Chương 147: Chapter 146 - One Angry Turtle

The hole where the wall used to stand was still smoking when Ant went through it, and the ground on the other side showed him exactly what the blast had actually done. Bodies lay where it had thrown them, people and Kithren both, most of them still in the shapes they'd fallen into: one man face down with both arms flung wide, a Kithren the size of a dog on its back with its legs stiff in the air, a woman half-buried under a fallen roof beam who hadn't so much as raised a hand against it.

None of them had seen it coming. That much was obvious from how they'd landed. Further back, past the worst of it, the injuries got stranger rather than lighter. A man sat holding his own forearm at an angle it wasn't built for, a length of splintered timber still driven through the meat of it. Someone else was dragging a leg that wouldn't take weight, blood soaking through cloth wrapped hastily around a gash that looked like it had come from flying stone rather than a blade.

Distance from the blast hadn't kept anyone safe from what it had thrown. If Ant had let himself believe one explosion would be enough to finish a clan this size, the sight in front of him already proved otherwise. Shouts rose from every direction at once, hoarse and disoriented, as people who'd been thrown flat started dragging themselves back up. A horn sounded somewhere off to his right, then a second answering it further out.

Near the sewer gate, figures were already pouring in from the tree line beyond it, fast enough that Ant understood immediately: those weren't the guards who'd been caught in the blast. Those were reinforcements, arriving to fill a gap that hadn't finished opening yet. He triggered Appraisal without breaking stride, letting the skill do what it had done since the reader-lens integration awhile ago, reading everything in his field of view at once rather than one target at a time.

The dense blur of information that came back was exactly as much as it always was, too much to parse cleanly in a single glance, but four shapes in it stood out from the noise the way they always did. Epic. Epic. Epic. And then, unreadable where a level should have sat, a fourth read that resolved a half-second later into a name he already knew. Sunclaw. Somehow gone from this field entirely once the last one went down, and here again tonight, no worse for whatever had taken it out of the fight before.

"Four Epics," Ant shouted, loud enough to carry over the noise around him.

"Sunclaw's one of them, east side, near the collapsed section." He didn't wait to see who'd heard him properly.

"Cindermaw, Ashclaw, take one each of the other three. Andy, Sunclaw's yours." That left one more unaccounted for, a fourth shape Appraisal had barely resolved before the fight swallowed his attention elsewhere. Three Epics of his own against four of theirs was a bad trade, and there was nothing to do about it right now except keep fighting and hope it didn't matter before the night was over. Andy didn't answer in words.

He simply changed direction, and beside him Hexa's six heads turned as one toward the east, already moving before the rest of her caught up. Duncan went past Ant a heartbeat later at a dead run, Shelly keeping pace beside him with a speed that shouldn't have belonged to something her size. She'd spent years being the thing that stood and absorbed, patient under every hit that came her way while Duncan directed the fight around her. There was none of that patience in her now.

She hit the first cluster of Marigolds fighters shoulder-first, scattering three of them clear off their feet before any of them got a weapon up, and Duncan followed the gap she'd opened with his shield already swinging. Marigolds had killed his brother. Ant had promised him this night would come, the people responsible finally standing in front of him instead of somewhere out of reach, and Duncan meant to make every one of them answer for it.

Ant found Maren and Axel a few strides further on, already engaged with two fighters who'd tried to flank a wounded man crawling for cover. Axel took the first one on a raised forearm without so much as a stagger, and Mahkir was there half a second later, claws finding the gap Axel's block had opened before the man had time to recover his balance.

It was the same rhythm they'd built during their first Vortex run, refined over more fights than Ant had bothered counting since, and it landed just as cleanly now as it had the first time it clicked.

"Left," Maren called, not even looking at Ant as she said it, and he took the second attacker without needing anything more than that single word to know what she meant. The fight didn't stay contained to any one place after that. It broke into a dozen smaller ones scattered across what had been open camp ground a few minutes ago, none of them lining up with each other, none of them waiting for anyone else to finish first.

Rebekah had found high ground on the collapsed section of wall itself, arrows going out in a steady rhythm that never seemed to slow no matter how many targets presented themselves, each one finding something vital before the person it hit had finished registering the first one. Kalsar and Xylock worked through the thick of it without wasted movement, Xylock's runes drinking down whatever magic came near him and giving it back twice as hard to whichever Kithren had thrown it.

A Marigolds Kithren loosed a lightning-charged strike at Kalsar's exposed flank and Xylock simply fed on it, the runes along Xylock's forearms flaring bright before he returned the same charge doubled through a single crushing blow that put the creature down without another sound out of it. Kalsar hadn't so much as broken stride through the exchange, already moving toward the next threat before the first one had finished falling.

Petra held a chokepoint between two half-collapsed buildings almost single-handed, her Kithren planted directly in the gap and simply not moving, dense enough that three separate fighters found that out the hard way, and nothing that tried to push past her got more than a few feet for the effort. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Natalia met her assigned Epic near what had been the camp's central well, Cindermaw's flame washing across a heavyset, armour-plated shape that barely seemed to notice it, and the two of them settled into the kind of grinding exchange that wasn't going to end quickly either way. Natalia called adjustments to her own people between exchanges without ever raising her voice much above the noise, more concerned with who was covering whom than with the fight directly in front of her.

A short distance off, Garrick and Ashclaw traded strikes with something winged and fast, claw marks opening along both combatants in a pattern that suggested neither of them had found the other's real weakness yet.

Nadia and Bastian had found each other in the chaos rather than been placed together, Stinger's barbed tail keeping a wide half-circle clear around the two of them while Bastian's Kithren coiled low and struck at anything that came inside it, never wasting a movement on anything that wasn't already dying.

Neither of them had been with the clan long enough to have earned this kind of trust from the people around them, and both of them gave no ground at all rather than risk being the reason a line broke somewhere they were responsible for. Ben, Priya, and Marcus fought as a loose triangle near the collapsed section of the eastern wall, watching each other's backs with the ease of people who'd already proven themselves to each other once, the night they'd chosen to stop being Marigolds and become part of this instead.

None of them had fought their old clan in the open like this before, not people they'd once called comrades, not with their own names attached to every blow. Priya put a man down with a strike that had nothing hesitant in it, and didn't look at his face afterward.

Somewhere behind the worst of it, Rowan moved with a bag over one shoulder and no weapon at all, dragging the wounded clear of the fighting one at a time, working fast and saying almost nothing, checking a pulse here and pressing a hand flat against a wound there before moving to the next one. He didn't stop for anyone who was already past helping. Stopping for them would only have cost someone else the chance he could still give. Ant lost track of how long the middle stretch of it went on.

Fights like this didn't have a shape he could hold in his head all at once, only pieces of it he happened to be looking at whenever his attention landed there. He caught Rikku from the corner of his eye, further back than he'd told her to stay, and watched a Marigolds fighter's blade catch her across the side before her own toad Kithren reacted, a thick cloud of something acrid and green billowing out between her and the man who'd struck her.

She staggered clear of it coughing, one hand pressed to her ribs, and somebody, he didn't see who, hauled her the rest of the way back toward the tree line before the fighter could push through the cloud after her. He didn't have time to check whether she'd be all right. There wasn't time for anything except the next thing in front of him. Sunclaw killed one of the clan's own fighters before Ant even saw it happen, someone whose name he didn't know and wouldn't learn until well after the fight was over.

She'd drifted too close to the edge of Andy and Hexa's fight, trying to close a gap in the line that had opened further down. She couldn't have known what she was walking toward. From where she stood, it would have looked like open ground, a chance to help somewhere the line was thinning, nothing more dangerous than that.

Sunclaw broke away from Hexa's fourth strike in a motion too fast to follow properly, claws raking across the woman's midsection before anyone near her had time to shout a warning, and she went down without a sound loud enough to carry over everything else happening around her. She didn't get back up. Nobody had the few seconds it would have taken to check, and the fight kept moving around the place where she'd fallen, closing back over the gap almost as soon as it opened, without slowing down at all.

Whatever restraint Sunclaw had shown across two previous fights with Hexa, there was none of it left tonight. It fought with a precision that had nothing patient left in it, methodical rather than cruel, and Hexa seemed to be spending more just to keep pace with it than she had in either of their last two meetings. Andy watched from the handler's distance he always kept, hands loose at his sides, making no move to close it, saying nothing that Ant could hear. The fighting stayed frantic on every front at once.

Neither side gave ground for more than a few feet before someone pushed back into it, and neither side looked close to breaking, not yet, not with numbers still close enough on both sides that momentum could tip either way on a single mistake. Ant's own sword arm was moving on muscle memory alone now, each swing landing where it needed to without him consciously aiming any of them.

Mahkir found an opening against the winged Epic that had been trading blows with Garrick and Ashclaw for longer than either of them could afford, and took it without hesitation. Flame Breath rolled out in a wide arc, catching three lesser fighters who'd bunched too close together at once, the sound that came out of them raw enough that even the people fighting nearest didn't look over to watch.

The winged Epic staggered clear of the heat, giving Ashclaw the half-second he needed to land a real strike of his own for the first time in the exchange. Ant took stock of the field properly for the first time since the charge began, forcing himself to actually look rather than simply react to whatever came at him next. Four Epics still standing, none of them close to finished. Natalia and Cindermaw still locked in the same grinding exchange as before, no ground gained on either side.

Garrick and Ashclaw's opponent already recovering from Mahkir's fire, wings flexing to test whether the damage had cost it anything real. Andy and Hexa driven back another step by whatever Sunclaw had left in reserve tonight. The fourth hadn't shown itself again since the first charge through the wall, which bothered Ant more than an Epic he could actually see fighting would have.

On the ground level the fight looked close to even, closer than Ant liked, and a fight this close could still tip either way on a single mistake, one that might come from any of the three hundred people currently trading blows across ground that had been a quiet camp an hour ago, or from whatever the missing fourth was doing instead of showing itself. Ant looked out across the field. His people were losing ground. It was time.