Chương 16: Chapter 15 - Soul Render

The pale glint had looked like bone from across the chamber, one more piece of the collection scattered over the floor. Ant crossed to it anyway, boots scuffing through drifts of ash that still smelled faintly of scorched stone, the ceiling's earlier groan settling into nothing further behind him. He didn't reach it in a straight line.

The chamber pulled his attention sideways twice before he got there — first to a scatter of bone half-swallowed by the grey drift, then to a curved outline further along the wall that resolved, on a second look, into the rusted edge of a shield with no structural integrity left to speak of. He crouched over that one anyway, out of the same habit that had made him check every doorway in the district for years, and focused the appraisal on it. [Common Shield — Damaged.] Nothing. He moved on.

He thought of Adran without meaning to, the way he had every time something in this chamber lined up with what little the family stories said about him. The stories weren't much — a name, a date, a portrait so old the paint had gone the colour of tea, and Claire's voice reciting the same half-dozen facts she'd been given exactly as she'd been given them, no more curious about the gaps than anyone else in the family had ever bothered to be. Gone into the wasteland chasing something. Never came back.

That was the whole of it, repeated at enough dinners over enough years that it had stopped sounding like a tragedy and started sounding like a fact of the household, the way some families had a bad hip that ran in the blood. Had he come through here — not this exact room, maybe, but somewhere close to it, following whatever the device had shown him?

Had he stood over the same kind of wreckage, the same tally of people who'd walked into this valley and not walked back out, and understood something about it Ant still didn't? Whatever answer existed, this room wasn't going to hand it over easily.

He'd already counted the bones once, back before the fight, and none of them had been arranged the way a man who'd simply died would leave them — no single collapse, no single story, just years of accumulation from strangers who'd found the same shelter and paid the same price for trusting it. He kept moving. Another blade, snapped at the guard, its maker's mark long since corroded past reading. A gauntlet, fingers curled as if the hand inside it had closed on something at the very end and never let go.

[Common Gauntlet — Damaged.] Then, finally, the pale shape he'd started toward in the first place. It wasn't bone. Half-buried against the base of the wall, propped rather than dropped — someone had set this down deliberately, at some point, in a chamber that had otherwise swallowed everything it touched. He worked it free of the dust with both hands. A short sword, curved along its length in a way that favoured speed over weight. Lighter than he expected when he lifted it clear.

Not new — the metal had the dulled patience of something old — but intact in a way nothing else in this chamber was, no pitting, no rust creeping along the edge. Markings ran the length of the blade, worked into the metal rather than scratched on afterward, the kind of detail that meant something to whoever had put it there even if it meant nothing to him yet. He focused the appraisal on it out of habit, the same reflex that had already swept the shield and the gauntlet and found nothing worth a name.

[Soul Render — Common. Curved Short Sword. Str +1, Agi +1, Magic +5.] He looked back at the debris scattered behind him. The shield had read as damage and nothing else. The gauntlet the same. Whatever had happened to the people who'd carried those, their equipment had come out the other side as scrap with a category attached to it, not a name. This hadn't. [Equipment — Soul Render equipped.] The listing appeared in the previously empty slot before he'd done anything to make it happen, as if picking the blade up had been enough. He turned his own screen up to check. [Str: 9] [End: 4] [Magic: 5] [Agi: 11] [HP: 30/30] [Mana: 15/15] He felt it before he'd finished reading the numbers. The sword hadn't changed weight in his hand, not really, but his grip on it settled differently — surer, like his fingers had found the balance point on the first try instead of hunting for it.

He rolled his shoulder and the ache that had been sitting there since the fight answered slower than it should have, like something had quietly turned the volume down on it. He stood, and his legs took the movement without the small, grinding protest they'd been giving him for the last hour. He flexed his free hand once, twice, and it closed faster than he expected it to, the motion arriving before the decision to make it fully landed. This book is hosted on another platform.

Read the official version and support the author's work. Nothing dramatic. He wasn't going to punch through a wall. But the difference sat in him the way a held breath sat in the chest — present, unmistakable, gone the moment he tried to point at exactly where it lived.

"Magic plus five," he said out loud, to nobody in particular.

"I have no magic. How does that even work." Mahkir offered nothing from where he'd curled up near the ash. Ant checked the Kithren tab out of curiosity. Unchanged — Mahkir's numbers sat exactly where they had, the sword's boost running through Ant alone rather than the bond. Two separate systems, then. The gear affected the wearer. The bond affected the pair. He noted it and looked down at the blade again, turning it once so the markings caught what little light the chamber offered.

He wanted to know what it could actually do. He stepped clear of the ash, found what passed for open floor, and settled into something that vaguely resembled the stance he remembered from illustrated manuals he'd read a decade ago — feet apart, blade up, the posture of a man who had studied fighting the way other people studied maps of places they'd never visit. He cut the air.

Once, twice, a third time with more confidence than the first two, the boosted agility carrying the motion faster than his own reflexes would have managed alone. Your feet are wrong. Ant stopped mid-swing.

"Excuse me?" Your feet. Mahkir hadn't moved from his spot in the ash, eyes half-lidded, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was critiquing a stance from a prone position ten feet away. Whatever you just did with the second one, don't do it again. You nearly put yourself on the floor.

"I didn't put myself on the floor." You nearly did. I watched it happen in slow, humiliating detail. Ant lowered the sword.

"Oh, I'm sorry — I didn't realise you were a sword fighter. With feet, no less. Do you even have feet? I've been meaning to ask." I have paws. Paws that would still outperform whatever you were attempting.

"You're the size of a dinner plate." An unusually excellent dinner plate.

"You don't hold a sword." I don't need to hold a sword to know when someone's about to fall over holding one. The amber eyes finally opened all the way, fixed on him with something that might have been amusement if Mahkir's face allowed for that kind of range. Try it again. Slower. Whatever you're picturing in your head isn't what your body's actually doing.

Ant opened his mouth to argue, found he didn't have the ground to stand on for it, and reset his stance instead — slower this time, weight settling more evenly, and even he could feel the difference in it, some old clumsiness smoothing out by degrees he couldn't fully explain. Not skill. Just a body finally listening to instructions it hadn't been given before.

"Better?" Marginally. You have the enthusiasm of a drunk man and the technique of a worse one. But marginally.

"High praise." I don't hand out the other kind. He tried a wider cut next, over-committed to it the way he had the second swing, and felt his weight tip too far forward before he'd finished the motion. He caught it — barely, one boot skidding through the ash and holding — and looked over to find Mahkir watching with the specific, unbothered patience of someone who had called that exact mistake before it happened and saw no reason to say so twice.

"Don't." I said nothing.

"You were about to." I was going to say you're improving. Marginally.

"You use that word a lot." It's an accurate word. I'd use it more if you gave me reason to.

"You're supposed to be encouraging." I'm supposed to be honest. Nobody promised you encouraging. But he said it without any real edge to it, tail curling once against the ash, and Ant found himself almost smiling at an insult that somehow still managed to feel like company.

He ran through the motion a dozen more times anyway, chasing the outline of something he didn't have a name for yet — not competence, not really, but the first thin edge of it, the sense that his body might one day do this without thinking rather than fighting it step by step. He stopped counting somewhere past ten.

His shoulders had started to remind him, insistently, that they'd spent the day being cut open and burned near and generally treated as expendable, and his arm throbbed sharply enough on the next swing that he lowered the blade and let the moment end there. The rest of the chamber gave up nothing else. He swept it properly this time, appraisal running across every surface the enhanced vision could reach, working from the far wall back toward where he'd started. A second shield, worse than the first.

A helmet with the crown caved in, whoever had worn it not walking away from whatever had done that. Fragments of things too small and too corroded to register as anything beyond debris. The same story, told over and over in different corners of the same room — more broken equipment, more people who hadn't made it, nothing that carried a name the way Soul Render had. No artifact. No trace that Adran had ever set foot in this exact room, whatever his device had led him toward.

Ant sat down eventually, back against the cold stone, the sword resting across his knees. Mahkir padded over without any particular hurry and settled against his leg, the warmth of him bleeding through the fabric of the stolen coat.

"What about you," Ant said quietly.

"What will you become, I wonder." Mahkir's ear moved. Not much. Enough to say he was listening. No answer came. He'd stopped expecting one whenever Mahkir decided there wasn't anything worth saying. He sat with the question anyway, the sword warm from his own hands rather than any heat of its own, and let his mind drift somewhere less comfortable. He needed training, someone who actually knew what they were doing rather than a housecat with opinions about his footwork.

The clan wasn't an option — he didn't even let himself finish that thought properly before setting it back down. Which left nobody he could currently name, a chip he didn't know if he could safely take, and a body that was, for the first time in five years, worth training at all. That last part sat strangely in him, turning it over. Five years of being told, in every way a world could tell a man without saying it outright, that he wasn't worth the investment.

And now, apparently, he was — Agility eleven, Magic five, a sword that answered to him specifically and a Kithren that had just spent an hour correcting his stance instead of walking away from him the way everyone else eventually had. It wasn't much to build a life back out of. It was more than he'd had yesterday. He needed a plan. He didn't have one. Outside, through stone and gap and valley wall, the wasteland waited with the same indifferent patience it always had.