I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1454: The One Who Throws The Sky

I CAN COPY AND EVOLVE TALENTS

Chapter 1456: The One Who Throws The Sky

Commander Vanessa had been fighting the Forest Hunters for thirteen years, and in all of those years she had hated nothing in the world as much as she hated that mist.

It was not poison. It did not choke. If you breathed it in, it tasted of wet bark and nothing else. But it drank fire. Whatever the Hunters burned inside those censers, their mist crawled over a flame and swallowed it the way wet sand swallows a match, and she had watched it do exactly that to her own fire more times than she wanted to count.

The Heritage of Flames. The greatest fire in the Empire, some said the greatest fire in the world.

And every time it met that mist, it went out like a candle in a cellar.

It was going out now.

She stood at the foot of the rubble slope with her sword in both hands and her vermilion hair plastered to her face with sweat and soot, and every blaze she threw up the slope sank into the grey and died before it could catch.

The captains were holding either side of her, barely. The big one in his earthen plates had taken a spear through the gap under his arm and was fighting one-handed now, still wading forward, still roaring. The lean woman’s hook-blades had slowed. And old Harsk, who bellowed less and killed more than any of them, had gone down under three spears at once not two minutes ago.

Vanessa had seen him fall.

She had not been able to reach him.

"COMMANDER!"

Someone was shouting behind her. She did not turn. The mist was coming down the slope now, rolling ahead of the censers in a slow grey wave, and behind it came the next rank of Hunters, in no hurry at all, as if the Keep already belonged to them.

And then lightning walked up the slope.

There was no other way to describe it. It did not fall from the sky the way it had fallen on her own training ground two days ago. It moved along the ground, low and crackling, cutting straight through the rolling mist like a thrown knife through wool, and at the front of it, walking, was a black-haired boy in the black uniform of the North Guards with his hands empty at his sides.

Rian.

Vanessa stared.

’That fool is going to get himself killed.’

The Hunters on the slope saw him too. They turned toward him together, a dozen spears swinging round at once, and the boy did not slow down. He did not even look at them. His eyes stayed on the poles.

Northern, for his part, had already chosen.

The censers were carried by pairs, one Hunter holding the pole and one guarding the holder, and they were strung across the top of the slope in a long, loose line with a dozen paces between each pair. Too far apart for Lightning Chains to jump. The Hunters had learned that much already.

So he would not ask the lightning to jump.

He stopped at the foot of the rubble, planted his feet, and pulled everything the body had into a single point in his right fist. Lightning Rod’s One Strike was a simple thing. All the strength, all the speed and all the lightning a body held, spent in one perfect instant, with nothing left behind it for ten long seconds.

He was a Sage, after all. He could only put a Sage’s worth into it.

More or less.

The strike left him as a single white line, flat and straight across the top of the slope, and it did not bother with the Hunters in between.

It went through the first pole, and the second, and the third, and every pole along that line in the space of a breath, and every censer they carried split open at once like a row of rotten gourds. What spilled out of them was not mist anymore.

It was a thin, sick, yellow ash, and the wind coming off the forest picked it up off the rubble and carried it away over the broken rampart as though it had been waiting all morning for permission.

Then the Hunters were on him.

Ten seconds.

Northern had fought through longer. He caught the first spear under his arm and snapped the shaft, stepped inside the second and put an elbow through a dusk-blue throat, and for the rest of the ten seconds he did very little that anyone watching would have called impressive. He simply did not die. He ducked and he turned and he let the Hunters get in each other’s way, which they were far too good to do for long.

On the tenth second, the lightning came back into his hands.

He put it into the ground.

Behind him, at the foot of the slope, Vanessa felt the mist go.

She felt it before she saw it, the way you feel a door open in a cold house. The grey that had sat on her fire all morning lifted off it like a wet blanket dragged away, and the flame she had been holding down in her chest out of sheer habit went up her arms before she had even told it to.

The Heritage of Flames came back into the world all at once.

It poured out of her in a wall. It ran up the rubble slope faster than any Hunter could run, vermilion and white and roaring, and it did not go out. It climbed the broken rampart and spilled through the breach and set the treeline beyond it alight, and every Hunter caught on that slope simply stopped existing inside it. The heat alone threw the nearest soldiers onto their backs. Up on the wall walk, the snow went to steam with one long hiss.

Northern stood in the middle of it with his arm over his face.

’So that’s what she looks like when she isn’t unconscious.’

Then the fire parted around him, politely, and he realised she had done it on purpose.

It was over quickly after that.

Tema heard it first. She had followed Doron to the foot of the barracks, and she stood there with her head cocked toward the treeline while the fire roared, and under the soot her face had gone the colour of tallow.

"They’re leaving."

Doron looked at her.

"Running?"

"No." She shook her head slowly. "Not running. They’re... they’re saying one word, all of them, over and over. I think it means enough. Like when you’ve finished eating."

And the Hunters went.

They did not break. They did not scatter. Whatever was left of the host drew out of the yard in good order, rank by rank, carrying what dead they could reach, and slipped through the smoking breach into the burning treeline the same way they had come. Not one of them looked back.

"NOBODY GOES UNDER THE TREES!" Vanessa roared after the first squad that tried. "I SAID NOBODY! LET THEM GO!"

Then the yard went very quiet.

It took most of the morning to count the dead. The North Guards had lost a hundred and six soldiers and two captains, and the Gate Wardens had lost twice that on their own wall and were not saying so. The granaries were half burned. The stables were empty. The northern rampart that had held for four hundred winters was a ramp of rubble now, and the soldiers who climbed it to look out over the forest came back down again without saying much.

The Eleventh Squad had lost no one.

Han had two cracked ribs and would not stop complaining that his skin still felt like a flagstone. Baletta had burned the hair off one forearm. Iren sat against the sandbags of the second ground with his arms around his knees, shaking so hard his teeth rattled.

And when Peaker came to tell him he had carried fifty-three wounded soldiers off the field that morning, he only nodded and went on shaking. Nyssira and Pam had spent the whole battle hauling the wounded to the healers behind him, and Pam was already making very sure that everyone knew it.

And Jalsket came down from the inner tower with his hair still pitch black.

He stood in front of Northern with his hands behind his back and his eyes on his boots, the way he had been told to stand.

"Sir. It won’t go back."

Northern looked at him.

"Won’t it?"

"I’ve been trying for an hour, sir. I think I scared it."

Somewhere behind them, Han laughed and then groaned and grabbed his ribs.

In the quiet of Northern’s head, meanwhile, a different kind of count was going on.

[Your clone has slain Catastrophic Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[You have gained +12 talent fragments]

[Your clone has slain Catastrophic Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[You have gained +12 talent fragments]

[Your clone has slain Devil Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[You have gained +18 talent fragments]

[...]

[Echo acquired: Catastrophic Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

It went on for quite a while. Northern let it scroll past behind his eyes without really looking.

’Fifty-eight... for a Sage, I’d say that’s respectable.’

A shadow fell across him, and when he looked up, Vanessa was standing over him. She was black with soot from her hair to her boots, the pot pipe already smoking between her teeth, and she looked down at him for a long time without saying a word.

"That line on the slope," she said at last. "That was a Sage’s output, was it?"

"Give or take."

"Give or take." She blew a thin stream of black smoke over his head. "You walked up that slope alone, kid."

"I had a word with the pole-holders."

Vanessa kept looking at him. There was no smile on her face at all, and Northern had the uncomfortable feeling that she was about to ask him something he would have to lie about.

Instead, she took the pipe out of her mouth and pointed the stem at the squad sprawled behind him, at Han and Iren and the boy with the black hair that would not go back.

"All of them came back."

"All of them."

She nodded, once, and walked away.

Tema waited until the Commander was out of earshot, then sidled up beside him, bouncing slightly on her heels and wearing the proud little smile again as though the morning had never happened.

"Captain. Before they went, they said something else. About you."

Northern did not look at her.

"Do I want to know?"

"They don’t have a word for it, exactly. It’s more of a picture." She screwed up her face, thinking. "The closest I can get is... the one who throws the sky."

For a moment, Northern said nothing at all.

’That’s a terrible name.’

Tema tilted her head at him, delighted.

"I think it’s kind of pretty."