Chapter 44: The Last Fifteen Minutes
Chapter 44: The Last Fifteen Minutes
I ran.
Not straight down the slope. Open grass was where long legs won, and my only advantage was that I could enter spaces the Ash Ogre could not.
I cut sideways through the treeline toward the ruins.
Trees did not stop it. The ogre came through them the way a man might cross tall grass, each stride landing beneath a continuous roar of breaking trunks. Every few steps, it swung the club sideways and erased thirty metres of woodland.
It was fast. Something that large should have been slow and inevitable, the kind of threat you could keep ahead of if you started early enough. Instead, every stride consumed eight of mine. The only reason it did not catch me during the first minute was that it kept smashing obstacles rather than going around them.
The geometry changed slightly in my favour when I reached the ruins.
Narrow and broken. It wants a straight line. Do not give it one.
I entered an alley between brick terraces.
The club struck a roof behind me, and I stopped hearing properly.
Pressure arrived before the debris. A strike that large shoved the air ahead of it, and the air hit like a hand. I slammed shoulder-first into the opposite wall. Something the size of a fist struck my pack hard enough to fold me forward. Brick followed, and I ran through the rain with both arms over my head.
Exits. Check them.
Three choices waited at the alley’s end. Left into a courtyard. Straight onto a wide road. Right through a collapsed shopfront.
The road was death: long, clear, and perfect for the ogre. I could not see the courtyard’s far side, which meant it might be a box, and I had painful memories involving places that might be boxes.
I went right.
The shop opened into a service lane four feet wide. The ogre could not follow, so it went over. It came down on the terrace to my left, and the whole row buckled. The wall beside me leaned inward and began shedding bricks.
I sprinted the last twenty metres with a building collapsing at my shoulder.
[Blind Call Recovery Remaining: approximately 00:11:20]
Eleven minutes is nothing. Eleven minutes is a cup of tea. You have wasted eleven minutes doing absolutely nothing a thousand times.
I forced air in through my nose and out slowly. After three breaths, my hands came back under control and the darkness at the edges of my vision receded.
Then the club came through a chimney stack forty metres away, and terror took the control back.
I began again.
That happened over and over. The breathing worked. Fear ate it. Each time I reclaimed it, I bought one clear decision.
Feline Grace bought the rest.
It never made me fast. It stopped me from falling.
I came off a collapsed wall onto loose brick. My feet slipped, found ground again, and carried me onward before I had consciously corrected them. I crossed a floor with half its joists missing and shifted my weight away from a board the instant it gave. I went through a first-storey window because the stairs were gone and landed four metres below on rubble.
The landing was bad.
I got up.
That was the entire miracle. It should have cost me an ankle. Instead, it removed skin from both palms and allowed me to keep moving.
Somewhere in the next block, I lost the pack. Masonry struck across my back and snapped one strap. The bag swung around, tangled at my elbow, and pulled me sideways.
For two steps, I kept hold of it.
Food. Blanket. Cookware. Everything I had carried out of the house.
Leave it. Do not die for things.
I let go.
The loss made me faster. I hated that.
[Blind Call Recovery Remaining: approximately 00:04:05]
The final four minutes survived in disconnected pieces.
A factory floor with no roof. The ogre came through the long wall, and the structure folded behind me. I climbed through waist-deep rubble at the far end with blood running into one eye and my left arm refusing half the instructions I gave it.
I checked the timer three times in ninety seconds. It never moved faster because it was a counter, and counters do not become compassionate when frightened people stare at them.
I reached a taller shell—four floors, much of the frame intact, a courtyard behind it—and made the last bad decision of the chase.
I went through instead of around.
The ogre struck the building from outside.
Its club swept across the ground floor and missed me.
The distinction mattered.
The roots hit the concrete apron eight metres to my right. The floor came up. Pressure crossed the room and went through me like a wave made of brick.
I did not remember flying. I remembered the wall.
It was cracked already, which was probably why I lived. The surface gave when I struck instead of stopping me all at once. Something in my chest failed with several sharp crunches that I felt more clearly than I heard.
I fell onto my side.
When I tried to rise, my body declined the request.
Blood filled my mouth. I spat, and more replaced it. My vision became a red-grey smear with one bright edge. Breathing produced a grinding sensation beneath my shoulder blade.
Above me, daylight disappeared.
The Ash Ogre stood over the gap in the wall and raised its club.
[Blind Call natural recovery complete.]
[Blind Call Charges: 1/1]
I could not focus on the window. I reached for the command through intent alone, the way a hand searches for a familiar switch in darkness.
Now. Now. Please. Now.
[Blind Call activated.]
[Eligible Grade: SS.]
[Summon selected.]
[Physical manifestation initiated.]
The air changed.
I felt the arrival before I saw it—a cold, clean pressure spreading through the ruined room, unrelated to the ogre’s weight.
My first coherent emotion was not relief.
It was guilt.
I pulled somebody out of her life and put her beneath a club. She is going to die here with me, and she was never even asked.
Through the blood blurring my eyes, I caught pieces of her. White robes patterned in gold, crossed close over the full chest and long, mature lines of a tall woman’s body before falling in immaculate folds. The tailored layers narrowed at her waist, followed the controlled turn of her hips, and opened just enough in motion to suggest long legs beneath them. Loose sleeves hid everything except one pale, fine-boned hand. White hair fell beyond her waist. Golden eyes watched the descending club from a face of cold, remote beauty that made attraction feel dangerously similar to staring at a blade. A sheathed sword rested against one hip, humming so faintly that I felt the vibration more than heard it.
The ogre roared.
Its club fell, dragging enough air to drown the room in sound.
Beneath it, the woman’s voice remained quiet and cold enough to cut.
"Begone, pest."
She did not draw her sword.
She raised one hand and moved her index finger.
For an instant, something impossibly sharp occupied the space before her. It was not strength rolling off her body. Her manifested flesh remained confined to my Level 9 ceiling. What crossed the room was intent—condensed sword understanding, placed with a precision the ogre had no method of resisting.
A pale line passed through the descending club.
Then through the ogre.
The tree split first. The field boss remained upright for one confused heartbeat before its body separated cleanly through the middle.
Both halves fell on opposite sides of the building. Their impact lifted me from the floor and dropped me again.
The woman had not moved from where she appeared.
No impossible speed. No overwhelming physical blow. One finger had merely given direction to a sword intent refined far beyond anything the crude creature could comprehend.
[Over-Level Technique Detected.]
[Manifestation Instability: 0% → 18%.]
[Manifestation Remaining: 11:52 → 09:44.]
[Energy strain detected.]
The output had been a diminished shadow of whatever she could do at home. It was still more than the ogre could survive. One pale fingertip trembled once before becoming perfectly still again.
[Class-Assisted Kill Confirmed.]
[Experience transferred.]
[Level increased.]
[Adrian Vale has reached Level 10.]
[Experience toward Level 11: approximately 80%.]
[Active summon synchronisation complete.]
[Manifested Level: 9 → 10]
[Attribute and energy ceilings increased.]
[Existing injuries unchanged.]
[New energy capacity: Unfilled.]
[Duration added: 10% of SS-grade Level 1 duration.]
[Remaining timer capped by the Level 10 normal maximum.]
The last thing I saw was the woman in white standing over my broken body, golden eyes fixed on my face.
Then the room went black.