SSS Awakening: I Become The Strongest Breeding Knight

Chapter 116: 116. Fourteen Seconds Is Long Enough to Learn What I’m Afraid Of

I stood there with Alicia’s arms around me. I counted the seconds, because I’d learned that from her.

I got to six... Then to nine... Then to fourteen, and the rumble of the mountain came back, and a new crack ran across the cliff face above us, and somewhere in the rock behind me, something very large started to fall.

”Eveline!”

A scrape... A cough... A small clatter of stones, and then a head, covered in gray dust, poked out of the crevice, followed by a pair of singed ears, a pair of shoulders, and a heavy, limp, bleeding shape hauled out behind her on her back.

Oh my god... She’d done it. And she’d gotten him.

She came out of that gap like a cork out of a bottle, dragging Garrick Voss by the collar of his coat, and she took three more staggering steps across the scree before her knees gave out.

She dropped him gently in the dirt. She stood over him, panting.

Her face was caked with dust and streaked with tears. A few sparks had caught the tip of her left ear, and it was smoking faintly.

Garrick opened his eyes. He looked at the sky.

”I survive death for the second time...” He said, in a thin, dazed voice, ”That was... a lot of rock.”

”Don’t talk,” said Eveline fiercely and turned on me.

That look... I’d never seen her angry...

I’d seen her frightened, embarrassed, delighted, and mortified, in roughly equal proportions. But I had never seen her with her fists clenched at her sides, her ears flat, and her whole small body shaking with a fury so hot that I took a step backward.

”Eveline...”

”Don’t you ever,” she said, ”stand there like that again!”

”Eveline...”

”I mean it! You stood there!”

”You JUST stood there, and you screamed, and you didn’t move, and the whole mountain was coming down!”

”And I’d just put the last of the rack knights down at the gully and turned around, and I was right there, and you...” Her voice cracked. ”You could have... been killed!”

”He was...”

”I know what he was! But it doesn’t matter!” She stomped the ground. You’re not allowed to just stand there and let things fall on you!”

”I wasn’t standing there! I was trying to dig!”

”With your hands!”

”It’s the only thing I had!”

”You had me!” she shouted. ”You had me, you idiot, you had a rabbit, and you didn’t even ask...!”

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

It hit me then.

It hit me like a wall, standing in the dust at the mouth of a collapsing mountain, with a burning ear in front of me and a hundred things I should have said.

I’d been terrified of Corvane. I’d been terrified of the Core, the tethers, the Council, and the wrong signature on a piece of paper.

But none of that had been the real thing.

The real thing... the thing that had been sitting in my chest all day like a block of ice, was the instant that small gold shape had vanished into a crack in the rock, and I hadn’t been able to feel her.

I didn’t say any of that... I didn’t have the right words.

I reached out and took her by both shoulders and held on.

I held on for one second. Then two.

And then, probably, a second longer than I should have. She stopped talking.

Her ears came up slowly, and she looked at me with wide, wet eyes, and I looked back at her, and for a while neither of us said anything at all.

”You’re... shaking,” she said finally, in a small voice.

”So are you.”

”I’m allowed to... I just saved a man.”

”I know.”

”I did that.”

”You did that.”

She nodded, slowly. She lifted one hand and put it, very lightly, over mine.

Alicia, who was watching from behind... I can tell that she smiled for us, and she’s feeling relieved.

...

By the time the sun was high, the Hollow had stopped falling, and the long, ragged heap of rubble that used to be Site Nine had settled into something almost peaceful.

We’d gotten everyone out. I counted them twice, because I couldn’t stop.

Seventeen from the cells, with Doyle among them, walking on her own two feet. Nine from the racks, laid out in a row on the dry grass with blankets over them.

Bram, Tobias, and a dozen technicians sitting in a shaken, silent huddle beside the wrecked refinery wall, with Wynn standing guard over them like a sheepdog.

A tired, battered, filthy, living crowd, spread out across the ruins of a village that had been dead for two years.

I watched Sharon cross the grass toward a woman lying on a blanket.

She walked slowly. Slower than I’d ever seen her.

She had a cut on her forehead and a bruise on her jaw and a cloak somebody had thrown over her shoulders, and she held herself very stiffly, like someone afraid of what she’d see.

She stopped in front of the blanket. She knelt and put her sword down on the grass.

And she looked at the face on the pillow.

Captain Maren Doyle opened her eyes.

She’d held that cell door for an hour with a borrowed sword and a body that had given out about halfway through.

The crystal bands had drained her more than she’d let on. When Holt had carried her out, she’d been unconscious, and she’d stayed unconscious until the sun hit her face.

She looked at the red hair. And she looked at the bloody forehead.

A crooked, painful little smile crept across her mouth.

”Instructor,” she whispered. ”You’re late.”

I’d never seen Sharon cry.

I want to be clear about that. I’d seen her furious and drunk and tired and, once, briefly, in the Citadel gardens, almost shy.

But I had never seen water in her eyes.

She knelt there with her hands on her knees and her head bowed, and for about five seconds, a single tear slid down the side of her nose and dripped onto the blanket, and she didn’t make a sound.

Her shoulders shook just once.

Then she stood up.

”What are you lot gawking at?” she roared.

Her voice wobbled, and she made it louder. ”Standing around like a herd of cows!”

”There are wounded people here! Fetch water! Fetch bandages! Does anyone in this valley know how to use a damned blanket?!”

Nobody smiled. And nobody even dared.

Holt vanished around the corner of a ruined wall at a speed I’d never thought he had in him, and Dessa grabbed a waterskin and ran in the opposite direction, and for about a minute, the whole crowd erupted in a flurry of frantic, deliberate activity that fooled absolutely no one.

Eveline came up beside Sharon.

She didn’t say a word. She had a bandage on her cheek now, and a tuft of fur missing from the tip of one ear, and she stood quietly at Sharon’s elbow like a small, patient shadow.

Then, very gently, she lifted one hand and patted Sharon’s back, once, between the shoulder blades.

It was an awkward pat. It was the pat of someone who’d never done it before and wasn’t sure it was allowed.

Sharon growled.

It was a low, wordless sound, the kind a big dog makes when it’s being scratched in the wrong place.

But she didn’t move away. She stood there with her jaw clenched and her eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the horizon, and she let the pat happen, and after a moment, she reached up and covered the small hand with her own.

Bram shuffled up behind them, clutching his half of the tally stick. He looked at Holt, who had come back with a bucket, and held it out in both hands.

”I think this belongs with you,” he said, in a dry whisper. ”I’d like to go back to Commander Hallis...”

”I’ll tell him everything... Every name, every date, and every crate I ever signed for.” He swallowed. ”I’ll stand up in front of any court you like.”

Holt took the stick. He turned it over in his big hands, and slowly, gravely, he nodded.

”You’ll have an escort,” he said.

”I’d like that.”

”You’ll have a lot of them.”

”Ohh yeah~! I’d like that even more.”