Chương 121: Chapter 120 – The Line Holds

The first of them through the trees wasn't wearing purple and orange-red at all. No disguise left on any of them now — plain dark leathers, unmarked. Whoever was behind this hadn't needed the colours to fool anyone anymore. The fooling was already done. This was the part where they finished what the trick had bought them time to set up.

Nine of them, moving into the clearing with the unhurried confidence of people who had never once considered losing, and not one of them alone — each handler had a Kithren of their own pressed close at heel, dark-scaled and quick, nothing like the shardbacks or the untamed pack from three days back.

And ahead of all of it, low and long-bodied, scales the colour of old blood, a Kithren unlike anything Sam had seen even in the bestiary sketches — fast where the shardbacks had been slow, precise where the dark-scaled pack had been merely disciplined. Sam's lens flickered before he'd consciously thought to raise it, some old reflex from a hundred drills catching the movement and reading it on instinct. [Kithren — Epic Grade. Serpent-type. Level — unreadable.] He didn't need the confirmation.

He held onto it, because a confirmed number was worth more to Duncan later than a guess, assuming there was a later left to report it in.

"Voss. Get our original line moving, now, back the way we came, past the marker tree, straight to Rushbrook. Don't stop for anything."

"We're not leaving you—""You're not staying here to die for nothing." Sam didn't raise his voice.

"Somebody needs to tell Ant what's going on — the colours, the cloth, all of it. That's you. Go." Voss grabbed Orlo by the arm and turned, and the eleven of them broke for the treeline at a dead run. Sam didn't watch them go. The nine dark-leathered fighters spread out as they crossed the clearing, fanning wide to flank rather than pressing straight in, and Sam read the maneuver fast enough to shout before they'd finished forming it.

"Rocks at our backs. Nobody stands alone." Vell and the outer patrol's people scrambled into position around him just as the first of the flanking pair closed the distance, and the formation held by inches rather than by margin. Then the first wave hit. Sam took the nearest of the dark-leathered fighters with a lance thrust through the ribs, wrenched the point free, and turned into the second one's swing before the first had finished falling.

Candice went past him low, meeting the man's own dark-scaled Kithren head-on rather than the man himself — a lean, armor-plated thing built low to the ground, quick enough that she took a shallow gash along one ear closing the distance before her jaws found its throat first. A spike through the man's own leg dropped him a heartbeat later, and neither of them slowed down to watch either one die.

"Watch the flanks!" Vell shouted.

"They're trying to split us!" A third fighter came at Sam from the side, his own Kithren cutting in low at the same instant to force a split second's hesitation between the two threats. Sam gave the beast the shaft of the lance across the skull hard enough to stagger it off its line, then caught the man's blade and drove the point through his thigh, then through his throat on the follow-through.

The Kithren came back in dazed rather than deterred, and Sam finished it with a short, brutal thrust before it found its feet properly. A fourth fighter came in right behind the third, no pause between them, and Sam took the man's first swing on the haft, turned it wide, and opened his throat on the return stroke before he'd recovered his stance. Vell took two more down in the same handful of seconds, blade moving fast and hard.

"You'll have to do better than that," she told the fifth one, and put a blade through his sword arm, and finished him a heartbeat later. The serpent-thing didn't engage. It circled at the clearing's edge, watching, patient in a way none of its handlers' Kithren had been. Sam took a hit across the ribs, turned mostly by a half-step backward he hadn't consciously chosen. He answered with the lance's butt into the man's jaw, then the point through the gap in his guard, and kept moving.

"Sam, right!" A woman's voice, one of the outer patrol's own. Sam pivoted on the warning alone, caught a strike aimed at his back on the flat of the lance instead of eating it clean, and put the man down with a reversed strike that cracked ribs on the way through. Candice took a hit of her own — a blade across the ribs, where her build ran thinnest. She turned into the strike instead of away from it, closed the gap, and put her jaw around the man's forearm. He went down before he understood he'd lost.

She rode the momentum straight into the fighter beside him, ice forming before her paws touched ground again, and put a spike through his throat before he'd finished raising his own blade. A sixth fighter met a raised foreleg with a downward blade and lost the sword for it, torn clean from his grip. Candice finished him and turned straight into the seventh, ice already re-forming along her spine, blood running from two wounds she hadn't stopped for.

The outer patrol's lead took a bad cut across the gut from the eighth fighter and folded, dragged clear by two of Vell's people. A third stepped into the gap. Sam took a glancing cut to the calf closing that same gap, drove in from the side while the eighth man's attention was still on the wounded lead, and put the lance in under his ribs, out through his back. The ninth came at Sam with a two-handed blow meant to end it outright. He took it on the shaft, driven back a full step, both hands numbed to the wrist.

He drove forward through the numbness anyway and put the man down. Nine dark-leathered fighters. Not one of them standing, and not one of their own Kithren standing either. Bodies littered the mud in every direction Sam looked, more than he'd bothered to count. Sam and Candice stood back to back a moment, both bleeding, surrounded by bodies neither of them should have been able to put down alone. Vell caught his eye across the clearing and said nothing.

You're bleeding worse than you're letting on, Candice said, low, just for him. So are you. Good thing neither of us plans on stopping to compare notes. The serpent-thing still hadn't moved. It sat coiled at the treeline's edge, watching the aftermath the way it had watched everything else — unhurried, indifferent to the loss of nine handlers and nine Kithren, as if the whole first wave had only ever been the price of admission for something it actually cared about seeing.

Then more of them came through the trees behind it. A second wave, fresh where the first nine had been ground down — more dark leathers, more Kithren at heel, and Sam felt whatever strength the short pause had given him drain straight back out through the soles of his boots.

"Positions!" Vell was already moving, dragging two of her people back into the gap the fallen had left. A dark-leathered fighter caught Sam from the blind side before he'd finished resetting his stance. A blade opened his sword arm from elbow to wrist, and the arm went dead and useless in the same instant. Sam moved the lance to his other hand, clumsy at first, and drove it through the man's chest regardless. He fought the rest of it left-handed. One of the second wave found the gap his ruined guard left open.

Sam took the strike across the ribs rather than dodge it clean and used the half-second it bought him to put the lance through the man's throat instead. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. One of the second wave's own Kithren broke from the treeline behind them, a heavier build than the first pack, plated across the back like something between a boar and a lizard, and came at Sam's blind side while he was still finishing the second man.

He caught the charge on the lance's shaft rather than his ribs, driven back a full step by the weight of it, and one of Vell's people drove a spear into its flank from the side before it could recover — between the two of them it went down choking into the mud. Two more came at him together, coordinated, one high and one low, and Sam took the low strike on his boot rather than his leg, stamping down hard enough to break the blade's angle, while the high strike went wide over a duck he barely had time to commit to.

He answered the low one first — a downward strike into the back of the man's neck while he was still recovering his balance — then rolled the lance up and around into the second man's ribs before he'd finished his own follow-through. Both went down inside two seconds of each other.

"Sam, on your six!" Vell, somewhere behind him, still moving despite everything already thrown at her that day. Sam turned and caught the new attacker's first swing on the shaft, gave ground, gave more ground, and finally found the gap he needed when the man overextended chasing him — a single thrust, in and out, and the man dropped without a sound.

A few feet away, one of Vell's remaining people finally ran down a fast, low Kithren that had been harrying the group's flank for a full minute, cornering it against the rocks and putting it down alone before it found another gap to slip through. Vell went down in the middle of all of it, three fighters converging at once, and took one with her before the other two finished it. Sam heard the gap in the noise where her voice had been and kept fighting.

Two more of Vell's people fell covering the space where she'd stood. A dark-leathered fighter got past Sam's ruined guard and opened a line across his good shoulder. He answered left-handed and off-balance, the strike landing hard rather than clean, driving the man back into the reach of the outer patrol's last fighter, who finished it.

"How's the arm," that man shouted, already moving to the next threat.

"Still attached," Sam said.

"Barely." Two more of the second wave came at him almost together, and Sam backed into the rocks rather than let them circle him, forcing them to come at him one at a time through the narrow gap the stone left open. The first died on the lance. The second, smarter, tried to go around the rock instead of through the gap, and Candice caught him there instead, a spike through the back of the knee dropping him before he'd finished the maneuver.

A third came at him from the opposite side while he was still recovering, and this time Sam didn't have the angle to meet him clean — the blade caught him across the forearm of his one working arm, shallow but enough to make the next grip on the lance slick with his own blood. He'd have taken worse if the outer patrol's last fighter hadn't put a blade through the man's back before the follow-up swing landed.

The second wave thinned like the first had, fighter by fighter, Kithren by Kithren, until the outer patrol's remaining people numbered two and Sam's own arm hung useless at his side and Candice was bleeding from four separate places she hadn't stopped to acknowledge. The clearing had gone quiet the way a battlefield does right before someone decides it's over — no more dark leathers left standing, no more Kithren left to throw at the gap. Only the serpent-thing was left. And only now did it finally move.

It came off the treeline at a speed that made every fight before this one look like practice, and it didn't go for Sam. It went for Candice. She saw it a half-second before he did — turned, ice gathering along her spine, meeting the strike head-on rather than trying to outrun a speed she couldn't beat. The impact threw her into the rocks hard enough that Sam felt it in his own chest. She got up. Blood ran down one foreleg where the plating had opened her to the bone.

She got up anyway and put herself back between the serpent-thing and the nearest of the wounded. The second strike caught her across the flank and pinned her — one leg bent wrong beneath her, no way left to rise. Sam screamed her name across the clearing in a voice that didn't sound like his own. She kept fighting anyway. Flat on the ground, unable to stand, she turned her head toward the last dark-leathered straggler still moving and put a spike through his knee. He went down screaming before he reached anyone.

The next came at her from the other side, thinking a downed Kithren meant an easy kill. Her spike caught him through the boot and froze it solid to the earth mid-stride, and he pitched forward off his own trapped foot hard enough to snap the ankle inside it.

A third came in low, staying under whatever she could still throw, and she waited until he was close enough that dodging wouldn't have saved him before catching him across the throat with a spike thrown from nearly flat on her back, the angle wrong, the strength behind it barely a fraction of what it should have been, and it was still enough.

A fourth got close enough to raise his blade over her exposed neck, and her last spike caught him in the eye before the blade finished its arc, and he fell across her without ever completing the swing. Four kills, from the ground, with half her body already gone. The serpent-thing finished it on the fifth pass. Her voice in his head cut off mid-word. Not fading. Gone. Sam didn't scream a second time. What came out of him instead carried him across the clearing before good sense caught up to it.

The lance took the serpent-thing in the flank hard enough to crack scale, and it staggered, and Sam pressed into the opening without slowing down to check whether it was safe to. It came at him a second time, faster, angrier, jaws snapping for the arm he still had use of. Sam threw himself sideways rather than meet it square, took the ground hard on his bad hip, and came back up swinging before the pain of the landing had finished registering.

The lance caught it under the jaw this time, driving up and in, and it screamed properly for the first time all fight, a sound that carried past the treeline and out into whatever was still listening beyond it. A tail-strike he barely turned aside caught him across the hip instead of the spine it had aimed for, and put him down on one knee. He got back up.

The two remaining outer patrol fighters fought back to back a dozen feet from him, trading kills between them with the kind of desperate coordination that came from having nothing left to lose. Sam couldn't spare the attention to watch them properly. He heard one of them go down grunting rather than screaming, and heard the other one keep fighting alone, still calling out warnings to a partner who could no longer answer them. The serpent-thing circled him twice, testing angles, and found none it liked.

It came in regardless, jaws wide, and Sam met it with the lance braced against his own hip, letting the creature's own weight drive the point deeper than his arm alone could have managed. It reared back off the impaling blow, screaming, blood pouring freely from the wound now instead of seeping, and didn't come in a third time. It circled him once more, wide, wary, favoring the leg on its wounded side.

Sam matched the circle rather than let it choose the angle, forcing it to keep giving ground it clearly didn't want to give, and for one strange, suspended moment the two of them simply stood there measuring each other across ten feet of bloodied mud — one exhausted man on his feet through pure refusal, and something Epic-grade that had learned, too late, exactly what that refusal was worth. He stayed on his feet through it. Nobody had peeled off to chase Voss's line.

Every one of them was still here, still committed to this clearing, still spending everything they had on one bleeding man and a handful of dying strangers instead of eleven people already running for Rushbrook.

"Left side!" Sam called, and the outer patrol's last fighter moved without asking why, covering the flank he could no longer watch himself. The serpent-thing broke off at last, pulling back, wary now in a way it hadn't been at the start. The last of the outer patrol dragged himself clear along the rocks, bleeding, somehow still breathing. Sam let him go.

Nine of the enemy's dead from the first wave, and however many the second had taken to put down — he'd lost the count somewhere past the fifth or sixth, too busy staying alive to keep a tally worth trusting. The serpent-thing bleeding out from three separate wounds somewhere past the treeline. That was the whole of the clearing now — Sam, and what was left in it. Candice. Nothing answered. He looked down at her once and made himself look away again.

He held the ground anyway, one arm dead, blood running warm down his side, lance still in his one working hand, in case anyone still needed the extra few seconds it would buy them. His legs had started shaking somewhere in the last few minutes without his permission, a fine, constant tremor he couldn't will away no matter how hard he set his jaw against it, and he stayed upright through it because staying upright was the only order left worth giving himself, and there was no one left to give it to him instead.

The wind moved through the clearing, carrying the smell of blood and churned earth and something colder underneath it that he didn't have the strength left to name. Somewhere far off, past the treeline, past the marker tree, he thought he heard something that might have been voices — might have been Voss's line making it clear, might have been nothing at all but his own blood roaring loud enough in his ears to sound like hope. He chose to believe it was the first one.

Believing that took nothing from him, and it was the only thing left that still could give anything back. He didn't hear the second Kithren at all. It crossed the last few feet of ground behind him without a sound, and Sam had no warning of it beyond the faintest change in the air, a half-instant too late to matter.

The hair on the back of his neck rose anyway, some animal instinct older than sound or sight both, and Sam understood before he'd even finished turning that this was the one he wasn't going to walk away from. I'm sorry, brother. He turned anyway. Whatever instinct was left in him after everything the clearing had already taken, it turned his body one final time toward the dark. He didn't see what it was. There wasn't time.