Chapter 8: The Rag

Aren didn’t run straight at the monster, because that was exactly what Darius would have done.

He went left instead, into the grey trees at the edge of the clearing, low and fast, with the moss swallowing his footsteps. The strip of shirt over his nose and mouth smelled of sweat and blood, and it was already slipping, so he tied it tighter with clumsy, shaking fingers as he ran.

In the clearing, Vivienne stood alone under a hundred silver blades. Gravemaw had sunk its huge body almost to the ground, all six legs bent, its round mouth aimed straight at her, the rings of stone teeth spinning so fast they whined.

’Think. You’ve got about ten seconds. Use them.’

He couldn’t fight it, and he couldn’t even hurt it. He had one use of his skill, for one second, and during that second he would be as soft as paper, so there would be no second chance. Whatever he did had to be done with a single touch, at exactly the right moment.

Vivienne’s blades had already hit those plates once and left nothing but thin white lines. But if the plates had no hardness at all, even for a second, those same blades would go through them like water.

’I don’t need to win. I only need to open the door at the right moment and let her walk through it.’

Gravemaw charged.

It moved like a falling wall, and the ground shook violently under it. Vivienne swept her sword down, and every crescent above her flew forward at once, a storm of moonlight crossing the clearing.

Aren came out of the trees from the side.

He was three steps from the creature when the blades were halfway across the clearing. He was two steps away when its body thundered past in front of him, so close he could smell the cold grave stink of its plates. On the last step, he reached out and laid his bare hand flat against the grey stone of its side.

He didn’t say anything. He simply looked at the plates under his palm and thought one word, very clearly.

Zero.

The door inside him opened.

The plates didn’t crack or break. They just quietly stopped being hard. For one second, the armor of a Rank D monster was as soft as a pillow.

In the same second, the silver blades arrived.

They went through Gravemaw as if it weren’t there, dozens of them, sliding in one side and out the other. The creature didn’t even have time to scream at first, and its legs folded under it. Its mouth gaped wide, and then the sound came out of it, high and terrible, the scream of something very old finding out it could die.

And in that same second, Aren’s own body became nothing.

He felt everything that held him together lose its strength at once. Even the air felt sharp against his face. Gravemaw was still thrashing in its death throes, and one of its back legs swung out in a wide, blind arc.

It barely touched him, but that was more than enough.

He flew helplessly, and the clearing spun. Something in his left side broke with a sound he felt more than heard, and then the second ended and his body came back to him just in time to hit the trees. He crashed through branches, bounced off a trunk, and landed face-down in deep moss twenty paces from the clearing.

After that, everything was pain, and he couldn’t breathe without something grinding horribly in his chest.

’The rag. Get rid of the rag. Now!’

His hands didn’t want to work, so he made them work. He dragged the strip of cloth off his face, shoved it down into the wet moss under his body as deep as he could, and let his face fall into the moss beside it.

Through the trees, very far away, he heard Gravemaw’s scream fade into a long rattling breath. Then he heard absolutely nothing.

In the dark, the System spoke to him.

He wasn’t awake and he wasn’t dreaming. He was floating somewhere in between, and the blue windows opened one by one in front of him like lanterns along a long hallway.

[Primary Anchor has slain: Gravemaw (Rank D).][Primary Anchor has absorbed its core.][Vivienne Ashgrave. Rank F: Level 4 -> Level 9.][Anchor’s technique evolved under extreme pressure.][Crescent Moon Blade (Grade C): Stage 1 -> Stage 2.][Source: Investment recorded. Host risked life on behalf of Anchor.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel appeared in the darkness, glowing softly. He watched it spin with a strange calm, far too tired to hope.

It passed the wide x10 segment and kept going, then passed x100, slowing gradually. The pointer crept over the edge of the narrow segment and stopped right in the middle of it.

[Result: x1,000.][Return: Crescent Moon Blade. Grade C +3.][Skill acquired: Crescent Moon Blade (Grade S).][Mastery: 0%.]

He stared stupidly at the name.

It was her technique. The silver crescents he had watched cut down wolves and carve a monster two ranks above her, the power that had made the whole Great Hall leap to its feet. He had it now, three grades higher than hers.

’And I can never, ever use it in front of anyone. One silver crescent in my hand, and every person who’s seen her fight will know exactly where it came from.’

If laughing hadn’t hurt so much, he would have laughed.

"Aren. Aren! Open your eyes, you idiot."

He opened them, and the purple sky was gone. Above him was an ordinary grey afternoon with real clouds in it, and Mira’s face hanging over him, red and wet and furious.

He was lying on a stretcher in the walled garden outside the Training Rift. People were shouting frantically everywhere. Instructors ran in and out of the circle of white stones, and healers in white coats knelt beside other stretchers. Behind them, the tear in the air was flickering and shrinking, its edges red now instead of shimmering.

"They found you in the trees." Mira’s voice cracked. "You weren’t breathing right. I thought..." She stopped and scrubbed her face with the back of her hand. "I left you there. I picked Tam up and I left you there!"

"You were right to," Aren croaked. "That’s exactly what I would have told you to do."

"I don’t care what you’d have told me." She grabbed his hand and squeezed so hard it hurt more than his ribs, and she didn’t let go.

A healer came and pressed glowing hands to his side, and the grinding in his chest dulled to an ache. While she worked, Aren listened. Everybody around him was talking excitedly about the same thing.

"...alone, she killed it alone..."

"...a Rank D, and she’s only F, how is that even possible?"

"...Silver Moon Empress, she cut it to pieces..."

A little way off, inside a ring of instructors, Vivienne sat on a stone bench with a blanket around her shoulders. Her braid had come half undone, her armor was scratched and filthy, and a healer was wrapping a cut on her arm. She wasn’t looking at anyone. She was staring at the flickering tear in the air, and she looked lost, which was an expression Aren had never seen on her before.

Professor Crane stood in front of her with his scroll.

"There was someone else." Vivienne’s voice was quiet, but it carried clearly. "At the end. A man came out of the trees and touched it, and then my blades went through its armor. They hadn’t before."

"A man," Crane repeated.

"His face was covered with a rag." She frowned. "I only saw him for a moment."

Crane gave her a look that was almost gentle, which looked very strange on his face. "You fought a monster two ranks above you, Lady Ashgrave. You used more power than your body has ever held. Exhaustion plays tricks on the eyes. Your blades simply broke through."

"They did not simply do anything."

"Of course." Crane wrote something on his scroll. "We will search the area."

Two older students near Aren’s stretcher had heard every word, and one of them leaned toward the other with a grin.

"A man with a rag on his face. The Rag! The great Lady Ashgrave, saved by a ghost with a dishcloth."

The other one laughed, and the joke spread through the garden faster than any healer could move. Within minutes, Aren heard someone else say it, then someone else again. The Rag. By tonight the whole Academy would know the name, and almost nobody would believe he was real.

’The best place to hide is inside a joke.’

Vivienne turned her head. Her eyes swept slowly across the garden, across the stretchers and the students, and passed over a bruised servant lying with his hand in a commoner girl’s grip.

Then they came back.

Just for a moment, they rested on the moss stains on his torn shirt, and on the blood at his left side.

Aren let his eyes go unfocused and his head roll slightly sideways, like a boy who had been hit very hard and wasn’t sure where he was. After a long second, Vivienne looked away.

Someone else had been watching him the whole time.

Darius Holt stood at the edge of the white stones without a scratch on him. He had come out of the Rift before anyone else, Aren had heard a healer say, and now everyone in the garden knew why, because Team Four had told the instructors exactly who had run.

Darius walked over slowly and stopped beside the stretcher. His face had gone noticeably pale.

"You saw what happened in there," he said softly, so Mira couldn’t hear over the noise. "Whatever you think you saw, you didn’t see it. Do you understand me, Zero?"

Aren looked up at him and said nothing.

[Darius Holt. Hostility: 98% -> 100%.][Darius Holt can be anchored when the Host reaches Rank E.]