My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 164: The Grave Opened and the Chains Inside Were New

The floor held through two more breaths.

On the third, the exhibition square stopped being a floor.

The gridded slab Soren was standing on split down its center seam with a crack that killed the band mid-bar, and the two halves folded downward into a dark that had no business being that deep under a reception hall.

Soren was already off the square.

He’d stepped back on the second breath because a man who counts learns to move on the count, not the event.

The nearest guests hadn’t counted anything.

The screaming started the way it always starts, one voice, then the room.

◆◆◆◆

"Doors," Soren said, and the word went down the wire and through the hall at the same time.

Joan had the west doors open before the second scream.

Dani killed the hall lights over the exits and doubled them over the doorframes, and three hundred people did what light told them to do, which was run toward it.

Maren swept her demonstration flame into a low wall between the crowd and the opening, a fence that said this way is closed without saying anything was coming.

Something was coming.

It came up out of the split slow, and it came up partial, and partial was the part Soren filed first, because the shape that rose through the broken square was the front third of a thing whose back two-thirds stayed down in the dark holding it back.

Shadow.

Old shadow, the dense kind, the kind he’d stood in front of exactly once before, in a sublevel, watching it wear the abstract idea of a wolf.

A forelimb the size of a support column.

A shoulder behind it that bent wrong.

The suggestion of a head that hadn’t decided on a face yet, eyeless, turning through the reception light without being touched by any of it.

The system caught up.

[DING! — Entity signature detected. Classification: FAILED. Nearest match: PRIMORDIAL, partial. Advisory: signature is a fragment of a larger registered pattern.]

A fragment.

Somewhere there was a whole, and this was the piece of it somebody had cut off and put in the ground under an academy.

Then Soren saw the chains.

They came up out of the dark with the thing, wrapped through its partial mass at the shoulder and the base of the limb, links thicker than his torso, anchored somewhere down past where the reception light could reach.

The fragment heaved against them and the chains held and the whole hall rang with it, a sound in the bone more than the ear.

Old chains.

The metal had the black-green of a century in the ground.

Except at the wear points.

Soren read the links where they crossed and rubbed, and at every crossing the black-green was gone and the metal underneath showed clean. Bright.

Dressed and oiled, the wear faces smooth in the exact way a thing gets smooth when someone services it.

A century of grave, and the shackles had been maintained inside the year.

He stood behind Maren’s fire wall with a hall emptying at his back, and he put that on the count where it landed with a weight he could feel: whoever buried this thing had never left.

They’d been coming back.

Down through the dirt under the east yard, on a schedule, with oil, to keep the grave in working order.

The coordinate on his exhibition slot had been pre-filled by the same kind of hand.

◆◆◆◆

"Kane."

Troy Minden came through the crowd against the flow of it, jacket gone, sleeves up, his Spectral Knight unfolding out of him in a sheet of white light before he’d finished crossing the floor.

He didn’t ask what it was. He didn’t ask for a plan.

He took the spot on Soren’s left, the open side, the side Grimm wasn’t covering, and he set the Knight’s blade between the fragment and the last knot of guests jamming the west doors.

"You knew," Troy said. "Whatever’s under your class, you’ve known for a season."

"I knew there was a lid."

"And you stood on it every day."

"It was my lid."

Troy’s jaw did the small thing. "We’re talking after."

"If there’s an after, you’re buying."

The fragment heaved again and a chain link the size of a door frame came up out of the split and slammed back down, and the floor around the opening spidered, and the two of them stopped talking.

Selah hit the perimeter first.

She came down from the center display at a dead run and dropped to one knee at the edge of the broken square, palms flat to the tile, and the frost went out of her own hands in a sheet, up out of her skin and across the floor, sealing the spiderweb cracks before they could spread toward the crowd.

The cold came off her arms in a fog and her breath went white and she held the ring of it, alone, her body the whole machine.

Maren’s fire wall bent higher.

Grimm slid between the fragment’s reaching limb and Selah’s kneeling back, low, hackles full, shut eyes fixed on the eyeless head, and the fragment’s not-yet-face swung down toward the wolf and stopped.

For one long second, nothing in the hall moved but the fog off Selah’s arms.

◆◆◆◆

The flash came from the wrong direction.

Not the fragment. The seats.

Soren turned and found the delegate, the fourth name, the one the shell had paid across a border, standing alone in the emptied delegation row with a recording lens raised, and the lens wasn’t pointed at the thing coming out of the ground.

It was pointed at Maren.

The man had a primordial fragment heaving out of a grave forty feet away and he was filming a girl’s bloodline.

Soren crossed into his line and stopped there, between the lens and the wall of flame, and stood still.

The delegate lowered the lens an inch. "You’re obstructing a historic record."

"I’m the exhibit," Soren said. "Record me."

The delegate looked at him. Then past him, at the fire, and something in the man’s face weighed the witnesses and settled.

He put the lens away and walked, unhurried, toward the doors, and Soren watched him go and added the unhurried to the count, because everyone else in the hall had run and this man had gotten what he came for.

◆◆◆◆

Behind him the chains rang again.

The fragment had stopped heaving toward the crowd.

It hung in the broken square, partial, patient, the eyeless head still aimed down at Grimm, and its whole front limb turned, slow, and reached instead for one of its own chains.

It gripped the serviced link.

And it began, with a care that was worse than the heaving, to work the bright wear-face back and forth against the anchor stone, in the smooth practiced groove somebody’s maintenance had spent a year polishing for it.

The chains weren’t holding it in.

They’d been teaching it where to file.