THE CHRONICLES OF DREKI-VESTR THE PALADIN REINCARNATION VERDALIA

Chapter 10: The Problem

The river stank of copper and rot.

Hallah stood at the treeline, Gold Rush resting on her shoulder, and watched the morning mist curl off the water like something trying to die. The woods were wrong here. Not the clean, managed forests of Sylvareth she’d read about in Academy texts—those were curated, polite, domesticated. This was old Verdantis wildwood, the kind that had grown unchecked during the Silence and never forgot the taste of iron. The trees were black oak and bloodpine, their bark scaled like armor, their roots drinking from soil that remembered when dragons were young.

”You’re scowling,” Lucan said.

”I’m assessing,” Hallah corrected, not turning around. ”There’s a difference.”

But he was right. She was scowling. The Guild posting had said the Titanoboa nested two miles upriver, near the bend where the current slowed and the mudflats began. That was an hour’s march from the city walls, far enough that the Royal Guards had peeled off at the treeline with visible relief, close enough that Hallah could still see the spires of Valeris catching the dawn light behind them.

Too close. S-rank threats didn’t nest this close to civilization. A-rank threats, yes. B-rank, certainly. But if this thing was truly A-rank, it should have been deeper in the wilds, not lounging in the mud like a bored crocodile waiting for breakfast.

”Rufus was right,” Lucan said, adjusting his glasses. He’d replaced the pair Aldric had smashed, these ones gold-rimmed and enchanted to resist fog. ”We’re under-leveled.”

”We’re fine,” Hallah said, finally looking at him.

He was twelve. She was twelve. They were children holding A-rank seals that should have belonged to twenty-year veterans, and the copper disks pinned to their cloaks felt suddenly very heavy, very cold, and very much like targets.

”We’re A-rank,” she continued, forcing her voice into the register Brant used when discussing forge-tolerances. ”I’m the sword, you’re the spell. We stick to the plan.”

”The plan,” Lucan repeated, ”assumes the posting is accurate.”

”Then we verify.”

Hallah turned back to the river, her hand finding the lump in her belt-pouch where Horgrin’s charm sat wrapped in waxed cloth. The Cluck Tar merchant had sworn it would cure any poison short of dragon venom. She’d grumbled about the expense—twenty silvers was a week’s worth of steel stock—but Lucan had insisted, and she’d taken it to shut him up.

Not that I’d use it on myself anyway, she thought. It’s for him. If he goes down, I use it on him. That’s the job.

”Stay behind the shield line,” she said, stepping into the treeline. ”If it’s armored like the posting says, I’ll need to get inside its guard. You wait for my signal.”

”And if there’s no signal?”

”Then I fucked up,” Hallah said, ”and you run.”

Lucan’s jaw tightened. She knew that look—the stubborn set that meant he was calculating seventeen different ways to disobey. But he didn’t argue. He was learning. The conditional A-rank meant Rufus trusted his power but not his judgment, and Lucan was desperately trying to prove the old rat wrong.

They moved through the woods in silence. Hallah took point, her shield—modified Kharzun heater, Sixfold engraving catching the dappled light—held high and ready. Gold Rush hung at her hip, the orichalcum core thrumming with a warmth that only she could feel, a father’s love forged into metal.

The mud was already changing under their boots. It sucked at each step, soft and greedy, and the air grew thicker the deeper they went, the copper smell settling on the tongue like a swallowed coin. Every breath tasted of the river now, of rot and old iron, and Hallah found herself breathing through her mouth just to keep the stink from sitting in her nose.

The signs started a quarter-mile in.

First, the birds stopped singing. Not the gradual fade of dusk, but the sudden, absolute silence of prey animals recognizing death. Then the smell—thick, sweet, like rotting flowers mixed with copper. Then the tracks: serpentine drag marks through the underbrush, scales the size of dinner plates crushing ferns and saplings alike.

”Big,” Lucan whispered.

”Big,” Hallah agreed.

Bigger than the posting suggested. The tracks were fresh, the crushed vegetation still weeping sap. The Titanoboa had passed through here within the hour, and it was moving toward the river, not away from it.

Hunting, Hallah thought. It’s hunting.

They found it at the mudflats.

The beast was coiled around a fallen log, its armored scales—black and iridescent, like oil on water—shifting in the morning light. It was massive. Twenty feet of muscle and plate, with a head the size of a carriage and eyes that glowed with a sickly, internal luminescence that had no business belonging to a natural creature. The corruption was visible even from fifty yards: dark veins pulsing beneath the scales, a faint tremor in the air around it like heat haze on winter ice.

The scales didn’t just shift, they moved, plates sliding over one another with a sound like wet leather creaking, each one catching the light for a heartbeat before going dark again. The luminescence in its eyes pulsed in time with the veins, a slow, sick rhythm, and the tremor in the air made the morning mist curl away from the beast’s body as if even the fog didn’t want to touch it.

”That’s not A-rank,” Lucan breathed.

”No,” Hallah agreed, her hand tightening on Gold Rush’s grip. ”It’s not.”

The Titanoboa lifted its head. It didn’t turn toward them—there was no slow, dramatic pivot. One moment it was staring at the water, the next its gaze locked on Hallah with the immediacy of a predator that had known they were there all along.

Its mouth opened. Not to strike, but to speak.

”You’re the problem I’m looking for.”

The voice was wrong. It came from the snake’s throat, but it wasn’t the snake’s voice. It was layered, whispered, the sound of wind through a crypt, of pages turning in an empty library. It was the voice of something that had been waiting a very long time.

Hallah felt ice in her gut. Not fear—recognition. Zalvrek. The Hollow King. The sealed god was speaking through this creature, using it like a mouthpiece, peering out at the world through borrowed eyes.

Me, she realized. It’s looking for me. The Paladin.

”Run,” she said to Lucan.

”What—”

”Run!”

The Titanoboa struck.

It was faster than anything that large should have been. The head snapped forward, jaws unhinging to reveal fangs like daggers, and Hallah barely got her shield up in time. The impact drove her back ten feet, her boots plowing furrows in the mud, and the sound—crack—was the shield’s iron rim bending under the force.

The force traveled straight up her arms and into her shoulders, jarring her teeth together hard enough to click, and her breath left her in a single punched-out gasp. Mud sprayed up around her boots as they slipped, caught, and held, and for a heartbeat the whole world narrowed to the weight on her shield and the copper taste flooding her mouth. Then the head was already pulling back, the glowing eyes measuring her, weighing how she braced and how much she gave.

Not biting. Testing.

That was the cold part. It wasn’t trying to kill her with that strike, it was learning her — her guard, her weight, how she set her feet, how fast she recovered. A predator’s first pass, a question asked with twenty feet of armored muscle, and Hallah understood with perfect clarity that every answer she gave it would be used against her in the next pass.

Hallah snarled and lunged, Gold Rush coming free in a golden arc. The blade sang as it fell, orichalcum core blazing with holy light, and struck the beast’s neck where the scales thinned.

The arc felt right in her hands, the weight and balance she knew the way she knew her own heartbeat, and the holy light ran along the edge like sunrise along a blade. For the space of a breath she believed it would cut, believed the way she always believed when Gold Rush sang, and then the edge met the scale and the whole world turned to anvil.

Sparks.

The sword bounced. Hard.

Hallah’s arms went numb to the elbows. She stumbled, staring at the beast’s armor where Gold Rush had struck—a shallow scratch, nothing more, already healing with tendrils of black smoke.

The vibration sang up through her hands and settled in her elbows as a deep, buzzing ache, the way hitting solid stone with a hammer sang back through the handle. Gold Rush nearly tore itself from her grip, and she had to clamp her fingers down hard to keep it. The scratch was already closing, black smoke curling from the shallow line like breath on cold air, and the smoke stank of rot and old libraries, of something that healed by refusing to be hurt.

”Fuck,” she said.

The Titanoboa reared back, and its throat swelled. Hallah knew that posture. She’d seen it in nature texts, in Guild bestiaries, in nightmares she’d never admitted to having.

The swelling wasn’t like a breath drawn in. The throat sacs filled in slow, visible pulses, the skin stretching tight and dark, and a low hiss began building somewhere deep in the beast’s chest, a pressure sound, a kettle coming to boil. A green-black sheen gathered at the back of its throat, wet and shining, and Hallah’s gut knew what was coming a full second before her mind named it.

”Poison!” she screamed. ”Lucan, barrier!”

The mist came in a cloud, black and green, rolling across the mudflats like a living thing. Lucan’s hands were already moving, the incantation spilling from his lips—”Murus lucis, surge!”—and a dome of force snapped into existence around him, the air crystallizing into a shield of compressed light.

The dome formed with a sound like ice spreading across a pond, thin and bright, and its surface shimmered as it set, light folding over light until the air itself looked solid. The mist hit it and curled, seeking, green-black tendrils sliding along the curve looking for a gap, a thin place, any way in. Lucan’s hands trembled with the effort of holding the shape together, his fingers spread wide as if he could press the light into staying, and Hallah could see the strain in the set of his jaw, the way he poured himself into the wall between himself and the cloud.

Outside the dome, the mist found her skin. It touched her cheek first, cold and seeking, a damp finger tracing her jaw, and the smell filled her nose until she could taste it on the back of her tongue. It curled around her shoulders and down her arms, looking for a way in through her leathers, through her mouth, through the corners of her eyes, and every place it touched went a little numb, a little distant, as if her own body were quietly leaving her.

Hallah didn’t have barriers. She had her shield, and she had her body, and she had the charm.

She ripped the waxed cloth away, crushed the crystal in her fist, and felt the magic surge through her—then falter. The charm’s power was a candle flame against a blizzard. It touched the poison mist and evaporated, not dispersing the toxin but revealing it, highlighting the corruption that was too strong, too divine, for alchemy to touch.

The reveal was the worst part. For one heartbeat the charm’s dying light lit the mist from within, and Hallah saw what was really in it — not just poison, but corruption made vapor, dark veins threading through the green-black cloud the way they threaded through the beast’s scales. The light showed her the shape of the thing she was breathing, and then the light went out like a snuffed candle, leaving the taste of ash on her tongue and the mist still rolling in, untouched.

S-rank, she realized with horrible clarity. This is S-rank. We’re children fighting a god’s avatar.

The mist hit her like a physical blow. It didn’t burn. It didn’t choke. It invited, whispering promises of sleep, of rest, of the hollow peace that came when you stopped struggling and let the darkness take you.

The whispers weren’t words, not quite. They were a feeling shaped like a voice, like water closing slowly over her head, like the moment before sleep when the whole world goes soft and nothing hurts anymore. Just lie down, it seemed to say. Just stop. The mud is soft. The fight is over if you let it be over. And some traitor part of her, the tired part, the twelve-year-old part that had been fighting since she was five, almost listened.

Hallah bit her tongue until blood filled her mouth. The pain anchored her. She was Sovringard steel, forged not born, and she would not fall to a fucking snake’s breath mint.

The blood was hot and sharp and real, a nail of sensation driven straight through the fog in her head. Her jaw clenched down hard on the pain and held it there, the way a forge-worker held a hot piece with tongs — not flinching from it, using it, letting the hurt be the thing that kept her standing when everything else wanted her down. Pain was a tool. Pain had always been a tool. She just had to remember how to hold it.

She roared, and her divine aura ignited.

Gold light exploded from her skin, a corona of holy fire that pushed back the mist in a ten-foot radius. The Titanoboa recoiled, hissing, and for a moment—just a moment—Hallah saw fear in those glowing eyes.

The light came with heat on her skin, a warmth that started behind her ribs and poured outward until the air around her shimmered. The mist burned back from it, hissing and curling, retreating ten feet in every direction, and the ground beneath her boots dried and cracked in the sudden heat. The beast’s head pulled back, its whole coiled length shifting away from the glare, and the glow in its eyes flickered, just once, like a candle in a draft.

It recognizes this, she thought. The Paladin’s light. It knows what I am.

”Lucan!” she shouted, her voice rough with poison and divine fire. ”It’s armored! I need an opening!”

”Working on it!” he called back. His barrier was flickering, mana reserves draining fast. She could see the sweat on his face, the grey pallor of metabolic drain. He was burning through his reserves too quickly, the conditional A-rank showing its limits.

The flicker was at the edges first, the dome’s light thinning in patches, going dull where it had been bright. Sweat cut clean lines through the dirt on his face, and the grey under his skin deepened with every breath, the color of someone running a race on an empty stomach. His hands stayed steady anyway, spread wide, holding a shape that wanted to come apart, and Hallah loved him for that steadiness even as she hated what it was costing him.

Hallah charged.

Her feet found the mud and fought it with every step, each boot sucking free with a wet pop and slamming down again, spray flying up around her ankles. The beast loomed larger with every stride, the head the size of a carriage becoming the size of a house, the scales becoming plates, the plates becoming walls, and she ran straight at the wall because there was nowhere else to run that didn’t leave Lucan alone with it.

She couldn’t cut the beast. That was clear now. Gold Rush was a masterpiece, but it was a sword, not a siege weapon, and the Titanoboa’s scales were orichalcum-hard, corruption-touched, divine in their resilience. So she did what Brant had taught her to do when the tool failed: she changed tools.

She dropped Gold Rush.

The sword sank into the mud, forgotten, and Hallah threw herself at the beast with empty hands.

The weight left her hand all at once, a sudden lightness that felt wrong, like setting down something that had been part of her arm. The mud closed over the blade with a wet sigh, swallowing the gold down to the grip and then past it, and her hands were empty in a way they hadn’t been since she was a child in a forge-yard. Empty hands. A fighter’s worst moment. And her bravest one.

The Titanoboa met her halfway. They collided like two freight trains, and Hallah felt ribs crack—crack, sharp and clean—as she wrapped her arms around the creature’s neck, getting inside the reach of those massive jaws, using her weight and momentum to drive the head down, down, into the mud where it couldn’t strike at Lucan.

The shock ran through her shoulders and into her chest, a deep jarring thud that knocked the air sideways in her lungs. The scales were cold and slick under her arms, plates sliding against her skin, and the stink of rot and copper filled her nose so thick she could taste it. The head’s weight drove down under her, mud spraying up around them in dark fans, and she felt the whole coiled body resist, then give, inch by inch, as her weight and her fury pushed it where she wanted it.

Tank, she thought, distantly. A tank has got to take hits.

The hold was everything now. Her muscles screamed against the beast’s neck, a tree trunk wrapped in armor, and her aura burned where it pressed against the shadow under the scales, light wrestling corruption as a physical pressure she could feel in her teeth. Seconds stretched into years. Every second she held was a second Lucan had, bought with her body, and she held.

The thrash rolled through the beast’s whole body, a wave of armored muscle that lifted her feet off the ground and slammed them back down, mud exploding around her boots. Her grip slipped an inch, scales sliding under her palms, and she locked it again harder, fingers digging for purchase between the plates, her arms shaking with the effort of staying wrapped around something that wanted, more than anything, to throw her off and turn.

Mud flew into her mouth, gritty and cold, and her hair whipped across her face, blinding her in red flashes. The world spun, mud and sky and black scale wheeling past, and her stomach lurched with the motion, but her hands knew their job even when her eyes didn’t, fingers locked, arms locked, body locked around the neck. Blind was fine. Blind she could fight through. Letting go she couldn’t.

But the beast was stronger than her.

She felt the fangs pierce her gut before she saw them. A sudden, cold pressure, then wet heat, then the unmistakable sensation of something vital being punctured. The Titanoboa had twisted, contorted, brought its hind fangs up in a strike she hadn’t anticipated, and now they were buried in her abdomen, punching through muscle and organ, seeking her spine.

The cold pressure bloomed into wet heat that spread fast, blood soaking through her leathers in a warm rush, and the puncture was deep and wrong, a pressure that didn’t belong inside a body. Her breath hitched and caught, half a gasp trapped behind her teeth, and the terror that came with it wasn’t death, it was the spine-seeking slide of the fangs, the knowledge of how close they were to ending everything. And her hands did not let go. That was the choice, made with blood, made with everything she had left: hold, no matter what was buried in her gut.

Hallah screamed.

Not a shriek. Not a whimper. A roar, raw and bloody, the sound of a forge-worker burning her hands on molten steel and cursing while she worked. She didn’t let go. If she let go, the beast would turn on Lucan, and Lucan didn’t have the armor to survive this.

The roar tore out of her throat raw, blood and air and fury mixed, and it cost her, the sound scraping her throat the way the fangs scraped her gut. But it was fuel, not surrender, the way a forge-worker’s curse was fuel, the way pain had always been something to work with rather than something to obey. She poured it all into her grip and held.

”You’re the problem I’m looking for,” the voice whispered again, bubbling up through the poison and the blood. ”The light in the dark. The spark that refuses to die. I will swallow you, Paladin. I will hollow you out and wear your skin like a cloak.”

The whisper wasn’t just in her ears anymore. It bubbled up through the blood in her mouth and into her skull, a voice inside her own head wearing the snake’s throat like a mask. The patience in it was the worst part, older than the Silence, older than the seal, a thing that could wait forever and was telling her so. Wear your skin like a cloak. The image landed cold and clear, and her grip tightened anyway, because some threats you answered by holding harder.

”Fuck... you...” Hallah gasped, blood filling her mouth.

She could feel her mana reservoir draining, feel the poison and the blood loss competing to see which would kill her first. Her vision was tunneling, grey at the edges, but she could still see Lucan through the haze. He was moving, hands raised, incantation building.

But he was hesitating. She could see it in his eyes—the fear, the trauma, the memory of Aldric’s fists and the certainty that if he acted, he would hurt someone he loved.

Two clocks were running in her body now, poison and blood loss, racing each other to see which would take her first, and the tunnel vision greyed in from the sides like fog on a window. Through the haze Lucan’s hands were up, his mouth moving around the shape of a spell, and his eyes were the thing she couldn’t look away from — the fear there, and behind it the ghost of Aldric’s fists, the old lesson that his power hurt the people he loved, standing between him and the strike.

No, she thought. Not today. Not ever again.

”NOW!” she screamed, the sound tearing her throat. ”LUCAN, NOW!”

The scream tore her throat raw, blood and breath shredding out of her together, and it didn’t matter, nothing about her throat mattered now. What mattered was the sound reaching him through the fog and the fear and the ghost of Aldric’s fists, a girl refusing to die quietly and demanding, with her last good breath, that he refuse with her.

She didn’t command him to step aside. She didn’t ask him to be careful. She demanded the strike, demanded his courage, demanded that he trust her to hold the line while he did what only he could do.

The Titanoboa twisted its fangs, trying to tear her open, and Hallah held on with the last of her strength, her hands locked around its throat, her divine aura blazing so bright that the mud beneath them began to steam and harden into glass.

The mud steamed first, water hissing out of it in thin white threads, and then it hardened, the wet earth baking under her aura’s heat into a dark, cracked glass that spread outward from where they grappled. The smell of hot earth joined the rot and copper, and the glass cracked under the beast’s thrashing, sharp black plates shifting and splintering, but it held enough, it held, and so did she.

Lucan moved.

He didn’t cast the Fourth Order. That would take too long, require too much precision, demand too much from reserves already depleted. Instead, he reached out—not with his hands, but with his will—and touched Gold Rush where it lay in the mud.

The touch wasn’t a hand. It was a thread of intent, thin and trembling and utterly certain, reaching across the mudflat to find the blade where it lay swallowed by the mud. And the orichalcum answered, the way a struck bell answers, a hum Hallah felt through the mud and through her own bones, the metal waking up to the hand that had called it.

The sword erupted.

Orichalcum conducted magic. It was in the lore, in the texts, in the very structure of the metal Brant had forged. And Lucan, desperate and brilliant and burning through the last of his conditional A-rank grace, poured every drop of mana he had left into that conduit.

The blade didn’t rise. It ignited.

Arcane fire, white and terrible, raced up Gold Rush’s edge, following the orichalcum core, seeking the point of contact—the place where Hallah’s bloody hands gripped the beast, where her divine aura burned hottest, where the corruption was thickest.

The fire raced line by line up the edge, white and clean and terrible, and the heat of it didn’t burn her, it passed her, the way lightning passed a rod without burning the rod. The mist boiled off around them in a sudden hiss, the whole mudflat lighting up white, and Hallah felt the fire coming the way she felt weather coming, a pressure and a brightness and a certainty, and she did not flinch from it.

The fire found her.

It didn’t burn. It channeled, pouring through her body like lightning through a rod, using her as the fulcrum, the anvil, the point of convergence between holy light and arcane destruction.

Her body became the path, holy light from her aura meeting arcane fire from the blade inside her own chest, and the meeting point was her, was her hands on the beast, was the place where everything converged. The pain transmuted as it passed through her, the way ore transmuted in a forge, and what came out the other side wasn’t pain anymore, it was purpose, bright and hard and absolute. Her hands stayed locked. The circuit stayed complete.

Hallah screamed again, but this time the scream was power, was purpose, was the combined force of two children who refused to die.

The fire struck the Titanoboa’s throat.

The beast convulsed. Its scream was the sound of a thousand glass windows shattering, of the Hollow King’s whisper being torn apart by light, of divine corruption meeting mortal defiance and losing. The armored scales didn’t crack—they evaporated, blowing outward in a cloud of black ash that smelled like burning libraries and rotting flowers.

The shattering rolled across the mudflats in a wave, glass-thin and endless, and the whisper that had lived in the snake’s throat tore apart inside it, a voice unmade, a patience broken. The corruption lost its grip on the scales all at once, the dark veins going dull and empty, and the plates blew outward as ash, black and fine, settling over the mudflat like snow that smelled of burning paper and dead flowers.

The fangs in Hallah’s gut withdrew, tearing, and she felt herself falling, falling, the world tilting sideways as the beast’s head crashed into the mud beside her, eyes darkening, the light going out of them one flicker at a time.

The tearing was fresh agony laid over old agony, blood pouring faster now that the plugs were gone, and her body folded sideways without her permission, the world tilting hard. The beast’s head crashed down beside her, mud exploding upward in a dark fountain, and its eyes went out the way a fire went out, flicker by flicker, the sick luminescence guttering down to nothing.

”Not... a problem...” she whispered to the dying god-thing. ”The... solution.”

Then the darkness took her.

She woke to pain.

Not the sharp, clean pain of a forge-burn or a training bruise, but the deep, wet agony of organs trying to knit themselves back together around foreign matter. She could feel the poison still in her system, a cold thread winding through her veins, but it was retreating, being burned away by the last embers of her divine aura.

The knitting was the worst of it, a deep pulling ache, an itch she couldn’t scratch located somewhere behind her ribs, organs drawing themselves together around the holes the fangs had left. The cold thread of poison retreated inch by inch, burned away by the last embers of her aura, and every inch it gave up left a clean, sore emptiness behind it, the way a burn felt clean after the fire went out.

”Don’t move,” Lucan said.

His voice was wrecked. She cracked one eye open—just one, because the other seemed to be glued shut with blood and mud—and found him kneeling over her, his glasses gone, his face streaked with tears and dirt and something that looked like ash.

”You’re crying,” she croaked.

”I’m not,” he lied, horribly.

”Fucking... liar.”

She tried to sit up. Agony lanced through her abdomen, and she looked down to find her armor—her good Sovringard-made leather—torn open, the flesh beneath bandaged with strips of cloth that had once been his shirt. The bandages were red. Very red. Worryingly red.

The cloth stuck where the blood had dried, his shirt torn into strips and knotted with shaking hands, and the red had soaked through in spreading patches, fresh over old. Her fingers found the knots without thinking, tracing them the way she’d trace a seam, and the smell rose up off the whole mess, blood and mud and sweat, the smell of the fight still on both of them.

”How bad?” she asked.

”You need a Cleric,” Lucan said. ”Proper healing. The wound is... it’s deep, Hallah. It hit your liver. Your kidney. I can see... I can see things that shouldn’t be visible.”

”Gross.”

”Hallah.”

Lucan’s hand went to his pocket and came out with the jade pendant, green and warm from his own skin. The healing charm he’d bought that night, while she slept, slipping back into the Guild hall the way he’d planned. He’d been saving it for the ball, to give her between dances. He looked at her gut, at the blood, at the things that shouldn’t be visible, and the ball went clean out of his head. He pressed the pendant to her wound.

The knit started at once, a pulling warmth, stitches drawing together under her skin, and with it came the draw, a hollow hunger opening behind her ribs as the charm drank her body’s own strength for fuel. Her breath eased as the worst of the torn flesh drew shut, the bleeding slowing from a pour to a seep, and the cold poison thread retreated another inch. Not healed. Not whole. The deep damage was still there, and the poison wasn’t gone, and she would still need a Cleric. But the wound was closed enough, and she was stable enough, and his hands stopped shaking.

She looked at him then, really looked, and saw the terror there. Not just the fear of losing her, but the fear of having caused it, of having struck the blow that burned her from the inside out while she held the beast in place.

”Hey,” she said, and her hand found his, bloody fingers wrapping around trembling ones. ”You did good.”

”I burned you.”

”You saved me.”

”I could have killed you.”

”But you didn’t.” She squeezed, hard, using the last of her strength. ”That’s the job, Lucan. I’m the anvil. You’re the hammer. You don’t apologize for striking.”

He stared at her, mouth working, and then he did something that surprised them both. He laughed. It was a broken, hysterical sound, but it was real.

”You’re insane,” he said.

”You’re welcome.”

They stayed like that for a long moment, kneeling in the mud next to the smoking corpse of an S-rank monster, holding hands while the blood dried and the sun climbed higher. The Royal Guards would find them eventually, or the Guild scouts, or perhaps just the crows. But for now, they were alone with the aftermath, two children who had faced a god’s avatar and won.

Hallah’s eyes drifted shut. She was tired. So tired. But before she let the darkness take her again, she had one last thing to say.

”Lucan?”

”Yes?”

”If you tell anyone I screamed... I’ll tell everyone you cried.”

His hand tightened on hers. ”Deal.”

”And Lucan?”

”Yes?”

”Your conditional A-rank?” She cracked one eye open, managed a bloody smile. ”Consider it... fucking earned.”

Then she passed out, still smiling, still holding his hand, still the problem that Zalvrek would have to find another way to solve.

Because she wasn’t dead.

Not even close.