Chapter 51: A lesson in suppression
Being the underdog in any situation typically required proving yourself to whoever was watching.
This was exactly why Ethan preferred working alone.
But times like these always came, and preference didn’t change that.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
The village square had begun filling slowly as word spread through the surrounding streets, villagers drifting toward the open space with the unhurried curiosity of people who had spotted something worth stopping for.
White Ghost stood at the center of it, his voice carrying the same controlled calm it held in every other context.
"No weapons. You are not to fight, only your summons."
He looked between Ethan and Ruyan as he said it.
"You are not allowed to kill your opponent’s summon, and are each limited to a maximum of one."
The villagers gathering at the edges of the square watched with open interest, their faces carrying none of the weight the situation actually deserved. To them this was entertainment, a welcome interruption in the rhythm of ordinary days. They understood in a surface way that the people standing in their square were their protectors, and they enjoyed the labor those protectors performed.
Could he blame them for that.
They simply didn’t understand that the kind of insubordination playing out in front of them right now was not a small thing. Cracks in a unit’s cohesion during an active operation didn’t stay contained. They spread, and when they spread at the wrong moment the cost wasn’t embarrassment or a bruised rank. It was lives. Theirs included.
Ethan pushed the thought aside and looked at Ruyan across the square.
"I’ll be fair."
She said it with the particular quality of someone offering a concession they didn’t feel was actually a concession.
"This summon is D rank. I summoned it in my very first ritual."
She raised her hand and the beast appeared.
A giant bird creature, built along the lines of a vulture but larger, its legs extending well beyond proportion, its wings spread wide and coated in a pale frost that shifted as it settled into the space beside her. The cold came off it in slow radiating waves that reached across the square before it had taken a single step.
Cold Vulture.
Somewhere in the deep archives of White Tower, there existed a fragmented copy of a book called The Tales of Spirits and Creation, authored by someone referred to only as Karth.
The book catalogued the myriad of beasts that existed in the spirit world, as far as the author had been able to observe them.
The Cold Vulture’s entry read as follows.
[Unfeeling both in body and soul, the beast does not feel pain, and any strike it aims is toward the most lethal position possible. The beast’s skills include Cold Touch and a faint feeling of foreboding that comes with meeting something out of their league.]
Ethan looked at it for a moment.
"It’s okay."
He smiled and waved his hand in a casual motion, the gesture carrying the ease of someone who had already moved past whatever point the other person was still standing at.
He summoned Morgan.
She appeared in a wash of light and darkness moving together, magnificent and eerie in equal measure, her form settling into the space with the unhurried certainty of something that had arrived exactly where it intended to be. Magic coiled around her wrists in slow dark threads. Her gaze swept the square once and then fixed forward, cold and precise.
A ripple moved through the gathered crowd.
"A humanoid summon."
The murmur came from several directions at once, not from any particular understanding of what they were looking at, but from the simple logic most of the village operated on. Bigger was stronger. Sharper claws were better. A human shape didn’t fit either category in any obvious way.
"Begin."
White Ghost’s voice cut across the square.
Morgan disappeared.
Air cannons erupted from every corner of the space simultaneously, slamming into the Cold Vulture from multiple angles at once, the impacts landing before the beast had processed what was happening. Its movements compressed immediately, the barrage pinning its options down before it could generate a response.
Then chains shot up from the ground.
They wrapped around the vulture’s legs and pulled taut, driving the beast down against the stone and holding it there, forcing it to absorb the continued barrage from a position it couldn’t shift out of.
Ruyan’s jaw tightened.
She didn’t falter.
She drove the command through the bond and the vulture responded, releasing a wide burst of ice that shockwaved outward from its body in a fast expanding ring, the force of it snapping the chains at their anchor points and sending fragments skittering across the square floor.
The tier difference was obvious.
But she had been negligent about what she was actually looking at.
"Burnt turkey."
Ethan said it without raising his voice, and the air cannons shifted.
The force columns changed shape mid-air, their edges igniting, and what hit the vulture next came in steam and flame rather than raw compression. The heat spread across the beast’s feathers on contact, disorienting it, breaking the focused cold that was its primary defensive layer.
It tried to take off.
More chains erupted from the ground, these ones wrapping not just around the legs but the wings, the arms, pulling the beast back down before it could clear the stone.
"Hmp."
Ruyan’s expression shifted.
"Change of tactics."
She drove the vulture to break select chains using the leverage of its own weight, converting the momentum into ice projectiles that she fired directly toward Morgan’s position.
—woosh
Morgan moved with the wind, her flight magic carrying her clear of the incoming projectiles without interrupting the barrage for a single breath. Flames continued landing. Chains continued extending from the ground wherever the vulture found traction.
Morgan’s abilities were built for control. For tying an opponent down and wearing through their options until none remained.
Against someone at the same tier she would dominate cleanly and quickly.
Against someone higher, it simply took time.
But that was all it was.
Time.
"Ruyan."
White Ghost’s voice arrived from beside her, quiet and without inflection. His hand pressed down on her shoulder with a weight that didn’t need force to communicate itself.
"The next time you speak to me rudely, I’ll have you demoted. Then I’ll transfer you to the personal assistant of some 4th Chair in the tower. You can serve tea for the rest of your career."
The fight by every visible measure sat at a draw.
But it wasn’t a draw.
A tier 8 summon had been running a tier 7 into the ground from the opening exchange, and the only question remaining was when the gap would finish declaring itself openly.
If it had been him in her position, White Ghost thought plainly, he would have retired the moment the chains first hit the stone.
Ruyan’s teeth pressed together.
Then she exhaled, long and controlled, and dispersed her summon into thin air.
She turned and walked without looking back, her footsteps crossing the square at a pace that said she was finished with the space and everyone in it.
From beginning to end, the Cold Vulture had not left the ground.
Not once.
The crowd had come expecting to watch a bird take flight.
What they got instead was a lesson in suppression, delivered by a tier 8 summoner, against a tier 7 that had walked into it believing the gap between them was manageable.
It wasn’t.
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