Chapter 599: The Reason Behind Survival
The water in the puddle evaporated instantly, and the crater grew larger from the Ascenders’ strikes.
Ace and Klein were gone.
Samuel’s face contorted sharply.
The composure he had barely been holding onto through the loss of his leg and arm finally broke.
"COWARD!"
His shout rang across the arena furiously, filled with venom.
Tom, Sierra, and Farid looked at him. Each of them held their own thoughts in silence. None of them said anything, but the outcome of the battle had already been decided.
At the same instant, three separate devices chimed at their belts.
Each of them checked their communication channels.
The same voice note played into each of their ears.
"Attack has ceased across all zones. Dark organization forces have been eliminated or have retreated. Ground engagements are winding down across the city. Casualty reports incoming."
They looked at each other.
The fight was over.
"Search for him!" Samuel shouted.
He kicked the floor off his remaining leg, propelling himself upward. He rose into the smoke-choked air above the arena.
His spiritual consciousness spread outward across the entire region, sweeping through every region, scanning for Klein and Ace’s mana signatures that he was well familiar with by now.
"He must be around here! Klein’s teleportation can’t cover more than a few kilometers at a time! They must have surfaced somewhere close! Search every water source! Every canal! Every reservoir! Find them!"
The command echoed across the ruined arena and out into the surrounding zones.
Tom, Farid, and Sierra didn’t move.
None of them raised their weapons. None of them activated their own senses. None of them followed Samuel’s commanding presence into the sky.
They were too tired.
Every one of them had been fighting continuously against an Ascender opponent. Their mana reserves were nearly bottomed out. Their bodies had been stretched past their normal limits.
They were also experienced Ascenders. All three of them knew, without needing to discuss it, that the search was pointless.
If the dark organization had wanted to escape, they had escaped. Klein’s water teleportation had range, and their bones had provided the power to extend that range further. Whatever body of water they had emerged from, they had likely already moved through several more since then, chaining teleportations across the city’s water infrastructure until they were far outside any practical search radius.
The organization’s escape planning had almost certainly included multiple contingencies.
Safehouses. Chains of misdirection. They had been building this operation for months, possibly years. He wouldn’t have executed a plan of this scale without an exit strategy that could survive every failure mode.
Chasing them now would only cause further destruction across the city.
More collapsed buildings and disturbed residential zones. More civilian casualties from their strikes that would inevitably destroy whatever they touched.
Tom exhaled slowly. His golden fire dimmed and finally extinguished across his gloves.
Sierra’s bow relaxed.
Farid stored his staff in his storage ring.
The three of them ignored Samuel entirely as he continued his frantic search through the sky above them.
Tom’s voice was meant only for the two Ascenders standing beside him.
"Let him look."
Sierra glanced sideways at him.
"He won’t find them."
"I know. Let him."
Farid nodded once.
The three of them stood in the ruined arena, breathing slowly, watching the smoke drift across the sky above them. The battle was truly over. Whatever the day had cost them, and it had cost them a great deal, the immediate danger had passed.
They could rest now. At least for a moment.
Sierra’s gaze drifted across the ruined crater to two specific corpses.
Baaron and Ian.
Both bodies had wilted during Ace’s ascension, their flesh withering to something that looked less like recent death and more like corpses recovered from decades-old graves. The men who had walked into this fight as Ascenders now lay in the rubble as dried, papery husks, their armor collapsed inward around their shrunken frames.
Klein hadn’t taken them.
He hadn’t bothered to recover their bodies. He hadn’t given them the basic respect of an escort out. He had left them exactly where they had fallen, treating them like the dead dogs their organization had apparently always considered them.
Perhaps he hadn’t had the mana or the time to spare. Perhaps his reserves had been too focused on his own escape to divert energy to a corpse retrieval. But whatever the reason, the outcome was the same. The Ascenders who had spent years serving the organization had been discarded the moment their usefulness had ended.
Sierra had a long, bloody history with both of them.
She had fought Baaron across three different engagements over the past forty years. She had personally captured Ian’s twin brother during the Silverpine operation. She had known these two men, in the professional sense of knowing enemies. She had studied their skill, their tendencies, their fighting styles.
Now they lay in the dirt.
’I wonder. Would that have been me if Tom hadn’t saved me?’
Klein’s ambush had been near-perfect. His lance had been perfectly aimed. Her escape measure had already been spent. If Tom hadn’t dropped from the sky at the exact right moment, she would be lying in the crater herself right now, drained by one of the bones she had in her storage ring.
Her corpse discarded in the battlefield.
She turned back toward Tom.
Her voice came out softer than it usually did, "Thanks for earlier. I’ll treat you to dinner after this mess is cleaned up."
Tom grinned, "If you want to thank someone, thank my little boy. He was the one who saved you. I was just the delivery vehicle."
He paused, tilting his head.
"That said, I’m not going to say no to a free dinner from you. I’ve earned at least that much today."
Sierra’s brows drew together.
"You mean... Moon?"
She had known Kael since he was a small child. She had watched him grow up during her visits to Tom’s estate over the years. As talented as Kael was, she couldn’t see how the young man could have been the reason she was still breathing. Whatever coordination had happened during the fight, Kael’s position hadn’t been near her engagement with Klein.
Besides, she had seen the way Tom’s eyes lingered on Moon throughout the day. She had noticed the warmth in Tom’s tone whenever the boy’s name came up.
The "little boy" Tom was referring to wasn’t Kael.