Chương 323: Chapter 322 - Void Snake

Memories started. He did not invite them. They came the way the chain sometimes pulled things out of him when it ran at full capacity without a stabilizing hand on it. Alice managed the draw. Without her the chain ran open and the draw pulled everything. An ocean... somewhere beneath the surface, pressure on all sides, salt water in his eyes. A narwhal coming through the dark water at speed, and the moment of impact, the horn going through him, and the cold spreading outward from that point.

Then the cannons started to fire, The sky above and the arc of his body over the waterline. Ships below him, drawing past. A woman who had green hair and grreen eyes. Drifting close in a space that was not the ocean neither the void, but something in between. Her voice close against his ear saying he was strong, saying he was above, saying he was Primordial, and the rest if the world could not account for him. Then came the faces that haunted him dead or alive.

Ivy, close enough that he could count the details of her expression. Lyssandra with that particular quality of controlled danger she carried even in stillness as she brandished her sword. He pushed through both of them with his hands, felt them give way, felt nothing on the other side. Mary. Brian. Karmen. Rebecca. Every face that had attached to him since arriving in this world moving past at a rate he could not slow, voices layering over each other until the individual words dissolved into frequency.

His head throbbed at the center and spread outward. Then complete silence had arrived. He became aware that he was suspended. Two chains hung loosely around his forearm, the only things connecting him to anything. Below him was the carriage roof. Above him was the void. The snake was gone. He could feel the absence of its thread signature the way you feel a sound stop after it has been running long enough to become background. A flat surface materialized beside him.

Dark and solid and shaped without the context of where it had come from. Then Ayame came over the edge of it, stepping down from whatever height she had been at, moving toward him with her eyes already on his face.

"Are you alright," she said. Flat and direct. She said it the way she said most things, with no variation in delivery to indicate whether she expected the answer to be yes or no. He groaned. His whole skull felt like it had been compressed and released. He looked up at her from where he was hanging in the chains and registered that he was probably not presenting a compelling image of someone who was alright.

"The snake," he managed. She looked at him for a moment.

"Split."

"In half?"

"Two halves," she confirmed.

"You moved at a speed I have not seen from you before." He thought about that. He did not remember moving. The last thing with any clarity before the memories had started was the snake coming in low on the first pass. Everything after that was the ocean and the woman with green hair and the faces. He reached up and caught the edge of the carriage roof and pulled himself back onto it. His arms worked. His legs worked when he tested them. The pain in his head was migrating from sharp to dull, which was progress.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Arthur called from the far end of the carriage. He was standing near the access panel, one hand on the structure for balance, looking at the space where the snake had been with an expression that said he had seen the end of it but not the whole thing and was working out how to feel about that. Ayame crouched beside him as he sat on the roof and got his bearings. She did not touch him.

She was close enough that he could hear her breathing, which was even and controlled.

"How did you move that fast," she said.

"I do not know."

"You do not know." She looked at his face with the focused attention she gave things she was evaluating.

"Your nose is bleeding again."

"It does that."

"More than before." He pressed the back of his wrist against it. The contact confirmed she was correct. More than before by a meaningful amount. He looked at his other hand. The chain was still visible around his forearm, loosely coiled, the iridescent surface catching none of the void's light because the void did not produce light in the conventional sense. Ayame looked at his hand. Then at the chain. She did not comment on it directly.

Instead she reached out and took his hand in both of hers, not tightly, just a flat and even grip, and held it. He did not react to this outwardly. Inwardly he noted that she had done it without hesitation, without a preamble, and without any indication that it required explanation.

"So strong," she said. She said it quietly. Not to him exactly. More to herself, or to the assessment she was running, or to whatever internal accounting she maintained for things she observed. He looked at her hands around his. He did not pull away.

"The snake is gone," he said.

"Yes."

"Is the train fine?"

"Yes."

"Valen presumably stayed inside." He mumbled"I heard him at the window," she said.

"He knocked on the glass twice." Lucid exhaled through his nose and immediately regretted it as the movement registered in his skull. He pressed the wrist back against his face. Arthur crossed the roof toward them, his footsteps audible even through the void's ambient silence. He stopped a short distance away and looked at Lucid with the expression of someone who had decided not to say several things.

"You passed out," Arthur said.

"I am aware."

"You destroyed an A rank Unfaithful and then passed out."

"In that order, yes."

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?" Lucid shot back floating helplessly in the void as Ayame held him.

"It is supposed to be accurate," Arthur replied. Arthur looked at Ayame. She did not look back. She was watching Lucid's face with the same focused attention she had maintained since crouching beside him.

"The snake was edible," Ayame said. Both of them looked at her.

"Was," Arthur repeated.

"It split cleanly," she said.

"Two sections. The forward section went into the void. The rear section is still here." She tilted her head slightly toward the edge of the carriage.

"Void snake. A rank. The meat will be dense. High in fate essence concentration."

"We are out of food," Lucid said slowly.

"Yes," she agreed.

"And there is half a void snake on our carriage."

"Just under half." Arthur stared at the section she was indicating with no particular expression on his face. Then he said, "I am not eating void snake."

"You were hungry enough that we heard your stomach through two closed doors an hour ago," she replied.

"That is different from eating void snake."

"It is snake," she said.

"It is protein. It will keep." Lucid looked at the section of snake. He thought about Arthur's stomach. He thought about the distance to the next station and the supplies that were not on the carriage.

"She is right," he said. Arthur turned to look at him.

"You are taking her side."

"I am taking the side of the available food." Arthur was quiet for a moment. Then he said, with no real conviction, "I do not even know how to prepare void snake."

"I do," Ayame said. She released Lucid's hand and stood. She moved toward the edge of the carriage with the same economy of motion she moved everywhere. Lucid watched her go. Then he leaned back on his hands and looked up at the void above them, purple and enormous and, now, one A rank Unfaithful lighter than it had been. His head still throbbed. His nose had mostly stopped. The chain had settled back to its passive draw and the ringing in his left ear was faint. Then the warmth arrived.

Not from the void, not from the ambient temperature of the carriage roof. From inside. Something familiar pressing through the space behind his sternum, green and careful and already reading the damage before he had named any of it.

"Are you alright, Lucid?" Her voice. Back in the shared space where it belonged, formal and unhurried and carrying underneath the formality something that was neither formal nor unhurried. He exhaled.

"You have bad timing," he said.

"I have perfect timing," Alice replied.

"You simply have a tendency to create situations that make any timing appear insufficient." A pause.

"You are bleeding. Your chain ran unmanaged. You have destroyed an A rank Unfaithful with no conscious account of doing so." Another pause, shorter.

"I was not gone long."

"Long enough."

"Yes," she said, and did not follow it with anything else. The green warmth moved through him steadily, finding the damage and beginning to address it in the sequence she always used, most critical first, cosmetic last. The throbbing behind his eyes eased. The ringing faded. Across the roof, Ayame was crouching over the rear section of the void snake with her red dagger, working with a precision that suggested she had done this before or something close enough to it.

Arthur stood a few feet back watching her with the expression of a man who had not yet committed to whether he was going to eat void snake. Lucid sat on the carriage roof in the purple void and let Alice work.