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Chapter 129 — The Blackridge Report
They did it in the long tent with the map still staked to the table and the eastern half of it crossed out.Laura at the head. Mercer propped in a chair with his leg out straight and a face the colour of paper. Four officers Knox didn't know, two clerks, and Bael standing at the back because he'd refused a seat.Knox stood too. Nobody offered him one and he wouldn't have taken it.They went through it from the first horn. It took two hours and most of it wasn't about him. Company positions, the collapse of the eastern flank, the timing of the third company's front, who had ordered what and when and whether the horns had been read right. Twice a clerk read a line back and an officer disagreed with it and they argued the point down to the minute.Knox's name came into it about forty minutes in and then it didn't leave."Who called the eastern column back off the road.""Morales, sir. Captain was down.""On whose authority?""Nobody's," Bael said from the back. "Thirty-one of us came hom
Chapter 128 — What the Battle Cost
The releases were at seven.Knox hadn’t known that was a thing they did formally until Neris came and got him. Four summons were too broken to keep bound and their summoners had signed for it overnight, and there was a piece of open ground behind the medicine tents where it was done, and the custom at Blackridge was that anyone who could walk came and stood there.Knox could nearly walk. He stood.It took about ten minutes. Each summoner went out alone to their beast and put a hand on it and said whatever they said, and then the light took it apart, and the summoner walked back and somebody else went out. Nobody talked. A boy from the third company got halfway through and couldn’t finish and a sergeant went out and stood next to him until he could.Ignis watched all of it from where he lay.They can’t call them again.No.Ever.No.The drake put his head down.Then it’s the same as dying.It’s not the same, Knox said, because it wasn’t, and then he stopped, because he wasn’t sure the
Chapter 127 — The Tide Breaks
Knox never got to answer her.The field answered first.It started somewhere out past the third company and came across the whole line inside a minute — a change in the noise that Knox felt before he could name. Then a Hollowvein Stalker came out of the dust forty yards away, alone, stopped, and stood there turning its head like something that had just woken up in a place it did not recognise.Behind it, along a mile of front, the Tide stopped pushing.“Signals,” Laura said, and she was already moving. “Every horn. Now.”Knox got up because sitting down and watching it was worse.He had one arm and no mana and his ribs made a noise when he breathed, and Neris found him somewhere in the middle of it and put a hand on his chest and told him to stop, and he stopped for about ninety seconds.From where he stood he could see maybe a third of it.The controlled beasts had come apart. Not all at once and not the same way — some of them simply stopped, some of them turned round and went north
Chapter 126 — The Two-Spike Falls
Knox walked the last forty feet because he couldn't run them.【 Mana: Critical 】He'd been ignoring that panel for a while. It sat in the corner of his vision and stayed there and there was nothing he could do about it, so he stopped reading it.The Vorul was on one knee in the dirt with black around both legs and one arm, fighting it, and winning slowly.Knox could see the restraints thinning where the shoulder worked against them. Nyxarion was holding, and Nyxarion had never held anything for longer than two seconds before today, and the cold coming off the bond had gone tight in a way Knox didn't have a word for.How long.Not long enough for you to walk."Ignis."The drake came up beside him on three legs, dragging the fourth, breathing wrong.Its stance, Knox said.It's kneeling. It hasn't got a stance.It's got one knee and one arm holding it up. Take the arm.Ignis put four fixed points down the length of that arm from the shoulder to the wrist.【 Pressure Control: 74% 】【 Fixe
Chapter 125 — Nowhere to Run
It went north-east and it went fast.Knox couldn't catch it. He knew that before he'd taken four steps — his left arm was dead weight, his ribs were grinding, and there was not enough left in him for Echo Step twice in a row. Half a mile of open ground and it was moving on a ruined knee faster than he could move on two good legs.Ignis couldn't catch it either. The drake got up and went three strides and the bad foreleg went out from under him and put him down on his chest.Don't chase him, Knox said. Look at the ground in front of it.I can't reach—You don't have to reach it. Put it where it's going.Ignis got his head up.【 Distribution: Four Fixed Points 】The ground buckled forty yards ahead of the Vorul, four separate lines sinking under pressure in ground the thing was already committed to. It came down into that and its knee folded and it went over hard and slid.It was up again in under two seconds.But it was two seconds.Knox turned to the shadow.Nyx.I heard him.I'm not
Chapter 124 — Cut the Connection
Knox couldn’t go.That was the whole problem and it took him about a second to work it through. The moment he pulled Ignis and Nyxarion off it, the Vorul would either finish the drake or walk into the wider battle and be gone, and Knox had no way to find it again in four hundred acres of dust and no way to make anybody believe him if he did.So it had to be somebody else.He got behind Ignis long enough to turn his head and find the western edge of the reserve ground.“Bael!”The man was fifty feet back with a broken company reforming around him — twenty-odd on their feet, six or seven summons up, most of them somebody else’s.“Morales—”“There’s a relay north-east. Past the third company front, up on the rise.” Knox pointed with the arm that still worked. “It’s feeding the thing. Every time it pulses, the wounds close.”Bael looked at him for about as long as it took to breathe in.“How far past the front?”That was all he asked.He didn’t ask how Knox knew, or what a relay was doing
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