Chapter 43: 0.13
The plot sat at the edge of the city, past the last of the lights, where the roads gave out and the grass grew wild.
It was empty. A wide, walled square of bare earth owned by the Fening family, undeveloped for years, guarded by nothing but a rumor no one dared repeat out loud.
Aidan walked through the gate with Solenne at his side and Tom on his shoulder, and none of them cast a shadow anyone could see.
Tom had wrapped all three of them in a fold of woven thread. Invisible. Silent. A hole in the world moving across the dark grass.
’Master.’ Tom’s voice was quiet in his head. ’Stop a moment.’
Aidan stopped.
The little Vaelith’s mismatched eyes had gone very wide, gold and silver catching the moonlight, staring down at the ground beneath their feet.
’The threads here.’ Tom swallowed. ’They all end. Right below us. Dozens of them, cut short, buried in the dirt.’ A pause. ’There are forty-three people under this field, Master.’
Aidan went still.
’Forty-three,’ he repeated.
’Bones. All of them. Old and new.’ Tom’s tail curled tight. ’This is where he brings the ones who don’t heal. The ones the guild can’t pay off. This is his quiet place.’
Aidan looked out across the bare, innocent-looking square of earth.
Forty-three people. Under a field, at the edge of a city that looked the other way. While the young master who put them there rode through the streets laughing.
A vein stood up along Aidan’s temple.
He smiled. It did not reach his eyes at all.
’Solenne,’ he said, very softly. ’Get ready to draw the sword I created for you. We’ll have some bloody fun here.’
"What are you standing for? Get moving." Ferrus slapped Solenne’s back, pushing her into Aidan in front of her.
’Understood. Slow and painful deaths, right?’ Solenne unfurled her clenched fists as she asked. Her eyes looked eager.
’Slow and painful, yep. I want some entertainment out of their misery.’
They were already waiting, because Chuzo had wanted them to be.
Floodlights snapped on across the plot, and the gang stepped out of the dark. Chuzo Fening at the center, cleaned up now, his cruel little smile back in place, flanked by his handful of friends and a wall of hired Windwell muscle.
"So you came." Chuzo spread his arms, delighted. "The nobody in the coat. You have no idea how much trouble you saved me. I was going to have to send people to drag you here, and here you are, walking in on your own." He tilted his head. "And you brought the grey-haired girl. Good. I remember her."
The three of them simply appeared, ten meters inside the wall, and the whole gang flinched.
"Chuzo Fening," Aidan said. His voice was pleasant and it was terrible. "Number one family in the city. Owns a top-thirty guild. Rides bikes through crowds because breaking a stranger’s arm makes him feel big." He looked around the empty field, slow and deliberate. "And buries the ones who break too easy right under his own feet."
Chuzo’s smile flickered.
"Forty-three," Aidan said. "That’s the count. Did you know your own number, or did you lose track somewhere around the twenties?"
The gang went quiet. A couple of the friends glanced at the ground, then very quickly did not.
"I don’t know how you know that," Chuzo said, and the delight had gone thin, "but it doesn’t matter. You’re standing in the last place you’ll ever stand, and nobody knows you’re here." He gestured lazily at Ferrus. "Take the girl alive. The man, mostly alive. I want him to last."
Ferrus Halloway moved.
He was fast, Epic-rank fast, crossing the ground in a grey blur with a blade of hardened Mana already swinging for Aidan’s neck.
Aidan caught it on one knuckle duster without turning his head.
The impact cracked the earth in a ring around his feet. Ferrus’s eyes widened. And Aidan finally looked at him, up close, with those cold and empty eyes.
"You’re the strong one," Aidan said. "The blade. Epic-rank. The scariest thing this sad little rich boy owns." He leaned in. "You’ve killed people for him, haven’t you. Some of the forty-three are yours."
Ferrus wrenched his blade back and struck again, faster.
Aidan let the second strike come, tilted his head a hair so it hissed past his cheek, and drove one fist into the Epic-rank blade’s shoulder.
CRACK.
The arm came off cleanly, blade and all, and hit the dirt.
Ferrus screamed. It was the first sound of the night that wasn’t a threat.
"That’s for the ones you did quietly," Aidan said.
He caught the man’s other wrist as Ferrus reeled, and broke it, and tore the arm free at the shoulder.
"That’s for doing it and sleeping fine after."
Ferrus went down to his knees, and the whole gang stared, frozen, because the scariest thing they owned was on the ground in pieces and the man in the coat hadn’t moved his feet.
Aidan crouched to Ferrus’s eye level.
"You spent your life being the sharp thing other people pointed," he said quietly. "Here’s the part nobody warned you about. There’s always a sharper thing."
He took Ferrus’s head off with a single motion, and the Epic-rank blade of the Fening family fell silent for good.
Aidan straightened, cracked his neck, and turned to the rest of them.
"Right," he smiled "Now the fun part."
...
The gang broke and ran.
It did not help. Tom had already isolated the whole area. No place to run, no way to scream for help.
"Solenne," Aidan said. "Half are yours. You know what to do."
"Understood." Solenne’s voice was flat and cold, and she raised the sword.
The blade was Aidan’s work, forged from his aspects, a length of dark crimson edged in violet decay and threaded with pale wind, humming faintly in her grip. She had killed over two hundred Terrors with it in today in a Terror Tear.
Tonight she used it like she had been born with it, because tonight she was not alone in her own body.
Tom reached into her thread and read the fight like open book.
Every swing the gang threw, Solenne was already gone. She blinked with Hollow Step, here and then there, and the thread-sight put her exactly where each blow was not, so that a dozen desperate men swung at empty air over and over and never once touched her.
"You can’t," one of them gasped, hacking at a space she had left half a heartbeat ago. "Hold still, hold, why can’t I?!"
"You spent years hitting people who couldn’t move," Solenne said, appearing at his side. "Now you can’t hit one who can."
She took his legs out from under him with the flat of the blade, and left him screaming, and blinked to the next.
Aidan took the other half with his fists.
He did not use a single technique. No wind, no rot, no bullets. He walked into them and used his hands, because his hands were enough and because he wanted to feel it.
"You know the worst part?" He caught a fleeing thug by the collar and put him into the dirt. "It’s not the bones you break. It’s that you’re bored. You hurt people because you ran out of anything else that made you feel alive." He stepped on the man’s back, not quite hard enough to end it. "Buried forty-three of them out here to keep it interesting."
He moved through them without hurry.
A knee here. A shoulder there. Every strike measured, every one landing exactly hard enough to drop a man in agony and exactly soft enough to keep him awake for the next one. The heat at the base of his skull poured out of him one blow at a time, and the field filled with the sounds men make when the thing they always did to others starts happening to them.
"This is for the arm you broke on the street tonight," he told one.
"This is for the boy you were going to ride through," he told another, his body painted red from blood of others.
"And this," he said, standing over the last of them, "is for the forty-three you thought nobody would ever count."
Chuzo Fening tried to run.
He got three steps before a wall of wind slammed shut in front of him, and he turned, and there was nowhere left.
His guild was worthless out here. His family name was worthless out here. His Epic-rank blade was in three pieces on the grass, and his friends were a chorus of broken sounds behind him, and the true Young Master Chuzo Fening, who had never once in his life been on this side of it, finally understood what his forty-three had felt.
"Wait," Chuzo said. "Wait, wait, I have money, I have the guild, I can give you anything, whatever you want, I can make you rich, I can make yo—"
"You can’t count," Aidan said, walking toward him. "That’s the thing. Forty-three people, and you couldn’t even keep track. They were that small to you."
He cracked his knuckles.
"Let me show you how it feels to be small."
Chuzo Fening opened his mouth to scream for a city that had always come running.
For the first time in his life, nobody did.
"Scream." Aidan made a clawing motion, and lacerated Chuzo’s face, body, and everything as he turned buck naked.
He cut the ding-dong below with a wind-blade his Chuzo’s agonized scream shrilled.
Chuzo called for his dad, mom, uncle, as snot, tears, and shit covered him. A small tornado was whirling around him, cutting him all over in small cuts that bled little by little, and blowing cold biting wind, all over, magnifying the pain and the sound of his scream both.
"With this pace, you’ll suffer for two to five minutes depending on how long you stay conscious."
[0.13% of accumulated anger vented.]
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