Aren did not run straight at the monster.
That was what Darius would have done.
He went left instead, into the grey trees at the edge of the clearing, keeping low and moving fast.
The moss swallowed the sound of his steps.
The strip of torn shirt over his nose and mouth smelled of sweat and blood, and it was already slipping, so he tied it tighter with shaking fingers as he ran.
In the clearing, Vivienne stood alone with a hundred silver blades in the air above her.
Gravemaw had lowered its huge body almost to the ground.
Its six legs were bent.
Its round mouth was pointed straight at her, and the rings of stone teeth inside had started to turn so fast they made a high whining sound.
Charging without a plan was how people died.
So he made one, very quickly, in the ten seconds he had.
He could not fight the creature.
He could not hurt it.
He had one use of his skill, for one second, and during that second he would be as soft as paper.
That meant he would not get a second chance.
Whatever he did had to be done in a single touch, at the exact moment it mattered most.
Vivienne’s blades had already hit those grey plates once and left only thin white marks.
But if the plates had no hardness at all, even for one second, those same blades would cut through them like water.
He did not need to win.
He only needed to open the door at the right moment, and let her walk through it.
Gravemaw charged.
It moved like a falling wall.
The ground shook under it.
Vivienne swept her sword down, and every silver crescent above her head flew forward at once, a storm of moonlight crossing the clearing.
Aren came out of the trees from the side.
He was three steps from the creature when the blades were halfway across the clearing.
He was two steps away when Gravemaw’s huge body passed in front of him, so close he could smell the cold grave smell coming off its plates.
On the last step, he reached out and laid his bare hand flat against the grey stone of its side.
He did not say anything.
He looked at the plates under his palm and thought one word, very clearly, the way he had thought it in front of the iron post.
Zero.
The door inside him opened.
Under his hand, the plates changed.
They did not crack or break.
They simply stopped being hard.
For one second, the armor of a Rank D monster was as soft as a pillow.
In the same second, the silver blades arrived.
They went through Gravemaw like it was not there.
One after another, dozens of them, sliding into its body and out the other side.
The creature did not even have time to scream at first.
Its legs folded.
Its great mouth opened wide, and then the sound came out, high and terrible, the sound of something very old finding out it could die.
And in that same second, Aren’s own body became nothing.
He felt it happen.
His skin, his bones, everything that held him together suddenly had no strength at all.
The air itself felt sharp against his face.
Gravemaw was still moving, still thrashing in its death, and one of its back legs swung out in a wide, blind arc.
It barely touched him, but it was enough.
He flew.
The clearing spun past.
Something in his left side broke with a sound he felt more than heard, and then the second ended and his body came back to him, just in time for him to hit the trees.
He crashed through branches, bounced off a trunk, and landed face-down in deep moss twenty paces from the edge of the clearing.
For a moment, only pain remained.
It was everywhere.
He could not breathe without something grinding in his chest.
The rag, he thought.
Get rid of the rag.
His hands did not want to work.
He made them work anyway.
He pulled the strip of cloth off his face, pushed it down into the wet moss under his body, and pressed it as deep as he could.
Then he let his face fall into the moss beside it.
Through the trees, very far away, he heard Gravemaw’s scream fade into a long, rattling breath.
Then he heard nothing at all.
In the dark, the System spoke to him.
He was not awake, and he was not dreaming.
He was somewhere in between, floating, and the blue windows opened one by one in front of him like lanterns lit in a long hallway.
[Primary Anchor has slain: Gravemaw (Rank D).]
[Primary Anchor has absorbed its core.]
[Vivienne Ashgrave.
Rank F: Level 4 → Level 9.]
[Anchor’s technique evolved under extreme pressure.]
[Crescent Moon Blade (Grade C): Stage 1 → Stage 2.]
[Source: Investment recorded.
Host risked life on behalf of Anchor.]
[Mirror Return triggered.]
A small wheel appeared in the darkness, the same size as the one in the forest, glowing softly.
Its four segments turned slowly in front of him.
He watched it spin with a strange calm.
He was too tired to hope.
It passed the wide x10 segment and kept going.
It passed x100, slowing, slowing.
The pointer crept across the edge of the narrow red segment and stopped there, right in the middle.
[Result: x1,000.]
[Return: Crescent Moon Blade.
Grade C +3.]
[Skill acquired: Crescent Moon Blade (Grade S).]
[Mastery: 0%.]
He stared at the name.
It was her technique.
The silver crescents he had watched kill wolves and cut through a monster two ranks above her.
The thing she had been born to use, that made the whole Great Hall stand up and shout.
He had it now, three grades higher than hers.
And he could never use it in front of anyone.
The moment a single silver crescent appeared in his hand, anyone who had ever seen Vivienne fight would know exactly where it had come from.
Somewhere in the dark, he would have laughed, if laughing had not hurt so much.
“Aren.
Aren.
Open your eyes, you idiot.”
He opened them.
The purple sky was gone.
Above him was a normal grey afternoon sky, with real clouds, and Mira’s face was hanging over him, red and wet and furious.
He was lying on a stretcher in the walled garden outside the Training Rift.
All around him, people were shouting.
Instructors were running in and out of the circle of white stones.
Healers in white coats knelt beside other stretchers.
The tear in the air behind them was flickering and growing smaller, its edges red instead of shimmering.
“You were in the trees,” Mira said.
Her voice cracked.
“They found you in the trees.
You weren’t breathing right.
I thought…” She stopped and wiped her face with the back of her hand, hard.
“I left you there.
I picked Tam up and I left you there.”
“You were right to,” Aren said.
It came out as a croak.
“That’s what I would have told you to do.”
“I don’t care what you would have told me.” She took his hand and squeezed it so hard that it hurt more than his ribs.
She did not let go.
A healer came and pressed glowing hands against his side, and the grinding in his chest became a dull ache.
While she worked, Aren listened.
People were talking all around him, loud and excited, and they were all talking about the same thing.
“…alone, she killed it alone…”
“…Rank D, and she’s only F, how is that possible…”
“…Silver Moon Empress, she cut it into pieces…”
A little way off, in the middle of a ring of instructors, Vivienne sat on a stone bench with a blanket over her shoulders.
Her silver braid had come half undone.
Her armor was scratched and dirty.
A healer was wrapping a cut on her arm.
She was not looking at anyone.
She was staring at the flickering tear in the air with an expression Aren had never seen on her before.
She looked lost.
Professor Crane stood in front of her with his scroll.
“There was someone else,” Vivienne said.
Her voice was quiet, but it carried.
“At the end.
A man came out of the trees and touched it.
Then the armor…
my blades went through it.
They hadn’t before.”
“A man,” Crane repeated.
“His face was covered.
With a rag.” She frowned.
“I only saw him for a moment.”
Crane looked at her with an expression that was almost gentle, which on his face looked strange.
“You fought a monster two ranks above you, Lady Ashgrave.
You used more power than your body has ever held.
Exhaustion does strange things to the eyes.
Your blades simply broke through.”
“They did not simply do anything.”
“Of course.” Crane wrote something on his scroll.
“We will search the area.”
Two older students standing near Aren’s stretcher had heard everything.
One of them leaned toward the other with a grin.
“A man with a rag on his face,” he said.
“The Rag.
Sure.
The great Lady Ashgrave was saved by a ghost with a dishcloth.”
The other one laughed.
The joke moved through the crowd faster than any healer.
Within a few minutes, Aren heard someone else say it, and then someone else again.
The Rag.
By tonight, the whole Academy would know the name, and almost no one would believe he was real.
Vivienne turned her head.
Her eyes moved slowly across the garden, across the stretchers, across the students.
They passed over Aren lying there, a bruised servant with his face swollen and his hand in a commoner girl’s grip.
They did not stop.
Then they did.
They came back, just for a moment, and rested on the moss stains on his torn shirt.
On the blood on his left side.
Aren let his eyes go unfocused and his head roll a little to the side, like a boy who had been hit very hard and did not quite know where he was.
After a long second, Vivienne looked away.
Someone else had been watching him the whole time.
Darius Holt stood at the edge of the white stones, clean, without a single scratch on him.
He had come out of the Rift before anyone else.
Aren had heard a healer say so.
And now everyone in the garden knew why.
Team Four had told the instructors exactly who had run.
Darius walked over slowly and stood beside the stretcher.
He looked down at Aren with a face that had gone pale.
“You saw what happened in there,” Darius said softly, so Mira could not hear over the noise.
“Whatever you think you saw, you didn’t see it.
Do you understand me, Zero?”
Aren looked up at him and said nothing.
[Darius Holt.
Hostility: 98% → 100%.]
[Darius Holt can be anchored when the Host reaches Rank E.]