Chapter 109: Liaraen vs Yorel
Liaraen lunged.
The green sword of the Sael’thoryn lineage cut through the air with the fluid trajectory the enchantment dictated. Her first target wasn’t Yorel but the nearest puppet—the warrior who’d been preparing the alpha’s flesh. Liaraen approached from the lateral angle, and with a single descending arc, she cut the tendon threads Yorel had connected to the puppet’s nape.
The threads released.
The warrior fell limp like a cut-string puppet.
Liaraen turned.
Another step. Second puppet. Another thread cut. Another body falling to the ground.
Yorel moved his hands.
The remaining eighteen puppets changed coordination. Instead of surrounding Liaraen from all directions at once, they began converging in undulating waves. Five from the front. Five from the right flank. Five from the left flank. Three from behind, blocking the retreat route.
Liaraen moved with the green sword forward.
Three puppets from the front lunged simultaneously with hands extended like claws. Without weapons. Without technique. Just bodies moving with the mechanical coordination Yorel imposed through the threads.
Liaraen evaded them with a lateral spin. The lineage sword cut the threads of two of them in a single broad motion. The two fell. The third continued its lunge, and Liaraen dodged it with a backward jump.
Yorel grunted.
With the first sign of frustration since the fight began.
"Elf. Apparently you’re going to make this difficult."
"Apparently yes."
*There. They both used the word.*
*Doesn’t matter. Keep going.*
Liaraen kept moving.
With the lineage sword tracing arcs that cut tendon threads with the precision of a guide the sword itself indicated through the enchantment. Each arc eliminated one or two puppets. Each fallen puppet was a body saved in the sense that Yorel’s connection broke and the body entered the same collapsed state it had been in moments before when the parasite consciousness died.
Five puppets down.
Thirteen remaining.
Yorel moved both hands forward.
And the remaining threads split. Instead of one per puppet, there were now two or three per puppet on the remaining thirteen. With anchors distributed across different body points. At the nape. At the shoulders. At the base of the spine. Yorel had made the control points redundant.
Liaraen noticed on the next cut.
She reached a puppet. Cut the nape threads. The puppet should have fallen. But it remained standing because the shoulder and spine threads still held it. The puppet threw a punch. Liaraen dodged it by millimeters.
"Alright," Liaraen said to herself.
She adjusted.
She began cutting in wider arcs that hit multiple anchor points at once.
It worked. But it was slower. Each puppet required two or three cuts instead of one.
And while Liaraen took time to eliminate one, the others closed in.
A warrior reached her from the right flank with the short sword it had abandoned earlier. Liaraen spun the lineage sword to block. The metals clashed. The enchantment amplified Liaraen’s strength enough to deflect the impact. But the warrior’s sword grazed her right arm above the elbow, opening a cut approximately five centimeters long.
Liaraen responded with a horizontal slash. She cut the warrior’s threads. The warrior fell.
Another cut on her left shoulder reached her from behind. Liaraen felt blood run down her collarbone.
*They’re coordinating better.*
*Yorel is learning my rhythm.*
She glanced at Yorel from the corner of her eye.
Yorel was standing ten meters away. His hands moving in the air like someone playing a stringed instrument. His broad smile restored. And his eyes following Liaraen’s movements with the attention of someone calibrating in real time the improvements to introduce into the puppets’ choreography.
*He’s a full puppeteer.*
*Each puppet that falls, he adjusts the remaining ones.*
*I have to reach him.*
Liaraen began moving toward Yorel.
With the lineage sword forward, cutting threads along the way.
Ten puppets remaining.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
And at that moment, when Liaraen reached approximately five meters from Yorel, Yorel did something different.
He moved his hands toward the dead alpha creature’s body.
The remaining threads on his fingers—approximately ten—released from the six remaining puppets. Those six puppets fell simultaneously to the ground. And the ten threads undulated through the air and settled on the alpha creature.
They anchored into the pulsing red skin.
They searched for the large tendons of the torso, of the destroyed legs, of the neck pierced by Liaraen’s sword.
And they began to pull.
The dead alpha creature moved.
It rose slowly from the ground.
With its arms still destroyed. With Liaraen’s green sword still embedded in its neck. With the pulsing red lines now dimmed by death, but with movements coordinated by Yorel’s threads.
Liaraen stopped.
With her sword forward.
Without a sword.
Because the lineage sword was still embedded in the alpha creature’s neck.
And the alpha creature was standing between her and Yorel.
With Liaraen’s sword as its own involuntary weapon.
Liaraen processed that in less than a second.
*Yorel is using the alpha as a giant puppet. With my own sword as its weapon. I’m going to have to take it back.*
*And do it without the alpha tearing me apart with its claws.*
*Even damaged, they still cut.*
Yorel spoke then, with the calm voice Nathan had heard in the settlement over the past two days but now without the humble mask.
"Elf. I’m going to intensify this."
And Yorel took a step toward the alpha’s fallen body.
With a broad smile.
And with his right hand beginning to produce a different type of thread.
Thicker.
Dark red instead of white.
With a signature Liaraen recognized with her own Soul Sense as something akin to the parasite energy the main consciousness had emitted in life.
*Ah.*
*Yorel is going to fuse with the alpha.*
*He’s going to absorb the residual parasite signature along with the body’s physical strength.*
*He’s going to become something larger.*
---
Yorel approached the alpha’s body.
He extended the red threads toward the torso.
The red threads penetrated the skin. They connected with the body’s internal fibers. And Yorel, with the calibrated calm of a craftsman executing the final phase of a work planned for decades, began to fuse with the creature.
Not physically in the sense that his body became the alpha’s body.
Physically in the sense that his tissues began to join with the alpha’s dead tissues through the threads. The alpha’s flesh became a functional extension of Yorel’s body. The creature’s destroyed arms began to move again, pulled by the fused tendons. The legs too.
And Yorel rose from the ground.
His human body positioned itself on the alpha’s back, with the red threads keeping him integrated into the creature’s body. Yorel’s human head appeared above the alpha’s right shoulder. With his smile maintained. With his eyes glowing for the first time with the same pulsing red as the creature’s skin lines.
And the alpha’s five jaws opened once more.
With Yorel controlling the movement.
With a voice that was now a single voice—Yorel’s—but amplified by the large creature’s body resonance.
"Draken respects creativity. This configuration is new. I’m going to propose it at the next conclave."
Liaraen retreated two steps.
With empty hands.
With her right arm bleeding from the warrior’s cut. With her left shoulder bleeding from the rear cut. With her left side still aching from the wound she’d received during the fight with the eight reinforcements. With her right calf wounded from the same fight.
And with Nathan ten meters away, collapsed on the ground, without the lineage sword that had won him the previous exchange with the alpha creature.
Yorel-alpha took a step forward.
The ground trembled slightly with the combined weight of the deformed humanoid body with the human mounted on its back.
And Liaraen prepared for what she knew was going to be the most difficult moment of her life up to that point.
With her right hand searching for something that could serve as an alternative weapon.
And finding nothing.
---
Meanwhile.
On the clearing’s ground. Ten meters from the fight.
Nathan had lost most of his vision.
He could only see a very narrow cone ahead. Everything else was gray. The sound of the fight reached him muffled. The sensation of his wounds no longer hurt in the acute sense from earlier, but was a constant, distant presence, like noise from a neighboring room.
His body was failing.
Nathan knew it.
Without medical intervention in the next few minutes, he was going to die.
And yet, with what remained of his consciousness, he began doing the only thing he could still do.
*System.*
*Status.*