Chapter 163: Chapter 163: Where It Hurts II
CRACK.
Aisling’s hands came off the spear. Both arms dropped to her sides, and she stood like that for one full second — upright, held in place — and then Vespera’s hand came back.
The spear fell.
Aisling followed it.
Vespera stood over her with the heart in her hand and blood running down her wrist and off her elbow, darkening the red carpet black.
"No—"
The word ripped out of Marcus, and it did not sound like a command.
Vespera raised the heart above her face and opened her mouth and let the blood fall. She held it there for a long moment. Then she lowered the heart, looked at Marcus, and bit into it while she held his eyes.
[AISLING BYRNE — EMERALD SPIRE — S-RANK] [LEVEL: 52] [STATUS: DEAD]
[VESPERA — HEART OFFERING: TRIGGERED] [HP RECOVERY: ACTIVATED] [VESPERA — HP: 1,588,100 / 1,900,000 → 1,744,100 / 1,900,000]
Finn stopped moving.
The Possessed Knight in front of him was still there and his axe was still in his hands and none of it reached him for a full second, because he was looking at Aisling on the carpet and Aisling on the carpet had no chest anymore.
He had seen people die. He had been in the room when it happened. He had kept fighting after, because stopping only made it worse.
He had never watched something rip an S-rank’s heart out and smile.
He had never understood, from inside the room, what Level 98 meant.
His axe lowered half an inch.
His foot moved backward. One step, the sole of his boot quiet against the carpet, and he did not decide to take it. His body had decided before his mind finished reading the window.
Vespera swallowed.
Her eyes left Marcus and came to Finn.
They settled there and stayed.
Finn pulled the foot back and brought the axe up, because she was looking at him and the only thing left to do was look like he meant to fight.
His heartbeat was loud enough to hear.
Vespera moved.
There was no crossing the hall. One moment she was standing over Aisling. The next she was in front of Finn and her hand was around his neck and she was lifting him, and none of the time in between existed.
His hands locked around her wrist and pulled. Her grip did not shift. Her fingers did not move. It was not the grip of something struggling to hold him. It was the grip of something that did not notice the effort.
His boots left the floor.
The portrait frame behind him cracked against his back and the wall behind that cracked, and he pulled at her wrist with both hands and could not make it matter, and she lifted him another inch, and the air in his throat ran out.
The sound that came out of him was not a word he chose.
"Dad!"
The hall held it.
Marcus turned — not looked, turned, his whole body pivoting —
Vespera’s head tilted slowly.
Her grip did not loosen, but her eyes moved from Finn’s face to Marcus’s and back, taking her time, and the smile that came was different from the ones before it. Not amusement. Recognition.
"Dad?" she said softly.
She pressed one finger gently into the side of Finn’s jaw, turning his face a degree toward Marcus.
"So." She studied the two of them together. "This one is yours."
Marcus’s voice came out low. Controlled. His hand was closed to a fist at his side.
"Don’t touch him."
Vespera looked at him like he had said something she had been waiting for.
Her thumb found the side of Finn’s throat just under his jaw and pressed in, and where it touched the skin a red mark burned through, fast and deep, not on the surface.
It reached past skin. It reached somewhere else.
[BRIDAL CURSE: POSSESSION TAX APPLIED] [TARGET: FINN HALE] [EXP GAIN REDUCED BY 50%] [CONDITION: ACTIVE UNTIL CURSE SOURCE IS DESTROYED OR PURIFIED]
Finn read it.
His hands were still around her wrist. His fingers were still there. But the strength ran out of them for one second while he understood what the window meant.
He had come to Floor 20 to grow. To stop being twenty-four in a room full of S-ranks. To stop being the name that got a seat because of who his father was. And the floor had found that, had looked at the exact thing he was reaching for, and cut it in half.
Vespera watched his face change while he read.
"Possession," she said, quietly and pleasantly, "is not about the body. Any creature can hold a body." Her thumb moved once across the red mark. "It is about owning what someone is trying to become."
She looked at Marcus.
Then her other hand rose, fingers extended, and Aisling’s blood was still on them — dark and drying, still under the nails — and the hand came toward Finn’s chest, slow and deliberate, pointed at the same place it had gone through Aisling.
Finn looked at the hand.
He saw the blood.
He saw the pieces of Aisling still on the fingers.
His mouth opened.
Marcus was seven meters away behind two Possessed Knights when the hand rose.
The Knights moved to keep the gap. The support shouted. The shield fighter tried to push through from the wall side and the Knights blocking him turned and held the line.
Vespera’s fingers spread.
Marcus vanished.
Not ran. Not moved. The space between him and the Knights existed, and then he was not in it, and the Knights’ attention tracked toward where he had been and could not find where he was, and where he was was in front of Vespera with his right fist driven back and already swinging before she had processed the displacement.
Vespera’s eyes moved toward him.
Her smile had not finished deciding what it was when his fist landed.
BOOM.
Not the sound of a punch. The sound of something accelerated past the speed the material was built to survive. Vespera’s body folded around the point of contact, her hand left Finn’s neck, and she and the portrait wall behind her left the hall at the same moment — stone, brick, frame, plaster, and red dust bursting outward as she went through it and into the dark of the chamber beyond.
[VESPERA — HP: 1,744,100 / 1,900,000 → 1,390,000 / 1,900,000]
Finn dropped.
He hit the floor on one knee, coughing, one hand at his own throat, and the EXP window was still in front of him, patient and still, floating in the settling dust.
[EXP GAIN REDUCED BY 50%]
Through the hole in the portrait wall, a chamber stretched out in the dark beyond. Vespera was on her feet. Already. Her wing was torn at the joint and the gown was gone on one side and blood ran from her mouth, and she was upright and facing the gap and she was not smiling anymore.
Marcus stood at the edge of the hole.
He rolled his shoulder once. He did not look back at Finn.
He stepped through the wall.
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