Chương 77: Chapter 76 - Your Kithren Is Dead!

Mahkir laid Raven down gently at the treeline's edge, careful even through the adrenaline still running hot in him, and turned back toward the clearing. Ant wasn't there. He'd counted the humans without meaning to — Kalsar, one hand pressed hard against his side to keep the blood in. Ray, breathing hard, tiger circling him twice before settling. Raven, still and pale on the ground, blood dried dark along her temple where the club had caught her. Three, where there should have been five.

He ran the count again, certain he'd missed someone, willing the other two to step out of the dark and complete it, and came up with the same three a second time. The howl tore out of him before he'd decided to make it, raw and furious, and he was three strides back toward the clearing before Xylock's shadow fell across his path. The gorilla didn't say anything — couldn't, not in any language the humans standing near them would understand — but he didn't need to.

He simply planted himself, all four arms loose and ready, immovable as the treeline itself, dark eyes steady on Mahkir the whole time. Mahkir hit him anyway, shoulder-first, snarling, and Xylock absorbed the impact without giving an inch of ground. Move. Xylock didn't move an inch. Mahkir tried to go around him.

Xylock matched the angle, wide enough to block the path either way, and when Mahkir snapped at him — a warning more than a real attempt to bite — Xylock caught his jaw in one massive hand, gentle enough not to hurt, firm enough that the message landed anyway. Not today.

"WHERE IS ANT?" Kalsar's voice again, closer now, ragged with the climb up from the clearing's edge. He staggered the last few steps to the treeline, one hand still clamped over his side, and ran the same headcount Mahkir just had — himself, Ray, Raven. Two short, and both of them the wrong two to be missing. Ray was the one who saw it first.

He grabbed Kalsar's arm and pointed, hard, across the clearing to the far side of the camp — a second stretch of treeline, dark against the fading moonlight, and in it, unmistakable even from this distance, a broad grey silhouette far too large to be anything but Kris's Kithren.

"There." Ray's voice came out tight, urgent.

"He's over there. Wrong side." Kalsar stared at it a long moment, calculating behind his eyes in a way that had nothing to do with the pain in his side.

"Stupid boy," he said, low, more frustrated than angry.

"Why would he go to that set of trees. I should have been more specific — should have pointed, should have said which side, should have—" He cut himself off, teeth set hard together, and pressed a hand harder against the wound at his side instead of finishing it.

"He's not stupid." Ray didn't look away from the far treeline.

"He's careful. He'll see us pull back, put it together, and get himself home from there. He's not going to sit in the wrong trees waiting to be told twice."

"He'd better." Kalsar's voice had gone completely flat, the tone he used when a decision was already made and he was only waiting for his own body to agree to it. He turned back toward the clearing, toward the noise still rising from it, and Mahkir felt the shift in him before the words even landed. Mahkir started forward again, straining against Xylock's grip, every line of him aimed at the buildings where Ant had disappeared.

"No." Kalsar said it to Mahkir directly this time, the way he sometimes did when the urgency of a moment overrode the fact that Mahkir couldn't answer him back.

"I know. Believe me, I know." His voice cracked slightly, and he didn't bother hiding it.

"But look at us. Look at Raven. We go back in there now, we don't come out again — any of us. We get clear. We get help. We come back for him properly, or none of this was worth anything at all." Mahkir didn't stop pulling. But he stopped gaining ground, Xylock's grip absolute, and after a long moment the fight went out of his shoulders rather than out of him entirely — a slow collapse rather than a decision to stop. Kalsar hauled Raven up across his good side, grunting through the effort of it, and looked at Ray.

"Can you make it the rest of the way on your own two feet, or do I need to worry about you too?"

"I'll manage." Ray was already moving, tiger falling in at his heel, throwing one last look at the far treeline before the trees swallowed the sight of it.

"He'll come back on his own. He's not stupid." Nobody answered that a second time. There wasn't time to, and none of them entirely believed it anymore anyway. They moved, fast as Kalsar's side and Raven's limp, unconscious body allowed, which wasn't fast at all. The alarm behind them had thinned to isolated shouting now, no organized pursuit that Mahkir could hear, but none of them trusted the quiet enough to slow down and test it.

Xylock walked rear guard the whole way, glancing back every few strides, one arm still close enough to Mahkir to grab him again if the fight in him found its feet a second time. It didn't. Not because it had gone anywhere, but because there was nowhere left to put it. Ant's absence sat in Mahkir like a held breath he couldn't let out, and he carried it the only way he knew how — silent, low to the ground, ears flat, watching the dark behind them for a shape that never came.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. The figure stayed motionless in the trees, watching the group head back toward their camp. Not exactly what I expected, she thought, and slung her bow back over her shoulder before melting back into the shadows. — Ant woke up mid-motion, already being dragged, boots scraping stone he couldn't feel properly yet, everything arriving in pieces that refused to line up. A door. Hinges shrieking.

Voices somewhere above him, unhurried, talking about something that wasn't him at all. Hands under his arms, hauling him upright long enough to throw him forward, and then the floor came up to meet him, hard and cold and unmoving. The door slammed behind him. He lay there a while, cheek against stone, waiting for the world to stop tilting. Every breath dragged something raw across the back of his throat, dust or smoke or both, and his forearm throbbed in time with his pulse where the blade had caught it.

When it finally settled, he pushed himself up onto his knees, one hand braced against the wall, and looked around at exactly as little as he'd expected to find. A cell. Small, windowless, a single lantern burning somewhere outside the bars, throwing more shadow than light. The air hung damp and mineral, faintly metallic, with something underneath it he didn't want to name — old blood, maybe, worked so deep into the stone that no amount of scrubbing had ever quite lifted it back out.

"First we killed his Kithren," a voice said from beyond the bars, amused, unbothered.

"Now we've got the leader too. Good week." A second voice, further back, laughed at that — short, ugly, the sound of someone who found the whole thing genuinely funny rather than performing menace for its own sake. Ant didn't try to place either of them yet. There wasn't a face attached to the voice, just dark and bars and an outline standing comfortably on the other side of both, unhurried, patient, in no rush at all to step into the light.

Cold went through Ant, fast and total, and for one long, terrible second he believed it completely. Mahkir. Nothing answered. He reached for the bond the way he'd reach for his own hand, instinctive, automatic, and found only silence where Mahkir's presence should have sat — no warmth, no dry commentary, no sense of him at all, just an absence shaped exactly like him. Panic closed around his throat before he could stop it, sharp and total, and he had to force the next breath in through sheer will.

He made himself think instead of feel. His system. Anything that might tell him something these people couldn't lie to him about. He pulled up his status, and the screen answered the way it always did, patient, indifferent to the state he was in. HP: 4/70. Low. Lower than he wanted to look at directly. But it was climbing already, not falling — a small, stupid comfort, the only direction that number had to move now that the fight was over.

He backed out of his own stats and opened the Kithren tab, hands shaking, and there it was. Mahkir. Level 6. HP: 31/50. Alive. Hurt, clearly — thirty-one wasn't a number that came from nowhere — but alive, and the number sat there plain and unmoving, nothing about it that read like a lie. The system had never once given him false information. He didn't know how to make himself distrust it now just because a stranger in the dark wanted him to. So they'd lied. About Mahkir, at least.

Which meant everything else they'd said, or hadn't said yet, needed weighing the same way. That was something, at least. A single fixed point in a room built to take every fixed point away from him. People lied. Numbers, mostly, didn't. He chose to keep believing the numbers a little while longer. He looked around the cell properly for the first time, and noticed what he hadn't in the first disoriented seconds — the stone wasn't just stone.

Threaded through it, in uneven veins that caught what little light the lantern gave, sat something duller, grayer, embedded deep enough that he couldn't have pried a piece free even if he'd tried. It ran along every wall he could see, floor to ceiling, a mineral he didn't recognize and had never read about in five years of obsessive study. That was the wall between him and Mahkir. It had to be. Nothing else made sense.

He got up and tested it anyway, because sitting still and believing something wasn't the same as knowing it. The bars gave nothing — cold, solid, mortared deep into stone that didn't so much as creak when he leaned into it. He worked his way around the cell's edge, pressing at seams, checking the door's hinges for rust or slack, and found exactly what he expected to find. Nothing. He pulled up his system again, backed into the Skills tab, and made himself think rather than panic.

Appraisal wouldn't help him here — nothing in the cell needed identifying that he hadn't already worked out for himself. Concealment might. If the guards believed he'd already slipped past them once, a door left open a half-second too long on their next visit could be the only opening he'd get. But Concealment ate mana by the second, and his reserve wasn't bottomless.

He ran the math without much confidence in the answer — full mana, if he actually had it, bought him somewhere around two minutes before it burned out on its own. Not enough to wait out a guard's schedule. Enough, maybe, to disappear at exactly the right moment and not a heartbeat before. He'd need to know they were coming. He'd need the door open, or about to be.

Use it too early and he'd be standing there, mana spent, visible again, with nothing to show for it but an empty pool and a room full of people who now knew exactly what he could do. He filed it away rather than test it. Whatever he tried, it needed to work the first time. He sat with that a while, back against the driest corner he could find, and made himself breathe through it — slow, deliberate, the kind of control Kalsar had drilled into him without ever once calling it that.

Whatever this place was, whatever they wanted from him, falling apart on the floor of it wouldn't help either of them. Somewhere out there Mahkir was alive and hurt and probably losing his mind trying to reach him. The least Ant could do was still have a mind left to reach back with, whenever the wall finally came down. He checked his own number again some time later, with nothing else in the cell to mark the hours by. HP: 44/70. He checked it again after what felt like a long while and got 64/70 back.

Twenty points. Call it two hours, if the number climbed the way he thought it did — steady, reliable, ten a turn of the clock, no window to confirm it against but nothing better on offer either. It wasn't much of a clock. It was the only one he had. Footsteps came eventually. More than one set, unhurried — the walk of people who weren't worried about anything he might do from inside a locked cell.

Ant stayed where he was, let them look at him a moment before he spoke, kept his voice level even though nothing underneath it felt that way.

"You knew I was the clan leader," he said, conversational, like it was the least interesting part of his whole evening.

"Before I said a word. That's — interesting, isn't it. Almost like you knew we were coming." Silence, for a moment. Then a laugh, low, from somewhere behind him rather than in front — a voice that landed wrong before Ant had even fully placed it, familiar in a way his gut recognized faster than his mind did.

"That's because I told them." Ant turned, slow, the cold from a moment ago hardening into anger, sharp-edged and ready to be used.