Chapter 650 650: Be A Savage!
The cleanup started before anyone formally said it should.
That was the thing about people who had just survived something together. Nobody needed to announce that the bodies needed moving or that the fires needed fully dousing or that the soldiers Arthur had left behind, the ones breathing and conscious and sitting against walls with their hands bound by whatever rope the villagers had produced, needed to be consolidated somewhere defensible. It just happened, the way things happened when a group of people had been through enough together that they had stopped waiting for instruction and started reading the situation themselves.
Three of Werner's reds had the prisoner situation handled within twenty minutes. Harrowfield's men had done most of the capturing themselves, which said something about what a village looked like when it had been terrorized for weeks and had finally found an outlet for the feeling. The prisoners were not mistreated. They were simply moved to the granary with the brisk efficiency of people who had decided that efficiency was the most dignified response available to everyone involved.
Noah was moving timber.
The harbor's east dock had taken damage from one of the aerial blasts early in the fight, a section of planking collapsed into the water, the support beams underneath sheared. The fishermen wanted it cleared before the tide came in and made the problem worse, and Noah was the most useful person for moving heavy wet timber quickly, so he moved heavy wet timber.
He had been doing this for forty minutes when Sera appeared beside him, looked at the stack he had built, looked at him, and said, "You're not tired."
"I'm a little tired," Noah said.
She looked at the stack again. "You moved all of this since the fight ended."
"I had help."
She glanced at the two village men who had been theoretically helping and who were currently sitting on an upturned boat catching their breath.
"Right," she said, and left.
Pip was helping Mistress Edra's staff carry food out to the square, where a rough communal meal had assembled itself from whatever the Saltback's kitchen had available and whatever the village families had brought out of their own stores. The gesture had started with Mistress Edra and then spread the way good gestures spread, each person who saw it deciding they could also contribute something, until there were three long tables covered in bread and soup and dried fish and two enormous pots of something that smelled like it had been simmering since morning.
The recruits ate. The village men ate. Three of the captured soldiers ate too, because someone had decided that feeding prisoners was the right thing to do and nobody had argued strongly enough against it.
Nami was sitting on the harbor wall with a bowl of soup watching Shade at the far end of the dock. The dragon had not moved from its position, which had stopped alarming people and had started becoming a feature of the harbor, like an unusual piece of furniture that everyone had agreed to accept.
A small girl had gotten within ten feet of it.
Her mother was twenty feet behind her, hovering at the edge of her own courage, and Shade had looked at the child with those violet-rimmed eyes and then looked away, which the child had correctly interpreted as permission to take another two steps.
Nami watched this and ate her soup.
---
Valen found Noah at the timber stack as the morning wore toward midday, the sun overhead doing nothing particularly dramatic, just existing at full height the way it did when it had no interest in atmosphere.
"Leave that," he said.
Noah set down the beam he was holding.
"Walk with me."
The recruits nearest to them noticed. Of course they did. Three of Werner's reds exchanged looks that said what they thought about instructors pulling the strongest student aside for private conversations, the looks carrying that particular sourness of people who had also fought hard and were not being asked to walk anywhere. A yellow recruit who had taken a dark chi strike to the shoulder and had it healed by Sera in twenty seconds flat watched Noah follow Valen toward the village's outer road with an expression that was trying very hard not to be what it was.
Cael noticed too, from where he was helping stack salvaged dock timber. He watched them go and said nothing and went back to work, which was its own kind of commentary.
They walked through the village's northern edge and out past the last buildings onto the road that climbed into the hills above Harrowfield. The sounds of the cleanup faded behind them, the voices and the work and the particular noise of a community putting itself back together after something had tried to take it apart. Up here it was just the wind off the hills and the late afternoon birds and the road under their feet.
Valen walked with his hands behind his back. His spear was not in his hands, which Noah noted, the weapon at his back instead, the golden glow completely absent from his frame. He looked like a man taking a walk. He looked relaxed in the way that very experienced fighters looked relaxed, which was to say the relaxation was genuine and did not mean what an untrained observer might think it meant.
He was quiet for a long stretch of road.
Noah let the quiet sit. He had learned early that people who wanted to say something but were taking their time about it usually had a reason for the time, and filling the silence on their behalf rarely produced anything useful.
"I grew up in the capital," Valen said finally. "Sheva. You know it?"
"By name," Noah said.
"It's big. Not beautiful, not the way people say cities are beautiful in stories. Just big. Loud. The kind of place where you can go hungry surrounded by more food than you've ever seen in your life because none of it belongs to you." He paused. "I was eight when my parents died. Fever season. It came through the lower districts every few years back then, and one year it came through our street, and when it was done I was the only person in our house still standing."
He said this without drama. The way people described things they had carried so long the weight had become ordinary.
"The order found me three years later," Valen continued. "Not because I sought them out. Because I broke a man's arm in a market dispute. He was a merchant, twice my size, trying to take back food I had technically stolen. I broke his arm and ran and an instructor named Petyr saw it happen from across the market and followed me for two days before he introduced himself."
Noah walked beside him and listened.
"Petyr said I had the hands for it. That was how he put it. Not that I was strong, not that I was fast, just that I had the hands. I didn't know what that meant for another year." Valen glanced at his own hands briefly. "The gate was the Ironwood Gate, three days northeast of the capital. Different gate from yours. Different chambers, different trials. The blessed item I came out with was the spear, and I had no idea what to do with it for the first six months except that it felt like it belonged in my hand in a way that nothing else had ever felt like it belonged anywhere."
The road had climbed enough that the harbor was visible below them, the morning light flat and grey across the water. The ships, what was left of them, sat at the bay's mouth where they had drifted after Shade was done with them.
"Petyr died in my third year," Valen said. "Dragon hunt in the southern ranges. He made a mistake that twenty years of experience should have prevented and a mistake in that work only happened once." He was quiet for a moment. "He was the closest thing to a father I had managed to find by that point, so that was twice. Two fathers, two different kinds of losing them."
Noah said nothing.
"I'm not telling you this for sympathy," Valen said, reading the silence correctly. "I'm telling you because all of it, the capital, the market, the gate, Petyr, twenty years of hunts after Petyr, all of it taught me one thing that I would trade every technique I know to keep."
He stopped walking.
Noah stopped beside him.
Valen looked at the harbor below them, at the smoke still rising from the water in thin columns where the ships had burned.
"Knowing what was real in front of me," he said. "Not what I wanted to see. Not what made sense given what I already believed. What was actually there."
He turned and looked at Noah.
And Noah saw a white line.
It appeared the way it always appeared in his own timeline, clean and direct, a thread of information his perception produced when something with genuine lethal capacity was about to use it. He had not seen a white line since arriving in this era. Had not expected to see one here, on a road above a fishing village, directed at his throat by a dragon knight instructor standing four feet away.
He leaned back.
Valen's roundhouse kick passed through the space Noah's neck had occupied half a second before, the air from it crossing Noah's face, and Valen landed from the kick in a clean stance and looked at him without surprise.
"Good," Valen said. His voice had not changed at all. Still the same measured tone from the walk. "I didn't expect anything less from you."
Noah straightened. His heart was doing something he was pretending it was not doing.
"That kick," Valen said, "was twenty percent." He rolled his shoulders once. "Twenty percent and you moved like you'd seen it before it started. I've thrown that kick at every recruit in your group at some point during training, Burt. Testing them, seeing how their instincts run. You're the first one to dodge it since I started teaching." He paused. "You're also the one who cracked the dragon scale board on the first day without using a technique. You're the one who walked out of the second floor of the gate with a warden's debris behind you. You're the one who ran at a wyvern in the harbor while twenty-eight other people were asleep or running the opposite direction."
He reached back and took the spear from his back.
The golden glow did not ease in gradually. It arrived at full intensity, the same way it had arrived when he had come off the roof during the battle, the energy in the weapon and the energy in Valen being the same thing expressed through two different surfaces.
"And today," Valen said, his voice finally losing the walking-in-the-hills quality and becoming something harder underneath, "you rode a dragon."
He moved.
The spear came around in a horizontal sweep that was not aimed to hit. It was aimed to move, to displace air, and the displacement it created was not subtle. The golden energy running through the shaft released as it cut across the road and the arc it left behind it carved a line through the dirt surface and kept going, the released energy traveling outward through the grass at the road's edge and flattening everything it touched in a ten-foot radius.
Noah went backward and over the road's low boundary wall and into the hillside grass, his feet finding the slope, and Valen was already through the wall behind him.
The spear was spinning now. Not a display, not a threat posture. Valen had been using this weapon for twenty years and the spinning was how he generated the rotational energy that made his strikes carry forces they had no right carrying from a human body. The golden light trailing off the shaft as it spun turned the hillside into a pattern of shadows and light that moved faster than comfortable.
"I have seen many recruits come through gates and come out changed," Valen said, the spinning not slowing his voice at all. "Some of them come out harder. Some come out smaller. Some come out with ideas about themselves that the rest of training either confirms or corrects." He came forward. "In twenty years I have never seen one come out with techniques that were not in any curriculum I have ever taught."
The spear came around in a strike that Noah ducked under, the wind from it crossing the back of his neck hot with released energy, and the tree behind him lost two branches from the edge of the arc without the weapon touching them.
CRACK.
"The dark chi," Valen said, coming forward again without pause, the spear in continuous motion. "The red and the white running together. In the gate. Against Gorrauth. I heard about it, Burt. A few people came forward and have claimed they saw it through the barrier the same as every other recruit saw it and unlike every other recruit I knew what they were talking about."
Another strike, low this time, aimed at the legs, and Noah jumped it and the energy discharge from the shaft hit the hillside where he had been standing and the grass there went flat in a circle three feet across.
"That is King Arthur's technique," Valen said, and his voice had climbed now, the measured tone fully gone, something genuine underneath it that had been waiting for this conversation for weeks. "That is the forbidden working. The technique that the order has spent twenty years telling every recruit belongs to the enemy. That comes from allegiance to something we fight against."
He came at Noah faster. The afterimages started then, not a trick of the light, an actual consequence of speed applied at a level that left the previous position still burning in the retina while the body had already moved to the next one. Valen at the left. Valen at the right. Valen directly ahead with the spear compressing for a thrust that had a golden energy behind it, the Vital Point Technique loaded into the weapon's point, and Noah felt the white line appear and moved and the thrust went past his ear and the tree behind him split down the center from the compressed energy releasing at the tip.
KROOOOM!!
The trunk fell sideways.
"WHO ARE YOU, BURT, SON OF ALDRIC!"
The shout came from somewhere genuine. Not anger exactly. Louder than anger, more complicated than anger, the voice of a man who had spent twenty years learning to read what was real in front of him and was looking at something he could not read and it was costing him something to not be able to read it.
The spear came again. And again. Each strike backed by that golden energy, each one carrying the VPT compression in the point, the technique that had been designed to put down dragons being applied to a space that Noah kept vacating by margins that were getting smaller.
'He's faster than I thought,' Noah's mind ran even as his body moved. 'He's been holding back this whole training period. The golden spear is not just a weapon, it's an amplifier. Every bit of energy he puts in comes out multiplied at the point of contact.'
A strike came down from above and Noah went sideways and the ground where the spear tip hit erupted, the compressed energy driving into the hillside and throwing a spray of earth that caught him across the shoulder.
'Should I hit back?'
The thought arrived clean and uncomfortable.
'If I hit back I confirm everything he suspects. If I show him what I can actually do he has his answer and his answer leads somewhere neither of us can come back from easily. But if I keep not hitting back—'
The spear came around in a combination, three strikes in sequence so fast they existed as a single extended event, and Noah moved through the gaps between them with decreasing room, the third one catching the edge of his sleeve and the energy discharge from it running up his arm and making his hand go numb for three seconds.
'He's going to land one,' Noah thought. 'He's mapping where I move. Each exchange he learns something. That's what twenty years looks like. He doesn't need to be faster than me, he just needs to be patient enough to run the equation until it solves.'
Valen pulled back and stood twelve feet away breathing hard, the spear held in both hands, the golden glow running across every surface of it and throwing light across the flattened grass and the two fallen trees and the general destruction that a twenty-year veteran's twenty percent had produced in the last five minutes.
"You haven't hit me," Valen said. His voice was still working harder than usual, the exertion visible in his chest. "Not once. Every recruit I've ever pushed fights back. It's instinct, it's training, it does not matter, they fight back." He looked at Noah across the twelve feet between them. "You've been moving around me like you're waiting for something. Like you're hoping I'll stop."
He raised the spear.
"Use it," Valen said. The golden glow intensified, the light off it strong enough to throw shadows in the afternoon sun. "The technique. The forbidden working. If you're going to stand here in front of me and tell me you're just a boy from a village, then fight me like one. Be savage, Burt! Be ruthless!!" His jaw was set. "But if you're something else, then stop wasting both our time and show me what you are."
He came forward.
The combination that followed had no spaces in it. The spear was everywhere, the VPT compression building in the tip with each rotation, each strike sending visible waves of compressed air outward from the point that flattened the grass in expanding rings, and Noah was moving and moving and moving and the room was running out.
A strike came at his chest.
He saw the white line.
He saw three white lines.
'He's throwing a combination VPT. Three points, sequenced, each one targeted at a different vital junction. If the first one lands it disrupts my movement and the second one has a stationary target and the third one—'
Noah moved left and the first strike went past his shoulder and he moved right and the second went past his ribs and there was no room for the third one and he knew there was no room for the third one.
He felt the compression of it building in the spear tip a foot from his sternum.
**ROOOOAAARRR!!!**
The sound came from the trees behind Noah. Not a distant sound. Not a warning from far away. A sound that arrived at full volume, no buildup, no approach, just there and enormous and real in the way that standing next to a sound that size made everything else briefly irrelevant.
And then, a red fog came out of the treeline.
Low at first, rolling across the hillside grass the way it always rolled, red and warm, the temperature climbing with it. The fog reached Noah's feet and kept coming, spreading outward across the destroyed hillside, and from the trees behind Noah a pair of nostrils emerged, puffing out a hot breath that hit the back of his neck like opening an oven.
Valen had stopped.
The spear was still raised but the combination was gone, the moment dissolved, his eyes fixed on the point past Noah's shoulder where the treeline was producing something that the red fog and the heat and the scale of that roar had already announced before it was visible.
"A red death," Valen said.
His voice had gone quiet again. Not the walking-on-the-road quiet from earlier. A different kind. The quiet of a man who had spent twenty years hunting dragons and was standing ten feet from one that had not been invited.
He looked at the red death behind Noah.
He looked at Noah.