Chapter 53: 53. Something Locked Away for Centuries. It’s Opened Without Permission
Another short silence... Marshal nodded.
The chimera came around for its dive, and Lucian began to move into position. He felt the bond open wider as he reached for Marshal’s synchronization and Glacielle’s.
He maintained thirty percent power, with twenty-five percent at a steady level, which was enough for him to feel the heat from the sun passing through his blade and mixing with the ice that was already present.
It felt like having two opposing forces in the same hand and not letting either one take over the other. This was exactly the kind of control that Dragon Breathing was slowly giving him.
"Brace yourself, my dear Master!" Octavia said.
"Ready when you are!"
Octavia’s geyser shot him up just as the chimera dove, and the force was so strong that it felt like a real hydraulic surge that put him above the chimera’s angle in two seconds. At the top, he might have had one second of useful position.
"HRAAAAHHHH!!!" Lucian doesn’t waste any chance and just went straight with the slash.
The blade hit the spot where the scales were thinner, at the junction of the neck and shoulder. The solar and ice magic hit at the same time, breaking through the hide and dropping the chimera out of the sky.
It fell to the ground sixty feet away and didn’t get up.
Lucian’s fall was more chaotic than his rise, and he had time to think about how much it would hurt when he landed. Then, Octavia’s water caught him ten feet off the ground and lowered him the rest of the way in a controlled deceleration that was, given the circumstances, one of the most impressive things he’d seen anyone do.
"I got you, hehehe." Octavia winked at him.
"Thank you, Octavia!" He sighed in relief. "I was highly positive that I could break a leg with that fall..."
The last chimera tried to run away to the north, clearly understanding what was going on and making the right choice. Glacielle’s ice spear hit its right wing from three hundred feet away, and Marshal’s Solar Execution finished it.
The chimera got slashed into two pieces.
Lucian was having a hard time breathing. The stress of the triple synchronization had settled in his chest like a hot coal.
When he stepped toward his sword, which he had dropped on the landing, his legs told him they had something to say about what had just happened.
Before he fell completely, Marshal was there, her hand on his arm. She held on for a moment longer than he needed to get his balance back.
"Easy, rookie," she said, and there was something about the way she said it that was different from how she usually corrected people.
Something that sounded like what it was.
He said, "That was close," referring to the whole fight.
"You made the right calls." She let go of his arm, but it took her longer than usual to get back to her normal stance. "The aerial strike was risky, but your threat assessment was good enough."
"If we had waited, we probably would have lost Octavia’s barrier." She looked at him steadily. "And now... I think it’s safe to say that you’re thinking like a real commander day by day."
"I’m still trying to do better," Lucian giggled.
Octavia, from somewhere behind them, made a small, grateful sound that she immediately covered with a cough. Glacielle was watching Marshal with the considering expression of someone whose earlier prediction was proving accurate.
...
At noon, they reached the outer defense line, which was fifteen miles from the capital. Marshal called for a thirty-minute break, and it was clear that he was making a tactical decision, not a suggestion.
Lucian’s body can finally have its rest. His mind was still going over scenarios with mythical creatures, sacrifice counts, and purple portals, but his legs were much more convincing in their case for stopping.
The riverbank had water, which Octavia used quietly and effectively to heal the minor wounds she got in the fight with the chimera and to fill up the water pouches in her armor. She crouched at the edge of the water with her tentacles partially out and trailing in the current.
There was something clearly different about her; she wasn’t putting on the careful show she had been putting on for Hesten. She looked more like herself, whatever that meant for a Thiren who had been hiding who she was for hundreds of years.
Glacielle sat next to her, not because she needed the riverbank, but because she wanted to. They talked in low voices so that their words didn’t carry.
Lucian heard the word "Marshal" once and the soft sound of Glacielle laughing at something Octavia said. He decided not to think about it too much.
’I can’t hear clearly what they’re talking about, but I’m glad to see Glacielle is at ease talking to someone now.’
’She’s not acting all possessive again, which is good because a girl who acts like a yandere could be damn scary...’
Marshal sat on a flat rock about twenty feet away from the river, apart from the group in the way she defaulted to when she wasn’t actively instructing them. Lucian brought his water flask and sat beside her, which required a slight contortion of her usual body language to accommodate, but she didn’t shift away.
"You haven’t said much since the bridge," he said.
"I only talk when I have something to say."
"Well yeah... fair enough, I guess." He drank some water. "Then for what it’s worth, I’m glad it was you who chose me as your master..."
"In the situation where Glacielle and I were about to die, I mean." He laughed. "When you showed up after the emergency summon, it was a pivotal moment."
"I didn’t find you." She looked at him sideways. "The system deposited me."
"You know what I’m trying to talk about..."
A break.
"Yes," she said. "I do..."
She was quiet for a moment and stared at the river. "Not once in hundreds of years of waiting in the summoning realm have I talked to anyone about the commander."
"Not since the Abyssal Wars ended."
Lucian said, "You told Octavia."
"Octavia is..." she thought, "...hard to deflect."
"She asks direct questions in an indirect way, and you answer before you know it." There was a brief pause that might have been laughter. "It’s kind of annoying, but I guess that’s already in her personality."
"She has good instincts."
"Yeah, very much so." Marshal put her flask down on the rock. "About the commander and not being seen, I told you at the bridge."
She appeared to select her words carefully. "I’ve carried that for a long time..."
"The certainty that caring about someone specific was just vulnerability wearing the costume of loyalty." She looked at the river. "And then you said my name."
"Kyrathiel," Lucian said on purpose because it was clear that it was important and he wanted her to know he understood why.
She let out a slow breath. "Yes."
She looked at her hands. "It felt as if something that had been locked away for centuries suddenly opened without asking for permission."
Her voice was steady but had a new, more real edge to it that came out when she was being honest at the cost of her professional composure. "I don’t know how to deal with that."
"You don’t have to do anything with it right now," Lucian said. "We have to get through a war first."
"And then?"
He looked her in the eye and said, "And then... we’ll try to figure it out."
Neither of them spoke during the moment, which seemed to last forever. Octavia shouted from the riverbank that the thirty minutes were up. Marshal stood up and said they were moving. The camp turned back into a marching party, but something had changed between them that couldn’t be changed back.
