Chương 61: Chapter 60 - Running On Empty

Mahkir broke off mid-stride. He'd been circling the second wolfish thing for the better part of a minute, patient in a way that had nothing calm behind it, waiting for the exact half-second it would overcommit — and then, without warning, without so much as a glance back at Ant for permission, he turned away from it entirely and bounded straight for Kalsar's Kithren instead. The wolfish thing, left mid-lunge with nothing to land on, stumbled and had to catch itself against the dirt.

Mahkir opened his mouth and breathed fire at Kalsar's Kithren. For one endless second, nobody moved. The yard, chaos a heartbeat ago, seemed to hold itself around that single point of orange light, and even the man Ant had been trading blows with went still, weapon half-raised, forgetting for a moment that he was supposed to be swinging it.

"What's he—" Kalsar's voice cracked across the yard, full of shock for a moment before realization struck him.

"Clever Kithren," he said, a smile spreading across his face. He tried to raise himself from the ground. His leg gave out under him, but he managed to look up in time to watch the flames make contact. Kalsar's Kithren didn't flinch from the flame. It didn't brace against it, didn't so much as tense the way anything should tense when fire touches an open wound. It opened its mouth and drank the flame in. The fire didn't scorch the fur the way fire should have.

The dark markings along its limbs answered it instead, the same way Ant remembered from that very first sparring round — dormant lines flaring into sharp, lit red, running the whole length of its arms in an instant. With the runes lit, energy poured through it, visible under the skin, pulsing along every limb in time with its own heartbeat, and the ruined shoulder began, right in front of everyone, to heal.

The dangling arm twitched once, twice, then closed into a fist on its own, strength flooding back into it as the runes settled into a steady burn, the wound sealing from the inside out until there was nothing left of it but a raw pink scar and skin still faintly warm to look at. Ant stood there with Soul Render still raised, forgetting for a second that he had an opponent of his own standing three feet away, watching him. It clicked before he'd fully worked out why it mattered. None of these attackers used magic.

Not one, across the whole fight — no spells, no elemental strikes, nothing but steel and muscle and the same physical Kithren abilities Ant had been dodging and blocking since the first blow. He'd seen this exact thing happen before, back on the very first day, the sparring round that had earned them Kalsar's training in the first place — Mahkir opening with Flame Breath, and Kalsar's Kithren drinking the whole blast in instead of burning, runes lighting up its arms until it could barely be tracked.

Ant had spent that whole fight thinking he'd made a mistake handing it fuel. What he hadn't understood, until right now, was how much of a difference that fuel actually made. Kalsar's Kithren was dangerous regardless — years of arena bouts didn't just evaporate because the runes stayed dark — but it had been fighting this whole time with one hand behind its back, running on raw muscle alone, and never once getting to be what an actual arena champion's training had built it into.

Kalsar's Kithren rose from its knee in one motion, all four arms working again, the newly healed one flexing experimentally as though checking it was still attached before committing to it fully. Whatever exhaustion had been dragging at every movement a moment ago was gone entirely, burned off along with the wound, and what stood in its place made the hair rise on the back of Ant's neck just from watching it happen. It didn't walk back into the fight. It arrived in it.

The nearest attacker — the one who'd been circling Axel, waiting for an opening that never came — didn't see it coming until all four fists connected at once, a single blow from four directions that lifted him clean off his feet and put him down hard enough that the ground seemed to flinch under the impact. Kalsar's Kithren didn't pause to check the result.

It was already moving, already turning toward the next attacker, four arms working in a rhythm no single human body could have matched — a punch, a sweeping backhand, a grab that never quite closed because the target twisted free of it at the last instant, and then a second punch that caught him anyway on the follow-through.

Whatever the man tried, there was always another arm coming from a direction he hadn't accounted for, and after the third exchange he simply stopped trying to hit back at all and concentrated everything he had on staying upright. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings." Excellent," Kalsar said, dragging himself another few inches upright, eyes fixed on his Kithren with something raw and delighted breaking through the exhaustion in his voice.

He raised his voice, calling out across the yard — not to Ant, not to anyone in particular, just to the fight itself.

"Think you can take him down? Try now, while he's fully powered up!" Off to Ant's left, Hazel let out a short, disbelieving laugh — more breath than sound, cut off almost as soon as it started, one hand pressed against her ribs where the earlier hit had landed.

"Should've thought of that hours ago," she said, dry even through the pain of it.

"Man's been fighting at half strength this whole time and none of us noticed."

"Focus," Kalsar snapped back at her, though there wasn't any real heat behind it. Near the doorway, half-shielded by the frame he hadn't left since the fighting started, Thomas had gone rigid, both hands gripping the wood like it was the only thing holding him upright. Bramble pressed against his side, ears flat, watching Kalsar's Kithren tear through the yard with something that looked, on a bear that size, almost like disbelief. Neither of them moved to join it.

Neither of them had moved the whole fight, and Ant didn't have time to wonder why, only enough to register, distantly, that they were still there, still watching, still choosing not to be part of any of this — Thomas's knuckles white against the wood, Bramble's weight shifting from paw to paw like he wanted to move and didn't know toward what. Ant didn't have room to think about it further.

The man in front of him had recovered from his shock and swung again, sloppier than before, rattled by whatever he'd just watched happen twenty feet away, and Ant caught it on Soul Render out of pure reflex, his mind still half-occupied with what Mahkir had just done without asking him first. You knew he hadn't taken any magic, Ant sent through the bond. No runes lit. I saw that much myself.

Nobody else looked, Mahkir sent back, already circling toward his own fight again, tail low and steady despite everything happening around him. You were all watching the fight in front of you. I watched him. Cost me mana I could've spent elsewhere. Doesn't matter. Look what it bought us instead.

Ant didn't have an answer ready for that, and didn't get the chance to find one — the man in front of him swung a third time, wide and desperate now, overcommitting the way exhausted people always overcommitted eventually, no matter how much of the fight they'd already survived. Ant stepped inside it, caught the wrist, and drove him down into the dirt hard enough that he stayed there, breathing but done. One Kithren fighting at full strength wasn't the same as winning.

It bought them ground — real ground, the enemy giving up positions they'd have died holding a minute ago — but there were still five of them standing, and every one of those five had trained for this the way Ant's people hadn't. The first minute of the fight had gone to the clan because nobody expected Ant to appear out of thin air, or Raven and Shrike to come over a wall they thought was secured, or a wounded Kithren to suddenly stop being wounded. That advantage only worked once.

"They're regrouping," Kalsar said, and there was nothing satisfied left in his voice now. He was watching the same thing Ant was — the five falling back toward each other rather than the wall, shoulder to shoulder, weapons coming up in a line instead of scattered across the yard. One of them said something low to the man beside him, and the whole line shifted half a step in response, tightening, the kind of coordination that didn't come from panic.

"They're done being surprised. Watch how they're standing now. That's not fear. That's people remembering what they actually trained for." He wasn't wrong. Ant could see it too, now that Kalsar had put words to it — five people who'd spent the last several minutes reacting instead of fighting, and were done reacting. It happened fast after that.

Two of them broke off together, moving on Shrike before Raven had time to read it as anything other than an opening — a feint low, then a spear thrust up and across that caught the osprey mid-turn, wing folding wrong in a way wings weren't built to fold. It hit the dirt hard and skidded, one wing dragging useless, a shriek cutting off too fast, replaced by a thin, ragged sound that was somehow worse than the scream had been. Raven's whole face changed.

She screamed something that wasn't a word at all — raw, animal, nothing left in it but the need to reach him — and went straight for the two men, dagger first, every ounce of the tight, careful rhythm she'd been fighting with abandoned in favor of getting to Shrike before anything else could touch him. That was exactly the opening the third man had been waiting for.

He came in from her blind side while she was still closing the distance, weapon already reversed in his grip, and the pommel caught her clean across the back of the skull. She didn't stagger. She simply folded, dropping straight down where she stood, dagger still in her hand, and didn't move again. Ant saw it happen from thirty feet away and couldn't do a single thing about it.

He was already moving before he'd finished registering what he'd just watched, the man he'd been fighting forgotten entirely, and it was only Mahkir's voice cutting hard through the bond — Axel's closer, Axel's already going — that kept him from sprinting straight into a gap he had no way of closing in time.