on. Up." I'm up. Mahkir wasn't. He got his front legs under him, swayed, found something that passed for standing. Twenty HP doesn't mean dead. Means it made a grave error not finishing me off.

"Show it what you got left." The chamber had gone from a fight to something closer to a hunt — eighteen more bodies crowding a space that had already felt small with half that many in it. Raven's team came in from the left, Thomas already shouting for people to mind the crack in the wall rather than stand near it, Sam saying nothing at all and putting an arrow through the thing's shoulder before anyone else had finished getting their bearings.

His Candice followed a half-step behind him with a spray of ice spikes that hissed where they landed and didn't fully melt. The thing turned, turned again, hunting for the gap that wasn't there anymore. Ashclaw caught its knee. Striata came in low under a swing that would've taken her head off a fight ago and wasn't fast enough to catch her now. Ant. Mahkir's voice had gone thin, stretched tight over the strain of it, more effort now than pain. One more. I've got one more in me.

"Mahkir—" One more. He didn't wait for permission this time. Fire built in his throat, visible even before it left him, and Ant felt it through the bond the way you feel someone spending the last coin in their pocket — not a decision, just the plain fact of nothing left after this.

The breath came out ragged at the edges, thinner than it should have been, but it landed square in the chest wound Cindermaw's flame had already opened, and this time the thing didn't recover ground the way it had every other time fire had touched it.

It came apart properly this time, all at once, no pause and no retreat into the wall to wait it out — the violet light running through it simply stopped holding together, threads of it unraveling in every direction at once, the whole of it dropping into motes of drifting color that dimmed and went out before they reached the floor. Nobody moved for a second. Then Nadia let out a breath that broke into a short laugh, sharp and disbelieving, and the chamber exhaled with her. [Wraithkin (Anomaly) defeated. Experience gained: 6, 000.] [Mahkir — 14, 325/32, 000 to Level 9.] [You have reached Level 12.] [Str 52 | End 59 | Magic 43 | Agi 62 | HP 97/97 | Mana 185/185.] [Ant — 700/15, 800 to Level 13.] Level twelve barely registered. Ant left the number where it sat, more urgent problem right in front of him, and got moving before the screen had finished fading.

Mahkir's legs finally gave out from under him — not collapse, just a slow, deliberate lowering, the way a body settles once it's decided the fight is actually over and not a moment before. Ant went down next to him without thinking about it, one hand flat against his side, feeling the ribs rise and fall too fast and too shallow underneath.

"You're an idiot," Ant said, quiet, meaning it the way he meant most things he said to Mahkir like that. Accurate. A pause, longer than usual. Still won, though.

"We won." Semantics. Around them, the violet light bleeding out of the chamber's walls had gone dull and grey, the residue finally spent, and for the first time since they'd crossed into this level of the vortex, the room held still enough to actually see. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. It wasn't empty the way it should have been.

Armor sat scattered against the far wall in pieces too corroded to be recent — a breastplate gone green with age, a helm with the visor rusted shut, the leather beneath all of it long since rotted to nothing. Weapons lay half-buried in the settling dust, blades pitted, one hilt still standing upright where it had been driven into a crack in the floor and left. And bones — not many, but enough, scattered and half-covered, the kind of remains that told a story nobody in the room wanted told out loud.

The smell hit Ant properly once the fighting stopped giving him something else to focus on — old dust and older rust, and underneath both of them the sweet, faintly rotten smell of something that had died in this room a long time ago and never left it. Nobody had come out of this room in a very long time. Somebody had tried.

"Petra." Natalia's voice cut through it, and Ant looked over to find her already moving, already down at Petra's level where she'd been kneeling since the fight ended — kneeling and not speaking, both hands still pressed flat against her own chest the way they'd been the moment it happened, like the pressure might hold something in that had already gone.

"I'm here." Natalia didn't touch her right away. Just got low, got close, got her voice down low, meant for one person instead of a room.

"I'm right here." Petra didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed on a point on the floor that didn't have anything on it worth looking at. Nadia crouched on her other side, quiet now in a way that didn't match anything Ant had seen from her yet, one hand hovering an inch off Petra's shoulder like she wasn't sure touch would help or make it worse. Garrick stood a few feet back with Ashclaw pressed against his leg, saying nothing, syllables catching somewhere behind his teeth every time he opened his mouth to try.

Bastian hung further back still, Coil wound tight around his ankle, watching without moving, the way someone watches a thing that could easily have happened to them instead.

"Thank you." Natalia said it without turning, pitched to carry to the whole crowd of new arrivals without losing anything for Petra.

"All of you. However you got here, whatever you left half-finished to make it — thank you." Her voice caught on the last word, and she let it stand instead of smoothing it over. Rebekah lowered her bow slowly. Ray's grin, still hanging around from the doorway, faded into open discomfort — the first time Ant had ever seen him not quite know what to do with his own face.

"We'll get her back to the surface," Natalia said, standing, one hand finally settling on Petra's shoulder the way it hadn't a moment ago.

"The rest of you—" she looked around the chamber, at the scattered gear, at the eighteen new bodies crowding into a space that had already claimed one life today, "—take what you need. Rare, common, doesn't matter whose banner you're flying. Nobody in this room walks out of it with nothing after what it cost to clear."

"You're sure?" Kalsar asked, not quite a challenge, more a last check he needed to hear answered out loud.

"I'm sure." She was already turning Petra gently toward the passage, her attention narrowing down to the one thing she'd decided actually mattered right now.

"I'll take her up myself." Nobody argued with that. Kalsar crouched next to Mahkir once Natalia and Petra had gone, running a hand along his flank with more gentleness than the gesture usually carried from him.

"Twenty HP," he said, not quite a question.

"He's stubborn," Ant said.

"It'll climb."

"It'll climb faster if he stops using it as a personality trait." But Kalsar's hand stayed where it was a moment longer than the line needed, and when he stood he looked older than he had walking into the chamber, the last hour sitting on him the way it hadn't during the fight itself. Andy came to stand near them without a word, arms crossed, eyes on Mahkir the way they always went, though for once he didn't say anything about it either.

The room settled into a quieter register once Natalia had gone — not comfortable, not really, but functional, people moving through the scattered gear with the careful, deliberate hands of a group that knew exactly what had happened here and didn't want to be the one who forgot it first. Ray picked through a pile of corroded plate with real focus for once, no patter running under it, holding up a warped buckler and setting it back down without comment.

Duncan and Hazel — arrived with the other team, Ant realized belatedly, HQ's whole rotation finally converged in one place — worked a section near the wall in silence, Hazel running her thumb along the edge of a pitted blade like she could read its history off the rust alone. Rebekah crouched by a scatter of arrowheads with Lem investigating each one in turn, nose first, before she let herself touch it.

Ant let Appraisal loose across the room the way Rank Two let him — not one thing at a time anymore, everything at once, arriving in that dense blur he'd never quite gotten used to. Grades scrolled past faster than he could hold onto them individually. Common. Common. Rare, a set of vambraces someone had already claimed. Rare again. Then one entry that didn't read like the rest.

It sat folded near the base of the wall, unremarkable enough that two people had already stepped past it without a second look — a dark cloak, plain at a glance, the kind of thing that wouldn't turn a head in a market stall. Ant almost walked past it himself. Appraisal caught on it anyway, the read arriving slower than the others had, more deliberate, the way it had when he'd first pointed it at Hexa back at the tournament. [Soul Veil. Cloak. Str +3, Agi +3, End +3, Magic +20. Skill — Stats can be enhanced by Magic. Grade: Epic.] He read it twice before he trusted it.

"A named item," he said, mostly to himself, crouching to pick it up. It weighed almost nothing. The fabric ran through his fingers strange, cooler than it should have been in a room this stale, and the Magic bonus sat there on the readout looking wrong for an item nobody else had given a second look.

"Ant." Maren's voice, closer than he'd registered her getting. She'd stopped a few feet off, eyes on the cloak rather than him, arms crossed the way they got when she was working something out before she said it out loud.

"This will probably suit you more than anyone else here. It's the same as the other one, isn't it?" He looked at what she was actually holding out to him — not a question about the cloak at all. A gem, fist-sized, glowing the same deep blue as the one that had put him on the floor of that first vortex chamber for a full minute, back before either of them had known what it would do to him.

"Yeah," he said.

"It is." He worked the old cloak off his shoulders first — the same Common-grade thing Hazel had handed him what felt like a lifetime ago, gone soft and thin at the seams from years of wear — and settled the new one in its place. It sat lighter than it looked, and for one strange second the fabric seemed to breathe with him, or he imagined it did, which came to about the same thing. First epic, Mahkir said, still down on the stone but watching now with an edge sharper than exhaustion. Took you long enough.

"Not now." Ant took the gem from Maren's outstretched hand. It was warm. Warmer than the last one, or maybe he just remembered that part wrong. The pull came the second his fingers closed around it — not painful yet, just present, a low hum behind his eyes that hadn't been there a breath ago. [Magic Gem detected.] [Absorb? Y/N]