Chapter 579 I Won’t Fight You

I couldn’t move my neck.

That was the first thing I established, lying flat on my back on a broken shelf of basalt. The stone under my spine still held heat from the dead dragon, but the rest of me felt like someone had scooped me out and poured cold lead into the space.

The black lines across my chest and arms itched. Not on the skin, either. It was a deep, sick prickle right under the bone, down where the Dark Essence had settled into my well.

’Great. Front-row seat. Can’t move my head.’

Directly above me there was no sky, just a crushed ceiling of black mountain peaks. Directly past my boots, if I dragged my eyes down as far as they would go, Kassie stood like an iron monument. Her black armor was slick with dragon blood, and the crimson-and-black greatsword rested easy on her shoulder.

Beyond her stood Devant.

He looked completely out of place among the ranks of drakes standing stiff and dead under Kassie’s new trick, red light burning in every empty eye socket.

His filthy purple scarf was tucked loosely around his neck. His alabaster skin looked paler still in the dim light, his amber eyes glowed faintly, and his dented tin cup hung easily from his left hand. He hadn’t spilled any of it.

Kassie didn’t look at me. Her attention stayed nailed to Devant, her whole body held in that absolute, military stillness that meant someone was about to get split in half.

"Friend or enemy?" Clipped and flat, tossed back over her shoulder the way she’d ask a scout for a head count.

I coughed and tasted something dry and flaky on my tongue, like rust scraped off old iron. My throat gave me a rasp and not much else.

"...I don’t know."

That was all she needed.

Devant took a small step forward, his thin boots making no sound on the scorched gravel. He tilted his head and gave us that pleasant, slightly hollow smile that always turned my stomach. Then he looked at Kassie, and the smile stayed exactly where it was.

"I won’t fight you."

’Oh no... he said the thing.’

The tally I’d once kept in blood on my own forearm went off in my head like an alarm. Devant’s whole existence was a walking contradiction. If he said he wasn’t going to fight, it meant he was already mid-swing.

The next moment, he was simply somewhere else.

There was no rush of air, no kick of dust, no blur of movement. One second he was twenty paces away behind a drake, and the next he was standing five feet off Kassie’s flank.

Kassie didn’t even turn her head. She slammed her boot into the stone, and the whole ledge groaned as her aura burst outward.

A wall of crimson pressure flattened the air. It ground the loose rubble into powder and pinned the grey dust to the rock. On me, it landed like a warm hand on the chest, the ally’s share, and I was forty percent stronger all at once.

’Forty percent of nothing. Still can’t move my neck.’

It would have put an Champion-rank Summon on their knees. Devant only swayed a little, and his scarf fluttered in the pressure wave like he’d stepped into a draught.

With a sharp jerk of her chin, Kassie sent the dragon army at him.

Three raised Cinder Drakes lunged at once, their dead jaws snapping for his ribs. Devant didn’t even take a breath. His hand went to the hilt at his hip, and for an instant the dark ledge flashed violet.

His sword came out of its scabbard.

He cut through the front rank without breaking stride. The three drakes didn’t explode, and they didn’t crash. They just came apart along hair-thin lines, the top halves sliding off the bottom halves, and they were heaps of grey ash before they ever hit the ground.

At the same time, my Death Sense spiked.

It didn’t spike toward Devant. It ignored the boy with the purple scarf completely. Instead, it screamed toward the empty space directly behind his left shoulder.

For a single heartbeat, the light behind him bent inward. Something stood in the dark beside him. It was a silhouette too tall to fit on that narrow shelf, and it fit anyway. It didn’t have a face or any shape I could hold onto, just an outline my eyes kept sliding off. A smell came with it, thick and sweet, old rot and cold water.

Then it was gone, swallowed back into Devant’s shadow before I could work out what I was looking at.

’What the fuck?’

I had seen that once before. Same shoulder, same bent light, in the tunnel mouth the day the collector died.

Devant crossed the rest of the distance in one smooth motion, his blade whistling through the red aura. Kassie got her greatsword up in time. The impact banged off the mountain walls like a thunderclap and cracked the basalt under her boots, and I felt the fissures run through the shelf and into my back.

Devant didn’t press the blade. He pivoted on his heel, violet light dragging after the sword, and opened a thin red line straight across Kassie’s cheek.

A single bead of blood welled up on her skin.

Kassie didn’t flinch. She didn’t retreat.

Instead, she smiled. It was a wide, wild smile with teeth in it, the kind a kid wears when someone finally hands over the present they’ve been staring at all year. It had been a very long time since anyone had drawn blood from the Crimson Tyrant.

In the same breath, her left hand shot out like an iron vice. She missed his neck, but her gauntleted fingers caught the trailing end of his filthy scarf. She wrenched it hard and tore it clean off his shoulders, and the cloth shredded in her grip as she stepped back.

Devant stopped.

He stood six paces away with the tin cup balanced flat on his palm. Not a drop of water had spilled over the rim. His neck looked strangely thin without the scarf, pale as a peeled stick, but his face hadn’t changed at all.

He gave her the same pleasant look he’d walked in with.

"Let’s continue."

Then he sheathed his katana.

’Yep. There it is again.’

He said let’s continue, which meant the fight was over.

Right on cue, the red glow holding up the remaining dragon corpses began to flicker. The five minutes on Kassie’s Throne of Corpses ran out all at once.

The drakes slumped. Their stiff muscles let go, and they dropped back into motionless heaps of bone and cold meat. The crimson drained out of their hides and left them grey, the red light went out of their eye sockets, and just like that the ledge was a graveyard again.

Kassie clicked her tongue at the ruined corpses. She had the face of someone whose phone just died at two percent in the middle of a call.

She tossed the shredded scrap of purple onto the stone and spat.

Devant turned his back on her, which nobody sane did to Kassie, and walked slowly to the outer lip of the ledge. He stood right at the edge and looked down into the black drop that ran on toward the deeper layers of the Precipice.

He didn’t look back. His voice came soft enough that the wind nearly took it.

"You opened the door."

Kassie wiped the blood off her cheek with the back of her gauntlet and took a step toward him, her grip shifting on the greatsword.

Devant went on as if she hadn’t moved at all.

"It made a very loud noise. Everything down here heard it."

For a moment, nobody spoke. Even the wind howling through the peaks dropped away, and the silence it left behind pressed on my eardrums like deep water.

Then the basalt under my spine shifted.

Far below us in the dark, something turned over a second time.