Chương 44: Chapter 28.5: Blade of Ember

I nearly blacked out. The barkback roared directly in front of me while rain hammered through the shattered trench line and workers screamed somewhere behind the collapsing barricades. ELIGIBLE MERGE DETECTED Axe Strike: Copper (early). Guarded Blade: Copper (early). Shared nature identified: guarded approach, committed execution, defensive movement converted into killing force. Merge available. The merge pressure no longer felt like an offer.

The two skills ground against each other violently inside me, demanding resolution, and I accepted almost by instinct because the beast was coming again and there was no room left inside me for separate answers. ABILITY MERGE ACCEPTED Axe Strike and Guarded Blade have begun merging. Compatibility basis: heavy weapon commitment, guarded approach, controlled positioning, and decisive killing force. Pain detonated through me. It was not clean pain, nor ordinary advancement.

It was pressure and heat and collision, a forge being lit behind my bones. The battlefield vanished beneath white noise while instinct overwhelmed conscious thought. Axe Strike and Guarded Blade tore apart inside me before slamming back together in a new shape. Precision became momentum. Positioning became violence. Defensive flow became killing force.

The axe in my hands grew hot enough that rain hissed where it struck the steel, yet there was no flame, only a faint ember glow drawn along the edge like the memory of something burning. MERGE COMPLETE Axe Strike has been consumed. Guarded Blade has been consumed. Ember Blade has awakened at Iron (early). This evolved combat ability begins below its source abilities but carries a broader path: guarded movement, committed axe strikes, heat, momentum, and controlled violence. The barkback lunged again. I moved.

Later I would remember the next moments only in fragments: mud exploding beneath my boots, heat roaring through my arms, the axe carving downward with impossible force while the new skill drove every ounce of movement through the edge itself. The barkback split from shoulder to sternum, not merely cut but broken open by heat and momentum combined. The impact hurled the corpse sideways into the trench wall hard enough to collapse another support brace behind it. Shock held the breach for less than a breath.

Then the horde arrived. Not a pack. Not a probing wave. A true surge of bodies came pouring through the weakened eastern section, scavengers first and then heavier shapes behind them, all driven forward by hunger, fear, or whatever pressure waited deeper in the Greywash. Men shouted orders that vanished under the shriek of claws on timber. The collapsed trench became a funnel of black hide, teeth, mud, and steam. I met them head-on.

Ember Blade felt terrifyingly natural, not like a new skill but like something the other two had always been trying to become. Every defensive step became an attack before thought could separate them. Every strike carried explosive momentum through the axe edge, heat pulsing along the steel as rain hissed away in silver bursts.

I cut down the first scavenger before it reached the inner barricade, turned the recoil into a sidestep, and drove the axe through the throat of the next creature with a motion that also placed me outside the third beast's leap. Something opened in me. Not calm. Not courage. A flood. The heat beneath my chest burst outward through muscle and marrow, filling the exhaustion-ragged spaces inside me with violent energy. My wounds steamed in the rain.

The torn scratches along my ribs closed enough to stop spilling blood. My breath came hot and fast, no longer humanly measured, and for the space of those terrible minutes the trench did not contain a tired Iron (late) commoner. It contained a blade moving through bodies. The defenders saw it. Some backed away from me without meaning to. Others rallied because anything that frightening on their side seemed close enough to hope. Bren roared, "Behind Vey! Hold behind him!" The order saved the line.

Militia formed around the space I carved open. Jory dragged a wounded worker away from the breach while stabbing wildly at a scavenger that tried to follow. Wade, bruised and half-bent, braced a shattered support with one shoulder and shouted at two labourers to wedge the beam before the trench collapsed completely. Bren drove his spear through any beast that slipped past my reach, his face hard with relief and something closer to fear. I barely saw them. The horde became motion and answer.

A scavenger leapt low and lost both forelimbs before it landed. Another came from the right, jaws open for my thigh, and Ember Blade split its skull through the upper jaw. A barkback forced through the gap behind them, its plated shoulder knocking two militia aside as though they were fence posts, and I turned toward it with the new skill burning through every line of my body. The beast lowered its head and charged. I stepped aside at the last possible moment.

Guarded Blade's old discipline still lived within the evolved path, but now it no longer merely protected me. It created the angle. The axe struck into the barkback's neck as the creature passed, and Ember Blade carried the force through the cut with such heat that the wound smoked despite the rain. The barkback stumbled, tried to turn, and took the second strike beneath the jaw. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

It dropped against the barricade like a felled tree. Another notification struck me mid-breath. The advancement did not feel like relief. It felt like the fire finding better channels. ABILITY ADVANCED Ember Blade has advanced from Iron (early) to Iron (mid). You now better understand compact killing strokes, guarded attack lines, heated force transfer, and how to turn defensive movement into immediate execution.

This evolved ability grows through disciplined violence, close pressure, controlled heat, and surviving battles where restraint and brutality must become one motion. I staggered, caught myself, then kept moving because the breach had not ended and men were still dying. The skill sharpened around me, no longer simply brutal heat and momentum, but controlled force. The axe did not need wide arcs anymore. Smaller movements carried more damage. Angled cuts drove energy deeper.

Defensive footwork became launch points for compact killing strokes that split hide, bone, and armour-like plating where ordinary Iron weapons skidded uselessly away. The horde broke against me. Not all at once. Not cleanly. It broke the way floodwater breaks around stone, spilling to either side, seeking weaker ground. That gave the defenders room to breathe. Bren's line locked shields across the inner trench. Wade's emergency brace held long enough for workers to drag a wagon frame into the gap.

Jory, blood streaking one cheek, shouted insults at a dying scavenger with such hysterical ferocity that two militia beside him began laughing in shock. I kept killing until there was nothing immediately in front of me left alive. By then dawn had crawled grey and sickly over the eastern line. The rain softened from a hammering sheet into a fine mist, revealing the damage with cruel patience. Bodies filled the trench so thickly that workers had to climb over them to reach the wounded.

Human dead lay among beasts, sometimes under them, sometimes held in their jaws. A boy from the timber crews sat beside the broken barricade staring at the place his left hand used to be. One of the refugee men from the south road wagons wept silently while holding another man's head in his lap, though whether brother, cousin, or stranger no one stopped to ask. The eastern line had held. It looked like failure anyway. I stood in the mud at the centre of the breach while the axe hung low in my hand.

Ember Blade's steel still radiated faint warmth despite the rain, steam rising from the edge in thin shifting threads that curled around my wrist and disappeared into the grey dawn. Bren noticed the weapon, then the veins along my throat, then the shallow wounds across my forearms that had already begun closing faster than they should have. The older guard's face hardened into the expression of a man choosing which lie would do the least harm. Jory approached first, though slower than usual.

The ferryman looked shaken in a way his jokes could not quite cover, his sword still trembling in one muddy hand.

"That axe wasn't doing that yesterday."

"Merge," I said. The word sounded small beside the trench full of dead. Wade sat against a shattered support beam nearby, holding his bruised ribs with one arm while staring at the breach as if personally offended that it still existed.

"You evolved a combat skill?" I nodded. Jory looked at the bodies piled near the inner barricade.

"That looked less like evolving and more like the frontier developing anger issues." Nobody laughed. Bren stepped closer through the mud, lowering his voice as workers began shouting for stretchers behind us.

"Grade?"

"Iron (mid)." The older guard's eyes sharpened.

"Already?"

"It advanced during the fight." Wade swore softly.

"Of course it bloody did." A guard captain reached us then, a broad woman named Halra with a split lip and one arm in a sling from the night's fighting. She surveyed me with the same expression she gave collapsed walls, wounded men, and fires burning too close to grain stores. Not admiration. Assessment.

"You're Vey." I turned slightly.

"Yes."

"I watched the eastern breach from the inner brace line." Her gaze moved across the axe, the bodies, and finally to the blood still drying along my sleeves.

"You helped save that section."

"Didn't save enough."

"No one ever does." The words were not comforting, which somehow made them more honest. Halra looked toward Bren.

"He's off rotation tomorrow." I frowned.

"I can still fight."

"That wasn't a question."

"The wall will need bodies."

"The wall needs bodies that won't collapse in the middle of it." The captain looked back to me.

"You're shaking." Only then did I notice. My hands trembled violently around the axe haft, not from fear but from depletion. The burst that had carried me through the horde now receded, leaving behind something hollow and cold enough that the heat under my skin could not fill it. My knees felt loose. My ribs ached where claws had torn through cloth and flesh. Every breath came with a faint metallic taste.

"I'm fine," I said, because nothing else seemed useful. Halra snorted.

"That lie's wasted on officers." Bren placed one hand lightly against my shoulder, and the older guard's expression changed almost immediately. He felt the tremor there, the heat, the strained exhaustion beneath whatever strange force had carried me through the breach.

"One day," Bren said quietly.

"Take it." I looked back toward the eastern wall where workers were already dragging beast corpses aside to rebuild the barricade. The line had survived because I had become something frightening for a few minutes. It would need me again soon. Everyone knew that. Captain Halra seemed to know it most of all.

"That's an order," she said.

"You'll take the next day off rotation, Vey. Eat. Sleep. Stop looking at the wall like you can hold it upright by glaring." Jory, who had recovered just enough to be foolish again, lifted one bloodied finger.

"For what it's worth, he might be able to." Wade groaned.

"Don't encourage him." I almost smiled, but the expression failed before it formed. I looked down at Ember Blade again, at the faint warmth still held in the steel and the steam curling where rain touched the edge. The skill felt powerful, necessary, and terribly young inside me, as if something savage had been given a name but not yet taught restraint. Bren followed my gaze and said nothing for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was too quiet for anyone else to hear.

"What exactly are you becoming?"