Crownless Tyrant

The blood threads hit the stone wall behind Alistair, and cut through it the way paper tears.

He had moved before they arrived, as the Equalizer read Valve’s attack a fraction of a second before the threads extended.

Still, the wall behind where he had been standing now wore three clean lines carved through solid stone.

Precise and deep enough to put a hand inside.

Valve’s Characteristic didn’t rely on proximity; that much was clear from the first pass.

The blood threads could reach anywhere Valve directed them, cutting through distance the way a normal blade cut through air.

Fighting him meant fighting something that existed between him and every surface in the street, all at the same moment!

Alistair raised his Rune Sword and rushed forward.

The threads redirected.

Three came from the left, two from the right, all converging on the space Alistair was moving through.

He blocked one with his blade, dodged two, and the remaining two caught his leg armor and his forearm, leaving shallow cuts that were enough to draw blood and nothing more.

’He’s controlling them from his palm,’ Alistair thought. ’Every thread connects back to the blood on his hand, so if I close the distance, he has to withdraw them to defend.’

He pressed forward again.

The Equalizer equalized against Valve’s combat capability, not just the Characteristic, but also the Edgeform mastery underneath it.

Valve was good with a blade even without the blood, and the combination made him harder than anyone Alistair had fought since Sargus.

Their swords connected.

The impact rang through the narrow street, and Alistair felt the shock travel up his arm into his wounded shoulder.

Valve’s style was different from Sargus’s, as his brother had pressed with raw aggression, while Valve read.

Every movement was a reply to Alistair’s, with the discipline of a fighter who had learned to conserve himself.

Alistair struck at his guard.

Valve parried, and at the same moment directed three blood threads at Alistair’s legs.

The multidirectional attack forced Alistair to choose either the blade or the threads.

He chose the blade, and the threads cut across his thigh, though not yet deep enough to slow him.

"You fight differently from your brother," Alistair said between exchanges.

Valve’s jaw tightened, yet he didn’t reply.

Alistair was reluctantly impressed.

The color in Valve’s face had started to fade because each thread required fresh blood, and Valve’s palm was cutting deeper to maintain the supply.

He was a man bleeding himself hollow to fight, and it was hard not to respect it, even now.

However, something shifted in the middle of their third exchange.

A lieutenant approached Valve from the formation’s rear, staying well clear of the blood threads.

He spoke quickly and gestured toward a building on the settlement’s southern edge.

Alistair couldn’t hear the words, though he didn’t need to.

A supply building. Civilian infrastructure, the food stores, and the water routing, the kind of thing that kept a town breathing through winter.

Caldren’s order, then. The one that crossed the line.

Valve went still for one full second.

The blood threads around him went still, too, suspended in the air like frozen rain, and the fight paused in the way fights pause when something more important than combat is happening inside one of the participants.

The lieutenant waited, standing a little too straight, with his hand twitching at the edge of his belt.

Valve looked at the supply building.

Then at the lieutenant, and back at Alistair, who was standing six meters away with his Rune Sword raised and blood running down his leg.

Alistair didn’t move.

He recognized the moment for what it was, something being decided that had nothing to do with their fight.

’He’s being asked to use the blood against civilians,’ Alistair thought. ’Against the food stores. Against people who signed nothing and agreed to nothing.’

Valve’s hand, the one still bleeding, still feeding the threads, closed into a fist.

The threads didn’t move toward the building.

Instead, they moved back toward Alistair.

Valve didn’t give the order. He turned from the lieutenant without a word and re-engaged.

The blood threads returned to their geometry around the combat space, cutting at Alistair’s position with renewed intensity, and Valve pressed forward with his blade harder than before.

The lieutenant didn’t push, and nobody else pushed either.

The weight of a commander refusing an order settled over the contingent, and even the soldiers who hadn’t heard the exchange seemed to feel it.

A few of them slowed. One looked at the supply building, then looked away quickly, as if he had already decided not to have seen anything.

Alistair blocked a strike that nearly took his sword arm.

Valve was fighting with something behind his precision now, not quite anger, yet close to it.

The energy of a man who had refused one thing and was spending the refusal on the only thing in front of him.

The exchange continued.

Valve’s face was going grey at the edges, the blood loss compounding with each minute of sustained deployment.

He knew the math, and he fought with it fully factored in.

Alistair’s Equalizer ceiling was approaching rapidly.

He could feel it at the edges, the gradual dimming that meant his Characteristic was running out of room to equalize. Not catastrophic yet, but closing.

Due’s voice came in from somewhere in the settlement, distant but clear.

"Alistair, his focus is splitting. The contingent is losing coordination."

Silas’s disruption was still working, and Due’s obligation threads were still pulling, while Valve’s refusal had removed the operation’s purpose from its center.

Capture required complete coordination, so without Valve’s full commitment to the objective, it was falling apart.

Alistair felt the shift before he could name it.

The pressure against him eased by a fraction, as Valve pulled threads back to conserve what he had left rather than press for a resolution that wasn’t going to come.

They locked swords once more.

Valve’s blade came in high, and the Equalizer caught it cleanly. Their swords locked, with six inches of distance between their faces.

Valve’s eyes were dark and focused, and carrying something that wasn’t about this fight. Something older than Sargus, older than any of this.

"This isn’t going to end the way Caldren wants," Alistair said in a low voice.

Valve didn’t reply at first. His breathing was shallow, and the edges of his mouth were tight.

"No," he said finally, speaking while holding the lock. "It isn’t."

Seeing this, Alistair held his blade steady.

"You could walk away. There are other places."

Valve’s expression didn’t change, yet his eyes did. Something moved in them, briefly, before it shut again.

"I’ve thought about it," said Valve.

Then he pushed off, stepped back, and the blood threads withdrew with him, pulling back toward his palm like strings being reeled in.

He looked at Alistair for one more moment.

"My brother died for Caldren," said Valve, his voice flat. "He didn’t know that when he died. That’s the part that keeps me here."

Following that, he turned and walked back toward what was left of his contingent.

Alistair watched him go, saying nothing.

The blood threads dissolved. Valve’s hand was still bleeding, and he wrapped it with a cloth from his belt without slowing his pace.

The soldiers around him fell into formation behind him automatically, the instinct of men who had followed this man for years, regardless of how the operation had gone.

Valve’s contingent disappeared around the settlement’s western edge.

The morning went quiet again.

Due appeared at Alistair’s side, his face pale from sustained deployment, though his expression carried something that wasn’t exhaustion.

"He refused," Due said.

"I saw."

"He was ordered to use the blood against the civilian infrastructure. Food stores, water routing. He refused and fought me through you instead."

Alistair raised a brow at that phrasing, but he didn’t correct it. Due meant what he said, even when the grammar got strange.

"Caldren will know before sundown," Alistair said.

"Before noon, likely."

Alistair nodded and didn’t say anything else about it for a while.

However, Due wasn’t moving.

He stood with his eyes slightly narrowed, the way they got when he was reading something he didn’t fully understand, and his hand adjusted his collar slowly.

"What is it?" Alistair asked.

Due hesitated, which was unusual for him.

"An obligation just formed on Valve," said Due. "During the fight. I felt it settle when he turned from the lieutenant."

"Toward us?"

"No."

"Toward Caldren?"

"No." Due exhaled deeply. "It has no direction I can read. Obligations always have a direction, that’s the first thing I learn about one when it forms. This one doesn’t. It just... sits on him."

Alistair’s eyes widened slightly.

"Is that possible?"

"Apparently."

They were silent for a moment.

Alistair looked toward the western edge, where Valve had disappeared.

A thread without a knot was a thread that waited for someone to take hold of the other end.

’And when someone does,’ Alistair thought, ’whoever that is, they’ll have pulled a commander of Therasia onto their side without ever asking.’

He didn’t know who that would be, yet.

Only that someone already had their hand on it.