Chapter 30. Rank D
We didn't make it three steps off the island before the System caught up with me.
I felt it before I saw it — that specific full-body chime, the one I'd felt exactly once before, in a ravine outside Ashlow a lifetime ago. The blue pane bloomed, patient and bright, and scrolled the words slow, making sure I read every one.
[Rank E: complete — 100%.][RANK UP: E → D.][Demon King class: new skill tier unlocked.]New skill: Warding Shroud — weave the Mantle into a barrier of shadow.]Warmth spread through me, exhaustion and all — the clean, uncomplicated satisfaction of a number going up after a long, brutal climb. Rank D. We'd done it. I'd done it, one weeded gutter and one held gate at a time.
"Rank D," Bruno breathed, and then he was hauling me up off my feet into a hug that cracked something in my spine and I did not care even slightly. "RANK D! I knew you had it! Did you feel it? I felt it through the Pact — it went up the same instant, all warm, like—"
"Like getting good news for once," Lila finished, and she was grinning, scribbling even now, because of course she was. "A defensive evolution. Warding Shroud. Adrian, do you understand what that means? The Mantle's not just claws anymore. It's a shield. You can make a wall." She looked up, and the grin went soft and clever. "The King who holds the line, and now he's got a skill for holding lines. The class is listening to you. To the choices you make. Your legend is not yet written — but you're writing it."
I tried the Shroud, right there, exhausted as I was. I reached for the Mantle and, instead of spears, I spread it — and a low curved wall of woven shadow rose in front of me, dark and solid and cool, a barrier a person could stand behind. It cost almost nothing. A candle. It rose, and it held, and it did not want anything from me at all.
I nearly cried, honestly. After Blackfen, after the fire that wanted the whole world to kneel, a power that just quietly shielded felt like being handed back a piece of myself.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Vera watched me raise and lower the Shroud a few times, arms crossed, that unreadable look on her face. Then she said the thing she always said — the true thing, the hard thing, the reason I trusted her over anyone.
"Don't celebrate too long," she said. But she said it gently. "Rank D's a real climb. It's also a real problem." She nodded at me, at all of me. "Your aura's louder now. It'll reach further, cow bigger beasts, leak harder under pressure. Which means you're easier to feel. Easier to find. Every rank you climb to save the world—" she tipped her head toward the south, toward the boards papered with my face, toward a man named Harrow who didn't ask questions "—makes you a brighter target for the people who want you dead. And every drop of power you pour to hold the wards—" she glanced at the ring, at Yrsa "—pulls you closer to being the thing they're right to be afraid of."
She let that sit. Nobody argued, because nobody could. That was the whole shape of it, laid bare: a boy racing a doomsday clock, who had to get stronger to win, where getting stronger made him easier to kill and more likely to become the disaster — every single axis of progress carrying its own knife.
And then Vera did something she almost never did. She smiled — a real one, tired and warm and entirely without an angle in it.
"Which is why it's a good thing," she said, "that you've got three people bound to you who happen to be very, very good at the parts you can't do alone." She put a hand on my shoulder. "You hold back on the aura. We'll hold off the world. That's the deal. That's every day, from here on."
Bruno put a hand on my other shoulder. Lila leaned her head against my arm. Yrsa's wolf-thing pressed its huge grey side to my legs, and Yrsa herself gave a single gruff nod that meant more from her than a speech would from anyone else.
Above us, through the black branches, the two moons hung close — closer than Ashlow, closer than last season, that gold coin and that pale ghost sliding a hair nearer every year toward the night the world would need me to be exactly strong enough, and not one drop stronger.
There was a clock in the sky. There were hunters on the roads. There were a hundred and seven wards still to hold, and a fire in me that wanted the world on its knees.
But I was Rank D. I was still myself. And I was not, it turned out, doing any of it alone.
"Okay," I said, and for once it didn't come out as great, great, great. It came out steadier than that. "Okay. Let's go hold the line."
[Rank D. New quests unlocked.][Saga clock: the moons continue to close.]