Chapter 16: The Rope Bridge

Chapter 16: Chapter 16: The Rope Bridge

The bridge was older than the goblins. Elias could tell from the rope: thick grey hemp gone fuzzy with age, knotted through planks weathered silver long before anyone nailed a chieftain’s banner to the tower. It swayed with every step, a slow pendulum over a hundred meters of nothing.

Aveline walked out to the middle and stopped.

The chieftain met her there. Up close he was half a head taller than her, his rebar-and-car-door armor clanking with every breath. He grinned with too many teeth and growled something that needed no translation.

Aveline raised her sword in salute. Then she settled behind her shield.

The excavator axe came first, falling overhead like a tree. Aveline didn’t block it. She stepped left onto the very edge of a plank, and the axe bit into the bridge where she’d stood, splitting the board in half. The whole bridge bucked. Elias grabbed the post at the ridge end and held on.

Aveline was already cutting. Her blade raked across the chieftain’s forearm, sparks spraying where it met a car-door bracer. He roared and swung backhand. She caught it on her shield and slid half a meter back across the wet planks, boots skidding, ropes groaning.

"He’s using the bridge," Marcus said quietly over the Link. "Every swing goes into the planks, not her. He wants her off balance."

Elias saw it too. The Link painted the bridge in thin white lines, and every time the axe struck wood, those lines shivered and stretched. Two of the side ropes had begun to fray, their fibers glowing a faint red.

But Aveline was learning just as fast.

She stopped fighting the sway and started riding it. When the bridge swung left, she stepped left. When it dropped, she bent her knees and dropped with it. The chieftain swung at where she should have been and hit air, and Aveline came up inside his reach and drove her shield rim into his jaw.

His head snapped back. She cut low and hard behind his knee, where the rebar plates didn’t reach, and black blood sprayed across the planks.

The chieftain staggered.

In the Link, a new red point bloomed under his left arm: a gap where two car doors didn’t quite meet over his ribs. "Aveline," Elias said. "Left armpit. The plates don’t—"

"I see it."

She pressed forward. Step. Cut. Step. For the first time, the chieftain gave ground, backing toward his own tower.

That was when the archers opened up.

There were four of them, crouched in the watchtower’s upper window, and they had been waiting. The first arrow took Aveline in the back of the shoulder, between pauldron and mail. The second hit her shield. The third and fourth hissed past her head.

She didn’t fall, but she stopped. And the chieftain, grinning, stepped back into the fight.

"That," Marcus said, very calmly, "is interference."

"Marcus, I promised—"

"You promised." His rifle settled against the rock. "I didn’t promise anything."

Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

The tower window went empty.

But the chieftain had seen where the shots came from, and he had understood something else too: he wasn’t going to win this fight on the planks. So he raised the excavator axe high over his head and brought it down, not on Aveline, but on the hand rope beside him.

The rope parted with a sound like a gunshot.

The bridge flipped.

Half the planks tilted at once, the left side sagging toward the drop. Aveline’s feet went out from under her. Her shield slid off her arm and tumbled into the ravine, turning end over end until the smoke swallowed it. She caught a dangling plank with one hand and hung there, sword still in the other, her legs swinging over a hundred meters of empty air.

The chieftain braced himself on the surviving rope above her and lifted the axe.

She was losing.

Elias didn’t think. He’d stopped thinking somewhere around the cathedral.

Quick Step threw him off the ridge and onto the bridge. The planks were tilted at forty-five degrees and slick with blood, and he took them like stairs, three bounding strides with nothing beneath him on the low side. He saw the axe at the top of its arc. He saw Aveline’s face turned up toward it.

He got there first.

He threw himself between them and took the axe on his crossed forearms, his dagger braced against his shoulder. The impact drove him to his knees. Something in his left arm cracked. The excavator blade bit into the dagger’s guard and stopped a finger’s width from his collarbone, and the pain was white and total.

Then two things happened at once.

[Oathbearer (Echo) activated.]

Part of the blow turned inside his chest the way it had in Thornback Gully, like iron in a forge, and came pouring out as heat in his legs and lightning in his arms. The rest of it, the part meant for the summoner Aveline had sworn to protect, tore out of him along her oath like current down a wire and slammed into her.

Below him, Aveline ignited.

White light poured out of her. She hauled herself up the plank one-handed, as if gravity no longer applied to her, and caught Elias by the back of his jacket just as the chieftain wrenched his axe free to swing again.

The chieftain raised his arm. The car doors over his ribs parted. The red point in the Link blazed.

Elias drove the dagger in.

He put everything behind it: the echo, Quick Step, the push of Aveline’s burning hand at his back. The blade slid between the car doors, under the arm, and deep. The chieftain froze. The axe slipped from his fingers and fell, turning slowly, into the smoke.

Then he followed it.

The last rope snapped, and the bridge dropped out from under them. Still blazing, Aveline wrapped one arm around Elias and the other around a dangling rope, and they swung across the gap and slammed into the ridge wall below the post. She held them there while Marcus leaned over the lip and hauled them up one at a time.

Elias lay on his back on the red rock, his arm throbbing, and watched the windows open.

[Boss defeated: Thornback Chieftain.]

[Level up: 6 → 7.]

[Gate collapse in 5:00.]

"Core," Marcus said. "Riverbed. I can see it glowing. Four minutes if we run."

They ran. Elias found it in the shallows beside the chieftain’s body: a fist-sized core, deep orange, warm as a hearthstone. He’d carried enough cores to know what this one was worth.

A month of Mira’s treatment. Maybe more.

They stumbled out into the construction lot with ten seconds to spare, and the gate folded shut behind them with a sound like a sigh. Dawn was coming up grey over the rebar.

"You interfered," Aveline said.

"You were losing."

"I was resting." She looked at his arm, and her voice softened. "Thank you."

Marcus didn’t look up from cleaning his rifle. "For the record," he said, "I still never promised anything."