All My Summons Become Divine Girls

Chapter 219: The Third Ring

Juna ran the valley like she had been born in it, reading the dark through her nose while Hajin matched her pace three steps behind.

The tower stood a mile up the throat of the valley, and the bell had gone silent after the third ring, which was either very good news or the other kind. Wind carried the answer down to them halfway there, blood over torn earth with something sour underneath.

Juna’s stride flattened into a hunting gait without a word passing between them.

The tower clearing opened around a wreck of splintered fencing and collapsed ground, lit by a single lamp still swinging from the watchtower rail.

Trenches of thrown soil crossed the clearing in long ragged lines, dug fast and left wide open, because whatever made them had stopped bothering to hide. Three older trap pits along the treeline had been sprung flat before the party ever arrived.

A man stood against the tower’s base with a spear in his only hand, working entirely off his back foot because his left leg was soaked dark from hip to boot.

The ground in front of him erupted before Hajin could call out.

The thing that came up was pale and wide as a wagon, a burrower grown far past anything the belt stories had described, plated along the skull with jaws that opened sideways. It had shards along its collar ridge, six of them and it moved like the trap pits had taught it everything they had to teach.

The man did not retreat, stepping inside the lunge instead and putting his spear through the soft joint under its jaw hinge, a placement so exact it looked rehearsed.

The burrower wrenched sideways, taking the spear with it, and the man went down to one knee with his empty hand still closed around nothing.

"Juna."

Two wings snapped open mid-stride as she crossed the clearing faster than the lamp could throw her shadow. Her claws raked the burrower across the collar ridge, driving it flat into its own trench, but the thing shed her with a full-body wrench and poured itself back into the ground.

The clearing went still except for the lamp creaking on its rail overhead. Juna stood loose in the churned soil with her ears swiveling, reading the ground through her feet while every trench around her pretended to be empty.

Hajin stayed where he was with his hands in his coat, because she would not thank him for finishing her hunt.

The ground bulged behind her half a breath before the jaws came, her leap throwing her clear before the teeth could close. She came down through the back of its skull instead, both claws driven in to the wrist, and the light in its six shards guttered out before the soil finished settling.

Silence came back to the clearing by degrees while the thrown soil found its way down. The man on one knee looked from the dead burrower to Juna’s wings folding away, then past her to Hajin walking in with his hands in his coat.

"Huh," he said, and sat down in the dirt with his back against the tower.

Up close he was gray-stubbled, knotted with muscle across a frame that had given up carrying anything spare decades ago, the left sleeve of his coat folded and pinned at the shoulder. He dragged a cord tight around his bleeding thigh with hand and teeth, refusing to look away from it until the knot held.

"Hans, I’m guessing," Hajin crouched across from him, nodding at the tourniquet, "want help with that?"

"Want and need are different animals, lord," the old man tied it off with a jerk, breathing hard through his nose, "and you’ll be the new landlord, since the whole belt’s been chewing on nothing else for weeks. Did the villages shut their gates like they’re taught?"

"Before the second ring finished."

"Then the night’s a success," he looked at the dead burrower filling half his clearing, and something in his face went sour, "except for the part where I rang three. Sixty years keeping that bell honest, and one bad night spends it all."

[ CringeSlayer91: ] THE LEGEND IS REAL AND HE’S EXACTLY AS ADVERTISED

[ GrandmaViewer: ] He tied his own tourniquet with his teeth and apologized for the inconvenience. Marry him, someone.

[ ShadowMage44: ] that spear placement was cleaner than half the elite fighters we’ve watched, who IS this guy

[ ashley (Mod): ] Sixty years of one-man border patrol and his first thought was whether the villages closed their gates.

Vella arrived twenty minutes behind them with her kit, Ash asleep in a sling improvised from someone’s curtain.

Hans endured the healing in stiff silence while golden light closed the thigh wound to a seam, his eyes tracking every pass of her hands as if comfort this easy had to cost something.

"A burrower with six shards has no business this far south," he muttered, keeping his eyes on the treeline while Vella worked, "and it’s not the only wrong thing out here either, what with packs drifting out of the deep hollows while the spring dens sit empty two months early, like the whole belt started redrawing its map the second the pressure left your mountain."

"You felt that."

"Everything with a nose felt it," Hans snorted, tapping his own crooked one, "what with that mountain sitting on the east like a held breath for forty years, pressing everything wild away from it, only for it to vanish so every animal in the belt redraws its map at once, whether it was your gold vein or whatever else you did to get it."

Hajin held his stare in the creaking lamplight, offering nothing but the same dry patience. The old man’s mouth twitched, the silence apparently confirming whatever he had wanted to know.

"The drifting I can read, packs following pressure like weather," Hans went on, pulling himself upright against the tower before Vella could object, "but I can’t read the deep end, not when the hollows past the north ridge go quiet, because nothing empties a den in this belt except a bigger animal moving in."

The clearing stayed still while that settled, the lamp creaking on its rail above them.

"You need to sleep for two days," Vella said, snapping her kit shut, "healer’s orders, and I outrank everyone here."

"She does," Hajin agreed, standing without offering anything so insulting as an arm, "we’ll walk you down to the village, so you can insult my patrol gear on the way, since I hear you only take payment in salt."

Hans took his time looking them over, his eyes sliding from Juna’s twitching ears to the sleeping child on Vella’s hip.

"Salt’s for work," he said, limping past them toward the path, "but the bell rang three, and you came before the sound finished rattling in my teeth, which makes you the first lord in forty years the east didn’t have to survive, so that one was free."

The village gates opened before they finished knocking, and the lamplight inside was full of faces that had not slept.

Word of the third bell had traveled the walls faster than they could walk down. The crowd at the gate went quiet at the sight of Hans upright, because nobody in the village had ever seen him hurt.

The old woman from the salt shed pushed through the crowd, looking Hans up and down before hitting him across the good shoulder with her needlework bag.

"Sixty years you make us listen for that bell," she said, hitting him again, "and the one time you ring it proper, it’s for yourself, you stubborn old mule."

"Won’t happen again," Hans muttered, though nobody looked satisfied.

Hajin stood at the edge of the lamplight with Ash asleep on his chest, watching Hans get scolded onto a cot through the open doorway.

’Sixty years of one man holding all of this,’ he thought, looking toward the quiet valley one last time before the gate shut, ’it’s past time this region had more than one.’