Chapter 52: A Well Deserved Nap.
The response was not dramatic... apart from the wound.
That was the thing about this particular trump card that his father had tried to explain and that Silas had never fully understood until right now, standing in a dungeon boss room with his chest open and his mana sinking into the floor and a crumbling blade above his head.
His father had said;
it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t feel like power. It feels like suddenly knowing.
That was exactly what it felt like.
The world didn’t slow. The light didn’t change. There was no surge of mana, no visible discharge, no dramatic visual indicator of what was happening. The blade above his head didn’t glow. His wounds didn’t close. He didn’t feel strong.
He was just, present.
The noise dropped out completely—the ringing in his ears, the pounding in his head, the distant sound of Gareth’s blade meeting carapace, the arrows from Antonio, all of it falling away until there was only the single precise image of what was in front of him and the single precise understanding of what needed to happen and when.
The mantis.
The mantis needed to happen.
He could see it whole now in a way he hadn’t been able to before. Not just the forelegs, not just the carapace, not just the threat of it. The whole system of it, the way it was distributing its attention between Gareth who was the active danger and Aris who was the instinctive threat and the arrows which were the irritant.
Three things to manage simultaneously.
Three directions of attention.
Which meant there was one direction it wasn’t covering.
The timing arrived in his understanding with the certainty of something that had always been true and had simply been waiting for him to look at it directly. Not a window he had to create. A window that existed, that had existed since the fight began, that would exist for exactly one more second before the mantis completed its current movement and the geometry of the clearing changed.
One second.
He moved.
Not fast—or not only fast, it wasn’t about speed, it was about when.
He had been given the when and his body had the rest of it, the mana dregs that remained pouring into his legs not for power but for precision, finding the exact trajectory that put him at the exact point at the exact moment. The mantis didn’t see him coming.
Not because he was hidden, not because he was invisible. But because he arrived at the precise instant that all three of its attention vectors were pointing somewhere else, the single frame where the window was open and the space behind its left foreleg—the chest, the one place where carapace had to allow movement and therefore had to allow a gap—was exposed.
The crumbling mana blade went in.
Everything he had left went with it.
The blade disintegrated on the way through, the construct falling apart under the demand being made of it, but it had done its work before it went—found the gap, found the depth, found the something vital that lived behind the armor and had never been reached before.
The mantis made a sound.
A single sound, loud and absolute, the sound of something that had been the apex of its environment encountering a concept it hadn’t previously needed to understand.
Then it went still.
Not the violent stillness of the snake. Just still. The way things went still when the system running them received information it couldn’t process and simply stopped processing.
Silas hit the ground the next moment.
His legs had given the last of what they had to the movement and had submitted their resignation, folding under him with the graceless honesty of muscles that had been asked for more than they contained and had given it anyway.
He caught himself on one hand, which was something.
The clearing was spinning again, worse than before, the clarity already receding like a tide going out, leaving behind only the ordinary version of his awareness and the very comprehensive understanding of how badly everything hurt.
The mana blade was gone entirely.
Nothing left.
He looked at his hand. Empty.
"Silas."
The voice was close. Too close.
He stiffened.
Next to his his forehead, right there. He looked up.
Aris was crouched in front of him, the composed expression fractured in a way Silas had never seen before, brows furrowed in visible concern, eyes doing something that he couldn’t exactly find a way to describe other than the fact that it made him feel like the slash was worth it.
"I’m good," Silas said, doing his best to hold back the cough, and failing.
Plus the fact words came out considerably rougher than intended.
"You’re not good," Aris said, his voice was low, slow, and somehow spinning.
"Is it down?"
"Yes."
"Then I’m good."
Aris looked at him for a long moment.
He looked, Silas thought distantly, like a person—just a person, the architecture of Ashborne down, nothing being managed. It was the most he’d ever looked like the boy Virginia ranted to him about and the most he’d ever looked like himself simultaneously.
Then Yura was there, hands already working, the warm familiar pressure of healing mana doing its efficient triage on the things that needed triaging most urgently. The wound on his chest that had torn open again. The broken bones. The mana exhaustion that wasn’t a physical wound but that healing could shore up around the edges.
Gareth arrived, looked at him, looked at the mantis, looked back at him with the expression of a man who had two things to say and was deciding which one went first.
"Extremely Idiotic." Gareth said.
"It worked," Silas replied with the best smirk he could muster.
"Idiotic and it worked," Gareth amended. "I’m telling you, those aren’t mutually exclusive."
"The grace of Kairos," Antonio said, dropping from the canopy, landing with the easy grace of someone who had spent more time in trees than on the ground.
He was looking at Silas with an expression that was hard to read.
"I haven’t heard that chant since—"
"Antonio," Silas said.
Antonio stopped.
Looked at him.
Looked at the people around them.
"Right," he said, and let it go.
Silas exhaled slowly, letting Yura work, letting the spinning in his head settle by degrees.
The clearing was now quiet around them, the dungeon having produced its last major encounter, the mana pressure that had been building since the hollow now beginning the slow release of a space preparing to collapse inward around its dead core.
He became aware, gradually, that Aris had not moved.
Still crouched in front of him. Not touching, not crowding, just present—close enough that the fact of his presence registered clearly, far enough that it didn’t require anything from Silas.
Just there.
Silas looked at him.
Aris looked back.
The fracture in his expression was still there. He was going to close it soon—Silas could see the composure beginning to reassemble at the edges, the architecture rebuilding, the performance of okay resuming its ordinary position.
But it hadn’t closed yet.
"I wasn’t going to die," Silas said quietly.
Just for him, for some reason.
"No," Aris said, equally quiet. "You weren’t."
"Then stop looking like that."
A beat.
"Like what?"
Silas almost smiled. Almost. His face wasn’t quite cooperating.
"Never-mind," he said.
Aris held his gaze for a moment longer with the expression of someone who had several available responses and had selected none of them.
Then he stood, and straightened, and by the time he was fully upright the composure was back in place, everything managed, the fracture sealed.
"We should move before the dungeon begins disassembling." He said to the general direction.
Gareth nodded. Started directing.
Silas sat in the clearing and let Yura finish her work and thought about the moment just before Aris had stood up, the half-second where the architecture was still down and the expression was still unmanaged, and the thing that had lived in it that Aris had decided not to name out loud.
He filed it carefully, in the place he kept things that mattered.
And then Yura finally finished up, letting Silas release the breath that he had been holding since.
"You guys can take care of the rest..." He said, voice slurring, eyes already closing.
"I’m just... going to take a nap."