[Voidknight Ascension] Chapter 223 – The Battle’s Toll

It didn’t take long for the battle to turn in full. Even without Raiko’s help, the monsters acted like puppets with their strings cut. They ran around aimlessly, without direction or purpose, often attacking each other rather than any people.

As tired and beleaguered as Kale and his people were, they managed to turn the battle into a full rout. They had won. Which meant that Kale knew precisely who had taken down that ogre.

There was only one person who would saunter into the battle, pick the biggest, baddest monster there, and then deck it right in the face.

That was Sam to a T.

Ever since they were little, Sam had used his strength to make peace. It sounded odd, now that Kale thought about it, but Sam had been protecting him for as long as he knew him.

Not that Kale ever felt he needed it, but after the accident…well, there was no shame in asking for help. Kale realized he should have been more upfront and been a man about it, asking for Sam to help him instead of just taking it for granted.

Now it was like they were kids back at the playground with Sam squaring up to the big Hawaiian kid who got held back two grades and made even the teachers nervous.

He didn’t always win his fights, but even when he lost, the bullies usually left them alone. He made sure the cost was too high.

“Go on,” Chris said, motioning toward where they had seen the ogre fall. “We’ll finish up.”

The dullahans were clobbering any monsters that dared get close to the group and Haman’s Skyshard. Raiko was busy with Haman, holding and treating him like her long-lost baby.

The other Sil’marans were busy cleaning up the stragglers, still operating as a group. Their dullahans had gone off to strike at their own enemies now that the hordes had been annihilated.

Kale nodded to Chris and hurried down the slope leading up to Haman’s Skyshard.

Raiko, still holding Haman and…what was she doing? Kale squinted. The green light coming through the barrier around them bent the light oddly, but he was sure that she had been huffing Haman’s fur.

When he looked at her again, she regarded him imperiously. “Where are you going, Kale?” she asked.

Kale motioned. “There’s only one guy who could do that.”

Raiko’s answering grin told him everything he needed to know. “Another reunion, long awaited,” she mused to herself, hefting Haman in her arms.

The pobul squeaked excitedly and rolled onto his back, lifting all his paws into the air toward her.

Raiko obliged by petting his creamy belly.

In all the time that Kale had known him–which, admittedly wasn’t incredibly long–he had never allowed anybody to touch his belly. Even Xero treated the pobul with respect instead of babying him like he was just a precious animal.

Together the pair weaved through the crowds of people clustered for protection. Some were getting their wounds bandaged or tended to by one of the Sil’marans, others were putting a merciful end to suffering monsters.

“I take you’re their leader?” Raiko asked him. She only spared Kale a glance. The rest of her attention was devoted to Haman.

Kale shrugged his shoulders, then winced at the pain. “I suppose you could say that.”

Xero, who had been limping toward them, watched Raiko and Kale go. For a moment, he looked as if he intended to catch up to them, but then thought better of it and let them go.

Kale found that odd. Not least of all because the Samurai–while fairly taciturn–was quite friendly in his own way. He often went out of his way to meet people even if he didn’t say much.

The way he looked at Raiko spoke volumes.

They have a past, Kale reminded himself.

Kale’s Skyshard rolled up and down in small hills and dips, which was made all the more difficult to traverse thanks to the dead monsters and torn up ground.

They saw the ogre’s massive blue feet, its yellowed toenails pointed skyward, before they saw the rest of it.

“I sure hope its loincloth is intact,” Kale muttered darkly. “I don’t need to see that.”

Haman snickered, pulling on Raiko’s electrified scarf and playing with it. He rolled around, wrapping himself up in it and promptly fell asleep, his little paws twitching occasionally.

Raiko smiled down at Haman. She seemed so happy. Far more than anyone else on this battlefield.

Before they were halfway to the ogre, the ground rumbled. Kale looked at Raiko, and they both broke into a steady run.

They were nearly to the ogre when Kale threw out a hand and stopped Raiko from plunging headlong over the crack that formed in the ground.

Land crumbled and fell away inches from the tips of his boots. Kale gently tried to guide Raiko back, even as the soil eroded beneath her feet.

“Sam? Komachi?” Raiko shouted. “Where are you?”

Kale stared, dumbstruck. The ogre’s body, along with the ground beneath it, broke apart and fell away. Peering over the edge, Kale could see a lone figure perched atop the ogre’s face. The man was attacking with all his might as he pulled one weapon after the other out of the flapping dreadlocks, heedless of the danger he was in.

Kale shouted down to him. “Sam!” He could hardly believe what he was seeing. This had to be a trick. Sam was just holding out for dramatic effect. He’d surely jump up here any moment, right?

Raiko lunged for the edge, as if she were going to dive after him, but Kale held her back.

“No! The Maelstrom is down there!” he reminded her.

“I don’t care! He’s going to die!” She continued to struggle, but the divide between his Strength and hers was too vast. At least she didn’t seem willing to attack Kale.

With his strong arms wrapped around her middle, Kale kept her from leaping to her death even as he muttered quietly to himself, “C’mon, Sam. You’ve got this. Stop dicking around and get back here. We came all this way. You can’t ditch me now.”

Raiko and Kale watched as Sam snapped out of his furor. Realizing what was going on, he turned and looked up. Gathering strength in his legs, the shrinking figure seemed to jump but got caught on something.

“Oh, come on!” Matt said on Kale’s left.

Kai, Lenal, and Bal’daz appeared as well.

The large Hawaiian eyed Kale and then put a gentle hand on Raiko’s shoulder. He shook his head solemnly, his features grave. Even though he just arrived, he understood her desire. “Do not.”

She stared after Sam’s disappearing figure, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I can’t let him die…not after everything…”

Matt placed a comforting hand on her back. “He’ll be fine,” though even he could hear the lie in his voice. “Bet my immortality on it.”

“You have Haman,” Lenal reminded her.

“My King…” Bal’daz whispered.

Kale looked at the newcomers, unsure of what to make of them.

Raiko’s arm, covered with magical symbols, glowed with mana. Kale tensed, preparing himself for some kind of attack after all, but she touched her eyes with the liquid mana and studied the scene below.

Sam was too far away to do anything. They watched as his chunk of Skyshard was pulled toward the black wall of instant death.

At the last moment, he leapt from the ogre’s corpse and, in true Samuel Hunter fashion, jumped toward his demise.

As soon as the ant-sized figure of the man touched the wall, a brilliant flash of sheet lightning roared across the face of the black wall.

The black wall wobbled and opened for a moment, swallowing the ogre and closing again. There was no sign of where Sam had gone.

Gathering strength once more, the Maelstrom let out a burst of mana that rolled out through the air and rocked their Skyshard like a ship at sea.

Raiko shielded her eyes. Whatever she saw must have been much more intense.

“At least the ogre’s gone?” Matt suggested. “You know Sam isn’t going to let that be the last thing he’s done. He’ll be back to make sure we all know he was the one who went toe-to-toe with that blue-cheeked-up bastard.”

“Please don’t speak like that again,” Kai muttered.

“Oh, like you didn’t notice the hams on that dude’s butt? He could have sat down and made two Olympic swimming pools.”

Kale shook his head as Kai and Matt argued about the ogre’s backside. He understood it for what it was: a coping mechanism against the grief and the loss.

The mousy elf looked rather uncomfortable about the cheeked-up topic. She did laugh, though she tried to hide it.

She turned to Kale and extended a delicate hand. “I do not believe we’ve met, but I feel like I know you already from Sam’s stories. You must be Kale. I’m Lenal.”

Gently extricating himself from Raiko, Kale gripped her hand and shook it with a sense of bewilderment. He hadn’t shaken somebody’s hand since the job fair back in his senior year.

There hadn’t been much use for celebration or higher-class greetings in his life.

Despite the levity, nobody walked away from the edge as if they were all expecting Sam to leap up at the last moment and join them.

He never did.

“Sam will return,” Raiko promised, sounding calmer, but just as stricken. “He wielded Void mana against the Maelstrom.” She looked out across Kale’s Skyshard pitted with the scars of battle, and then towards Haman’s tiny isle.

Kale nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He wanted to believe it. But this was the second time that he had seen his brother fall to his doom.

He survived last time, Kale reminded himself, and tried not to dwell too much on it. Turning to Raiko, he said, “I’m not even sure what that means. What is ‘Void mana’?”

“A type of incredibly powerful mana only Samuel Hunter can wield,” she said gently. “Something that…I suspect was unusually effective against the Maelstrom. Wherever he went, was not where the ogre did, I hope.”

“Well, the ogre’s dead as shit,” Matt said. “So I don’t think he’s going anywhere. But man…I would have loved to loot the thing. Did you see all those sweet weapons in its hair?”

Haman chuffed in his sleep at the ogre’s mention. Clearly, he wasn’t a fan of the monster.

Kai clapped Matt heavily on the back, nearly making the man stumble over the edge. He boomed out a great deep belly laugh. “Then I expect Sam will return to us with a trove of weapons!”

Kale realized that their grief was horribly short-lived for seeing one of their companions just straight-up die. He could hardly believe that they were joking at a time like this.

Raiko smiled sadly and squeezed Haman in her arms. “Kale, you’re no longer on your own anymore. You’re welcome in our settlement, just as Sam wanted. Wants.” She looked away with obvious pain before steeling herself. “But you lead an independent faction now. That complicates things. If you wish for all your people to be protected against the Maelstrom, it is done. However, we must form an alliance for the [Sourcefield] to take a lasting effect on your Skyshard.”

Forcing himself to relax the fists at his sides, he looked around at the shimmering bubble-like shield that encompassed the much larger Skyshard below them. Enough to hold the whole of Kale’s Skyshard as well as Haman’s.

“It looks like it’s already protecting us,” Kale said.

Chris and Kylie hurried toward them, their excited expressions searching the gathered faces. It dawned on them a moment later what happened.

“Can the guy go one fucking week without yeeting himself off a cliff?!” Chris shouted. “Come on! Who does that?”

Kylie put a hand on her brother’s arm, and it was only then that Kale realized Chris had secretly been holding out hope that Sam was alive this entire time.

“He’ll be back,” Raiko reiterated.

“Who the fuck are you?” Chris asked, his expression dark.

“Queen of Sil’mara,” she said with forced patience, half lidding her eyes. “Sage Raiko.”

Chris didn’t mistake the careful movements of the other Sil’marans. Nobody reached for a weapon, but suddenly Kale found that there were two distinct groups facing each other near the edge of his Skyshard.

“Why don’t we head back to the others?” Kale offered diplomatically. “Introductions are in order, and it would be best in the company of all.”

And away from a cliff that somebody could be thrown from, Kale thought to himself as the two separated groups made their way back.