SSS Awakening: I Can Devour Gods to Evolve My Goddesses

Chapter 12: It Could Only Take One Name

Cassian did not return to the black-gold divine seat until the second underground dawn tide had fully receded.

The golden light in the eastern corridor was gone. The final tide had yet to begin.

Veyra’s right hand still rested over the thin strip bearing Orin Hale’s name.

”I devoured the bell it threw at me,” Cassian said. ”Two points. The transport platform stopped. The Bell-Keeper shouldered the main roll and left on foot.”

Veyra looked toward the eastern corridor.

”How long?”

”One final underground dawn tide.”

She was silent for a moment. Her thumb passed slowly over Orin’s name.

Then she held the strip out to him.

”Take him there.”

Cassian did not accept it.

”You just got him back.”

”Which is why he should return to the others.”

”We could lose him again.”

”I know.”

Veyra did not withdraw her hand.

The strip lay across her palm, so light it seemed to weigh less than the chain around her wrist.

Cassian stared at it for two breaths, then took it.

He had torn this from the Bell-Keeper’s grasp. It held no power, no map, no secret that could make him stronger. But it proved that he had once made the enemy leave one name behind.

Now Veyra wanted him to carry that proof back into danger.

He did not like it.

”I won’t promise how I get him there,” Cassian said.

”The decision is yours.”

Her answer did not make him feel any better.

Cassian closed his hand around the strip and left.

By the time he reached the first relay, the darkness below the second gap remained unbroken.

The final underground dawn tide had not yet risen.

The positions were simple. There was nothing to misunderstand.

Cassian stood on the near side of the gap. At his feet was the rock bolt he had already driven into the first relay, and the coarse steel cable ran from behind it toward the first broken span.

On the ruined road across the gap, the Bell-Keeper carried the main roll on its shoulder. Only one stretch remained between it and the Eclipse War Banner scar.

Nothing lay between them but the second gap.

Cassian held Orin’s strip between two fingers and raised it where the darkness could see.

The Bell-Keeper did not turn.

He waited.

The first thread of golden light crested beneath his feet.

Cassian did not move.

The underground dawn tide had begun.

Golden light climbed rapidly along both walls of the gap. At the Bell-Keeper’s side, its one remaining working bone bell suddenly turned toward the near side, its mouth aimed directly at the strip in Cassian’s hand.

The Bell-Keeper stopped.

It looked back.

Across the full width of the second gap, its gray-white mask showed no expression. Yet the main roll on its shoulder tilted slightly, as though the entire thing were waiting for its missing piece to return.

The bone bell rang once.

”Orin Hale.”

The strip in Cassian’s hand twitched.

Enough.

The Bell-Keeper wanted it.

Whether it cared about Orin or merely an incomplete roll did not matter yet.

The Bell-Keeper turned and walked toward him.

There was no stone beneath its first step into the gap.

The rising underground dawnlight compressed beneath its bone boot, forming one narrow golden footprint. The instant it lifted that foot, the print behind it shattered back into light.

One step. One foothold.

A road that moved only with the Bell-Keeper.

Cassian could not walk it.

But the Bell-Keeper could use it to reach the near side.

He lowered Orin’s strip slightly and took half a step back behind the rock bolt.

The Bell-Keeper kept coming.

The main roll lay across the back of its shoulders, held by a black-gold carrying strap that crossed its chest. The cracked, mute bell hung on its left, Cassian’s lost tension gauge still lodged in its tongue. Its right hand held the only bell that could still ring.

No weak piece had been thrown within his reach this time.

The entire Bell-Keeper was coming for him.

Cold gathered in Cassian’s gut.

He could put away the strip now and retreat across the first broken span.

The Bell-Keeper might not be able to pursue him after the tide ended.

But the main roll would remain on its shoulder.

The names of the Third Formation would pass beyond the banner scar, into a place Veyra could not see and Cassian could not reach.

Three steps remained between the Bell-Keeper and the near side.

It raised the bone bell.

War Instinct I gave Cassian a single crude image: the bell’s rim crushing his jaw as he fell backward into the golden light.

No weak point.

No answer.

The Bell-Keeper stepped onto the near ledge.

The bell exploded with sound.

Cassian’s broken blade wrenched sideways toward it, as if an invisible hand had seized the metal. At the same moment, the Bell-Keeper reached with its left hand—not for Cassian’s throat, but for Orin’s strip.

Cassian opened his fingers.

The strip dropped into that gray-white hand.

The Bell-Keeper’s fingers closed.

The main roll lifted behind its shoulder.

Now.

Predator Step I.

Cassian did not charge the Bell-Keeper.

He did not charge the second gap.

He flashed past the enemy’s right side and landed beside the main roll.

The hooked tip of his bent blade caught the black-gold carrying strap. Using the last of his momentum, he hauled down and forced the entire strap over the protruding head of the rock bolt at his feet.

The main roll crashed to the ground.

The Bell-Keeper turned at once.

Its working bone bell swept toward Cassian. He did not block with his blade. Instead, he ducked tight against the other side of the roll, putting the heavy black-gold case between himself and the bell.

Clang!

The impact knocked the entire roll half a foot toward the near side.

The strap remained caught on the rock bolt.

The Bell-Keeper grabbed the far end of the case and pulled toward the gap.

Cassian seized the other end.

It was far stronger than him.

The rock bolt groaned against the stone. The coarse steel cable behind it snapped taut. Chips of stone jumped one after another from the edge of the bolt hole.

The Bell-Keeper would not surrender the roll.

Its working bone bell rang again.

The pull through the bolt and cable surged violently. The head of the bolt tore upward by a fraction, and the carrying strap began to slip free.

Cassian could not win a contest of strength.

He jammed the broken blade beneath the case and threw his weight onto the hilt, rolling the main roll around the rock bolt toward the near side.

Once.

The black-gold case tipped over its narrow edge.

Before he could complete the second roll, the Bell-Keeper was already over the case, one hand descending toward Cassian’s head.

Orin Hale’s strip was still pinched in that hand.

It was less than an arm’s length away.

If Cassian lunged now, he could reach it.

All he had to do was release the hilt.

But the golden footholds in the gap were beginning to collapse from the far side.

The underground dawn tide was receding.

The Bell-Keeper saw it too.

It lurched backward, trying to drag the roll away before its final steps disappeared. The strap cinched tight around the rock bolt, and cracks spread rapidly through the stone around the hole.

Cassian’s hand had already lifted half an inch from the hilt.

Orin’s name was right there.

He had torn that strip back from the far side once. He had placed it in Veyra’s hand himself. Now the Bell-Keeper held it again, as though telling him his earlier victory could be taken away whenever it pleased.

Cassian wanted it back.

The impulse came faster than any calculation.

Then, at the edge of his vision, the main roll began slipping off the rock bolt.

Not one name.

The whole roll.

Cassian forced his hand back down.

The black-gold case turned over its final face and rolled completely behind the rock bolt on the near side.

The carrying strap stretched to its limit against the bolt head.

The Bell-Keeper froze for an instant.

If it kept pulling, the last golden footholds on the far side would break first.

It would not strand itself on the near side for the roll.

The working bone bell smashed down on the strap.

The black-gold fibers snapped.

The Bell-Keeper retreated with half the torn strap. Orin Hale remained caught between the fingers of its left hand.

As it stepped back into the second gap, it rang the bell at Cassian one last time.

The first-relay rock bolt jolted and almost tore free of the stone.

Cassian did not pursue. He did not reach for the bell. He pressed his entire body over the main roll and watched the Bell-Keeper step across the vanishing light.

The final footprint shattered.

The underground dawn tide fell completely back into the depths.

The Bell-Keeper stood on the far side.

One working bell.

One cracked, mute bell.

And Orin Hale.

Its shoulder was empty.

Cassian looked down at the long black-gold case beneath him.

It was heavy.

Far too heavy to gamble on the black-gold plate across the first broken span, which had only been tested under one careful adult’s weight.

He could not bring it back to Veyra yet.

But it was on his side.

It was not on the Bell-Keeper’s shoulder. It was not beyond the Eclipse War Banner scar. And the final tide had not carried it away.

Cassian pressed his palm against the lid and felt the solid weight beneath the silence.

At last, one corner of his mouth lifted.

The Bell-Keeper had used all three underground dawn tides.

In the end, it had retreated with an empty shoulder.

At the edge of the lid, a narrow slot gaped between the black-gold strips.

It was exactly wide enough to hold one name.

Cassian knew which name had once been there.

Orin Hale.

He stared at the empty slot. His satisfaction did not vanish, but it would no longer settle into anything complete.

The whole roll was on his side.

Orin was not.

Next time, Cassian would tear that name out of the Bell-Keeper’s hand again.