Chapter 52: Untitled
"That’s it, now!!"
Fin’s voice carried across the open terrain as he launched himself upward, clearing a land bridge in a single motion, the dust rising behind him as beasts scrambled in pursuit across the broken ground below.
The leading beast lunged.
Before it reached him, something coiled around it from the side, a grip that arrived without warning and tightened into a deathlock that left the creature twisting and strangling against the pressure of its own resistance.
Hela’s summon.
"Good. We got one."
Ethan appeared beside Fin and took his arm, steadying him, brushing the dust from his shoulders with several light taps before releasing him.
To his left, Morgan had already materialized, her form rising slowly from the ground as she drifted toward the giant serpent coiled around the Rock Drake subspecies, her eyes carrying the flat focused quality they held whenever she was working.
The main requirement for her evolution was to tame fifteen lesser dragons.
Whether any given creature qualified depended on a single variable: bloodline purity. There was no way to know from the outside. The only method available was direct contact, and direct contact meant Dragon Dive.
"Activate Dragon Dive."
Ethan gave the command and Morgan’s eyes went pitch black in the same instant, the light behind them replaced by something deeper and without edge.
She dove into the beast’s mind.
[Lesser Dragon subspecies detected.....]
[Evaluating mind strain capacity.... failed]
[Bloodline purity.... failed]
[Beast core integrity.... failed]
The information moved through Ethan’s mind in a stream that lasted only seconds, each line arriving clean and without ambiguity.
Beside the serpent, the Rock Drake screamed.
The sound carried through the surrounding terrain, raw and uncontrolled, the sound of something having its interior dismantled faster than it could process what was happening. Its body convulsed against the grip of Hela’s summon, limbs working without coordination.
Then its head went slack.
The serpent held the weight of it for a moment before releasing its coils, the carcass settling onto the ground without ceremony.
[You have slain a Hybrid Rock Drake]
Ethan looked at the notification.
He exhaled.
This wasn’t the first time the result had come back like this. It had happened enough times over the past three days that the sequence had become entirely familiar. Track the beast. Contain it. Activate Dragon Dive. Read the failures line by line. Watch the creature die under the evaluation. Skin what was worth keeping and move on.
The hybrid bloodline wasn’t clean enough. None of them had been.
"Bummer."
Fin stepped up beside him and patted his back with the easy sympathy of someone who had watched this play out enough times to know there was nothing useful to add.
"We killed twelve today though. That’s something, right?" He was already moving toward the carcass, his hands finding the back of his neck as he stretched. "Let’s head back. I need a shower."
"Yeah."
Ethan was already crouching beside the body, dagger out.
"As soon as I’m done here."
Fin didn’t push it.
The process was familiar enough by now that no one commented on it anymore. Ethan worked through the beast methodically, hands moving with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned early that waste was a choice and had made his peace with never choosing it. Years of poverty had a way of making that lesson permanent. His first month’s salary from White Tower hadn’t arrived yet, and the beast parts accumulating in his ring were the closest thing he had to a buffer against whatever came next.
He finished quickly and stood.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
A carriage designated to the group was waiting at the edge of the cleared area, and they rode back toward Tona Town without particular hurry, the dust of the afternoon sitting in the air around them as the terrain shifted from open ground to the rocky approaches leading into the town’s perimeter.
Three days.
They had been here for three days, and in that time the picture had changed considerably from what the reports had described. White Ghost monitored the beast population’s growth from the higher position while the strike team controlled the spread across the roads and surrounding terrain. The result was a net zero attack rate on goods moving in and out of the town, incoming and outgoing, not a single disruption reaching the villagers during the window they had held.
This was what happened when White Tower applied itself to a problem.
As for the strike team itself, their standing in the town had shifted accordingly. Ethan remained antisocial by default, his natural preference for keeping people at a functional rather than personal distance not changing simply because the context had. But he was always willing to help when someone came to him directly, and that combination had been enough.
The villagers liked him.
Some of the other team members were less settled about it.
"You’ve managed to rack up quite a lot of beast parts these past few days."
Lucas was waiting near the entrance of the main base building as Ethan came through the gate, his expression carrying a mild amusement that sat on top of something less comfortable.
It wasn’t that Ethan had done anything wrong precisely.
It was the way it looked from the outside. The consistent efficiency. The quiet accumulation. The fact that he never made a production of any of it, which paradoxically made it more visible rather than less.
They had landed on the word showoff.
It wasn’t accurate, but it was the word that fit the feeling, and feelings in a small team under sustained operational pressure didn’t require accuracy to stick.
"Hehe."
Ethan smiled without breaking stride.
"Something like that."
He moved through the entrance without stopping, his eyes forward.
Then he paused.
Just past the threshold, through the gap between buildings that gave a clear sightline to the road coming into town, a carriage was moving through the outer gate. White Tower’s crest was visible on its side even from here.
’It finally arrived.’
He held the thought for a moment before letting it settle.
The only reason they had waited this long was White Ghost’s insistence on doing this properly. Not simply clearing the roads or thinning the population enough to buy the town another few weeks. Full extermination. Body and soul, leaving nothing behind capable of replenishing what was removed.
For that, the approach had to start with the mother.
And the weapon now rolling into Tona Town on the back of that carriage.
Comments