CHAPTER HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN Kael grunted angrily while his men groaned in disappointment as they thought that the spear was going to get Patrick after Kael had aimed for his head, hoping to kill him with the second spear. “You missed!” Patrick said to Kael with a smirk on his face while he struggled to catch his breath after having a near-death experience while he watched the spear attempt to plunge into his head. “Hand me over a sword!” Kael said imperatively to his men, and one of them brought a sword that was shaped like a branch of a tree, with two sharp edges and a pointed end. The sword was made from bronze, and Lucy gasped at the sight of it,While Kael held onto the sword with a tight grip, he increased the pace of his steps while he growled at Patrick whom he wanted to kill so badly. “I think I have had enough of this! Let’s get this over with!” “Gladly!” Patrick nodded at Kael’s words, and he started walking toward him as well, keeping his eyes on the sword which was o

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN"Can we take them all?" Lucy asked but no one could provide a response, because the truth was nobody knew, and the savage men who remained were already closing the gap between them with their weapons raised."Stay behind me," Patrick said, tightening his grip on the sword that had just taken Kael's head. The blade still glowed faintly with red light on its edge, and for a moment he let himself believe that just maybe, it was enough to make the rest of the Forsaken hesitate.It wasn't.They came at once, not in the ordered way Kael had commanded his men before, but in a wild, headless charge, each man trying to be the one who avenged him."They've got no one telling them what to do," Borius said, already moving to place himself between the charging men and his sister. "That makes them more dangerous, not less.""Cheerful," Heather muttered, an arrow already fixed to her bowstring.ALERT: HOSTILE GROUP ENGAGINGRECOMMENDATION: DO NOT HOLD GROUND"Not planning

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENMorning came without much ceremony with light filtering down through the trees, the fog low enough that Patrick could see his own breath before he could see past ten feet in any direction. Nobody had slept well. He knew that without asking, because nobody complained about being tired, and that was usually how you could tell."Which way did you say he fell?" Heather asked, already checking her quiver."Near the ridge, past where we fought Rico." Patrick rubbed at his eyes. "I think. It's hard to tell one patch of that place from another.""That's helpful.""I'm working with what I've got."Borius pushed himself up slower than he wanted anyone to notice, one hand braced against the log, and Heather was at his side before he'd finished standing, though neither of them made a thing of it."You're limping," she said."I'm walking.""Those aren't the same word."He gave her a look that wasn't quite annoyed, and she gave him one right back that wasn't quite worr

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND NINETEENThey finally made it out of the fog into a clearing that didn't feel like it belonged in this decripit dimension , the ground here packed hard and swept clean in a way nothing overgrown ever managed to on its own, and Patrick understood before anyone said a word that they'd walked straight into somewhere people actually lived. A ring of crude shelters stood around a low fire pit, built from branches and hide and the bones of something large enough that Patrick didn't want to guess what it had been, and past the shelters, tied to a post driven deep into the dirt, stood Seth,m filthy, favoring one leg, but unmistakably alive, and the sight of him hit Patrick in a way he hadn't braced himself for."Seth," Lucy breathed, already moving forward before Heather's arm shot out and stopped her."Wait," Heather said, low. "We don't know how many there are yet."She was right to say it, because the answer came a second later when six figures rose up from around the s

CHAPTER HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONESeth slept for most of the day once his stomach had settled enough to hold food, curled up near the fire with the kind of stillness that told Patrick just how much the past two days had actually cost him, and the rest of them let him have it without much discussion, since nobody seemed to feel much urgency about moving again so soon after finally getting him back. Patrick spent a good part of the afternoon simply sitting with his back against a tree, doing very little beyond watching his friend breathe and letting Dara run through a slow, quiet check of everyone's mana levels, which came back low across the board but not dangerously so, which was about as good a report as he'd expected to get.It was somewhere past midday that he noticed Heather and Borius had drifted off a short distance from the rest of the camp, close enough that Patrick could still make out the shape of the conversation even if the words themselves stayed mostly private, and somethin