Chapter 579: You Could’ve Stopped It
What happened after that was not a fight in any meaningful sense of the word. Lin did not engage in exchanges. Did not trade blows or read the beast’s technique. Lin did what Lin did when something entered a space it was occupying without appropriate awareness of what that space contained.
It was brief.
And when it was over, Lin sat back down beside Damien and resumed its vigil.
The night continued.
More things came to the clearing. Some of them came with purpose, drawn by the Stormhorn’s earlier presence being gone and the territory being open in a way it had not been for a long time. Some came with curiosity, the changed quality of the clearing’s essence drawing attention from creatures that operated on interest rather than hunger.
Lin did not discriminate.
Things that entered the clearing found the same outcome, delivered with the same efficient, unhurried quality. The fox did not chase. Did not hunt beyond the clearing’s edge. Simply processed each arrival as it presented itself and continued its guard.
Luton contributed where relevant.
The two of them worked with the easy coordination of a long partnership, each one operating in its area of competence without overlap or interference, the clearing becoming progressively more definitively their territory as the night advanced.
By the time the forest’s darkness had begun its pre-dawn shift, the clearing around Damien looked considerably different from how it had looked when he fell asleep.
He woke.
The first thing he noticed was his chest.
He pressed his hand against it experimentally, the way he had been pressing against it for hours, and found something that required a moment to fully process. No pain. Not reduced pain. No pain. The tissue under his palm felt like chest that had not recently been impaled by the horn of a legendary mana beast.
He breathed in.
Full capacity.
Both lungs working exactly as they were supposed to.
He sat up.
And saw the clearing.
He was quiet for a moment.
The bodies were not a small number. The variety of them suggested Lin had not been selective about grade or type. Grade Fours, Grade Fives, at least two that were large enough to have been low Grade Threes. Scattered across the clearing in the specific distribution of things that had arrived from different directions at different times and had each had the same encounter with whatever had been in the clearing before them.
He looked at Lin.
The fox was sitting exactly where it had been when he fell asleep, tails arranged with neat precision behind it, gold eyes directed at him with an expression that was doing a great deal of work trying to communicate that it had simply been sitting here all night and did not know how any of this had happened.
The expression was not convincing.
Damien looked at the clearing again.
Then at Lin.
Then he exhaled.
"I leave you unsupervised for a few hours," he said.
Lin’s ears moved. Slightly. In the direction of anywhere other than him.
Luton pulsed from nearby, and if a slime could communicate amusement through a pulse, this particular pulse was strongly suggesting it.
Damien stood.
His legs held him without complaint. His chest held him without complaint. His right arm, which had been the last thing he had been uncertain about, moved without the specific resistance that the wound’s proximity to the underlying structure had been introduced into every motion.
Lin had been thorough.
He looked at his summon.
The fox sat in the middle of a cleared arena of its own accidental making, looking precisely as innocent as something that had spent a night methodically eliminating every creature that wandered into its vicinity could manage to look, which was not especially innocent but was delivered with enough commitment to be charming.
Damien shook his head.
Crouched in front of it.
Lin met his gaze directly, the gold eyes patient, the tails still in the particular stillness of something waiting to be told what happened next.
"Thank you," he said.
Lin blinked once.
He stood up and looked at the altar, still glowing at the far end of the clearing. Looked at the forest ahead of him, in the direction of the seventh and final altar.
One left.
He was healed.
He was rested.
And if the number of bodies Lin had quietly accumulated across the night was any indication, the altar’s radius might have received more contribution than he had been planning on providing himself.
He checked before walking to the altar and looked at it closely.
The glow was unchanged. The sixth altar was already at full activation and had been since before he fell asleep. The night’s additions had not altered that.
He filed it.
Turned back to the clearing.
Lin was watching him.
Luton had settled on his head.
He looked at Lin for a moment, considering. Then sent the cancellation command through the bond.
Lin dissolved into the portal with the same lack of ceremony it did everything with, the pale fur and gold eyes and nine tails going back to wherever his summons went when they were not here, the clearing suddenly feeling slightly larger without the fox’s presence in it.
He looked at the bodies it had left behind.
Then at Luton on his head.
"You could’ve stopped it," he said.
Luton pulsed. Once. With the specific quality of a pulse that was not agreeing or disagreeing but was declining to have an opinion on the subject.
Damien walked toward the treeline, in the direction the record pointed for the seventh altar.
It was the last one but he did not move immediately.
That was the first decision of the morning, and it was a conscious one. His chest was healed, his rest was genuine, and the seventh altar was waiting at the end of a path he already had the coordinates for.
None of those facts required urgency. He had been running at urgency for most of his time in this forest and his body had been honest with him about what that cost.
He sat in the clearing and let the morning be the morning.
The Forest of Twin Disasters had a quality at this hour that was different from its night character or its afternoon weight. The darkness was thinning above the canopy, the shift from black to the deep grey-green that preceded actual light, and the forest’s sounds had changed accordingly.
The nocturnal things going quiet, the others not yet fully awake, a window of relative stillness that was one of the few genuinely peaceful things the forest offered.
He sat in it.
Checked his reserves.
High. The night’s rest and the uninterrupted conversion process had brought him close to peak, Lin’s healing having removed the drain the wound had been placing on his system throughout the previous day.
He felt the difference in the clarity of it, the quality of full reserves versus the managed-shortage state he had been operating in since the Stormhorn fight.
He was in good shape.
He looked at Lin’s work.
The bodies scattered across the clearing were not fresh. Several hours dead, most of them, the window for viable meat having closed sometime in the night while he slept through it. He was not precious about that in general terms but eating meat that had been sitting in open air for five hours in a forest had a specific set of consequences he was not interested in managing.
The cores, though.
He moved through the clearing methodically, crouching beside each body and working quickly. The extraction technique he had been developing across the altar hunting was fully refined by now, the palm entry and the locating and the clean pull all running together in a sequence that required very little conscious attention. Body to body. Core to core.
The variety was interesting.
Lin had not been selective, as established, but the range of what had wandered into the clearing across the night said something about the forest’s ecology in this section. Grade Fours predominantly, the bread-and-butter occupants of the territory the Stormhorn had been suppressing.
Several Grade Fives, the smaller, faster types that moved at night when the larger threats were less active. And three that were solidly low Grade Three, the kind that had probably been operating near the edges of the Stormhorn’s territory range and had moved inward the moment the pressure dropped.
He collected them all.
Held the accumulation in his hand when he was done and considered it.
Aquila was fast. Genuinely, terrifyingly fast, the kind of speed that could change the angle of any fight it was in. But speed existed on top of a foundation of everything else, and the foundation of everything else was where Aquila was currently the weakest thing he had in the field.
The Griffin was not weak in absolute terms but weak relative to what surrounded it, which amounted to the same problem in practice.
He sent the summon command through his system. "Summon Aquila."
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