Chapter 25: A Knight’s Heart
Chapter 25: A Knight’s Heart
I couldn’t see the bullets.
The muzzle flashed white over and over, far faster than flashes were supposed to come. The gunfire sounded like something enormous tearing, and Aria stood in the middle of it—upright, bleeding from the shoulder, two metres from the man firing, with nowhere left to go.
That was all there was to see. Her armour was ruined. She was already shot. She had no room and no speed and I knew, in the way you know things a half second before they happen, that she was about to be hit again and again and again.
Then she stopped moving.
Not flinched. Not braced. Stopped — planted, both feet, sword coming up into a grip I hadn’t seen her use yet, and her head lifted like she was listening to something a long way off.
I had no idea what she heard. I only knew what I saw: a woman with a hole in her shoulder standing in front of an automatic weapon and smiling.
Her eyes lit.
Not a metaphor. The thin red rings I’d noticed in the pump room opened all the way, and light came out of them — real light, enough to throw a colour onto her cheekbones — and her whole face changed into something I can only describe as settled, as though a question she’d been carrying for years had finally closed.
"I understand now, Commander."
She said it quietly. There was nobody there to say it to.
Then the fire around her sword detonated inward.
Everything that had been running loose along the blade condensed at once. It went from a red shimmer to a solid bar of light in the space of a breath, so bright that the lamp above the gate stopped mattering and every surface in that yard turned the colour of a furnace mouth. It was like watching a beacon catch on a hilltop in the dark.
She didn’t charge. She didn’t dodge.
She slashed from exactly where she stood.
The fire came off the blade and kept going — a crescent of it, condensed and howling, sweeping out across the concrete at chest height.
It went through the burst first. I saw the storm die: a string of small bright disintegrations strung across the air between them, there and gone, like sparks coming off a grinder.
It didn’t stop there.
It went through the third guard, and it cut and burned in the same motion, and he had no time whatsoever to understand what had happened to him.
It didn’t stop there either.
It hit the gate.
The protection across the entrance flashed white, held for a fraction of a second, and tore apart. The steel gate went orange behind it, sagged, then blasted outward into the dark with a noise I felt in my teeth.
The crescent guttered somewhere out past the wall and died.
Aria went down on one knee.
It had cost her. Anyone could see it had cost her — her sword arm dropped, the blade grounded, and she stayed like that for a second and a half with her head down, breathing in a way that sounded expensive. That hadn’t been something she’d been holding in reserve out of politeness. That had been everything she had left, spent at once, through a body that wasn’t built to carry it.
[Over-Level Technique Detected.]
[Manifestation Instability: 0% → 24%.]
[Manifestation Remaining: 13:02 → 11:26.]
[Physical and energy strain detected.]
[Rest and avoidance of further over-level exertion may gradually reduce Instability.]
[Manifestation time already lost cannot be restored.]
[Instability Threshold: 100% — Immediate forced return.]
The red fire vanished completely. Her arm shook once before she forced it still. The technique had reproduced something her synchronized body could not properly sustain, and the missing time was not coming back.
I stood in the middle of the yard with a kitchen knife in my hand and completely forgot how to move.
Ninety seconds earlier I had been frightened of her. I’d watched her open two men’s throats and felt something in my chest go cold about it.
And now she was on one knee in a ruined gateway with a hole through her shoulder and her back perfectly straight, and I could not make myself feel anything at all except that she was, without any competition whatsoever, the most magnificent thing I had ever seen.
I grew up on people who were manufactured to be admired. Idols with three-person styling teams. Streamers with sponsor decks and lighting rigs. Every one of them, in that moment, felt like a drawing of a person.
Oh. I’m a fan. That’s what this is. I’m this woman’s fan.
She had killed three men in under a minute, and it did not make the slightest difference to the conclusion.
Aria stood, turned, crossed the distance between us in about a second, and grabbed me.
Her eyes went from my face to the kitchen knife in my hand, then past me to the open refuse container. She understood exactly why I was no longer inside it.
[Relationship parameters updated.]
Desire: 70 → 73
Trust: 20 → 28
Resonance: 3% → 4%
"Why are you standing there dazed? Stay like that and you’ll be full of holes soon."
She hauled me onto her back without breaking stride.
Behind us, Eastbridge woke up.
The sirens came first — three of them, out of phase, filling the whole settlement. Then the floodlights on the corner towers swung round one after another and pinned the wrecked gate in white. Doors banged. Voices started shouting across the camp, and under the shouting, boots, a lot of them, moving in our direction.
"Wait." I got a hand on her pauldron. "One second. One second."
She stopped, which was more trust than I’d earned.
I slid down and ran at the nearest body. The first guard’s rifle was completely intact — I’d watched the second come apart, and the third had gone into the dark with the man carrying it. I picked it up by the strap, and it was heavier than I expected in a way that felt significant. Then I tore the pouches off his belt: two spare magazines, then a third, then whatever else came loose. I stuffed boxed rounds into my waistband and the front of my shirt until the weight dragged, slung the rifle across my back beside the wrapped kitchen knife, and turned round.
I had no idea how to fire it. None. I could not have told you which part was the safety, and I wasn’t going to find out in the next five minutes.
What I knew was that it killed at forty metres, that ammunition did not grow on trees, and that in three days inside that wall nobody had ever once let me stand near one.
Aria was watching me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her yet.
"I was going to take that myself," she said.
"Then we’ll argue about it later."
"Good." Brief, real approval. "Up."
She picked me up and ran.
We went through the gap where the gate had been — the ruined edges still glowing dull orange, the heat of it washing over my face — and out into the broken ground beyond the wall, and Eastbridge came apart behind us into light and noise.
She used cover the way other people use a corridor. Pipe stack. Collapsed brick. The long shadow of a burnt-out transformer housing. Never straight, never more than eight or ten seconds in the open, always moving again before the sweeping light arrived where we’d been.
She was failing, though.
I could feel it through her back. The hitch in her stride had become a limp, the strapping over her hip had gone warm and wet against my leg, and every time she pushed off the left side her breath came out through her teeth. Her shoulder was bleeding down her arm and into her gauntlet. The forearm holding me under the knee had started to tremble.
I wasn’t much better. Somewhere around the transformer housing my vision began going grey at the corners, and keeping my forearms locked across her collarbone became the largest task in the world. Twice I felt myself start to slide and clawed my way back up.
"Adrian Vale."
"Still here."
"Stay there."
Behind us the searchlights fanned out from the broken gate and began pushing into the ruins in long white fingers. An engine started somewhere. A whistle went up, and a second whistle answered it further north, which meant somebody had already worked out which way we’d gone.
[Manifestation Remaining: 11:26]
[Dimensional Registry update.]
[Aria’s signature remains below preservation threshold.]
[Current Resonance: 4%]
[Required Resonance for temporary signature preservation: 5%]
[No Summon Slot required.]
One more percent. Eleven minutes to earn it.
Aria dropped into a gully behind a fallen section of overpass, went flat, and waited while a beam crawled across the rubble two metres above our heads.
Then she was up again, and running, and the dark of the ruins closed over us while the sirens spread out behind.