Chapter 37: A Cold Execution of Ego

Chapter 37: Chapter 37: A Cold Execution of Ego

"Revenge is a dish best served cold." — Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

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Vance ran. Joel let him run for exactly four steps.

That was as long as the mercy deserved.

Then he moved.

Phantom Tread carried him across the grass without making a sound.

A grey afterimage remained where he had been, arms folded and patient.

The real Joel reached Vance from the side the golden boy was not watching, his hand landing on Vance’s shoulder.

"You are carrying my property," Joel said, close to his ear.

He grabbed Vance by the sword arm and collar.

Then he swung him.

The A-rank of Caelmont left the ground, flew across the clearing, and slammed back-first into a tree.

WHUMP.

The impact knocked the breath out of him.

The tree shaked.

Above them, the canopy shook, sending a slow rain of leaves down around the boy crumpled at its roots.

Vance got back up fighting.

Terror had finally burned down to the only thing left beneath it.

Vance became very furious, "I’ll KILL you, you grey little...."

The dead blade swung in both hands, a wide, wild arc with no form or control behind it.

Joel stepped inside the swing and watched the blade pass a full arm’s length away.

Then he clapped.

Once. Clap.

"In the colosseum, you cut an Ash-Brute in half with one stroke," Joel said.

"That stroke had a plan and an audience.

"This one has neither. And neither do you.

"You’ve spent your whole life being watched, Aldrich.

"And it turns out you never learned how to fight without a crowd."

The second stroke came overhand, and Joel raised one forearm and let it land.

TANG.

The dead steel struck Joel’s arm like a railing being hit.

The blade shuddered in Vance’s grip, the vibration running down into his wrists.

Joel barely reacted to the blow. Then he answered.

A short, almost bored push of his palm sent the A-rank crashing to the ground.

"Get up. You have an A-rank mana core and the academy’s entire training behind you.

"I want to see what the city’s investment can really do before I’m finished with you."

Vance got up.

Blood ran freely from his nose, down over his mouth and chin. Grass was tangled in his golden hair.

Something behind his eyes had changed.

The terror was gone. In its place was something cold.

Joel recognized it.

It was the same place he went when he stopped thinking about fear and started thinking about what needed to be done.

Two months of tonic, a cellar, and a velvet case had all come from this boy’s cold place, and now the cold place had run out of other people to spend.

The crimson blade ignited again, but this time it was different.

The red light steadied, dimmed, and hardened.

Joel nodded.

The Fury-state was condensing Vance’s mana instead of wasting it.

There it was.

The real A-rank had finally arrived to face its own execution.

The exchange that followed lasted eleven seconds, and it was the finest swordsmanship Joel had ever been hit with.

The first strike came as a blur of hard light. Joel twisted off his hip and let it pass.

The blade carved a trench through the mud where he had been standing.

The second and third came together, one high and one low.

Joel took both on the Aegis Frame, giving up two yards of ground as a dead branch shattered behind him.

The fourth strike met Joel’s halberd, finally drawn.

The Silver-tier crescent absorbed the red impact with a sound like a bell ringing underwater.

The fifth came in low beneath it, a beautiful killing angle.

Joel took the strike across his ribs.

SNK

And the sound of an A-rank strike hitting Epic-class hide and simply stopping was like a vault door slamming shut.

[Ding!]

[Aegis Frame: 2,900 units absorbed. Host damage: 0.]

[Aegis Frame: 1,700 units absorbed. Host damage: 0.]

[Aegis Frame: 3,400 units absorbed. Host damage: 0.]

[Charge stored: 11,200 units.]

[System Note: the account is approaching maturity.]

Vance stood in the fading red light, his chest heaving.

He stared at his sword arm.

His wrist had stopped obeying the part of his brain that still believed his strikes could hurt Joel.

"There it is," Joel said quietly. "That was the whole of you, and it was worth the wait.

"Now let’s finish this."

He planted his feet.

The form came together; short, tight, and loaded with force.

Then Joel gave Vance everything he had taken from him, with interest.

The Meteor Piercer came as a single horizontal line through the darkness.

It struck the crimson blade at the forte and the guard at the same time.

The A-rank weapon of Caelmont’s newest hero did not simply break.

It became something else. A sword became shrapnel.

KRA-KOOM.

The pieces of it ringing off into the trees like thrown coins.

Vance’s arms went with it.

The force did not take Joel’s hands. He had measured the strike perfectly.

A pharmacist does not amputate when a fracture is enough.

Both forearms broke under the halberd’s arc.

The golden boy dropped to his knees in the mud, clutching his ruined arms against his chest.

The sound that escaped him was not a scream.

It was smaller and worse . Then the jungle swallowed it in silence.

•••

Chloe Bellamy had been moving since the sword exploded.

And she had been moving in the wrong direction.

Toward him.

Joel turned and found her halfway across the grass, her hands raised and her spell already forming.

"Joel," she said, and the warmth she had built her whole life out of poured into the word like heat into a frozen pipe.

"Joel, listen to me. It was never about hurting you, the families made the match before we ever met, and I was a girl with a trading house’s whole weight on my back, and Vance was the coin they traded me for..."

Her eyes were bright and streaming, and her voice cracked exactly where a lifetime of practice had taught it to crack.

"I chose wrong, and I’m paying for it. You, of all people, know what it’s like to be judged by someone else’s standards. We were good once, before any of this. Let me...."

She took one more step, and her fingers had begun the gesture of the Frost-Weaver’s opening fan, low and lovely and disguised as a plea.

Joel watched the gesture come. Something in him, the pharmacy tech who had worked too many night shifts, catalogued it without anger, the same way he once catalogued a forged prescription.

He spoke before the fan could finish blooming.

"Your hands were steady on the glass," he said. "Every night. A person’s hands shake when they regret something, and yours never did. Not once in two months.

"So the regret is a costume. A good one, I’ll give you that.

"But I’m not going to touch it."

He crossed the space between them at a walk, unhurried, while the fan froze half-bloomed in the air.

He flicked her temple with two fingers, precise and controlled, the way one taps a vial to settle the sediment.

She went down like a cut string, unconscious but breathing, into the grass.

Joel stood over the prettiest wreckage of his old life and felt something inside him close with a small, clean click.

’You were the cheapest thing I ever bought,’ he thought, without heat. ’One glass of tonic a night. I poured every one into a fern, and the fern is doing better than either of you.’

•••

Vance knelt in the mud, cradling his arms.

He had stopped pretending an hour ago. The pretending had been the last thing holding him up, and now that it was gone, he simply looked young, tired, and very small in the dark.

"You are going to kill me," he said. It was not quite a question.

"No," Joel said. "Killing you is the Mayor’s plan, not mine. It would make you a martyr, and that only raises your price.

"I’m going to do something Sterling will understand far better.

"And fear far more."

He crouched until they were eye to eye, because the sentence deserved to be delivered that way.

"Your mana core is a public asset, Aldrich. The Vanguard Academy’s fast track, the Mayor’s investment, the city’s golden summer, all of it rests on that core.

"Aethelgard audits its heroes. And a hero with a dead core isn’t a tragedy.

"He’s a failed investment."

He gently placed two fingers against the boy’s chest.

"I want you to understand what happens next before I close it," Joel said. "The tonic you fed me was careful work. Patient. Cumulative. You gave it to me for months, and I survived it.

"Now I’m going to return the favor.

"What happens to your core tonight will happen once. Cleanly.

"You’ll wake up ordinary.

"And you’ll spend the rest of a long, healthy, unremarkable life being exactly what you spent two years calling me."

The discharge was a single pulse, small and precise and administered.

CRK.

Vance screamed once.

Then the sound cut off as his core seized and the light went out of him.

The golden boy of Caelmont knelt in the mud of the Third Stratum, his arms broken, his core dead, and everything anyone had ever built around his name in ruins.

[Ding!]

[Lethal encounter survived (A-rank hostile, armed, premeditated assault).]

[Survival Accumulation: 100%.]

[Gauge converting...]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 4.]

[Target: Aldrich Vance. Status: core shattered. Threat assessment: retired.]

[System Note: some accounts close in cash. Some close in futures. This one closed in futures.]

Joel stood and drew a breath.

The silence between them had the weight of finished business.

"Now then," he said to the two of them, the broken and the sleeping. The habit had become a ritual.

"Let us discuss the extraction."