I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1453: The Ground We Chose

The host came down from the treeline without a single war cry.

There were no drums, and no horns of their own. There was only the drumming of hundreds of feet on frozen earth and the dry clatter of black wood as spears came level, rank after rank of them, while the censers swung on their poles overhead and poured more mist over the broken rampart than the morning wind could carry off.

For a moment, the North Guards simply watched it come.

Then the first rank reached the rubble slope, and the yard went mad.

Northern did not move straight away. He stood where he was with Doron at his left shoulder and Tema at his right, and he let Shingan open quietly behind his eyes.

The Hunters were simple on the inside. Lean muscle packed around dense bone, a soul core in each chest that burned no brighter than a Drifter’s, and here and there, scattered through the ranks, the steadier glow of a Nomad. Nothing that would make a Master on this Keep think twice.

What held his attention was their feet.

Not one of them ever put a foot down on untested ground. Each one landed exactly where the one in front had already stepped, and so the whole host flowed down the slope like water poured over steps.

’So individually, you’re nothing...’

He raised his hand.

Lightning Rod was the only talent this body carried, and he had already miscalculated with it once this week. The woman he had miscalculated on was forty paces away right now, bellowing at the Gate Wardens with her sword in the air, and he had no wish to explain to her why the lightning of a Sage had just erased her courtyard.

’Savant. Savant at most.’

He dropped his hand.

The bolt came down on the leading Hunter of the middle prong and did not stop there. Lightning Chains carried it on, snapping from one body to the next, and to the next, stitching a crooked white seam across the yard. Six. Seven.

Then it simply died in the air, a pace short of the eighth.

Seven Hunters fell where they stood, smoking, and their spears went clattering across the flagstones.

The eighth looked at the blackened ground in front of its feet for exactly one heartbeat. Then it stepped back, and the Hunter beside it stepped back too, and within three breaths the whole middle prong had loosened by another arm’s length between each body.

Tema’s fingers dug into Doron’s sleeve.

"They’re talking about it. They’re saying... something like, ’spread like seed.’ Spread like seed, spread like seed, it’s going down the whole line..."

Northern called the next bolt.

It took three of them.

’Oh, come on.’

He lowered his hand and watched the prong reform, looser still, without so much as a glance back at their dead. It was not the speed of it that annoyed him. It was that he had seen soldiers drill for a month to learn a thing these creatures had just picked up in the time it took to blink.

"Captain."

Doron had not taken his eyes off the rubble slope.

"Your lightning jumps. They won’t stand close enough for it to jump."

"I noticed."

"Then what do we do?"

Northern turned his head and looked across the yard, past the barracks lane where Han was still standing grey-brown and stubborn with a Hunter circling him at spear’s length, past the smoke rising off Baletta’s rampart, to the low sandbag walls that cut the Castle Keep into its training grounds.

He had walked those grounds for two days. Every one of them was a pen of open earth fenced by sandbags stacked chest-high, and every pen opened onto the next through a single narrow gap, wide enough for two soldiers to pass shoulder to shoulder.

Two soldiers. Not two soldiers standing an arm’s length apart.

"We give them a door," Northern said.

Doron frowned at him.

"A door."

"They won’t bunch up for me. So I’ll find them somewhere they have to."

He looked up at the inner tower. High on its parapet, small against the grey sky, a boy with a head of red hair was standing exactly where he had been told to stand, gripping the stonework with both hands.

Northern lifted his arm and swept it back, twice, toward the rear of the Keep.

Jalsket stared down at him.

Then his hair went black.

"Fall back?" Doron’s head snapped round. "The Commander ordered every squad to hold its—"

"The Commander said to make it expensive. I’m doing that."

Down on the ramparts, Baletta saw the black. She looked at the tower for a moment and then down at Northern, with her jaw set so hard he could see it from the yard. Then she did as she was told and began running along the wall walk toward the rear of the Keep, firing small, spiteful bursts into the yard behind her to cover herself.

Han saw it next. He shoved his Hunter off the end of the stair with one granite palm and backed away down the barracks lane, step after deliberate step, never once turning round, until a smear of yellow lightning swept past him and he was simply not there anymore.

Iren set him down behind the second ground’s sandbags, dropped to one knee himself, and was gone again before Han could even complain.

And the Hunters followed.

Of course they did. An enemy giving ground was an enemy that was losing, and so the whole host poured up through the barracks lane after the Eleventh Squad the way a tide pours into a harbour. They reached the first line of sandbags. Then they reached the gaps.

And they stopped.

Northern watched it happen from behind the second wall, and he honestly could not decide whether to be impressed or insulted.

They did not so much as touch the gaps. The leaders drew up short of them with one hand raised, and behind them the whole host came to a halt in perfect silence, spears upright, heads tilted toward the narrow openings in the low walls the way a hound tilts its head at a snare it has smelled but not yet seen.

"They know," Tema whispered. Her face had gone chalk-white. "They’re saying the walls are low and the doors are small. They’re saying... ’a trap, a trap, go up.’"

"Go up?"

Northern looked up.

The Hunters were already climbing.

They went up the barracks walls like squirrels up a pine, finding holds in the mortar that Northern would have sworn were not there. In a matter of breaths the rooftops above the second ground were lined with them, dozens upon dozens, dusk-blue against the grey morning, crouching on the tiles with their spears held low. From up there, the sandbag walls meant nothing at all. From up there, they could drop onto any ground in the Keep they liked.

’Of course they do. Of course...’

Beside him, Doron had gone very still. His hand had drifted to his chest, where the talent lived.

"Captain."

"I know."

"There are too many of them up there. If they come down on us all at once—"

"Doron."

The man looked at him.

Northern kept his eyes on the rooftops, and his voice came out almost lazy.

"You told me your fog smothers all five senses. All of them. Not just the eyes."

Doron’s brow creased.

"Yes."

"And Tema tells me they’ve been talking to each other this whole time, all across the yard, like birds."

Tema nodded quickly, not understanding.

Doron did not seem to understand either. Then his eyes went from Northern to the rooftops, from the rooftops to Tema, and the molten light in them sharpened all at once.

"They can’t talk if they can’t hear."

"They can’t talk if they can’t hear," Northern agreed. "Last card, Doron. Turn it over."

Doron Viccus Elmondrion drew in one long breath and let it out as fog.

It poured out of him black as spilled ink, too heavy to drift and too fast to be smoke. It rolled up the barracks walls the way the Hunters had, and it swallowed the rooftops whole, eave to eave, tile to tile, until the whole row of buildings above the second ground sat under a single shapeless bank of darkness so thick that the morning light simply ended at its edge.

Inside it, not a single sound.

Tema’s hand flew to her mouth.

"They’ve stopped. They’ve stopped talking. There’s... there’s nothing, Captain, they’re just... they can’t hear each other..."

Northern already knew. He had felt it through Shingan the instant the fog closed, a hundred calm, spaced, patient little soul cores suddenly jolting like men who had stepped off a stair that was not there. Blind, deaf and cut off from every voice around them, the most intelligent monsters in the north did exactly what every frightened animal did in the dark.

They drew together.

Back to back. Shoulder to shoulder. Spear by spear, all along the rooftops, in tight, blind knots, until no body stood more than a hand’s breadth from the next.

Northern raised his hand.

’There you are.’

He did not bother to throttle this one quite so much.

The bolt went into the black fog like a needle into cloth, and for one long moment the entire row of rooftops lit from within. A white web jumped and branched and jumped again through the darkness, twenty times, thirty, too fast to count. The tiles blew outward. The fog glowed like a lantern. And when the light finally died, the rain that came down onto the second ground was made of slate and char and long dusk-blue limbs.

The yard behind them had gone quiet.

Baletta stared down from the wall walk with her mouth open. Han, sitting propped against the sandbags with a hand pressed to his ribs, whistled low.

Doron let the fog settle, breathing hard, and said nothing at all. He only looked at Northern for a long time, with his hand still pressed flat against his chest.

But Northern’s eyes had already left the rooftops.

They had gone past them, over the broken barracks and the smoking yard, to the breach in the northern rampart. The censers had come forward. They hung above the rubble slope on their long black poles, a dozen of them, maybe more, and the mist spilling out of them was no longer drifting. It was rolling downhill now, heavy as poured wool, toward the one place in the whole Keep that was still burning.

Vanessa.

"Doron. Keep the roofs clear. Tema, stay with him."

Tema grabbed his sleeve before he could take a step.

"Where are you going?"

Northern gently peeled her fingers off his arm, one by one.

"To have a word with whoever is holding those poles."