Chapter 115: Saving Leon
Ren looked at the figure that was in front of him, Leon, now taken over by the spider.
"I really expected you to be the hardest for them to take over," Ren said. He scratched the back of his head as he spoke.
"How do I go about this now? I don’t want to kill you. Tch, I’ll have to force the spider out of you."
He stretched a bit, and then his eyes turned serious.
"Come."
Leon charged in, his sword at his side as he crossed the distance. He slashed upwards in a diagonal flow. Ren leaned back and dodged the blade. He watched it go past and then dashed in with a Flash Step. He kneed Leon in the gut and threw him back.
Ren dropped the spider in his hands and pulled his sword. He pointed it forward and then vanished. He crossed the distance faster than Leon could react.
Leon’s eyes followed the attack. He knew that his blade was not going to move fast enough to block it. A spider leg ripped out of his back and blocked the attack. Sparks flew as Leon was hurled back.
"You are coming out. Good."
He charged in, going with a slash aimed at Leon’s chest. Leon reacted by trying to block it with the spider leg. Ren smiled when he saw that. He angled the blade properly and cut through the leg in one move.
Screeech!
Leon moved back to recover. The pain caused his face to twist, the spider features coming out and then vanishing again.
Ren pointed his sword at him.
"Come out, spider, and let me cut you down fast."
Leon gritted his teeth and rushed in. He leaped into the air and swung down. Ren stepped to the side and evaded the attack cleanly, then proceeded to kick Leon right in the gut.
Leon’s eyes shifted.
Something moved behind them, the spider’s calculation bleeding through for just a moment before Leon’s face reasserted itself, and then all eight remaining legs tore out of his back simultaneously.
The sound of it was wrong.
Leon launched forward, all eight legs moving at once, each one striking from a different angle in rapid sequence, high and low and sideways, covering every line of attack and defense at the same time with the particular efficiency of something that had eight options where everything else had two.
Ren moved.
He read the first leg and stepped inside it, letting it pass. The second came from the left and he ducked, the third from above and he was already gone, slipping between the fourth and fifth with his body turned sideways, his eyes never leaving Leon’s face through all of it, watching the man behind the spider, tracking both simultaneously.
Clean. Unhurried. Like walking through rain and staying dry.
Then he drew the Soul Eater.
The first slash came diagonally, low to high, and the leg that met it came apart cleanly. The second slash reversed the angle and took the next one at the joint. He moved through the remaining six in a continuous motion, the blade finding each leg before it could redirect, each cut clean and complete, the legs dropping one after another until the last one fell, and the only sound in the space was Leon’s voice, twisted into something that wasn’t his.
Screeech.
Leon’s body buckled.
The pain moved through him visibly, his features shifting, the spider bleeding through and then retreating and then bleeding through again, the control slipping with every leg that lay on the ground around him. His knees hit the floor. His hands followed. And then the control broke entirely.
The transformation was not gradual.
Leon’s body expanded outward, the spider taking its full form, massive and low to the ground, eight legs replacing the eight that Ren had just cut, its abdomen thick and dark, its eyes multiplying across its head in two rows of black. Leon himself was visible at the center of it, half-submerged, his face slack and his eyes gone somewhere Ren couldn’t reach from the outside.
Ren looked at it.
"Now I can take you down," he said, and charged.
The spider threw everything at him, all eight legs driving forward simultaneously, its body low and fast, the full weight of it committed to ending the exchange in a single collision.
Ren went through it.
Not around, not under, through, his body finding the gaps between the legs with the same ease he had moved through them before, and when he cleared the final leg, he was already past the spider’s reach, and the Soul Eater was already moving.
The cut was clean.
The head came off in one motion, and the body that followed it down was not the massive spider but something reduced, the form collapsing as the life left it, and when the dust of it settled, Leon lay on the ground at the center of it, small and pale and barely breathing, his chest moving in shallow pulls that said alive but not much else.
Ren stood over him for a moment.
Then he sheathed the Soul Eater.
[.....]
Back in Raventown, the streets were wrong.
Not empty, not burning, just wrong in the particular way that a place went wrong when the people in it were still present but something else was using them. Movement where movement should not have been, stillness where it should not have been, the town running on a logic that was not its own.
Lia walked through it with her sword in her hand.
Every step she took was measured, her eyes moving across the street ahead of her in a steady sweep, reading each figure she passed, assessing. The sword stayed low at her side, ready without announcing itself.
A figure turned the corner ahead of her.
Infected. She read it immediately, the way it moved, the way its eyes caught the light wrong, the way it was already orienting toward her before she had fully come into its line of sight.
She stepped in.
The slash was short and precise, green flame riding the arc of the blade as it moved, and the arc that left the sword covered the distance between them and ripped through the infected in a single clean line. The green flame caught what remained and burned it, and the wind that moved through the street lifted the dust of it and carried it away before it reached the ground.
She watched it go.
"I don’t know how to save the ones that have already been taken over," she said quietly, to no one in particular, to the empty street around her.
She looked up at the town stretching ahead of her, at the figures moving wrong in the distance.
"But I’ll make sure I stop them from killing the rest."
She walked forward.