Chapter 49: Untitled
The next day, an advance team was sent out to check the area leading into town where most of the attacks had been concentrated.
Ethan was part of that team.
He followed closely behind White Ghost and two others as they moved along the ridgeline, the morning air carrying the cold of the mountain range down through the pass in slow steady currents.
"The footmarks are fresh."
White Ghost crouched in front of the hillside, his eyes lit with a soft white glow as he examined the ground.
"Down this ridge."
The light in his eyes was one of White Tower’s legacy spells.
Lightscope Inspection.
It allowed the user to analyze both physical and magical data simultaneously, cross-referencing what it found against prior knowledge stored inside the spell itself. In Ethan’s past life he would have described it plainly: bringing a phone loaded with reference material into an exam and having it read the room for you.
White Ghost straightened up.
"Let’s keep moving. It shouldn’t be far."
His voice was calm, unhurried, the tone of someone who had done this kind of work enough times to know that rushing it accomplished nothing.
They weren’t here to fight.
The objective was to follow one of the creatures back to wherever they were coming from, identify the source, and leave the extermination for when the full group was in position. Finding the lair first. Everything else second.
"Let’s keep going."
The three others fell into step behind him without comment, moving along the ridge in a loose formation, their footsteps kept quiet against the loose stone underfoot.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
They reached a ledge some time later.
Below them, coiled in the corner of a cave entrance set into the face of the cliff, a beast rested with the heavy stillness of something that hadn’t been disturbed in a while.
White Ghost studied it from the ledge without moving.
"Tier 8."
He said it quietly, more to himself than the group, and then his gaze shifted sideways to Ethan.
"Beat it up. But not so much that it’s afraid to run."
Asking a tier 7 summoner for that kind of restraint against a tier 8 beast was already unreasonable. The gap between tiers wasn’t simply a number, it was a genuine difference in output, in speed, in the margin of error available during a fight. Holding back precisely enough to damage without breaking required a control that most at that level hadn’t developed yet.
Ethan was the only one in this group who could realistically manage it.
"Okay."
He nodded once and without further deliberation began climbing down from the ledge position, moving at a pace that kept his footsteps even against the rocky face as he descended toward the cave entrance below.
"Shock rounds first."
He murmured it to himself as he loaded the crossbow, the mechanism clicking into place as he approached.
He opened fire.
The first bolt landed clean and the effect spread immediately, a sudden electric charge running through the beast in sharp radiating waves, jolting it out of its rest in a single convulsive motion.
The creature turned.
Its frustration was immediate and loud, a roar that rolled up the cliff face and scattered small stones from the ledge above.
Ethan didn’t let up.
He kept firing the same shock rounds in steady succession, maintaining a consistent tempo, each bolt landing before the beast had fully recovered from the last. Not enough to drive it into panic. Enough to keep it off balance, its anger building without giving it a clear target it could actually reach.
When it lunged forward he activated Black-Eyed Bat Evasion.
His form dissolved instantly into a scatter of dark shapes, the attack passing through nothing, and he reformed a step outside its reach before it could redirect.
—shuu
—shuu
—shuu
The rounds kept coming, methodical and even, never pressing hard enough to tip the beast past anger into the kind of desperation that made retreat impossible.
From the top of the ledge, White Ghost, Ella, and Lucas watched the exchange below without particular urgency.
The boy was competent. That much was visible from here, in the way he controlled the spacing, in the tempo he maintained without breaking it, in the ease with which the evasion skill handled the close exchanges that would have ended the approach for anyone working with less.
Ella watched with an expression that had shifted somewhere between satisfied and something she hadn’t fully named yet.
She hadn’t seen him fight before. Not properly, not like this, where the conditions were real and the margin for error was genuine.
’No wonder she’s so interested in him.’
The thought arrived plainly and sat there for a moment before her expression shifted into something else, a slow private smile that carried the shape of a plan she hadn’t shared with anyone.
One that would completely shake Ethan if he ever heard it.
"It’s running."
White Ghost’s voice cut through the ledge, sharp and immediate.
"Follow it."
Ella’s thoughts dissolved.
In under three minutes, Ethan had pushed the beast past the threshold it was willing to hold, its anger giving way to the instinct that said the damage wasn’t worth what it was getting in return. It turned and moved, retreating back along the base of the cliff in the direction it had come from.
Ethan followed.
Not close enough to force it back around. Not far enough to lose the line. The distance held steady between them as the beast moved, guided more by irritation than fear, heading back toward the only place it knew.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Somewhere deeper inside the mountain range, in a cave that the morning light didn’t reach, a shell cracked open.
A lizard creature pulled itself free of the casing, four legs finding the wet stone floor, two sets of wings folding flat against its back as it steadied itself. A single horn rose from its head. Its teeth were jagged and uneven along the maw, still too new to have settled into the shape they would eventually hold.
Around it, several other shells sat empty and long since cold, scattered across the floor of the cave in no particular arrangement, the residue of a clutch already weeks into the world.
At the front of the cave, a massive shape rested against the stone walls.
The mother beast turned slowly, her scales catching and releasing the faint ambient light as she shifted, the sound of them dragging against the cave wall low and continuous, a sound that belonged to something that had been in this place long enough to stop noticing it.
To a first glance, she looked like simply another large creature occupying a cave too small for anything else worth noting.
She was not.
Tier 6.
A lesser dragon, sitting at the center of everything the reports had been circling around for three weeks, unbothered and unhurried, her clutch hatching quietly in the dark while a town on the mountain’s edge counted its losses and waited for someone to come find the source.
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