Chapter 107: Yorel
Nathan reached the alpha two meters before it reached Liaraen.
He lunged from the lateral angle.
He applied Tactile Entropy to the creature’s left leg, at the knee joint.
The tissues began to age.
The joint weakened.
The creature, in full motion, lost balance on its left side. It fell forward with its entire body. It landed a meter from Liaraen.
Liaraen took advantage of the moment.
With the green sword glowing.
With the enchantment guiding her.
She approached the fallen creature and drove the sword into the back of its neck, at the point where the skull connected to the spine.
The sword penetrated approximately two-thirds of the blade’s length.
The creature emitted a sound Nathan had never heard from any species before. A low vibration he felt more with Soul Sense than with his ears. The distributed consciousness through the residents’ twenty throats screamed at the same time with the same vibration.
And the parasite signature began to destabilize.
The twenty residents stopped in the clearing.
The four remaining reinforcements around Liaraen stopped too.
The black eyes of all of them began to dim.
The distributed killing intent began to collapse.
Nathan felt it with Soul Sense.
With the fluctuation decreasing as the main consciousness faded.
The alpha creature, with Liaraen’s sword still embedded in its neck, moved all five jaws one last time.
And with the voice of the twenty throats fainter than at any previous moment, it said one thing:
"It wasn’t my choice, Hunter Voss."
Nathan looked at it.
*What?*
But before he could process the statement, the creature died.
The residents fell to the ground, all at once, with the coordination of a single organism shutting down.
The reinforcements fell too.
And in the clearing, in the sudden calm after combat, only Nathan and Liaraen stood.
Nathan looked at Liaraen.
With blood on his flank. With broken ribs. With his arm open. With his thigh open. With mana at 60. With his vision narrowed to the point of seeing almost only a central cone.
"Sprout."
"Nathan."
"Are you—"
His voice cut off.
The adrenaline that had kept him standing for the last twenty-five minutes began to collapse.
His legs gave out.
Nathan fell to his knees first. Then onto his back. Onto the clearing’s grass. With his gaze at the midday sky. With heavy breathing. With the feeling that he’d won but had paid more than he’d wanted to pay.
Liaraen ran to him.
She knelt beside him.
She took a cloth from her bag. She began applying pressure to the right flank wound, where the short sword was still embedded.
"Nathan. Hold on. I’m going to pull the sword out."
"Sprout."
"Nathan. Hold on."
Liaraen pulled the short sword out with a firm tug.
Nathan felt the metal exit. Fresh blood came out with more volume. Liaraen applied the cloth with pressure.
And from the southern edge of the clearing, someone came running.
Yorel.
With a horrified face. With empty hands. With his clothes stained with road dust. Running toward Nathan and Liaraen with the efficiency of someone who’d seen everything from the edge and was now arriving to help.
Liaraen saw him.
"Yorel! Help me! Nathan’s hurt!"
Yorel arrived.
He knelt beside them.
With a trembling voice.
"The kits. I brought kits from the shelter. Bandages. Herbs. Everything."
"Get them out! Fast!"
Yorel opened a small bag he carried on his shoulder. He took out clean bandages. He took out small vials of liquids. He took out pressed leaves that Nathan recognized as the type Ilena used in Marren for serious wounds.
Nathan looked at him from the ground.
With his vision still narrowed.
With the calibrated calm of someone who had accepted that the fight was over and was now in the recovery phase.
"Yorel."
"Nathan. Hold on."
"Thank you for coming back."
"Of course. Of course I came back."
Yorel began applying the herbs to the flank wound. Liaraen held Nathan by the shoulders to keep him still. Nathan felt the coolness of the herbs on his skin. The concentrated pain began to ease.
He closed his eyes for a second.
He opened them.
He looked at Yorel.
Yorel was focused on the wound. His hands applying pressure with precision. His face with the expression Nathan had learned to recognize over the past few days as that of an honest man who had been through more than he could process and was now doing the only thing he knew how to do well.
Nathan closed his eyes again.
Trusting.
And in the second before he fully closed them, Soul Sense, in its low-mana fluctuation, made a passive reading Nathan had done automatically over the past few months every time someone approached him with physical proximity.
Yorel’s signature.
And in Yorel’s signature, at the bottom, almost imperceptible through Soul Sense’s fluctuation, there was a layer Nathan hadn’t detected over the previous days.
Killing intent.
Directed at him.
Present.
Sharp.
Sustained.
Nathan opened his eyes.
He looked at Yorel.
Yorel was still applying the herbs to the wound. With calm hands. With an honest expression. With the efficiency of someone saving a wounded friend’s life.
And Nathan processed it in less than a second.
*He faked it.*
*The whole time.*
*From the settlement. From the feast. From the shelter. From the explanations. From the advice to Liaraen. From the logistics.*
*All of it.*
*Yorel is also a host.*
*The vegetarian was a cover. Or the infection didn’t come through ingestion. Or there’s something else the colony hid from me throughout the entire interaction.*
*And now that the alpha is dead, and the colony has collapsed, the signature Yorel had been hiding under the main distributed consciousness is manifesting for the first time.*
*Because the main consciousness is no longer there to mask it.*
*Because Yorel was always something different.*
Nathan tried to move.
Tried to shout.
Tried to activate any skill.
But mana was at 40. His body was in incipient hemorrhagic shock. Adrenaline had crashed. And Liaraen was still holding him by the shoulders, unaware.
Yorel moved a hand.
Nathan saw, with the last fraction of clarity he had left, that Yorel had taken something from the bag that wasn’t an herb.
It was a small dagger.
Short.
With a black blade.
With inscriptions Nathan didn’t recognize.
And with the tip aimed at Nathan’s heart.
Yorel raised it.
With the same honest expression on his face.
With the calm voice Nathan had heard over the past two days.
And with the words that finally revealed who he’d been all along.
"Forgive me, Nathan. It wasn’t my choice."
And he brought the dagger down.