I Became the Bully Extra in a Novel I Hate

The wall came apart before Arthur understood why he was moving.

He’d thrown himself sideways on instinct, Stima flaring hot down his legs, and the whole section of stone where he’d been standing folded inward like something had stepped on it from above. Dust rolled out in a wave. He hit the floor on one shoulder and rolled up onto his feet, sword already up, eyes tracking for the thing that had almost killed him.

There was nothing to track.

No light. No heat. No shape in the air. His shadow network screamed the position at him a half-second before his eyes could have caught it anyway — a wrongness moving through the corridor, invisible, fast, gone the second it landed.

What is that. What am I even blocking.

"Arthur." Vexis’s voice came sharp beside his ear. "We’re outnumbered and one of us just died. Focus."

Veris. On the floor behind him. Not moving.

He didn’t have time to think about that either.

The red-haired swordbearer broke off from the main press and went straight for Cael. Cael threw vines up between them, a wall of green rising out of the cracked stone floor fast enough to bend the man’s swing sideways — and the relic blade went through anyway, punching clean past the vines and into Cael’s throat.

Blood came out immediately. Cael’s hands went up, both of them, pressed flat against his own neck, and it didn’t matter. It sprayed between his fingers in time with his pulse.

"CAEL!"

Arthur was moving before he finished shouting the name. Green light bloomed at his palms, the healing pulse he’d barely gotten a handle on, and he shoved it into Cael’s neck and the blood kept coming anyway, too fast for the pulse to close.

The swordbearer stepped back, planted, and came up again — going for the head this time, blade angled to finish it.

Steel met steel a foot from Cael’s face.

"YOU BASTARDS WON’T GET AWAY WITH THIS!"

Thalon had crossed the corridor in the time it took Arthur to blink. Jaw locked. Face white with fury. He drove the swordbearer back two steps before the man reset his footing.

Soltice’s hand came up again.

Thalon got his blade across his own chest a half-second before the strike landed, and it still threw him. He went backward through the air and hit the far wall hard enough to cave it in around him, armor cracking apart in pieces, blood coming up his throat and out his mouth when he tried to breathe.

Arthur’s heart was doing something it had no business doing. Too fast. Too loud. He could hear it over everything else in the corridor.

Roz landed on his shoulder without announcing it, already firing, purple flame streaking past Arthur’s ear toward the nearest mage.

"BRAT. Get it together."

Arthur’s breathing had gone ragged and shallow and he couldn’t make it slow down. He grabbed a fallen sword off the ground — not his own, someone’s, it didn’t matter whose — and pulled Stima through every vein in his body at once.

I can’t keep throwing Hellshade. If I run the reserve dry down here I get Aetherthin and I don’t come back from that mid-fight.

He looked at Vexis.

Vexis looked back.

Neither of them said anything. They didn’t need to.

Flex.

Release.

Flex.

The blood moved through him in a rhythm that wasn’t his heartbeat anymore, wasn’t Vexis’s either, something the two of them built together in the space between one beat and the next. His hair lifted off his scalp. The veins in his arms and up his neck stood out dark, then purple, the color climbing under his skin like something poured in from the inside.

"Alright, Arthur." Vexis’s voice, quieter now. "Say it."

Soltice’s hand rose. Aimed. Center mass.

"Retrograde. 1st Pulse."

"Die, you pest." Soltice fired.

Arthur vanished with a sound like a held breath let go all at once.

He came out beside Soltice, blade already swinging, the edge stopping a hand’s width from his throat.

Soltice’s eyes went wide. "A — swordbearer?"

Arthur didn’t answer. His eyes had gone white, no pupil, no color, nothing behind them but the part of him that was still moving.

The red-haired man got there first. Steel met steel an inch from Soltice’s neck, the impact ringing off the fortress walls loud enough that Arthur felt it in his teeth.

"Soltice, fall back!"

Soltice’s eyes went wider. The world in front of him turned the color of a bruise.

Roz’s hand came up. What left it wasn’t a fireball so much as a small building’s worth of purple flame, and it hit the red-haired man square in the face before he finished his sentence.

The corridor detonated.

Soltice was thrown backward off his feet, hit stone, slid. He got his head up in time to see what was left.

"Harren!"

There wasn’t a face left to answer him. Just the shape of a skull, blackened, still smoking at the edges.

Soltice’s expression came apart. "You fucking brat." He was already turning, already screaming at the rest of the corridor. "KILL HIM. KILL HIM NOW."

Every Covenant soldier still standing turned on Arthur at once. Fire, wind, steel, all of it converging from every direction that had a body left to throw it from.

"ARTHUR, LISTEN TO ME, YOU’RE GOING TO —"

Debris answered before Vexis finished the warning. Chunks of the caved-in wall lifted off the floor and swept into the air in a loose, ugly wall, catching arrows mid-flight, absorbing a fireball that should have taken Arthur’s head off.

Sable was on his knees at the edge of the fighting, blood running freely out of his nose, both arms extended and shaking.

Arthur hit the ground and vanished again the second his boot touched stone.

He came out at Soltice’s neck for the second time.

Soltice threw himself sideways with a burst of wind, hair whipping across his face, breathing hard.

Behind them, Sable coughed blood onto the floor. He turned his head and saw Cael lying where he’d fallen, a dark pool spreading beneath him, his bellus pawing uselessly at his shoulder trying to move a body that wasn’t moving back.

Sable raised one arm.

The blood on the floor lifted.

It crawled back across the stone in a thin red current and found the wound in Cael’s throat and poured itself back in, like something rewinding, and a second later Cael’s chest heaved and he sucked in air hard enough that his whole body arched off the ground.

Sable vomited more blood onto his own knees. He didn’t stop watching Cael breathe.

Arthur swung again. And again. He wasn’t aiming anymore, not really — the sword moved because his body had decided it should move, and it kept finding targets because Retrograde didn’t miss even when nothing behind his eyes was steering it.

"Arthur! Are you even in there? Answer me! We haven’t swapped, so you have to be in there — LISTEN TO ME, GODDAMN IT—"

Arthur didn’t answer. His mouth hung open. Spit ran down his chin and scattered when he moved.

Soltice backed toward the ventilation shaft, riding a current of wind up the wall, putting distance between them.

He raised his right hand.

Arthur was already running at him.

"BRAT. Calm down.NOW!!"

He didn’t slow down. He didn’t hear it. His mouth was still open, tongue out, every part of him narrowed down to the one shape in front of him that needed to stop existing.

Soltice’s hand finished gathering. Whatever the attack was, it didn’t shimmer, didn’t glow, didn’t do anything Arthur’s eyes could use — it just built, silent and total, aimed straight at his head.

"JUST DIE ALREADY —"

The ventilation shaft screamed.

Something on the other side of it yanked, hard, a vacuum pulling in one direction with enough force to drag Soltice’s whole arm up and sideways before the attack cleared his palm. It went into the shaft instead of into Arthur’s skull and the shaft answered by blowing outward in a burst that knocked chunks of stone loose from the ceiling.

Soltice’s balance went with it. His feet left the floor.

His eyes found Arthur through the dust — gold hair, black coat, blade already coming up, already committed, no hesitation left anywhere in his body.

Soltice threw his free hand up.

Too late.

A yellow light met the black tattoo on his forehead and tore straight through it, through the sun that had sat there since before Arthur ever saw his face, and the black sun came apart the way everything else in this corridor had come apart tonight.

Arthur went through him.

Blood. Tissue. Pieces of a man who’d been standing a second ago, thrown in every direction the impact had room to send them. Arthur’s own momentum carried him past and into the far wall hard enough to bring another section of stone down around his shoulders.

Roz hit the wall a few feet away and caught himself by wind magic.

He looked across the wreckage at Arthur, buried to the waist in rubble, sword still in his hand, chest heaving.

"BRAT!"