Chapter 186: Divine One Sent To Help?

เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มี.ค. 2569 03:12

Chapter 186: Chapter 186: Divine One Sent To Help? The silence of the forest was a heavy, suffocating thing. After the chaos of shattering bone, the warbling shrieks of the Lanky ones, and the guttural roars of the Grey Monsters, the soft, rhythmic rustle of the silver-leafed trees felt like a mockery. The air here was cooler, filtered through the dense canopy of ancient trees, but it still carried the faint scent of iron and necrotizing poison. The girl, Kira, breathed heavily, her chest rattling like a broken bellows. The translucent feline legs that had allowed her to outrun death had long since dissolved, leaving her own limbs trembling with fatigue that went deeper than muscle and bone. Every breath she took sounded like a struggle against a lung full of glass. It seemed like she had burned through her essence to carry a stranger through a nightmare, and the toll was etched into every ragged breath she took. Blood... some hers, mostly not... dripped from her chin, splattering onto the soil in dark, heavy drops. Suddenly she looked small and frail. Gone was the predatory huntress who had hauled a grown man over her shoulder, in her place was a young girl barely reaching adulthood. Sol stood a few feet away, his bare feet sinking slightly into the rich, loamy soil. He didn’t feel tired. The Silver Liquid in his chest was already circulating, repairing the minor strains in his muscles and cooling the heat in his nerves. He looked down at his hands... pristine, yet marked with the invisible weight of the life he’d just watched expire. Meanwhile, Kira finally spat a thick glob of blood into the dirt, wiped her mouth with the back of a hand scarred by a dozen old battles, and stared up at Sol. Her stormy eyes, still wide with the lingering adrenaline of the flight, traveled from his pristine, glowing white tunic down to his bare, mud-flecked feet, and finally up to his crimson-tinted eyes. She looked like she didn’t know what to ask a total stranger, "Hmm! You don’t even know where you are?" she finally answered his earlier question, wiping her mouth with a blood-stained sleeve and her voice a ragged scrap of its former self. She finally caught enough breath to speak without gagging on her own copper-tasting spit and looked up at him, her stormy eyes filled with a volatile mix of awe, suspicion, and raw, jagged nerves "But you don’t seem like you’re lying. Well, you’re East of the Great Orrath forest. "These are the ancestral hunting grounds of the Veynar Tribe. Our borders. Our blood. Or what’s left of them after the attacks from those bastards." She forced herself to her feet, though her knees shook with a violent tremor. She circled around him slowly, her movements predatory even in her exhausted state, as if she were inspecting a mythical being that had just fallen out of the sky... which, in a way, he had. Sol stood his ground, his crimson gaze following her. He finally had a moment to look at her properly. She seemed to be the same age as him, and was shorter than him, but the way she carried herself... shoulders back, chin high, hand resting habitually near the hilt of that jagged, tooth-edged bone-sword... made her feel like a coiled viper. Even drained of energy, she looked like she could kill him in three different ways before he could blink. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢 "Now," she said, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous register that sent a shiver down his spine. "Start talking, ’Divine One.’ she spat, the title sounding more like an accusation than a compliment. "Who the hell are you? Where did you come from? One minute we’re being overrun by a Marauder Breach, the line is falling, and the next, there’s a flash of white light and a man in a silk dress is lying in the middle of a war zone looking like he’s taking a goddamn nap." Sol looked around, his new eyes taking in the environment with terrifying clarity. The "Orrath Forest" was a far cry from the prehistoric, suffocating jungle of his home near the Osari ravine. The trees here were massive beyond reason, with trunks as wide as houses, their bark etched with thick, glowing blue moss that thrummed with a faint, rhythmic power. It looked "managed," almost like a park designed by a giant who had a taste for bioluminescence and ancient order. He looked back at Kira. He couldn’t tell her the truth. The reality was too absurd. He couldn’t say, ’I’m a transmigrated writer from another world who just spent the afternoon fucking a goddess in a pocket dimension and got vomited out. ’ "My name is Sol," he said, his voice deep and resonant, vibrating in the still air in a way that surprised even him. "As for where I came from... I don’t really know. I remember a flash of light, a cold void, and then hitting the dirt in front of you." It was a partial truth. The best kind of lie. Kira’s eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. She didn’t believe him, but she couldn’t ignore the evidence. The white tunic he wore didn’t have a single tear. His skin was flawless, radiating a faint, terrifying warmth that she could feel even from five feet away. She stepped closer, her nose wrinkling as she sniffed the air around him. "You don’t smell like a savage. You don’t even smell like those disgusting Grey Brutes or the Yellow Stalkers." She reached out, her fingers hovering tentatively near the shimmering fabric of his tunic. She didn’t touch it at first, as if afraid it might burn her, but then she grazed the hem. Her eyes widened. "And this material... I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not woven. It’s grown. Like a phantom, but solid. This is High Clan craft. Or something older." She looked back up at his face, her stormy eyes searching his crimson ones. "You carry a Divine Aura, Sol. It’s faint, but it’s there. Like a coal that hasn’t gone out yet. Earlier our shaman has divined that a ’Divine One’ would be sent to help us. Are you that divine one?" Sol let out a bitter laugh that died in his throat. " I don’t know what the shaman may have said, but miracles don’t usually fall into the mud and I think you guys are much stronger than me. So, I doubt she may be talking about me. I’m just a guy who’s trying to figure out why everything is trying to eat me." Kira went silent. The mention of "eating" seemed to snap the fragile cord holding her together. The bravado, the suspicion, the "coiled viper" energy... it all seemed to drain out of her at once, leaving behind a hollow, trembling girl. She turned away from him, staring back toward the ridge they had just cleared. The sky was still a bruised, angry red, the color of a fresh wound. In his past life, he’d written clickbait articles about "10 Ways to Comfort a Friend," but standing here, in the shadow of a massacre, those words were just useless static. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. Sol opened his mouth to say something...anything... but no word came out. What do you say to someone who just watched their people get ripped into wet parchment? "Sorry for your loss"? "Good job on the running"? It all sounded like shit. Finally, Kira’s shoulders hitched. A ragged, wet sound escaped her throat. She stayed like that for another minute before she slowly, painfully, forced herself to control her emotions. She wiped her face with a gore-stained sleeve, smearing the dark blood into a gruesome mask. When she looked up at Sol, her stormy eyes were bloodshot and raw, but she was trying... desperately... to shove the grief back into whatever dark hole warriors kept their pain. "I... I apologize," she wheezed, her voice sounding like it had been dragged over broken glass. "That was an unsightly display. A warrior of the Veynar should not show such... such weakness. Especially not in front of a stranger." Sol looked at her, his crimson gaze softening just a fraction. After having sex Nia, Evara and Isylia, he had felt that he was some big shot when it came to emotions, But as he looked at Kira’s trembling hands, he felt that there was still so much to learn in this world. "Don’t worry about it," Sol said, his deep, resonant voice cutting through the stillness. "You just ran through hell with a hundred-and-eighty-pound anchor on your back." Kira gave a weak, hollow huff that might have been a laugh in a different life. "You’re heavier than an anchor. I think." "Something like that," Sol replied. He took a step closer, his boots crunching softly. "Thank you, Kira. For the record... you saved my life. I don’t care what they call me... ’Divine One’ or ’Lost One’... I was a dazed idiot in the dirt, and you didn’t leave me there. I couldn’t be thankful enough. Without you, I’d be a head on those monster’s belt right now." Kira didn’t look at him. She just shook her head, her voice trembling and her gaze drifting back toward the ridge where the sky still seemed to be bruised, apocalyptic red. "You saved mine too, stranger. That Lanky... I felt its shadow. I felt the poison in the air. If you hadn’t snapped its arm, I would be a black, liquefied corpse in the mud right now. We’re equal." Sol didn’t argue, but he knew she was wrong. He just felt a heavy, cold weight in his stomach. He knew he still owed her. Without him slowing her down, she might have been able to help her comrades. She might have been able to pull someone else out. Instead, she had been helping him. His mind flashed back to the clearing. He saw the golden light of the Bear phantom. He saw the man who had looked at him and smiled... that tragic, knowing smile that had stripped away Sol’s arrogance more effectively than any monster could. "The man back there," Sol asked, his voice low. "The one with the Bear. Who was he?"

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