Chapter 31: Verdant
Sera did not make it in time.
She watched the hippogriff bear down – heavy talons pressing Yuria into the ground, pinning her – and then its beak closed on her arm and shoulder and pulled. With a wretched squelching sound, it ripped her arm off, blood splattering as her muscles and sinew stretched and snapped. Yuria screamed.
The arm was not salvageable, Sera calculated. Her feet pounding the grass, her brain running the math automatically. A wound like that, without mana to staunch it, would kill a civilian soon. Yuria would bleed out and die in minutes. Maybe less.
She needed to move fast. She lifted her daggers and closed the distance in a leap, driving both blades into the claw still pinning Yuria to the ground. The hippogriff screeched and pulled back. She grabbed Yuria in the opening, dead weight, already going limp – and rolled away. The hippogriff snapped at them, but Sera was faster, throwing the unconscious researcher across her shoulder, already on her feet and running as fast as she could back to Ophelia.
Behind her the hippogriff screamed. She heard it wrench the daggers free and come after them.
It would be alright. Sera noted, looking ahead.
Rian was in front of her, in the distance.
Running toward her, hand gripping his scythe in preparation. His eyes found hers across the expanse – dark, steady, bruised twilight. Surreally, Sera thought again of dark amethysts. Then, he looked away from her, eyes focusing on the hippogriff.
They passed each other without stopping.
Sera kept running, eyes focused now on Ophelia whose gaze was already locked on the body being carried, hands glowing gold in preparation to receive the wounded girl.
She didn't see it, but she heard it. Felt it first, actually – a wave of heat rolling across her back, the oppressive weight of dark mana erupting behind her, thick and smothering, spreading outward like fog swallowing a field. It pressed against her skin even at a distance, dense and heavy, stifling.
Strong. Genuinely strong – a snapshot moment of an S-rank vessel released for a second, no restraint, no performance. Like Arlen in the basement room but different in register. Where Arlen's mana had been precise and cold and architectural, this was something heavier. Oppressive. The kind of strength that felt like a heavy hand. She thought of her instructor.
S-ranks, Sera noted distantly, were something else entirely.
Then she heard the shift of Rian's shadow scythe and the thud of his boots behind her as he swiftly culled the hippogriff, decapitating the beast in an instant.
She kept running. She was almost to Ophelia.
Yuria surfaced briefly – pain pulling her up through the dark – and let out a broken sound against Sera's shoulder.
"It hurts," she gasped. "It hurts."
"I know," Sera said. Yuria was already gone again, mind back in the dark. "Try your best to stay alive."
Reaching Ophelia, Sera crouched and set Yuria down in a single motion. Ophelia was fast, hands glowing and around the wound before Yuria had fully settled against the grass, muttering a spell under her breath. Hibiscus, as well, quickly and steadily wrenching a tourniquet tight around what little remained of the shoulder.
Sera stepped back, sat back on her heels, and exhaled. She wiped her forehead with her forearm.
Her part was done. Whether Yuria lived was Ophelia's problem now.
She looked up. Across the field the fights were still running – the second hippogriff, just then, crashing down with guttural garbled titter, the third being hounded on, as all the espers attacked simultaneously.
One casualty on the sideline did not stop an operation in progress. It wasn't supposed to.
After all, it was war. This exercise was war. Keep fighting until the monsters are dead. Save those who are useful. Ignore those who cannot be saved. Rules of triage. Yuria could not be saved – coupled with her growing notoriety among the raid force, she was expendable. It was her own fault she was in harm's way.
But Sera had rescued her and brought her back to Ophelia, and that had changed the situation. Ophelia and Hibiscus were now occupied with Yuria. Unable to help the team because of her choices. Sera winced. This would probably cost her, she thought, flicking a nervous glance toward Rena on the platform.
But hadn't Commander Thern done the same? Broken formation when the better call would have been to leave them both for dead.
She would examine that later.
The third hippogriff went down hard.
Sera watched it from the sideline – the formation closing in simultaneously, the beast wheeling and finding no gap. Caan's ivy whip burrowed deep into the flesh of its throat, Simon's lance pierced through its stomach, and Kael with a blazing staff soaring down from above to land a final bone-crunching crack against its skull as its body erupted into flames. It screamed once, sharp and truncated, and then it didn't. And the body crumpled to the ground with a heavy thud.
All around, espers were tense, weapons still raised.
"Stand down."
Rian's voice cut across the field. Clean. Even. The same voice he used for everything.
The formation held for a moment and then it loosened. Espers dropping out of stance, breathing hard, falling immediately onto the ground. The field collapsing into heaving breaths and unregulated groans.
Risa and Takumi were already moving – crossing from the periphery toward Ophelia, a few support personnel carrying a stretcher with them. Ophelia stepped back from Yuria and let them take her, her hands still glowing faintly, mana threads following the wound as they lifted the researcher onto the stretcher. Still alive. Barely, maybe, but alive.
Sera watched them go.
Then Joel's voice cracked across the open field.
"What's the point if we intervene!"
Not a question. Clearly about what had just transpired.
Sera looked up. Around her, espers who had been catching their breath did the same – heads turning toward the commanders standing at the far end of the field. Joel had Rian by the collar. Not dramatically – no shove, no raised fist. Just his hand closed in the fabric at Rian's chest, face close, flat fury of someone who had witnessed a fellow commander breaking protocol. Rian stood still and took it. Rena stood beside them, arms loosely crossed, not intervening.
The field stayed quiet. Arlen, closest to the three commanders, scratched his head and found somewhere else to look.
Then Joel turned to Rena.
Whatever he said after that was lower – private, between the two of them. She received it without expression. Her chin lifted fractionally. She said something back – short – and Joel held her gaze for a long moment before releasing Rian's collar and stepping back.
Rena's chestnut eyes caught her eyes across the expanse.
Sera looked away first.
Her finger picked unconsciously at her thumb. She had broken protocol to save Yuria. She breathed in deep. Shouldn't have done that. Fuck. Why had she done that?
Vessel, the entity rumbled.
Right. She snapped her attention back to the field. She could think about that later. She needed to get a hippogriff. The thing inside her would not be happy if she left empty handed.
Sera scanned the field. The carcasses were spread across the grass – the first two already drawing curious espers and guides from the other teams and support personnel for analysis and clean up, people gravitating toward the kills the way people always did after a fight. Too many eyes near the first two.
The third was quieter. Espers from the fight were still present, but fatigued and distracted.
Simon was there. Collapsed in a sitting position, onto the grass some yards from the carcass, still heaving, his spear planted in the ground beside him like a flagpole, blonde hair damp against his forehead. Not paying attention to anything except the inside of his own lungs.
Perfect.
Sera stood, brushed the grass off her knees, and walked toward him with a steady pace. Perfectly normal to check up on a friend. Perfectly legitimate. Nobody would clock it as anything else.
Simon looked up when she crouched beside him. His face still flushed from exertion, chest still heaving, green eyes finding hers with a boyish excitement she had catalogued across two months of weekly sessions.
"Good work," she said, patting him on the shoulder. "Need some guiding?" she asked.
Simon rested his head against her hand. "Yes, please."
She straddled him like she did with Mira in the caves. Sitting down in his lap with his legs between her knees, pulled him into a warm embrace, and let him rest his head against her shoulder.
Standard hold, cheek to cheek, her hands at his back, the professional warmth she used for everyone. More intimate than Hibiscus, because she couldn't pull much with less contact. His pleasure at her proximity was also a nice bonus. His pollution was thick after the fight, rich with exertion. She took the edge off it.
She looked at the distance – over his shoulder, fifteen yards away, the carcass.
She sent her mana downward. Through her knees. Into the grass. The tendrils tumbling and winding towards the hippogriff until she made contact with its claw. And then she moved fast, through the flesh – the arteries and veins, mana wrapping around the vessel before it could dissolve further. She pulled it back and inward toward her in one swift motion – something in her elated and greedy – felt it compress and settle into her core like something slotting into place.
The entity rumbled with interest and opened its maw. She pushed it away. Firm hold on her sanity.
Simon exhaled against her shoulder, some of the tension leaving him.
"That was some fight, wasn't it?" He mumbled into her shoulder, enjoying the sensation of pollution leaving his body, and the way her hips settled against his. He wrapped his arms around her waist.
"Yeah," she chuckled, patting him lightly on the back. "You did great out there, some pretty cool lance skills you've got there."
He tightened his arms. "Thanks," he mumbled. Sera noted his body felt incrementally warmer. "You too," he added, hesitantly. "Saw you save the researcher. Fast legs, you've got."
She mumbled a pleasant thanks in return.
They sat there, arms in each other, the wind rustling through scratchy grass, the murmurs of espers around them in the background. Sera breathed in deep and sighed. Simon, dirty with sweat, dust, and fatigue, wanted the moment to last forever.
"Hey," he said quietly. "Would you…could you come to my room tonight? For tea?"
She pulled back and looked at him. Green eyes, earnest, the blush already creeping up his neck before she'd answered.
Something sad wound through Sera's heart when she looked at him. Green eyes reminiscent of a verdant forest. A naive and earnest face. She couldn't give what she didn't have.
What was a lover to her, anyway. She'd had one once. Forgotten him entirely. Felt nothing about the forgetting. A lover was just someone she'd eventually kill.
Better he didn't know that.
The beast reached for the hippogriff's vessel again. She clenched her mana around it, pushed the hunger away again. Later, she thought, resolutely.
"No, sorry Simon," she said. Not unkindly. Attention occupied by the impatient beast inside her. "I've got something on my plate." She smiled.
He nodded.
"Yeah, of course," he said. "No worries."
He didn't push. Never pushed. But something ugly moved across Simon's face that Sera didn't see.