I Eat Monster and Gain Powers

Chapter 20: Take Off, NOW!

Eto moved before he decided to.

The archer broke from the rocks the second the arrow left their hand, already sprinting, and he was across the two hundred meters before they’d covered fifty of it, his legs eating the distance in long low strides that barely touched the ground, the bag on his shoulder forgotten, the sword forgotten, nothing in his head but the shape of their back ahead of him and the animal thing roaring that something had tried to kill him.

They were fast. But not fast enough.

They cut hard left through a stand of birch, real trees, real forest, none of the wrongness of Edelmere in the bark or the light, and he took the turn a half second behind them, close enough now to hear their breathing ragged and fast. They dropped and rolled under a low branch he had to duck to clear and came up already running again, and he grinned without meaning to, teeth bared, because some part of him that had spent seven months chasing rabbits and reindeer and wolves through undergrowth recognized this feeling and liked it.

They led him into a camp.

Tents, a dozen of them, canvas and rope strung between trees, cookfires still smoking, and the moment he broke the treeline into it every head turned and every hand went for a weapon.

”Archer’s got a Keth on her!” someone shouted, and then the first blade was coming at him and he didn’t think, he moved.

He pulled the daggers from the bag on the run, one in each hand, and met the first man’s swing with a cross block that nearly took the sword out of his grip, then stepped inside the man’s reach and put the shorter dagger through his throat before the man had finished being surprised by the block. He was already turning, already moving, the body still dropping behind him.

Two came at him from the left, spread wide, trying to flank. He went low under the first swing, felt the wind of the blade pass over his back, and drove up into the man’s gut with the second dagger, twisted, pulled it free in the same motion he used to spin into the other one’s guard. That man got a hand up to stop the strike and lost three fingers for it before the dagger found his ribs instead.

An arrow took him in the shoulder. He felt it hit, felt the sting of it, and did not slow down.

Another came from behind, from a rooftop of canvas, and he heard the string before he saw the shaft and turned his whole body sideways on instinct, the arrow catching only air where his chest had been a half second earlier. A third and fourth came in quick succession and he batted the first out of the air with the flat of a dagger, not even looking at it, and let the second graze past his ribs, a shallow cut, nothing worth stopping for.

Two more men rushed him together, spears this time, longer reach, trying to keep him at a distance he couldn’t close fast enough. He let the first jab come, caught the shaft of it in his off hand, and used the man’s own momentum to yank him forward onto the dagger in his other fist. The second spear caught him across the forearm, opened a shallow line of red, and he grabbed that shaft too and broke it over his knee before driving the jagged end back into the man who’d been holding it.

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Six down. He could smell how many were left, could hear their heartbeats scattered through the camp, more than he wanted to count, and the number of them was starting to grate on him in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with impatience.

He caught sight of the archer again, ducking between two tents, reloading on the move, and something in him snapped its attention fully onto them and stopped caring about anything else in the camp.

He went through the tents instead of around them.

Canvas tore, rope snapped, a table of supplies went over as he cut a straight line toward where he’d seen him, and three more came at him out of the smoke of a cookfire and he didn’t slow for them either, cut through the first with a dagger across the throat, took a sword strike across his upper arm from the second that would have opened him to the bone on anyone without a reindeer’s hide under his skin, and it barely broke his stride.

He kept ducking him. Around a tent pole, through a gap between crates, over a low fence meant for horses, and every time Eto closed the distance she found some new angle to slip through, and the frustration of it built in his chest until it had nowhere left to go.

Eto raised both hands.

The lightning came out of him in a wide arc, not aimed, not controlled the careful way he’d learned to control it, just released, and it caught two men rushing him from the side and threw them backward smoking into the dirt, caught a tent and set the canvas alight, caught the edge of the archer’s cloak and sent her sprawling.

The camp went quiet fast after that. What was left of them broke and ran, and he let them, because the one thing left standing that mattered to him was on the ground fifteen feet away, coughing, smoke rising off his shoulder where the arc had caught the fabric.

Eto walked to him slow.

He was scrambling backward through the dirt, and when he saw it wasn’t working, when he saw Eto was already standing over him, he reached up with both hands and tore the wrap free from around the lower half of his face.

A woman. Younger than he’d expected, dark eyes wide with real terror, a scar cutting through one eyebrow.

”Wait,” she said, in Keth, the accent thick and strange but the words clear. ”Wait, please, I heard you, I heard you speak Keth to noble, please, wait.”

He said nothing. He stood over her with lightning still humming faintly under his skin and the smell of burnt canvas and blood thick in the air, and let her keep talking.

”I was just doing my job.” Her hands were up, open, empty. ”I have no plan against you, no plot, nothing, I am a translator, that is all I am, I was hired to translate for this group, I know ten languages, I know Keth, I know the tongue of Rostalio, I know Ru’ekra, Khoekhoegowab. I know others besides.” She was talking faster now, the words tripping over each other. ”I can work for you. I can translate for you, anything you need said, anything you need heard, I will do it. Anything. Please.”

He crouched down in front of her.

”Anything,” she said again, quieter this time, watching his face for some sign it was landing.

He thought about it for a moment, and then he laughed, low and rough, the sound of it unfamiliar even to his own ears after months of grunting and growling and nothing else.

”I fuck you,” he said.

Her whole body went rigid. Her eyes went huge.

”No, wait, no.” The words came out in a rush now, desperate. ”Wait, there are other women, prettier women, more to your liking, I am sure, I have been told I have a small chest, you would not like, please, there are others…”

He raised his hand again and let another surge of it crack out across the camp behind her, catching the last standing tent, throwing white light across her face, and she flinched so hard she went flat against the dirt.

She dropped to her knees in front of him, head bowed, shaking.

He looked down at her for a long moment.

”Take off,” he said. ”Now.”

She looked up, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her face. ”Take what off?”

”Take off,” he said again, lower, no room left in it for asking twice. ”Now!”