Chapter 22: The Turning Point
Run.
Freya was running before she’d even thought the word. Her legs had decided on their own, and now her whole body was nothing but that — running, running, the slope, the pebbles rolling under her soles, the air slicing into her throat in cold blades.
Kyū and Roku galloped at her sides, flat to the ground, and they were slow, god, they were too slow. She bent down mid-stride, scooped them up one under each arm, nearly lost her balance, caught herself, kept going. Her thighs were already burning.
Why did I do this. Why did I do this why did I do this—
The tunnel mouth. She threw herself into it. Darkness swallowed her whole, and the golden light died behind her.
Don’t look back. Don’t look back, run, run—
She looked back.
Her heart skipped a beat.
The beast was in the tunnel. It filled the tunnel. Its half-unfolded wings scraped both walls at once, floor to ceiling, a tide of black membranes advancing toward her in silence, and at the center of all that darkness, two red points. Fixed on her. On her alone.
The scream came out on its own. She ran. She no longer knew if her feet were touching the ground.
I was too sure of myself. Too sure of myself, like an idiot, one enchantment and one level up and I thought I—
Something light landed on her shoulder. She nearly screamed again — it was a bird, and the voice that burst from it turned her stomach.
"Madam!!! Run, I’m coming, I’m doing everything I can!!"
Aria.
Aria, whose voice was breaking.
Aria, who promised to burn the world to ashes in the tone of afternoon tea, Aria whom nothing, ever, made so much as blink — and her voice had just cracked into the high notes like a child’s.
The cold that seized Freya in that instant had nothing to do with the running.
But she shook her head as she ran. Aria will make it in time. In the novels, they always make it in time.
"I know!! I’m running, Aria, I’M RUNNING!!"
A glance back. The red eyes had doubled in size. Closer. The only sound in all that black was the long scrape of wings against rock, steady, patient, like a blade being drawn across a whetstone.
She couldn’t even hear its steps. The thing wasn’t running.
It didn’t need to.
No no no no NO—
The pen. She tore the pen from her pocket, whipped the air behind her without turning, threw every ounce of will she had into it. The net of ink cracked open across the tunnel, thick, taut from wall to wall, anchored deep in the rock.
That’ll slow it down, it has to slow it down, please—
A sound of tearing fabric.
She looked. The net hung in ribbons. The beast hadn’t even slowed. It had simply raised an arm.
A whimper escaped her, high and thin, a sound she didn’t know she could make. Her legs weighed tons. Her lungs couldn’t keep up — every breath scraped, whistled, wasn’t enough. The scrape of the wings was right behind her now, right behind, she could feel the air shifting against her back—
The shadow swallowed her.
What little light remained disappeared, and Freya knew, with an absolute, animal certainty, that she could no longer run.
So her arms acted on their own. She hurled the two foxes ahead of her, far, as far as she could throw them, watched them roll out of the shadow.
Not them. Not them, at least.
And she turned around, the enchanted sword raised in both hands, facing the black tide.
The world slowed.
She saw everything. The bluish thread of the enchantment trembling, because her hands were trembling. The two red eyes descending toward her. Her own breathing, deafening.
With everything I have. Everything. Absolutely everything—
She struck. A cry torn from her gut, all the weight of her body, all the power of her remade muscles, a blow to split the earth open, the finest strike of her entire life—
The beast’s face tore open.
Not under the blade. On its own. The perfect black split in two across a maw, immense, bristling with dozens of teeth long and thin as knitting needles, and the sword came down straight into it.
The jaws closed.
CRACK.
The sound went through Freya from front to back. The blade — her blade, the Rank A enchantment that cut through matter like butter — shattered to pieces between the teeth, and the stump that remained slipped from her numb hands and rang against the floor.
A small, ridiculous sound. Almost polite.
Her legs gave out.
She fell backward onto the ground, and her body scrambled away on its own, heels clawing at the floor, palms shredding on the gravel, while she screamed — she could hear herself screaming from very far away, a voice that couldn’t be hers — and the pen in her hand spat out everything that crossed her mind, lances, blades, chains of ink, and every spell, every single spell, burst against the beast’s neck like soap bubbles.
It didn’t even slow down.
"GACHA!" Her throat tore on the word. "GACHA!! GACHA!!!"
[ Gacha still on cooldown. ]
The window floated before her eyes, gray, indifferent.
"DAMN IT!! DAMN IT DAMN IT DAMN IT!!"
Her hand found the sword stump. She hurled it with everything she had. It bounced off the matte black with a clink and vanished into the dark.
The beast stopped.
And slowly, very slowly, the needle-filled maw stretched. Upward. Across the whole width of what should have been a face.
It was smiling.
Freya stopped breathing. Her back hit the wall. End of the tunnel. End of everything. The maw came down toward her, centimeter by centimeter, savoring it, the red eyes planted in hers, gleaming, greedy, and there was not a single sound left in the world except the blood pounding in her own ears.
I’m going to die.
The thought fell, simple, clean.
I’m going to die here. For real. No respawn, no save, no—
The thing’s breath washed over her face, hot and putrid. The needles gleamed a hair’s breadth from her skin.
And in the din of her own heart, it was a face that rose. Violet eyes. A smile held back at the corner of the lips.
Aria.
I told you there was no need to worry. I kissed you in front of the girls and walked out feeling so clever, and you’re going to arrive too late, and you’re going to find me like this, and I’m sorry, Aria, I’m so sorry, I don’t want—
I don’t want to die.
She closed her eyes.
A dull impact. Something hot spattered across her face, her chest, ran down her cheek to her jaw.
No pain.
...?
She opened her eyes.
And her world stopped.
In the beast’s maw, impaled on the closed rows of needles, was Kyū.
The little body run through from end to end. His paws hanging limp in the void. And his cap — that cap that lit up bright pink for a scratch, for a scrap of meat, for nothing at all — was pulsing weakly. One wave of light. Then a fainter one. Then a fainter one still.
He had charged. While she was closing her eyes, that tiny body of nothing at all had crossed the tunnel and thrown itself into the maw in her place.
"...Kyū?"
The name came out tiny. A thread of a voice.
The cap pulsed one last time.
And went out.
"Kyū." Her voice climbed. "Kyū!! KYŪ—"
The world exploded.
Something seized her by the waist — a tentacle, immense and incongruously gentle — and tore her off the ground. The tunnel streaked past in reverse, the beast shrank, and she landed rolling ten meters away, over and over, until she bumped against something warm and trembling. Roku. Flattened to the ground, his cap chalk-white, pressing against her with all of his small body.
She raised her head.
Aria stood in the middle of the tunnel.
And it was no longer Aria.
From her back, from her sides, from her very shadow, tentacles erupted — ten, thirty, fifty — an entire forest of living darkness filling the gallery from floor to ceiling, undulating slowly, and the mana radiating from her crushed the air, made the rock vibrate, pressed down on Freya’s chest like a hand.
The servant who ironed her collars. The cook of last night’s feast.
The beast dropped Kyū’s body, which fell to the ground like a rag, and rose to its full height, wings snapped wide open, maw gaping on a scream that made no sound — only a wave that shook dust from the ceiling.
"A Rank S." Aria’s voice was trembling — not with fear, but with a rage searching for a way out. "SOMETHING AS PATHETIC AS YOU... DARED TO TOUCH MY MISTRESS!!"
And hell broke loose.
The beast spat a volley of dark orbs that pulverized the rock into smoking craters, right where Aria had stood a fraction of a second earlier. She wasn’t there anymore. She was above, at its flank, everywhere, her tentacles slicing the air in shrill whistles, striking like whips, coiling like serpents. A black wing scythed through an entire wall in a thunder of rubble; Aria walked through the cloud of debris without deviating a single degree. Purple glyphs ignited in a circle around her, poured out lances of shadow that nailed one wing to the ground and shredded it. The beast tore itself half free, howled its silent scream, retaliated with a blast that swallowed the whole corridor in absolute black.
The black settled.
Aria walked out of it at a stroll. Not one crease out of place on her uniform.
Freya watched, flattened to the ground, Roku crushed against her, incapable of the slightest movement. Two monsters were tearing each other apart in the bowels of the earth, and the rock wept gravel at every impact.
Then Aria decided it had gone on long enough.
Five tentacles burst from the very floor, ran the beast through from side to side, and lifted it into the air like an insect on pins. It convulsed, spat its orbs at random, slashed at nothing.
Aria raised her eyes to it.
"You spilled the blood of what belongs to her."
The tentacles drew taut.
"And you made her cry."
They pulled. Each in a different direction.
What fell back to the ground no longer resembled anything.
Silence returned all at once, so total it hurt the ears.
Freya got up. She didn’t know how. Her legs were shaking too hard to carry her and carried her anyway, to where she needed to be, the only place in the world. The little body lay against the wall, tiny among the rubble.
She collapsed to her knees and gathered him against her chest.
He was still warm.
That was the worst of it. He was still warm, like after a nap in the sun, and his cap was gray, extinguished, dull, and his head rolled against her arm without lifting, and his ridiculous little horn nubs still pointed forward, frozen mid-charge.
"Kyū..."
The name broke in two.
"I’m sorry..." She pulled him against her, curled her whole body around the small corpse, forehead against the motionless skull. "I’m so, so sorry..."
The tears fell onto the dark fur, heavy, burning, mixing with the dried blood on her cheeks, and she was rocking him without realizing it, back and forth, as if it could still do any good.
"Forgive me... Please... Please, forgive me..."
Roku pressed against her thigh. He raised his muzzle toward his comrade, once. He made no sound.
A hand came to rest on her shoulder.
Freya lifted a ravaged face, eyes drowned, searching for something to hold on to, anything, one second of comfort—
Aria’s face was grave. Closed in a way she had never seen it.
"I am sorry, Mistress." A pause. Something crossed the violet eyes that looked like true pain. "But at that same moment... assassins were sent to the village. The villagers are... all of them..."
She didn’t finish.
Something cracked open in Freya’s chest. Not a thought. Not yet a thought. A cold. An enormous cold that poured out all at once beneath her ribs and had nowhere to go.
The village. The square. The faces that bowed as she passed.
All of them.
"They are heading for the dungeon now," Aria continued in a low voice. "They made the villagers talk — they gave up the location of our camp."
The dungeon.
Naïa. Laïa.
Freya lowered her eyes to Kyū. One long second. When she spoke, her voice no longer trembled. It no longer carried anything at all.
"I’ll head back myself."
A breath.
"Kill them all, please."
"Mistress—"
"Kill them all." Her arms tightened around the little body. "And then bring the corpses to the dungeon chamber. The goblins’. This monster’s. And the assassins’. Please."
A silence. Aria looked at her for a moment, then bowed, deeply, lower than she had ever bowed.
"As you command."
And she vanished.
The devastated tunnel. The dust settling. Roku mute against her leg.
Freya tightened her hold around Kyū, the blood slowly soaking into her suit, warm at first, then lukewarm.
Then cold.
Silent tears slid down her cheeks, one by one, without a sound, without a sob, and fell onto the small lifeless body, rolling down the dark fur before losing themselves in the dust.
With her free hand, she reached out and scratched the top of the little skull, ever so gently, between the two horn nubs. Where he liked it. Where it melted him every single time.
The cap stayed gray.
"Don’t ever change, you..." she murmured. "That’s what I told you, isn’t it..."
Her voice broke apart completely.
"So why... why did you change, now... Wake up... Kyū, please... One more ’Kyu.’ Just one. I’ll give you all the meat you want. I’ll scratch you all night if I have to. So please... please..."
Only the silence answered her.
Roku gently laid his head on his comrade’s small body, and closed his eyes.
And in the bowels of the earth, in the middle of a world of wonders they had discovered together barely an hour earlier, Freya rocked her little soldier who would never answer again, repeating his name, over and over, until her voice was nothing at all.
~~
Author’s note: I knew this was coming the day I named him, so why am I this sad?? ...o7 Kyū
Comments