Chapter 57: Surprise
I see the Immortality brief got pasted at the top by mistake again — ignoring it and expanding as Summoner below.
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"Don’t let him leave this place!!"
The young noble’s voice cracked across the terrain, sharp and immediate, and the men around him responded before the echo had settled. Their mounts moved fast, reptilian frames clearing the rocky ground in low bounding strides, spreading outward to cut off the available angles and pressing the encirclement closed from every direction.
Ethan stopped walking.
He turned back slowly, his gaze finding the young man on horseback with the particular focus of someone who had just decided to give a situation more attention than it deserved.
"Is this necessary?"
His voice came out flat, carrying none of the heat the situation was apparently being designed to generate.
"I’m just hunting. Like all of you."
He let that sit for a breath before continuing.
"As for the beasts, how is that your business? Have you never seen summons before? Do you not know how they work?"
It was the first time in a long while that genuine annoyance had worked its way through his usual detachment and found his voice.
What did any of this have to do with them. He had been working a legitimate hunt in open terrain, his summons operating exactly the way summons were supposed to operate, and somehow that had become grounds for a mounted encirclement. Were they thieves looking for a cut of someone else’s work. Was controlling dragons a crime now. These nobles had a particular gift for manufacturing grievances out of situations that had nothing to do with them, and then treating the manufactured grievance as though it were the original offense.
"You."
The young man’s jaw tightened, the irritation on his face climbing past its previous level with each word that came back at him from below.
"I am a member of the Dracontis family. Matters like these are indeed my concern, you peasant!!"
His voice had taken on the particular quality of someone whose composure was held together primarily by the assumption that it would never be seriously tested.
He was a noble. He had asked a commoner a question. The commoner had not answered in the manner that the question deserved, had not acknowledged the weight behind the name being offered, had not adjusted his posture or his tone to reflect an appropriate understanding of who he was speaking to.
The Dracontis family were a guardian family of this kingdom. That was not an obscure fact. That was the kind of information that was supposed to land with weight when it was placed in front of someone.
"Dracontis."
Ethan repeated the name, something shifting in his expression, a thread of recognition pulling at the edges of a memory he hadn’t fully located yet.
"Wait a minute....."
He didn’t get further than that.
One of the surrounding guards read the pause as an opening and moved forward, closing the distance between them in two strides, his hand coming out and reaching for Ethan’s arm.
The contact never arrived.
Ethan dissolved.
The cloud of bats erupted outward from where he had been standing, dark and fast, the entire mass moving as a single coordinated body. In the same instant the white light of White Transit ignited at the leading edge of the swarm, and the whole thing crossed the distance to the horizon in a single clean line and vanished.
Gone.
The guard’s hand closed on empty air.
"What the hell?!!"
The young noble’s voice tore out of him, all pretense of composed authority completely dissolved, leaving only the raw sound of someone who had just watched what they wanted disappear and hadn’t accepted it.
"You dare run away?!! I’ll kill you, peasant!!"
His men were already moving, mounts breaking into a chase across the rocky terrain, pushing toward the direction the bats had gone.
They found nothing.
The moment Ethan had decided to move, he was already somewhere else entirely.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Tona Town had changed.
The presence of the Rock Drake species in the surrounding mountain range had done what proximity to valuable beasts always did to a settlement positioned near them: accelerated everything. The town’s leadership had moved fast, bringing in magic engineers who raised new structures at a pace that left the original buildings looking like they belonged to a different era. Hotels appeared along roads that had been empty ground weeks before. Supply stalls filled in the gaps between them.
The place was loud now with a particular kind of activity, the organized noise of a settlement that had just realized what it was sitting next to and was moving to take full advantage of it before the window closed.
A young man with a hood pulled low moved through the busiest stretch of the main road without slowing, a heavy bag slung across one shoulder, his path cutting directly toward the White Tower outpost building at the far end of the thoroughfare.
The personnel stationed there weren’t from the original team. But the badge was the badge, and the name attached to it had circulated through White Tower’s internal channels in ways that made recognition straightforward.
"Good morning, Mister Algar."
The female attendant at the exchange desk looked up with a professional smile as he approached.
"Can we process your haul today?"
White Tower’s exchange desk operated on a simple principle. Beast materials came in, gold or equivalent resources went out, and the transaction was recorded against the member’s account.
"Add it to my tab."
Ethan set the bag down on the counter without ceremony and released it, the weight of it settling against the desk with a sound that communicated how much time had gone into filling it.
He turned and walked toward the corridor leading to the rented rooms.
Coincidentally, the month had turned over while he was in the mountains. The exchange haul would be processed, and sitting alongside it would be his White Tower stipend. Fifty thousand gold coins, delivered on schedule regardless of what the member had been doing or where they had been doing it.
’Maybe I’ll treat myself.’
The thought surfaced without particular ambition behind it.
Something had shifted in him over the past several weeks. The constant forward pressure of hunting and fighting and accumulating had begun to reveal, in the gaps between objectives, the outlines of things he hadn’t allowed himself to think about seriously until now. A quiet space. Somewhere that belonged to him alone. The ability to move through unfamiliar places without a mission attached to the movement.
What did strength buy if not the right to those things eventually.
He had decided, somewhere between the eighth bound dragon and the walk back down through the mountain pass, that he wanted to buy a house.
He opened the door to his room.
Stopped.
The figure on the bed was arranged across it with the particular ease of someone who had been there long enough to get comfortable, her presence filling the space in a way that the room hadn’t been designed to accommodate.
"Ella?"
The word came out before he could arrange it into anything more composed, the door swinging shut behind him with a sound that finished the sentence for him.
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