Chapter Fifty
Kenyon
Yun hadn’t woken. The Guild had shown up, taken care of the mess. The corrupted was dead.
Not just sort of dead, not just barely having passed, but fully and completely gone. Even my skills couldn’t have saved him, not with what Ingram did to him.
“How is she?” Carter walked in, though he didn’t walk well. I’d healed him as well, but that wouldn’t stop all the aches from the injuries he’d sustained.
“Healed, but she hasn’t woken.”
Shear sat in the corner of the hotel room, silent as he’d been since the Guild had come, since we had somehow survived this entire mess. He was always quiet, but this felt suffocating.
“How much do they know?” I asked.
“The cameras told them everything, even if we hadn’t. They know she took down a corrupted who handed two S-Rank espers our asses, that she somehow stripped nearly every atom of corruption from him.”
“They aren’t going to fucking let this go.” Ingram strolled in not so much as limping. Then again, he’d gotten thrown around a lot less, and he was so prideful that he wouldn’t limp if he could avoid it. “Should have fucking hidden it.”
“Not enough time. I don’t like it either, but we’re going to have to deal with this.” Carter sighed and dropped himself into one of the chairs in the room. Just doing that went to show how bad he still felt. “The Guild is going to want to get their claws into her.”
“They assigned her to us. They can’t remove her for no good reason,” I argued, more because I didn’t like the implication rather than because I honestly believed it. I knew as well as anyone else exactly what the Guild could do when they wanted.
“They can’t take her, sure, but they can make things really uncomfortable for us until they get what they want, and what they’re going to want is to figure out what makes Yun different, what exactly she did and how she did it.
” Carter leaned forward, then let out a long, frustrated breath.
“I don’t even know what she did, so how the hell can we do anything to protect her?
How the hell can a guide do that to a corrupted? ”
“She’s done it before.” Shear’s voice came out soft, the way he interjected into conversations as though he’d been part of them all along. It drew the attention of all three of us.
“What?” I asked.
“Afterward, just before she passed out, I slipped into her mind. She doesn’t know, probably too distracted with what she went through, but I saw it.”
“What did you see?”
“The dungeon, again, the same one from her nightmare before. She relived it there, for a few seconds before she lost consciousness, and I saw it. A corrupted forced her into guiding inside a dungeon. That is why she’s different, why her guiding is different, and why she could do what she did today—because she’s been forced to do it before. ”
Silence met the information, all of it too horrible for me—for any of us—to accept.
Even the idea that a guide might have gotten sucked into a dungeon was bad enough, but to think a corrupted would do that? My stomach rolled at the wrongness of it, the sickening truth of it.
It explained so much, though.
Her fear, her abilities, her distrust.
And yet, despite her having every reason to have turned around and left us to our fate, she hadn’t.
I turned and stared at her, her eyes closed tight, her lids shifting as though she dreamed.
“So what now?” I asked.
No one answered at first, the reality of the situation so heavy, the lack of easy solutions, all of it crushing.
“We accepted a long time ago that we weren’t the Guild’s golden children anymore, that we didn’t want to be. Nothing’s different now,” Carter said.
“The Guild won’t just let it go,” Ingram pressed.
“They’re going to want to get their hands on her, and trust me, that isn’t a fate we want to let her suffer,” Shear said.
“She can’t trust them,” I agreed, knowing better than most exactly how much the bottom line mattered to the Guild. They would trample anyone if they thought it was worth it.
Carter, wearing a strangely serious expression, moved over and brushed Yun’s hair from her face. For a man who rarely stopped smiling, who never appeared to take anything to heart, he showed no signs of that happy-go-lucky man then. “They won’t touch her, and we’ll make damn sure of it.”
“What if they don’t accept that?” Ingram asked.
He smiled that time, but it wasn’t playful, not funny. Instead, it felt like a threat. “Then we’ll show them exactly why our squad used to be on top. If they think we’ve been a problem before, they have no idea what we’ll burn down for her.”