Chapter 344: Mini-Boss[3]

Kane didn’t look at Thora for more than a heartbeat.

The ape was still on its feet: ruined knee, opened shoulder, skull streaming around the place her axe had been, and the yellow eyes fixed on him alone.

He set his stance and opened the thing he had kept throttled since Grathak.

[Controlled Berserker Output: 55%]

[Backlash: Elevated]

[Warning: Tissue stress will compound if load is sustained]

He didn’t dismiss the window this time.

The cost sat in the numbers, honest and ugly.

Fifty-five percent, higher than the elephant, lower than the kill that had ended an emperor.

Enough.

The ape came.

Kane met it at the bad knee first.

Mjoldr’s spike drove through the already-compromised joint with the extra weight of the Rage behind it.

Bone and corrupted plating gave in with a wet, structural crack.

The animal’s leg folded.

It screamed and raked for his throat.

He was already moving to the second engagement, using the collapse to put the edge into the throat seam he had opened earlier.

Black arterial spray hit the roots.

The ape still didn’t die.

It caught his forearm in both hands and tried to pull him into a bite.

Kane tore free, reopened a line across his own ribs, and set for the third cut.

"Stay down," he said without looking at Thora.

"I am finishing this."

The skull was the last piece.

He stepped inside the animal’s failing reach, brought Mjoldr down in a full descending arc aimed at the base of the head where Thora’s axe had already weakened the cord, and put everything the fifty-five percent would give him into the strike.

The edge went through.

Slash.

The yellow light in the eyes snuffed.

The bulk of the mini-boss finally understood it was dead and fell sideways into the roots with a weight that shook the clearing.

Kane stood over it, breathing hard, blood running from the reopened lines on his forearm and the scrape along his ribs.

The system flashed amber at the edge of his vision: tissue stress, backlash climbing, recovery window confirmed. He let the Controlled Output drop and felt the cost settle into his body like lead.

[Controlled Rage: Offline]

[Amber flags: active]

[Recommendation: limited load until recovery window closes]

"Recommendation noted," he muttered, and turned.

Thora was trying to stand.

She had made it as far as one knee.

Her free hand was pressed to her midsection.

The compact axe lay a few paces away in the leaf litter.

When she pushed for the second leg, the breath left her in a sharp, involuntary sound, and she went back down to the root she had landed against.

"Don’t," she got out.

"I can—"

Kane crossed the space, set Mjoldr aside long enough to get his arms under her, and lifted.

Thora’s weight settled against his chest.

For a moment her body tensed, the old reflex to refuse help on anything physical, and then, for the first time he could name, she let the tension go.

She didn’t fight the carry.

Her forehead dropped against his shoulder once, brief and involuntary, and she said nothing while he got his balance and his axe back into his free hand.

"Ribs," he said.

"Bruised. Maybe cracked. I have had worse."

Her voice was tight.

"Put me down when the ground is honest. Not before."

"When the ground is honest."

He didn’t put her down yet.

Kane walked her as far as the base of the mini-boss tree and set her carefully against a root that would hold her upright.

Only then did he look properly at what the fight had been sitting on top of.

Between the major roots, in a hollow that the ordinary forest floor should not have allowed, a stone shrine had been built into the dark.

Small animal bones arranged in patterns.

Bone-circle charms laid in deliberate rings.

Dried blood worked into the grooves of the stone.

At the center, something pulsed with a wrong heat that had nothing to do with sunlight or residual combat.

Kane didn’t touch it with bare skin.

He pulled a cloth from his pack, wrapped the fragment once, then again, and only then lifted it free of the shrine bed.

The heat still came through the fabric against his fingers, persistent, familiar in a way that made the system surface without being asked.

[Object class: Unknown] ℯ

[Signature: Partially consistent with Berakamon post-Grathak projection]

[Recommendation: Do not handle without Griselda assessment]

[Secondary note: Devil-adjacent craft. Containment advised.]

He held the wrapped weight and, for a single breath, was alone with it.

The heat against his fingers was not the pod.

It wasn’t the extraction lock.

It was only a fragment of the same war that had already spent a people on a gate and was now sitting under a tree that had once been a game’s gate-check boss.

The door back to the real world stayed shut behind his eyes the way it always did: present, unopenable, set aside because the body in front of him and the woman on the root still needed him in this layer, not the other one.

He put the thought away with the cloth.

"Thora. Can you walk if I take most of the weight?"

"I can walk if you stop asking."

She got her feet under her with his help, jaw locked, and tested a step.

The breath she took was careful.

"Dusk is coming. If we are not back before full dark, Misha will invent a new kind of angry."

"Then we move."

They reached Sylvander’s outer works at dusk.

Thora refused the carry for the last stretch.

She walked through the gate under her own power: slow, upright, one hand still pressed to her ribs, while Kane matched her pace with the wrapped fragment in his pack and Mjoldr dark on his shoulder.

The household was already at the arch.

Misha’s eyes went first to the blood on both of them, then to the way Thora was breathing.

Kessa’s ears went flat.

Griselda’s gaze locked on the shape in Kane’s pack before it ever rose to his face.

"Are you alright, Thora?"

"I’m... fine."

Kessa sniffed the air near Thora and grimaced.

"You smell like cracked ribs and stubbornness."

"I smell like a woman who is going to sit down before she falls," Thora said, and did exactly that on the nearest solid crate.

"Someone find a clean cloth."

Griselda held out both hands for the pack.

Kane gave her the wrapped fragment without ceremony.