novelnext 397. Man of action
397. Man of action
As soon as Kai saw the flames in the distance, he looked at the tribals around him, then at Kael, whose face had already gone pale. “I’ll go ahead. Make sure the drinkers don’t escape.”Kael nodded at once.
The next second, Kai pushed himself into the air and shot straight toward the city. Even from far away, he could already see several buildings burning, their grass-thatched roofs fully caught in the fire, and with parts of the walls broken inward, it was obvious this had not been some accident.
By the time he reached the city, the whole place looked to be in chaos.
Tribals ran through the streets carrying buckets of water, throwing them over the fires wherever they could. Others were sprawled on the ground being treated by healers, their wounds smeared with paste and wrapped in rough bandages. Off to one side, several bodies had been laid together, and women and children knelt around them, crying openly.
The city was alive with panic, grief, and smoke.
A few people noticed Kai the moment he descended, and the reaction was immediate. Shouts went up. Several men grabbed for their weapons, ready to meet another attack. But then they saw who it was.
The weapons lowered the next second.
The shouting thinned into whispers instead, though the wariness in their faces did not disappear entirely. Kai didn’t stop for any of it.
He moved through the city until he saw a cluster of armored men gathered together, and at the center of them stood someone familiar.
Khalid.
Ansel’s brother had been watching the streets with a hard expression, but the moment Kai landed before him, some of that sternness eased. He and the men around him bowed slightly in respect.
“I didn’t expect to see you here today, Your Majesty.”
Kai looked past him once more at the burning city and said, “And I didn’t expect to find half the city in ruins. What happened here?”
Khalid frowned, and for a moment he looked up at the sky as if expecting something to drop right from it. When he looked at Kai again, some of the colour had left his face.
“Blood drinkers,” he said. “They attacked us three hours ago. We were prepared for them this time, at least as much as we could be with the recent attacks, but it still wasn’t enough. They had never struck the city directly before, and too many of our hunters who could actually fight were outside when they came.” His jaw tightened. “We were lucky they didn’t come here to kill all of us.”
Every word carried bitterness, and Kai knew the man blamed himself for what had happened. As a king who carried the lives of far more people on his shoulders, Kai understood that feeling too well. The fact that the blood drinkers were behind this did not surprise him, but it did raise more questions.
“One of your hunting groups was attacked as well. I ran into them on the way here,” Kai said.
Khalid’s eyes snapped up. “Are they safe?”
Kai nodded. “Yes. They are. They were being hunted by a lord-grade blood drinker. Once I killed it, the rest tried to flee, but I managed to capture a few for questioning.” Then he paused and asked. “Why did they attack the city?”
Khalid’s face darkened further.
There was no real relief on his face, not even at hearing that some of his people had been saved. It was as though his mind was still trapped inside something worse.
Kai got his answer a moment later.
“They wanted more answers,” Khalid said. “They’ve been kidnapping hunters and anyone else they can catch outside the city because they want to know why you’ve been traveling to the desert so often lately, Lord Arzan.”
He hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice grew heavier.
“As for the reason why they were here…” Khalid paused, as if the words themselves were difficult to shape, then finally said, “They took Maari.”
Kai’s eyes widened at once. “They kidnapped her?”
Khalid nodded grimly. “Yes. They were probably tired of the tribals failing to give them the answers they wanted, so they took one of the council members instead. They likely knew who she was from the people they had already abducted.”
After that, Khalid went through everything in detail.
He spoke of how the fighting had broken out, how the blood drinkers had struck from above and torn through the city’s defenses, and how, in the middle of the chaos, one of them had snatched Maari up and flown off with her. The others had remained behind only long enough to burn houses and spread more fear before rising over a great dune in the distance and disappearing beyond it. Some of the other council members had gone after them immediately with a small group, but Khalid clearly did not believe they would be enough to bring her back on their own.
Even so, if they could at least find the blood drinkers’ location, it would help.
By the time he finished that first account, Kael and the rest of the tribals also entered the city. Soon after, Kai and Khalid, along with a few other important figures, moved inside the building the tribes used for council meetings. There, Khalid went over everything again in even greater detail, this time including all that had happened over the last few weeks.
Kai had already learned much of it from Kael on the way here, but Khalid filled in the harsher parts.
He spoke of the bodies they had found—tribal men and women who had been taken and later returned as corpses. According to him, the blood drinkers had tortured them for answers, and when none came, they had simply killed them and discarded the bodies. Even then, Khalid made one thing clear with a grim sort of pride.
The council had made sure every tribal understood that no one was to speak of Valkyrie’s Tower, but that had also probably made the blood drinkers more obsessed with the tribals.
He had no idea how the tribals had endured torture at their hands and still kept silent, but one thing was clear to him. They truly had not given up the whereabouts of Valkyrie’s Tower. If they had, then the tower would already be under attack by now.
The debt the tribes felt toward him had likely played a large part in that silence.
Even the younger generations had seen what life under the Duneborns had been like, and they had also lived long enough now to see the difference. The tribes ruled the desert themselves. They were thriving in a way they never had before. And whether they said it aloud or not, they knew much of that had only become possible because of what Kai had done.
He was grateful for that. But gratitude did not calm him.
If anything, it only sharpened the anger he already felt toward the blood drinkers, and in that moment Kai was deeply glad he had chosen to come to the desert first instead of heading straight for the corruption zones. If he had left the tribes to deal with this alone for even a little longer, who knew what the cost would have been? With the weapons and potions his people were sending, they might have fought back well enough to survive, but their numbers would still have been torn down badly.
And Maari would almost certainly be dead.
Even from the little time he had spent around her, Kai knew she was one of the pillars of the tribes. More than that, she was one of the few voices among them that stayed steady and sane no matter the pressure around her. The tribes needed someone like that.
Which meant saving her came first.
Once Kai had heard everything Khalid and the others had to say, he looked around at the tribals gathered in the council chamber, all of them watching him intently. “I know the past few weeks have been hard on all of you. You’ve lost people to the drinkers, and in the end I’m part of the reason for it, because they’re here looking for me.”
Khalid immediately shook his head. “No, Lord Arzan. You’re the one who’s been helping us this whole time.”
“I know. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is still my problem.” He took a breath before continuing. “So don’t worry. I promise I will correct it, and it won’t take more than three days.”
The moment those words left him, whispers spread through the room. More than a few of the tribals looked at him with open hope in their eyes and no one doubted his words. After all, he was the man who had killed Khorvash, the Duneborn orc who had once stood in their minds like something close to a god. But it was Khalid’s voice that rose above the murmuring.
“What are you going to do, Your Majesty?”
Kai didn’t answer right away.
He looked around the room first, waiting as the whispers slowly died out.
In his mind, he went back over what he had already seen. The blood drinkers he had fought outside. The lord-grade drinker among them. The certainty that there was almost certainly an elder blood drinker somewhere deeper in the desert, perhaps even a progenitor. Kai could not know for sure without seeing it, but he was confident enough in one thing.
He could kill it.
So he finally spoke after a minute. “What I am going to do is very simple.”
He raised two fingers.
“First,” he said, folding one down, “I am going to save Maari and every other tribal I still can.”
Then he folded the second finger.
“And second, I am going to hunt down every blood drinker hiding in the Ashari Desert. Every single one of them. Especially the one leading them.” He let the words settle before finishing, “And when I get my hands on it, I will make sure they suffer even worse than the orcs did.”
***
Killian looked down at the corruption zone from the carriage Lord Arzan had created and found that he could not keep the usual sternness on his face.
He had seen the dead mana plague before. He had fought its creatures before. But this was very different.
In Vanderfall, the whole place had been swallowed in darkness, as if the land itself had simply been drowned beneath a black tide. Here, looking down from above, it felt less like darkness and more like death slowly spreading across the ground.
The town below had turned into a stain of black so deep and wrong that Killian felt his eyes linger on it against his will.
He had never seen a color like that before. And the people inside it were no longer people.
The weavers moving through the streets and crouching on rooftops were wrong in ways the old ones had never been. They were taller than him, broad-shouldered and twisted, with claws so long they looked like several blades had been jammed into each hand. Jagged stone growths had burst out of their backs and limbs, and from those rocky protrusions leaked a thick, dark substance that stuck to their flesh like rot made liquid.
These were not the weavers he knew.
And if the Watchers’ reports were accurate, then the weavers were not even the worst of it. The town stood close to several beast caves. Before, the creatures in them had rarely wandered too near the settlement, but with the corruption here, Killian doubted that meant anything now.
Still, for all of that, he did not feel fear.
After everything in the Earth Plane, after seeing the Spirit King Vaelthoros and surviving that place at all, ordinary fear felt as though it had been burnt out of him. He still remembered the moment he had cut through the Spirit King’s vines to free them and get them back to their world. Something about that moment had stayed with him since then, hard and steady in his chest, pushing him forward whenever hesitation might have taken root.
After all, if he had found the courage to stand against something as close to a god as Vaelthoros, then these were still only weavers and fiends—creatures warped by a force greater than themselves. It was his duty to put them down and grant them the only mercy left to them, so that whatever came after this life might be cleaner than what dead mana had made of them.
Unfortunately, the Enforcers and Mages riding with him did not seem to share that calm.
Fear sat openly on their faces. A few had gone so pale that Killian almost frowned at the sight. No warrior had any right to look like that before battle, but even as the thought crossed his mind, he understood why.
This was not an experienced unit he had been given. Half of them had hardly seen real combat, because the more seasoned Enforcers and Mages were already leading parties of their own into other corruption zones. The Mages, in particular, were worse for it.
They dueled often enough inside safe grounds, but that was not the same as stepping into a town overrun by dead mana creatures. Most of them lived too far inside their own studies. The Enforcers at least had missions and beast hunts behind them, but even that only carried a person so far.
None of them felt ready for this.
And truthfully, he couldn’t blame them.
Everything about this had been rushed. There had been no proper time to prepare them, no drills to make them familiar with these newer forms of weavers and fiends, no chance to let them sharpen their minds against what they were about to face.
In a moment like this, he could have spoken. He could have told them to steady themselves, to trust in their king, to remember their training. But Killian had always believed that words like that mattered less than people wanted them to.
Encouragement was still only encouragement. It did not stop claws or dead mana or fear. And he had never been a man of many words to begin with.
So as the carriage drew closer and closer to the town, he made his decision.
He looked at those with him. “Bring the carriage down and get off. I’m going ahead first, so none of you have to deal with problems right away.”
They all looked at him with confusion, some of them almost too startled to answer, but Killian no longer paid much attention to them. His eyes had already settled on one of the taller rooftops below where a cluster of weavers crouched together, their long claws hanging over the edge like hooked blades.
He drew his sword, waited until the carriage dropped low enough, took one breath and jumped.
Lightning burst through the length of his blade and raced across his body as he fell, and whatever shouts came from behind him were lost under the crackle of it. Killian ignored all of it. He hit the rooftop like a thunderstrike, coming down among the weavers in a flash of steel and light.
***
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