CHAPTER 458: 458: WHEN THE VEIL THINS PART TWO

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The assassins met them with an absence of surprise that was almost admirable. Seven-star men do not fear numbers. They cut them into shapes they prefer. Drones fell, not in screaming heaps, but in hard kneels with teeth showing and a hand still looking for work it could do before someone told it it was finished. Injuries bloomed like red handprints along the line. None of them stopped the line. Not yet.

"More," Shadeclaw said, knowing more would not be enough and asking for it anyway because that is how you keep other men’s sons breathing.

The mountain answered with bodies. Not deaths. Drones. More and then more, the way a tide knows how to repeat itself without losing the shape it loves.

For a space of breaths, the math held. Seven-star skill multiplied by four met five-star grit multiplied by two thousand and realized it had to sit down and think for a second. That second is sometimes what saves a house. It was not going to be enough tonight.

Silvershadow tasted it—where a line thins and refuses to admit it. He set his hand to call the second ring forward and felt another question arrive at his shoulder like a woman who has remembered she has a name even when she is not allowed to say it loudly.

"Weapon," Yavri said, without preface or posture. "Shield plates. Short spears. I am a six-star. My elites can hold a wall. We won’t run."

Silvershadow’s pupils tightened. He took in a dozen facts at once: the way her women sat like boards ready to be planed, not like prisoners planning to leap; the way her eyes had not left the fight except to measure which place would want her weight most; the way her jaw held itself as if it was not for biting but for clenching while you push something heavy uphill.

"Give them racks," he said to Shadeclaw without quite looking away from Yavri, and then louder, to the women who had marched under another’s song / kai’s enemies a few days ago: "You will stand where I put you. You break when I say break. You don’t run because you will not have the time to do it well."

Yavri’s mouth moved in something that might have been a smile if the world were less interested in being ugly. "Understood," she said, which meant I was born already knowing that.

Her captains —nine of them, flat-eyed and disciplined— took gear in the time it takes most men to decide whether to be insulted by an order. The racks hit shoulders. The short spears kissed palms. The women split into echelons with the kind of neatness that makes enemies think you are weaker than you are; then their neatness went away and something harder took its place.

"On me," Yavri said, and they moved like a door closing.

They hit the assassins not like a sword but like a sentence that ends with a period and does not care that you wanted a question mark.

Shields locked. Short spears stabbed for tendons and knuckles and the inside of a wrist that has spent a life pretending it does not hurt when it breaks. They did not try to be clever. They tried to be present in the place cleverness was supposed to go. For ten minutes that the world will call five in memory and thirty in pain, they blocked, absorbed, returned, set, reset, and made seven-star math write in smaller numbers.

Mia bled and did not yield. Thea cursed without using words and refused to count what she had left. Serit’s boot slipped and a drone’s hand grabbed his collar and pretended it had meant to be there all along. A woman with Yavri’s badge and a broken tooth laughed once when a knife missed her throat by a memory and set her shield a fraction higher.

On the high altar, Luna’s hands hovered over Miryam’s cocoon without touching and Akayoroi’s body planted itself so that anything which came up the spine of the mountain would have to argue with her first. Skyweaver’s wind feathers stacked, slid, and braided until the air above the ledge felt like glass you should not breathe on.

In the hall, the shell finished its last piece of music.

[Ding! Seven-Star Body Reconstruction: 100%. Consolidation: 100%.

Rank up complete. The host may exit.]

The sound didn’t crack. It softened. The walls around him loosened their careful hold and became a quiet, shredded fall. He inhaled a true breath for the first time in a day and a night and a handful of numbers. It burned sweet and deep and right.

He put his hands against the shell’s inside and pushed.

Light broke outward like a sigh. Fragments spun and sparked and went out before they touched the floor. He stepped through the dust of his old weakness and did not stumble. The world arrived all at once—the scream of a man who had found the end of his own story; the iron smell of a fight that did not care if you were tired; the delicate, private sound of his daughter’s cocoon singing like a kettle at the edge of boiling.

He did not run.

He leapt.

One stride to the ledge lip. One murder-long fall through cool air. He hit a lower shelf like a promise, let it spring him, took the next drop without checking the ground first because the ground belonged to him now, then bent the final fall into a step that put him between two knives and a pair of eyes the color of a new bruise.

Mia blinked once.

For the first time in over three months that had been longer than seasons, she looked at him without a glass or a story between them. Blood striped her jaw. Dust wrote a cruel verse on her cheek. Her eyes had no time to be anything but hungry and amazed; they were both anyway. He changed.... He had gotten handsomer. That is what bodies do when they decide to be kind to themselves and then teach the world to agree.

Everything in her face said Later is a word I have decided to hate.

Everything he said, I know.

A blade whispered behind her—one of the silent kind, made for back-talk and not debate, the sort good men never carry and bad men never sharpen enough because the first sharpen is always enough. It came for the seam between ribs because that is what seven-star does: it studies books you did not know were written about how your body ends.

Kai reached without looking, and the world did not notice he had moved until the blade did not go where it wanted to be.

His hand caught the assassin’s wrist halfway through its own certainty. Fingers closed, bone remembered who was king, tendons squealed and then lay down. The assassin made the first noise of the night that sounded like surprise. Kai’s other arm came around Mia’s shoulders when he turned to stop the next angle, and his body did a thing bodies do when they mean to kill and have to be gentle in the same breath.

It looked like he was holding her. Their lips were a few centimeters away from each other.

It looked, for a heartbeat the length of a kiss that hasn’t happened yet, like he had come all this way to remember how to put his mouth near another mouth and not take anything from it but heat.

"Mia," he said very softly, so that the words did not have to fight the knives to be heard. "You are here."

Her breath came back and forgot to leave.

"You look so beautiful." He smiled with only half his mouth, because the other half was busy with blood and the shape of a promise. "Give me a moment. I’ll be back soon. Let me deal with some mosquitoes."

He turned his face a fraction so that his lips were not on hers but could have been if the world had decided to be kind for once. It did not. But it watched him decide to make it kinder anyway.