Chapter 57: Worthier Prey
Chapter 57: Worthier Prey
I opened my mouth to explain the class and she was already looking past me at the clearing, so I gave that up permanently and told her about the Panther.
"Seventeen," she said. "Perhaps eighteen." Her mouth did something unimpressed. "I have stepped over larger."
"Not with this body. You’re at thirteen. It’s at seventeen — faster than you, stronger than you, and it can shut off its own sound and scent and presence while it moves. It wiped out or scattered an eight-person hunting party in daylight two days ago. At least two were dragged away, none returned, and they left only seven spent cases behind."
The lightning across her shoulders brightened perceptibly.
She walked to the edge of the hazel and looked at the clearing — the buried trigger arc, the nets, the chained carcass, the dark lanterns, the platforms.
"Whose plan?"
"Theirs. I approved it."
"It is intelligent." She said it like a diagnosis. "It is also cowardly, and it will be dull. Bring me to the boundary and I will find the animal myself. It suppresses itself; very well. It cannot suppress a hole in its chest."
"No."
"No?"
Do not tell her she can’t. Whatever you do, do not tell her she can’t.
"Forty people spent all day on that. If you go into the trees and it comes round behind them, some of them die and it still gets away." I pointed at the chained carcass in its black circle. "So here’s the trade. It comes to that. The lights come on. And the moment they do, you get the first close engagement — alone, before a single rifleman fires. Nobody in front of you and nobody beside you."
She looked at me for a long moment with those slit gold eyes, and I discovered that I was sweating.
"You are offering me the most dangerous position in your battle."
"Yes."
"And you believe this pleases me."
"I think you’d have taken it whether I offered or not. I’d rather you took it on my timing."
Vaelora laughed — one short hard sound — and set the butt of the glaive down.
"Agreed."
[Manifestation Remaining: 00:24:53]
Bringing her out to the south-east barrier was the most conspicuous thing I have ever done. Forty people had spent three hours getting used to the dark, and then a woman in black-and-gold imperial plate walked out of the tree line with lightning running over her horns, and the entire clearing turned around.
Nobody said anything. That was somehow worse.
Vaelora did not wait to be introduced. "You. Second archer. You are standing where the beast will be between you and your own men." The archer moved, and only afterwards looked at Neve for permission he’d already stopped needing.
She rearranged four positions in ninety seconds. Every one was correct. Every one was obeyed before the person obeying had decided to.
Neve came past me and said, very quietly, "Your friend."
"Yes."
"Right." She kept walking.
At eighteen minutes to eleven the Panther came into the clearing.
I never saw it arrive. One second the eastern edge was empty and the next there was a shape at the chained carcass — enormous, long-bodied, black with faint charcoal banding, low to the ground. Not a leaf had moved.
It put its head down. Then it went absolutely still.
It’s felt something.
Disturbed earth, or a wire under the litter, or the sheer wrongness of a clearing holding forty breaths — whatever it was, the Panther exploded sideways across the trigger arc instead of through it.
One restraint caught. Steel snapped shut on its rear leg and the chain came tight and the whole animal spun, screaming — and it tore free before the net lines had finished releasing, and the net came down on nothing, and all that trap gave us was a shallow red stripe above its hock.
"LIGHTS!"
Six floodlights and eleven lanterns came on at once.
The first volley went into the space where the Panther had been. Two archers loosed at a shadow. Somebody’s rifle put a round through the chained carcass.
It was already moving — flat out, across the open ground, straight at the base of the eastern platform where four people stood lit up like a shop window with no time at all to bring their weapons round.
And Vaelora went over the barrier.
She met it in the air, three metres up, laughing, with every scale on her body throwing light and the lightning erupting down the length of the glaive.
They hit like two cars.
Her glaive went across its chest, the Panther’s forepaws came over her shoulder and down her armour with a noise I felt in my back teeth, and at the instant of contact she detonated whatever she’d been packing along that blade. The flash took my night vision. The sound arrived a half-beat behind, flat and enormous, and both of them came apart in mid-air and went down eight metres from each other in the wet grass.
The Panther rolled upright immediately. So did Vaelora — with blood coming through the join at her shoulder where the plate had opened, running black in the floodlight — and she was laughing.
She’s hurt. The realisation was strangely cold. An A-grade in a Level 13 body, and that thing can genuinely hurt her.
Which meant it could kill her. Permanently. Return carried a summon back in full condition; it did not erase wounds, exhaustion, poison, or death. She could go down in that clearing, leave forty people alone with a Nightfang Panther, and return to her own war as a corpse.
The riflemen were the immediate problem. Two were tracking her instead of the animal, because she was the thing that moved, and one had already fired into open grass.
"Stop shooting!" I got up on the barrier so they could see where the shout came from. "Nobody fires past her! East platform — the gap at the plantation corner. West — the ditch line behind you. Watch the exits, not the fight. If it breaks for the trees, put rounds in the ground in front of it and keep it in here!"
Halloran repeated it in a voice that had spent thirty years telling people where to stand. The firing stopped. Sixteen barrels swung outward.
After that, for four minutes, it was one woman and one animal.
She never chased it. She stood in the middle of that clearing and used the glaive to own five metres in every direction, and every time the Panther came round toward a platform she was already at the intercept — heavy blade sweeping flat, lightning running down the shaft into her arms so her swings arrived faster than a weapon that size has any right to. She didn’t throw bolts. Everything went into the blade and stayed there until steel touched flesh, and then it came out at once.
Three times she caught it. Three times the clearing went white and the Panther went cartwheeling back through the grass. Three times it came up and vanished — dropping into the shadow at the edge until every sense I have lost it, then coming back out of a direction nobody was covering. It had four wounds across its chest and its hind leg was leaving prints, and it was still faster than she was, and both of them knew it.
Every detonation cost her. The constant crawl of lightning over her armour had thinned to a flicker by the third.
The hunters were watching her with their mouths open.
They were watching me differently.
I caught it in glances — Neve looking over twice, the needling hunter from the trade shed staring at me from the west barrier for a good three seconds while a monster went past him. From where they stood I had produced a horned imperial warrior out of a tree line, argued with her, promised her a Level 17 predator, and was now standing on a barrier calmly assigning fields of fire while she fought it almost alone.
I did nothing to correct it. There wasn’t time, and there wasn’t a correction that didn’t make things worse.
What I actually did was lie down on the barrier with the rifle and stop trying to hit anything.
Eleven rounds. I could hold the sights for about twenty seconds. Firing into that would have achieved nothing except possibly killing Vaelora, so I used the scope for what it was actually good for, which was looking.
And on the third disengagement I saw it.
Before the Panther broke away — before it dropped its presence and went into the dark — it twisted. Left shoulder dipping, weight rolling onto the right hind, head coming round to the right. Every single time. It had done it three times and I’d watched the third one properly, and I understood that this was how the trick worked: it had to load itself before it could disappear, and the load had a shape.
The fourth time it came out of the shadow was at the northern edge, and Vaelora turned it with a sweep that missed by a hand’s width, and I saw the left shoulder start to dip.
I was already tracking the space to the right of its head.
The shot had to go through a gap of maybe a metre and a half between the Panther’s neck and Vaelora’s hip, at seventy metres, from a man with Poor Coordination written into his bones.
Twenty seconds. You don’t need twenty. You need one.
I fired.
The round went into its right foreleg, high, at the shoulder joint, and the leg simply stopped being a leg. Mid-twist, mid-load, with all its weight coming onto that side — it went down face-first into the grass with its head thrown back and its throat wide open.
Vaelora did not need to be told.
She crossed the distance in one enormous stride and drove the glaive down into the exposed line under its jaw, and pushed it in to the crossbar, and let go of everything she had left.
The clearing turned white.
When I could see again, the Nightfang Panther was not moving, and there was a woman with a hole in her shoulder plate standing over it with steam coming off her armour.
[Outside participants detected.]
[Experience distributed by contribution.]
[Level increased.]
[Adrian Vale has reached Level 14.]
[Active summon synchronisation complete.]
[Manifested Level: 13 → 14]
[Attribute and energy ceilings increased.]
[Existing injuries unchanged.]
[New energy capacity: Unfilled.]
[Duration added: 10% of A-grade Level 1 duration.]
The change went through both of us. Warmth spread beneath my skin. Vaelora’s permitted ceiling rose, but it did not restore the energy she had spent or close the wound beneath her shoulder plate. The failing lightning over her armour gave one brief, unsettled pulse as its channels widened, then thinned again on the same depleted reserves. She glanced down at her hand, flexed it once, and then looked at the dead Panther as if offended that it had not survived long enough for her to test the improvement.
I had reached Level 14. The Blind Call durations would shift with it, and every future summon would arrive under a slightly higher ceiling.
None of that was safe to examine while forty armed people were staring at the woman I had produced from behind a hedge.