All My Summons Become Divine Girls

Chapter 217: Two Bells Means Run

The traveling clinic had been Vella’s idea, born from watching sick families stagger through the gate after two days on the road.

"If they can walk that far half-dead, we can ride it healthy," she had argued at breakfast, already packing her kit, and nobody could find a hole in that logic worth defending.

They left at first light with Cassie’s party as escort, Ash riding his usual post on Hajin’s chest while Juna ranged ahead of the horses. Loccy stayed behind planted at the mine gate, holding a parade stiffness she had invented for the occasion.

The last thing they saw leaving town was her waving the hammer overhead like a flag.

The first village sat half a day out, a cluster of maybe forty homes behind a stockade wall that had been patched so many times the original timber was a rumor. What stopped Hajin was the board mounted beside its gate, rows of small notches carved in weathered lines, one for every season the village had survived.

Somebody had been keeping that count for more than a hundred years without missing a season.

The headman came out to meet them with half the village gathering at his back. A woman near the front called out a name before anyone bowed to their lord.

"Lady Vella!"

It was the mother from the clinic line, who had walked two days for a maybe. The crowd that formed in the next minute formed around the healer rather than the ruler.

Vella froze for a heartbeat under the attention, then got dragged toward the sick houses by three grandmothers at once. The look she threw Hajin over her shoulder landed somewhere between help me and don’t you dare.

"They know her name and not yours," Juna observed from beside his horse, one ear flicking with amusement.

"Good," he said, watching Vella disappear into the first house with her kit, "healers should outrank landlords out here."

The headman walked him along the stockade while the clinic worked, pointing out the anomaly belt’s geography one scar at a time. The deep hollows to the north came first, where the packs bred, followed by the two valleys nobody entered after rain because the soft ground hid burrowers.

He saved the cull seasons for last, when the men went out in groups of ten and came back in groups of nine.

"The belt gives and the belt takes, my lord," the old man summed up his region’s entire philosophy while tapping the wall, "we hold the line here, and Hans holds everything past it."

"Hans," Hajin repeated, filing the name next to the version of it he had heard from villagers near the mine.

"The hunter," the headman said, scratching his jaw while he found the words, "he’s got one arm and no lord over him, never wore a badge in his life either. Every breeding season the safe roads get marked before we even think to ask, and any pack that starts massing ends up at the bottom of a ravine before it becomes our problem."

"We pay him in salt when he takes anything at all, same as my grandfather paid him, and none of us like thinking about that part too hard."

[ LoreSeeker99: ] hold on, GRANDFATHER? either there’s been generations of Hans or that man is not aging normally

[ RationalSkeptic7: ] or it’s a title passed down, occam’s razor people

[ GrandmaViewer: ] Or the poor man is just old and strong, my father split wood until ninety. Not everything is a mystery.

[ ashley (Mod): ] The real question is why an entire region has one volunteer guardian and nobody ever sent him help.

The road to the second village produced the day’s only fight, a hound pack of six breaking from a gully with the wind behind them and bad intentions ahead of them.

Cassie called the formation before Hajin finished turning his horse, her voice carrying none of the panic it would have held two months ago. Jonas anchored the front with his axe low while Toby’s light-flash broke the pack’s charge line.

Cassie’s earth wall rose at the exact angle that funneled the lead hounds onto Jonas’s swing.

The fight lasted under two minutes, ending with six carcasses and one shallow gash across Toby’s forearm that Vella sealed from horseback without fully stopping her sentence.

Hajin never left his saddle, and the pride he felt watching them work was a quieter, stranger thing than any core drop.

Ash watched the entire exchange without blinking, his small head tracking Jonas’s axe angles and Cassie’s wall placement in turn. The kid had seen Loccy crater six boars without half this attention, yet the weak humans fighting smart held him long after the hounds stopped twitching.

Hajin watched him watching them, wondering what was being filed away behind those unblinking eyes.

The second village told the same Hans stories with different scars.

Here he had pulled a child out of a burrower nest nine springs back, and here the arm was lost to a pack alpha. The blacksmith swore frostbite took the arm on the northern ridge instead of any monster.

The innkeeper’s mother insisted he had traded it to something in a cave for the region’s safety, and she would hear no argument otherwise. The stories agreed on nothing except the rules, and the rules had been repeated to children for so many decades they came out worn smooth.

"One bell means he’s driving something toward the ravines, so you stay off the roads," the innkeeper’s mother recited, folding her needlework in her lap, "two bells means run for the stockade, because whatever it is got past him."

"And Hans rings the first bell himself?"

"From whichever tower is closest, my lord. He rings once, always once, then he goes and does the rest," she looked up at him with eyes gone milky at the edges, "sixty years I’ve lived here, and I have never heard a second bell followed by anything but silence and a safe morning."

They reached the last village of the circuit at dusk, high in the belt’s northern shoulder where the treeline pressed close enough to touch the stockade.

Vella was elbow-deep in her third house of fever patients and Hajin was helping unload salt sacks that were only half a gift when the watchtower bell up the valley began to ring.

It rang once, and every head in the village turned north in the same motion.

Twice, and the street emptied around them mid-breath, mothers snatching children through doorways while the gate crew heaved the stockade shut.

Then the bell rang a third time, and the old woman who had been directing the salt froze with her hand still pointing, the color draining out of her face.

"Three," she whispered, staring up the darkening valley without blinking, "there was never a three, not once in my lifetime. Hans told us what a third ring would mean, and we prayed the bell would rust before we ever learned it for real. It means he needs help."

Hajin handed Ash to Vella and found Juna through the scattering crowd, her ears pinned flat toward the tower before he said a word.

"Lead," he told her, and the two of them went over the stockade wall while it was still closing.