A/N
2 Chapters combined into 1 longer (3.4k ish) chap, enjoy!
Chapter 809: The First Believer
The golden fist dissolved almost as soon as Lord Kaeven disappeared over the treeline, the light folding back into my chest like smoke pulled into a closing fist, and I stood there in the hedgerow with leaves still drifting down around me.
"You… you did that with one hit," Tomas said, his voice small and young inside my head. "One hit. That man was Rank 6. My da has a Rank 2 priest three valleys over who makes the village elder nervous just by existing, and you… Rank 6 with one hit… "
I held back a smile because I understood exactly what he was feeling, and the truth was that from the outside it probably did look absurd, a village boy in road-dusty clothes launching a fist of golden light that sent a Rank 6 elder sailing through the air like a poorly aimed stone.
Tomas wasn't wrong to be amazed by it.
"In a real fight he would have had a chance," I told him inwardly. "A Rank 6 who knows he is in a fight, is a different problem from what we just dealt with. What I hit was a man who thought he was about to erase a lost village boy in his hedgerow and hadn't even considered that the boy would hit back."
Tomas went quiet for a moment, processing that, and then he said, "That's a good lesson in not underestimating people."
He was right. That was a good lesson, a lesson I should keep in mind so I don’t become on the receiving end of such a punch in the future. But right now, this battle wasn’t over yet, not as long as we were both breathing.
I used Blink Step a few times in succession.
The world lurched and contracted multiple times, and I reappeared in the cover of the treeline beside the road, close enough now to see through the branches what Lord Kaeven's arrival had interrupted.
A frown appeared on my face when I realised what I was looking at.
There was a carriage stopped in the road, and behind it several more wagons, and men in patched travelling leathers who had been reaching for weapons and then stopped. At the centre of the frozen tableau, a face I recognised so thoroughly that for a half-second the loops collapsed on top of each other and I had to remind myself that she didn't know me, that for her this was the first time.
Lady Laelyn.
My frown deepened before I could help it.
Lord Kaeven had apparently been returning from the direction of the road, which meant he had been riding toward his estate when I had been hiding in his bushes, and the timing had brought Laelyn's caravan close enough to catch the entire thing, and there was nothing I could do about any of that now.
In the trench Lord Kaeven's body had carved in the packed earth, the elder was trying to rise, one arm bent at an angle that arms were never meant to bend, his fine robes shredded at the shoulder, and his face pressed sideways into the churned dirt with blood running freely down his chin.
He was trying to get up and he couldn't, and every time his one good arm pushed against the earth, it shook and gave out and sent him back into the trench.
"He's still alive," Tomas said, and I couldn’t tell if he was worried or relieved by it.
It didn’t matter, I needed to end this.
I stepped out of the bushes onto the road.
The guards near the wagons had gone still the moment I appeared, crossbows tracking but not firing, and I didn't look at them, I didn't look at the wagons, I didn't look at Laelyn where she stood in the second carriage with her hand braced against the frame and her eyes moving between the figure in the trench and the figure walking toward him.
I kept my eyes on Lord Kaeven.
He managed to turn his face toward me as I approached, and there was a desperate look in his eyes.
"You were going to kill a lost village boy in your hedgerow," I said. "No questions, no thought, nothing personal, those were your own words. A child gets separated from a caravan on your road and your very first instinct is to erase him because loose ends are inconvenient in delicate times." I shook my head slowly, watching the elder struggle. "I keep wondering how many times you've done it before today. How many travelers went missing on this stretch of road over the years and got blamed on raiders and Sun-Touched while you sat in that beautiful house with your blessed winter orchards."
Lord Kaeven's mouth worked, and his lips shaped something, a plea or a threat or perhaps the beginning of an offer, the currency that powerful men reached for when all other resources were spent, and what came out instead was a wet cough and a rush of dark blood that spread through his silver beard, and his one working arm trembled underneath him, pushing at the earth one more time without success.
I lifted my hand and closed my fingers.
Every leaf that had drifted down from the trees around us lifted off the ground at once, hundreds of them, then thousands, gathering from the ditches and the verges and the orchard rows beyond the fence until they were a single dense ribbon spinning in the air, and then the ribbon moved, and Lord Kaeven's head came free of his shoulders and rolled into the trench.
"No!"
The cry tore out of the wagon and Laelyn pushed through the door and landed on the road with both feet, her face drained of every colour it usually held, but Beric was already there, his arm sweeping across in front of her before she could take a single step forward.
I turned to face them, finally.
The guards had massed near the wagons, six of them, crossbows raised, swords half-drawn, and every one of them was scared, and every one of them was staying anyway, which was the thing about Beric's men that I had always respected even in the loops where they never spoke a word to me.
"I wish you hadn't seen that," I sighed. "And I wish we could have met differently than this. Believe it or not, I had a much gentler introduction planned."
I started walking toward them with my hands open at my sides to show that I didn’t mean them any harm.
Then Beric made a sound I had never heard from him before, something between a grunt and a groan pulled through clenched teeth, and his sword rang against the road as it fell from his hand.
The soldier’s legs went, he dropped to one knee with his free hand clamped hard against the left side of his neck, and the light bleeding through his fingers was white and unmistakable. The sight of it made me stop and stare at him for a moment, not understanding how this was possible.
"That mark," I said. "How do you still have that?"
I took a step forward, but Lady Laelyn stepped in front of Beric.
She put herself between him and me with her chin raised and her eyes carrying a heat I had never once seen aimed in my direction across every loop I had lived through in this world, and it stopped me short because it hurt to be looked at like that.
But I couldn’t let it affect me. I knew why she was looking at me like that. She didn't know me.
For her, I was a stranger who had just butchered a Rank 6 friend of hers in the road beside her caravan, and now I was walking toward her injured captain.
"Don't come any closer," she said, her voice steady despite everything.
Behind Lady Laelyn, the six guards had found whatever reserve of courage they had been drawing on, and they came forward together, putting themselves in a line beside her, crossbows levelled, and two of them had their swords out now rather than half-drawn.
"Stay back," said the one on the left, a broad-shouldered man with road dust on his cheekbones. "You've done enough damage today."
"Whatever you are," said the one on the right, thinner, younger, eyes going to the trench where Lord Kaeven's corpse lay and then coming back to me very deliberately, "you're going to stand where you are until we decide what to do with you."
The one in the middle didn't say anything, she just kept her crossbow trained on my chest with the focused calm of someone who had been trained to hit what she aimed at and intended to demonstrate that.
A smile appeared on my face because we all knew what the reality of the situation was, that if I really did intend to harm them, then there was no chance that any of them would survive, but what made me smile was seeing their loyalty.
Even after having seen what I did to a Rank 6 elder, they still decided to stand against me, all they did all of this because they were good people, and I liked good people who kept their word.
But standing here enjoying their competence wasn't going to resolve anything.
"I'm sorry about this," I said, looking at Lady Laelyn and then Beric's bent figure behind her, and then back at Lady Laelyn again. "This was not how I wanted you two to find out. Please understand that before anything else."
She opened her mouth to respond, and I raised one hand, which caused every guard's weapon to come up an inch, and before anyone could do anything with that tension I sent the memories outward through spiritual sense, every loop, every iteration, every version of this world's slow death and the people who had tried to slow it, and I aimed it at both of them as gently as I could manage.
Lady Laelyn cried out and her hands flew to her temples, her knees bending, and I moved forward on instinct before stopping myself because stepping toward her while she was in pain was exactly what would make everything worse.
Beric made no sound at all, his head simply dropped forward, and after a moment his remaining knee gave out and he lay down on the road unconscious.
The guards all started shouting at once.
"What did you do to them?"
"Captain! Captain, can you hear me?"
"He did something, he did something with his eyes, I saw it, something came out of his eyes…"
They charged, which was predictable, and I didn't want to hurt them, so I raised my right hand and began to write at a speed too fast for any mortal eyes to follow.
The character for sleep took shape in the air between us in blue light, one stroke, two, three, and the moment it was complete, it split into six copies of itself that shot forward and each one found a forehead.
The guard in the middle went down mid-step, crossbow discharging into the road with a crack of splitting packed earth, and the bolt buried itself somewhere harmless in the grass of the verge.
The broad-shouldered one on the left went sideways into the wagon wheel with a crash of leather against wood, and the younger one on the right had been mid-lunge when sleep took him and he pitched forward and hit the road with the flat of both hands spread out in front of him, which was at least somewhat better than hitting it with his face.
The other three went at various angles, one sitting abruptly in the road as though he had simply decided to, one against the wheel of the wagon behind him, one in a sprawl that tangled his legs in an uncomfortable position.
"A few of those probably ended in a broken bone," Azure murmured.
I held back a wince because I hadn’t been trying to hurt them.
Lady Laelyn hadn’t fallen, but she was standing with both hands still pressed against her temples and her eyes closed. I waited, because pushing anything at her right now would accomplish nothing, and after a long moment she opened her eyes and looked at me.
"This…this isn't real," she said. "What you showed me, the things in my head, that's some technique, some illusion, and whatever you're doing right now is part of it."
I held back a sigh.
In the previous loop, the trust between us had been built over weeks, weeks of small moments and careful conversations and the gradual accumulation of evidence that I was a good person, and then when I had finally told her the truth, she had believed me because the foundation for belief had been built long before the truth arrived.
I had given her none of that this time.
I had given her a dead lord and unconscious guards and a flood of memories that arrived without any preparation, so I understood completely why she was standing there shaking her head.
I turned my attention to the four corners of the road around us and began to write again, different characters this time, longer ones, and each one flew to a different corner and embedded itself in the air at the boundaries of a space large enough for the three of us, and the characters connected to each other in lines of blue light.
When it was complete, the presence of the two suns went distant, like sound is muffled behind a closed door.
It was a trick I had learned from Elder Thorn in the previous loop, and it was one of the more useful things he had given me, because it meant I didn't have to use spiritual sense or do anything that looked suspicious, I could simply speak, and neither sun would hear it.
"I'm not tricking you," I said. "And I understand why you don't believe me, you have every reason not to, and I know that all the reasons I give you would sound like something someone manipulating you would say." I paused, and then I said the only thing I had left that wasn't already in her head. "If I can kill a Rank 6 elder with one strike, what reason would I have to spend my time making elaborate false memories to show a saint candidate? What would I gain from it?"
Laelyn's shaking head slowed, and I could see the argument landing in some part of her mind that was still running on logic rather than shock.
"I have seen powerful cultivators do things that didn't make sense," she whispered. "Power distorts the mind. I've seen it happen."
I couldn't argue with that.
Whether it was Elder Molric, Elder Chen Yong, or Sect Master Yuan, they were all eccentric in their own ways, eccentricity seemed to just come along with an increase in cultivation, so maybe there was a world where a high-level cultivator spent his time creating elaborate schemes for no logical gain.
The problem was, I didn’t know what to do now.
I had shared everything I had with Lady Laelyn, and I didn't know what more I could do to convince her.
Then Beric coughed from where he was lying.
It was a rough sound, pulled up from deep in his chest, and Laelyn turned immediately and put her hand under his arm to help him up, and he straightened slowly, and he looked up at me with the eyes of a man suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder.
"As much as I hate to say this," Beric said, his voice rough, "the boy is telling the truth."
Laelyn looked at him as though he had just told her the road beneath them was water.
"Beric," she said, and there was more in that one word than most people put in full sentences, disbelief, and a plea, and the distress of watching the most sceptical person she trusted take a stranger's side. "You've never trusted a man you met an hour ago in your life."
"I know," Beric said.
"You told Korin last month that even merchants you've done business with for a decade deserve watching."
"I know," Beric said again.
"Then why…"
"Because I've been seeing it," he whispered as he brought his free hand up and touched the mark below his ear that his other hand had been pressing against. "For months, my lady. I thought they were nightmares at first. Then I thought I was losing my mind. They showed me a battle in a valley I'd never seen, and I died in it, and this boy was at the centre of it, and I followed him, and…" He stopped. "They showed me everything he just showed you. Every last piece of it. Before today. Before I ever saw his face."
Lady Laelyn looked at Beric for a long time, and then she looked at the mark that sat below his ear, pale against his skin, the interlocking lines sitting there undisturbed.
"If that's true," she said slowly, "the mark should work."
"I tried it before," Beric said. "Nothing happened. But after he touched me with that energy…" He glanced at me, and the look wasn't warm, but it was honest, which from Beric was what passed for warm. "I think it's different now."
He closed his eyes and the aura came flooding in as a pressure that pressed down on us.
The road groaned, the sleeping guards shifted without waking, Laelyn's hair moved despite there being no wind, Beric held it for three seconds, five, seven, and then he let it go, and opened his eyes to look at Lady Laelyn.
"My lady," he said. "As much as I hate this. We need to trust the boy."
Laelyn looked at Beric for another long moment.
Then she exhaled, a long breath that she had clearly been holding for some time, and nodded, and the look she turned on me wasn't trust yet, I wasn't going to pretend it was, but it was something that trust could eventually be built on top of.
"What now?" Beric asked me.
I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could, the forest disappeared between one breath and the next.
The road, the wagons, the sleeping guards, the trees, the orchard, they all went somewhere else, and in their place was a study, neat and spare, with shelves of scrolls along one wall and a desk of dark wood.
Laelyn looked at me immediately, and the accusation in her eyes was back in full.
"Did you do this?"
"No," I shook my head, examining the domain that had trapped us.
Beric's aura rose instantly, filling the study with pressure, and he put himself in front of Laelyn with his hand back on his neck and his eyes moving as he scanned for threats and exits in the same breath.
"There's nothing here," he whispered. "Whatever this is, it’s beyond what the mark can deal with."
He kept his aura up anyway, because that was Beric, and even when something was beyond him, he didn't stop doing what he could.
As for me, I didn’t panic because there was no need to. There was only one person in this world who would pull something like this off just to have a conversation, and that was the person that I had been looking for this whole time.
"When I asked you to meet me at Lord Kaeven's manor," a voice said, and it came from the chair behind the desk, which had been empty a moment ago and was no longer empty, "I didn't expect to find a dead Rank 6 and the birth of a Pseudo-Rank 7. Tell me, Ke Yin, what's going on?"
Kal was sitting in the chair with his legs crossed and his hands resting in his lap.
He was really there.
Whatever had consumed him at the end of the other loop, whatever the Otherworldly Being had done with his soul across the reset, the world had given him back, and he was looking at me like I had some explaining to do.
“Kal,” I smiled, “you’re alive.”
"Of course I'm alive," Kal said, sounding amused and mildly offended that I would think he was dead. "Why wouldn't I be?"