Chapter 70 — Bait
The underground valley fell silent for a second.
Just one.
Then Steve opened his mouth and the name came out again — not shouted this time, but broken, filled with things that had no way of becoming words.
"Nesin. Why. What is happening here."
They weren't questions. They were fragments of thought escaping before they could be organized.
Up above, Jelim floated.
Her face exposed for the first time — purple hair falling freely, purple eyes carrying that specific intensity that didn't belong to this world, her expression completely blank like the surface of water before the stone drops. She looked at Dregor and his group with the cold assessment of someone calculating angles, distances, and optimal points of impact.
*What is this idiot talking about now.*
The thought passed through her mind without any particular disturbance.
*Doesn't matter. I have work to do.*
She raised her hands.
The valley floor answered.
It wasn't gradual — it was immediate, as if the underground earth had been waiting for permission that had never been given before. Stone trees and roots tore free from the ground with the sound of the world ripping apart, rising vertically, roots dragging chunks of earth as they ascended. One. Ten. Twenty. The air filled with dirt and dust and the sound of stone separating from stone, and above it all Jelim remained at the center of that ascent like something that belonged to the sky and never to the ground.
Her hands split the group of trees in two.
Half remained suspended — motionless, waiting.
The other half began to change.
The wood twisted in on itself, roots bending, trunks breaking into smaller sections that tapered to deadly points with a precision that was not nature but pure will. The sound was disturbing — wood being forced against its own geometry, becoming something it had never been when it first rose from the earth.
Stakes.
Hundreds of them. Floating in the air like an inverted constellation, each sharpened tip pointed downward, pointed at the three men in the underground valley who looked up with different expressions — Dregor with calculated evaluation, Fanzel with a clenched jaw like someone who had just realized a grave mistake, and Dragf with the first genuine spark of interest he had shown since entering the scene.
Keara saw all of it from the edge of the battlefield where she was treating the wounded.
"This is not good."
Not for the enemies. For everyone in the radius of impact.
She turned to the freed prisoners — dozens of them, of various races, some still processing that they were out of the cages, others already on their feet and assessing escape routes with the eyes of people who had spent too much time memorizing enclosed spaces.
"Run. Now. As far away from here as possible."
Orzun was already moving before she finished the sentence.
"Run! Get out of this area!" the orc's voice cut through the valley with urgency that needed no explanation. "It's dangerous! Move!"
Then he turned and walked in the opposite direction — not away from the battle, but toward the fifth wagon where the figure with white-silver hair stood watching.
"Hey." Orzun stopped in front of her. "We'd better get out of here now."
Nessira didn't move.
Her emerald eyes were fixed on a specific point in the valley — on Steve, still on his knees, still staring upward with the expression of someone whose map of the world had been pulled out from under his feet without warning.
"I can't leave without him."
Orzun followed her gaze. Then looked back at her.
He said nothing. He simply stayed by her side.
---
In the center of the valley, Steve tried to organize what his mind refused to organize.
*Why.*
The word repeated in a loop that produced no answer — only more volume, more urgency, more of that specific feeling of injustice that has no clear object but fills the entire chest.
*Why me. What did I do wrong. Why is it always me.*
The room in Mozambique. The blue glow of the monitor. His mother in the hospital with her cold hand in his. The form. The question — *are you willing to lose everything?*
And she had sent the link.
She knew.
She had to have known.
---
Dregor looked at Fanzel with the specific patience of a man who would prefer not to need explanations but would listen anyway because the alternative was worse.
"You said the only threat was the older warrior."
It wasn't an accusation. It was a fact presented before the question.
"Tell me now," he continued, his voice completely flat, "why there is a woman floating in front of us with hundreds of stakes pointed in our direction and you didn't identify her as a threat."
Fanzel ground his teeth.
His blue pupils pulsed with active mana — already recalculating, already trying to understand how his detection had failed so completely. The answer came slowly, carrying the specific taste of a mistake that only becomes clear once it is already too late.
"The mask," he said. "The mask she was wearing hid her true power. My tracking magic read the surface and found it neutral. What was underneath…"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
Dregor remained silent for a moment.
"Damn it."
Dragf watched the stakes in the air with something close to appreciation.
"Now we're talking," he said. "Things are about to get ugly."
Up above, Jelim tilted her head slightly.
"It seems you've discovered the secret of my mask."
Her voice came out completely calm. Without pleasure, without anger — just acknowledgment.
"As a token of gratitude… I will eradicate you from this place."
The stakes descended.
---
It wasn't rain. It was a deluge.
Hundreds of sharpened points sliced through the air of the underground valley in converging trajectories. The sound of impact arrived before the eyes could process the speed. The ground exploded in multiple simultaneous points, stone flying, dust rising in columns that collapsed back onto themselves.
Dregor ran.
He didn't retreat — he advanced laterally, parallel to the line of attack, his feet finding gaps between impacts with the precision of a man who had spent decades learning that stopping meant dying. The stakes fell behind him, to his left, to his right — each one meters from the previous but the distance closing because Jelim was adjusting, because Jelim saw where he was going before he got there.
Behind Dregor, the valley was turning into rubble.
Fanzel opened a portal.
Simple. Immediate. The translucent surface materialized in front of him just in time for a stake to pierce the space where his torso had been. It passed through. He reappeared fifty meters to the side — outside the main line of attack, behind a rocky formation that offered minimal but sufficient cover to breathe.
Dragf didn't run.
He stayed where he was and drew his sword.
The stakes came. Dragf cut — a circular motion that wasn't defense but destruction, the blade intercepting sharpened tips and shattering wood before it could land. One. Three. Seven. The parries backward and to the sides were pure reflex, his body moving before his mind decided, decades of combat turned into instinctive geometry.
The rhythm was impressive.
Jelim observed for exactly as long as she needed.
*He reacts well.*
*Then he won't react to this.*
One stake came from below Dragf's field of vision — not from above, not from the front, but low and from the side, a trajectory impossible to intercept with his sword already committed to the previous defensive motion.
It pierced his right leg.
The impact was dry. Definitive.
Dragf lost his balance — he didn't fall, but the next step came out wrong, his weight distributed in a way his body refused to compensate, and for a second he stood frozen with the blade midway through its arc and his eyes dropping to the wood buried in his flesh.
He looked at his leg.
Then he looked forward.
The stakes that had been in motion had stopped.
Completely. Suspended. Floating at distances varying from centimeters to meters, each one motionless as if time had frozen only for them.
*Deliberate,* Dragf realized.
*She stopped them on purpose.*
*So I would see.*
He slowly turned his head — a warrior's instinct refusing to accept what logic had already processed.
The stakes were everywhere.
In front. To the sides. One above his right shoulder. Two at chest level. The closest one separated him from the next second by a distance that could not be measured in any unit that mattered.
Jelim floated in the air above it all, her purple hair completely still despite the moving air the valley produced, her eyes watching him with the expression of someone who had already reached the end of the calculation and was simply waiting for the result to materialize.
"One down," she said simply.
The stakes moved.
The sound Dragf made was brief.
After that, there was no more sound.
---
Steve stood up.
He shouldn't have been able to. Jelim's daggers had pierced his hands and legs, the Percentage System was depleted, and his body had absorbed more impact in the last few hours than should have been possible for someone without a conventional system to regenerate HP.
He stood up anyway.
One step. Another. His legs trembling with that specific vibration of muscle that had already spent everything but still received the order to continue.
"Nesin."
His voice came out hoarse. Hoarser than he intended. But loud enough.
"Nesin! Why did you bring me here!"
Jelim didn't shift her gaze from Dregor, who was still moving through the valley avoiding the secondary attacks.
*To hell with this kid.*
"Why!" Steve took another dragging step. "I demand an answer! I demand—"
His hand closed around a small fragment of stone from the ground.
He threw it.
The stone struck Jelim in the shoulder with an impact that wasn't pain but interruption — the kind of thing that couldn't be ignored not because it hurt, but because it existed, because someone had insisted on existing even when it would have been easier not to.
Jelim finally looked away from Dregor.
She looked at Steve for a long second.
"I'm sorry, Dagon," she said, her voice carrying into the air as if the veteran were present to hear it. "But you won't find your bait intact."
The daggers materialized and flew.
They pierced his hands. His legs. Steve dropped to his knees with a sound that echoed through the valley, his mouth open in a scream that didn't fully come out — it stayed trapped between his lungs and throat, choked by the impact.
"Answer me."
The voice came out like that. Broken. On his knees. With daggers in his hands and no active system and no Dagon and nothing.
"NESIN!"
The name echoed again.
Jelim turned back toward Dregor, who continued moving through the destroyed valley.
*To hell with it. I have other ways to get what I need.*
She raised her hands.
New stakes began to converge — this time not toward Dregor, but toward the point on the ground where Steve knelt bleeding, his voice already exhausted from shouting a name that produced no answer.
*To hell with everything.*
---
Steve saw the stakes coming.
He didn't try to move. There was nowhere to go. No strength. No system. No Dagon to leap over him at the last second with that irritatingly effective jump.
There was only him, the cold ground, the stakes, and the unanswered question that continued to occupy his entire chest, leaving no room for anything else.
*Why me.*
*What did I do wrong.*
*Why is it always me.*
The thought didn't finish.
Because something stepped between him and the stakes.
It wasn't a shield. It wasn't magic. It wasn't Keara with emergency healing or Orzun with a knife or anything Steve would have expected.
It was an embrace.
Arms wrapped around his torso — firm, immediate, without hesitation. A body placing itself in front of him with that specific determination of someone who had decided and wasn't looking for approval.
Nessira.
Her white-silver hair covered Steve's vision for a second. The scent was strange — not unpleasant, just different, like air after a thunderstorm in a place that doesn't exist in the real world.
The stakes struck.
The impact was enormous — Steve felt the shockwave pass through Nessira's body and reach his own like an echo of something much larger. The ground exploded. Dust rose in a dense column that completely swallowed the two of them, blocking any view of what lay outside.
Inside the dust, silence.
Steve didn't know if he was alive.
Then he realized he was breathing.
Then he realized the arms around him were still there.
The dust swirled and rose and began — very slowly — to settle.
---
In Thornvale, the streets did what streets do when there is sun, a market, and children running between vendors — they produced lively, continuous noise that needed no reason to exist.
Silvano was in a small tavern near the second gate when the sky changed.
It wasn't gradual. A massive shadow passed over the rooftops with a speed that didn't belong to any creature he knew — not merely flying by, but crossing the entire horizon in time that made the horses in the streets rear up without knowing why.
He stepped out into the street.
He looked up.
A dragon.
Black scales with a dark blue sheen. Wings that blocked a considerable slice of the sky when they reached the peak of each beat. Trajectory absolutely direct — north. Toward the Frozen Mountains.
No hesitation. No deviation. Like something with a destination that allowed no interruption.
Around Silvano, Thornvale fell into panic. Women pulled children indoors. Vendors abandoned their stalls. Someone was shouting orders that no one heard because everyone was already obeying the instinct to disappear from open spaces when a dragon was in the sky.
Silvano didn't move for the seconds he needed to think.
*A dragon flying toward the Frozen Mountains without looking at anything below.*
*That is not a wild creature looking for territory.*
*That is someone in a hurry.*
His hand went to his sword.
He climbed onto the roof of the tavern — one leap, two points of support on the sloped tiles, balance found without effort. From there he could see better. The dragon was already growing smaller in the northern direction, but the trajectory was perfectly clear.
"Holy Thunder Sword."
Silvano's eyes glowed white.
It wasn't a dramatic transformation — it was activation, like flipping a switch, the magic responding to the name like something that had always been present and only needed to be called.
He began to run.
Across the rooftops first — from house to house, his feet finding support points that weren't obvious but which he saw before he needed them, his body moving with the fluidity of someone who had spent years training in spaces where the ground was never guaranteed.
Then beyond the walls.
The Frozen Mountains rose on the northern horizon — distant, shrouded in mist, completely silent.
The dragon disappeared in their direction.
Silvano ran faster.
*Whoever you're going to save, dragon — I'll arrive in time to ask questions.*
---
In the underground valley, the dust was beginning to settle.
Jelim observed the point of impact from above.
The cloud of fragments and earth still rose, slower now, losing coherence as the underground air absorbed it. On the edges of the destruction, open craters where the stakes had struck the ground with enough force to crack the stone.
In the center.
Jelim waited.
The dust continued to settle.
The center of the impact was slowly revealed — and it was empty. There were no bodies. No blood. Nothing to indicate that anyone had been there when the stakes arrived.
Only broken ground.
And in the air, very faintly, a green glow that was already fading when Jelim tried to focus on it — like a reflection of light on moving water, present for less than a second before becoming only the memory of having existed.
Jelim remained completely still.
Her purple eyes swept across the valley.
Steve had disappeared.
Nessira had disappeared.
And the green glow that no being in this world should have been able to produce confirmed exactly who had taken them.
Jelim slowly lowered her hands.
*Damn it.*