Chapter 27 #3
She stepped aside to the side of his shield arm, casually effortless in the move. “You should be careful with big moves like this. They make you bleed faster.”
Hadric’s boots dug into the earth, and he spun, slashing the shield after her.
Luna made half a step back, the shield’s edge whistling in front of her face. The blood from Hadric’s wound splashed on the ground between them. “Be careful to not bleed on my shoes. You’ve already made enough mess.”
Alsen couldn’t help but strengthen the shield.
Luna didn’t move all that fast or with some extreme strength.
She had no bursts of speed, no sudden tricky moves.
She simply evaded him with effortless ease.
He remembered what she told him on one of the first days they had met.
When you fight one of our world’s top tiers, you die before you realize the combat has started.
Hadric now experienced it firsthand. He twisted his body, stabbing at her.
Luna stepped aside, half circling him by the sword’s hand. “That was slow. You really need to put more effort into it.”
In a blur, Hadric spun into a slash after her.
Luna ducked under the blade. It whistled an inch above her scalp. “What are you aiming at? My throat’s down here.” She pointed at her own throat as she stepped away.
Hadric roared, jumped in, and launched a combination. Three strikes, fast, fueled by system-enhanced speed and the last burst of adrenaline of a dying man.
Luna stepped aside, the entire thing completely missing her. “Why are you slashing at air?”
Hadric turned after her, but stumbled. His face was pale as death, eyes wide with terror.
“Done already?”
Hadric tried to take a step, but collapsed on the ground.
Luna stepped to him, raising an eyebrow.
In a last spurt, he slashed from the ground. His sword only passed through the air before it collapsed on the ground, together with his arm.
“Told you not to make big moves.” Luna walked away from him. In the stunned silence, she kicked up her spear, caught it, and turned towards Torben. “Want to avenge your friend? Line up in pairs. I’ll figure out a mass grave for you later.”
Torben met her eyes, pale himself. He’d built a company from fresh F-ranks and held it together through patrols and contracts that other groups wouldn’t take.
He had enough experience to recognize a certain death.
“Nobody’s avenging anyone,” Torben said.
His voice was rough, but controlled. He sheathed his sword with a deliberate motion, making sure she saw it.
“Put your weapons down. All of you. We bury Hadric.”
They sheathed their weapons. Not all at once, and not at all willingly, but they did. The tall man went last, his blade lingering before sliding home.
Luna braced the spear over her shoulder. She walked to the sleeping bag, picked it up, and glanced over her shoulder. “I’ll go hunt myself a dinner.” She left.
The camp stayed frozen.
Alsen floated above it, still barely able to process what he just watched.
Below him, two camps full of people stood in the wreckage of their previous assumptions.
Torben’s group clustered around a corpse that had nothing left to bleed.
Arleria’s shimmer rippled at the edge of the shelter, still cloaked, still watching.
Derell stood motionless, his sword still drawn, his expression that of a man who’d just been handed a puzzle with no solution. Malick had set his warhammer down, which Alsen had never seen him do. Kern put down the bow, returning his arrow to his quiver.
Alsen’s mind finally realized how close he had been to sharing Hadric’s fate.
Back then, in the first hour in this world, after the ogres, Luna used the same technique on him. He thought it was an instantaneous vision. He was wrong. It froze him for easily a second.
During that second, Luna had changed her mind and decided to give him a chance to talk it out. She gave Hadric no second chance.
The same technique now worked on him the second time. His chest tightened.
He finally pieced together all that his mind had been willfully ignoring.
Luna had hidden weapon techniques, no armor, no magical signature, experience with traps, with terrain hazards, the ability to survive in the wilderness with no support, knowledge of the underworld… everything about her screamed assassin.
Her moniker came to mind. Nurnfell Reaper. Killers weren’t known by their names, not when alive, so it was the name under which she became famous. The professional name, most likely.
It wasn’t as if she was trying to hide it. She laid everything out in front of him in plain sight. Ironically, precisely because it wasn’t all hidden, he never even spared it a thought.
Now, watching her fight a human for the first time forced his mind to face the reality.
He watched her silhouette vanish between the trees and let the cold settle into him. The shield hummed. The evening wind pushed against its surface.
Below, Torben knelt beside his dead man and said nothing.
Alsen lowered himself slowly, the shield dissolving as his boots touched ground. He landed apart from everyone, on the ridge where Luna’s backpack still lay, and sat down next to it.
Nobody spoke to him. Nobody spoke to anyone.
The fire crackled. The stream ran. Somewhere in the distance, a bird sang a song that had nothing to do with any of them.