Chapter 9: Rules of the Threshold

Chapter 9: Chapter 9: Rules of the Threshold

The second slot sat in his status window like an open door.

[Summon slots: 1 / 2]

Elias looked at it every morning. He looked at it on the bus, in the hospital elevator, in line at the noodle shop. And every time, he closed the window without doing anything.

The last time that door opened, someone had stepped through it out of her own death. Aveline had been one breath from the end, with three spears in her, a king, a pass, and a whole life behind her. Then she’d had him. Whoever came through next would be the same: someone’s last second, handed to a D-rank who didn’t even know how his own power worked.

Not yet. Not until he knew what he was holding.

So he went back to the Rat Warrens, not to fight this time. Three nights of work had swept the outer tunnels clean, and the king still slept behind its iron grate deep in the dark. That left a mile of quiet brick, which made it the closest thing he had to a laboratory.

He brought a notebook. Aveline thought that was very funny.

"You’re taking notes," she said, stepping out of a fold of white-gold light.

"Somebody has to." He checked his status. "Summoning you cost thirty mana."

He recalled her. She vanished mid-eyebrow-raise. He checked again.

"Recall costs five." He summoned her back, and she reappeared looking unimpressed. "And thirty to bring you out again. So I can’t flick you in and out all night."

"I’d prefer you didn’t," Aveline said. "It’s like being sneezed."

They tested distance next. Elias stood still while she walked down the tunnel, counting paces out loud. At twenty-eight, she stopped.

"Something’s pulling," she said. "Like a rope around my ribs."

"Keep going."

At thirty-one, her outline went thin, its edges flickering like a candle in a draft. At thirty-two, she was yanked three full steps backward, as if someone had grabbed her belt.

[Summon range: 30 m. Increases with level.]

"Thirty meters," Elias wrote. "For now."

He spent his unallocated points that night, all twenty of them, piled up over four levels. He’d always imagined that if he ever got any, he’d pour them into Strength like a real hunter. Instead, he put ten into Intelligence for the mana, five into Willpower, and five into Agility because Quick Step multiplied it, and felt very much like a porter planning a budget.

The last test found the warning.

He’d been reading his skills the way he used to read gate postings: slowly, line by line, looking for the catch. When he pressed on Threshold Summoning, the window expanded. Lines he’d never seen unfolded beneath it, and the text turned from white to a dull, steady red.

[WARNING]

[A summon who dies is lost permanently and cannot be summoned again.]

[If the summoner dies, all bound summons fade.]

Elias read it three times. The tunnel was very quiet.

"What is it?" Aveline asked.

He turned the window toward her, unsure whether she could even read it. Then he watched her eyes move across the lines and knew that she could.

She said nothing for a long moment.

"So," she said finally. "Twice is the limit."

"What?"

"I’ve died once. I don’t get to do it again." She said it the way she’d said thigh, ribs, shoulder. "And if you fall, I go with you."

"Aveline—"

"It’s a fair arrangement." She sheathed her sword. "Knights in Carrow swear their lives to the people they guard. Most of us just don’t get it in writing."

Elias closed the window. His hands weren’t quite steady. He’d thought the second slot was a door. It wasn’t. It was a promise he’d have to keep for someone he hadn’t even met yet.

"Then I don’t die," he said.

"Good." She clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger. "And neither do I. Write that in your little book."

The red text faded. Something else replaced it, white and quiet in the corner of his vision.

[Covenant bond strengthened.]

[Echo awakened: Oathbearer (Echo)]

[Take a blow meant for an ally. Convert part of the damage into strength for a short time.]

Thornback Gully was a D-rank gate in a construction lot on the east side, and it was full of goblins.

Elias chose it on purpose. Rats came in packs. Goblins came in warbands, with spears, archers, and a chain of command. If he was going to test something that turned pain into strength, he wanted something that could actually hurt.

The gate opened onto a ravine of red rock and thornbushes beneath a bruised sky. They found the warband at the bottom: eighteen goblins around a smoking fire pit, and one more on a ledge above them, wrapped in a cloak of feathers and leaning on a staff topped with a glowing green skull.

"Shaman," Elias murmured. "That one’s the problem."

"They’re all a problem," Aveline said, and went down the slope like an avalanche.

The warband broke against her. Spears skidded off her shield. Her sword carved through two goblins in a single stroke and kept going. Elias stayed behind her left shoulder, the way she’d taught him, calling the flanks. "Right, three. Archers on the ridge. Back—back—" She gave ground, and a volley of arrows hissed into the dirt where she’d been standing.

A goblin brute twice the size of the others charged her head-on, swinging a club made from a car axle. Aveline caught it on her shield and dug in, boots plowing furrows through the red dirt, her whole body locked against the impact.

On the ledge, the shaman raised its staff.

Elias saw it the way he saw everything. The skull’s eyes brightened. The shaman’s lips moved. Its aim drifted to Aveline’s right side, where her shield wasn’t. She was pinned under the brute’s club, and she would never see it coming.

The firebolt left the staff, a howling green comet.

Elias stopped thinking.

Quick Step threw him forward eight meters in a blink, out of his post and out of every lesson she’d drilled into him. He planted himself in the firebolt’s path with his arms crossed over his face.

It hit him like a car.

Green fire washed over his jacket, his arms, his half-healed ribs. The world went white and loud. He smelled his own hair burning, and for one second he was sure he’d made the dumbest mistake of his life.

Then the echo woke.

It wasn’t the white sun Aveline had become in the cathedral. It was smaller, a spark instead of a bonfire, but it was his. The pain poured into his chest and turned there, the way iron turns in a forge, and came out the other side as heat in his muscles and lightning in his legs.

[Oathbearer (Echo) activated.]

He looked up. On the ledge, the shaman was already chanting the next bolt.

He went up the rock face in three bounding steps that should have been impossible, Quick Step and the surge stacked together. The shaman squealed and swung its staff at his head. Elias caught it in both hands, braced it across his knee, and snapped it in half.

The skull shattered and its green light went out. The shaman toppled backward off the ledge, and every goblin in the ravine shrieked at once as their magic died.

Below, Aveline heaved the brute off her shield and finished it with a single cut. Then she looked up at him, standing on the ledge with two halves of a staff in his hands and smoke rising off his shoulders.

"You left your post," she called.

"You had a blind side," Elias called back.

She considered that. Then she nodded once, the way she had in the warrens.

"Good," she said. "Now come down. Your sleeve is on fire."