NOVEL NEXT Chapter 366: My Precious
Ren stood in the aftermath of the battle, the ruins of the forest steaming around him.
Smoke drifted lazily from burning branches, and blood soaked the bark beneath his feet.
The bodies of the Rosefield Knights lay in mangled heaps, strewn across splintered wood and shattered vines.
He exhaled, slowly rotating his shoulder with a groan.
"Three knights, three sets of problems, and not a damn clue which one of you was carrying the ruby."
He sighed to himself.
"Maybe I should've verified that before killing them all."
Thankfully, the first corpse was right in front of him.
With an exhale, he stepped over the corpse of the guy with the fire sword.
He knelt beside the body, cutting off the straps and pulling off the destroyed armor. He couldn't help but chuckle at seeing the hole his punch had left in the breastplate.
But that wasn't why he was doing this. He focused back on his task.
His hand dipped into the corpse's inner pockets, boots, belt compartments, and even the inside of the breastplate.
Nothing.
"Of course it's not you." He muttered. "You're one of those flashy fire guys. Not like Elias. Elias was pretty low-key and reliable."
"You probably insisted that you didn't need to carry it because your sword was the real treasure or something equally arrogant." Ren chuckled to himself as he stared at the dead man. "I wouldn't put it past you, Rosefield."
He moved on to the second.
The knight who could slice the very air. His limbs were twisted at odd angles from where Ren had blasted him into the tree.
Ren crouched beside the body, digging through it.
Still nothing.
"Wind guy... always the reliable lieutenant. Or at least that's the vibe I'm getting from you. You probably thought you had more important things to focus on than carrying a ruby fragment. We'll, fuck you."
He stood and looked at the third corpse nearby. The thread user.
There wasn't much left of her. When she'd fallen in death, her body had passed through her threads, and had been cut to pieces right before it lost its power.
"Guess not you either." He chuckled. "They wouldn't have given it to you, since you're not an actual part of their team. I don't even know where your torso is."
He turned away.
That left only one.
The slowing blade guy.
Ren sighed, rubbing a hand through his hair. "Of course it's the one whose body fell more than twenty feet to the forest floor and got turned into a scattered jigsaw puzzle."
He leapt down from the branch, landing lightly on a patch of thick moss at the base of the tree. His boots squelched as he took a step forward, scanning the ground.
"Where's your body, slow guy? Come on. Don't make me pick up your liver just to find a stupid rock."
He kicked aside a clump of leaves, then spotted something.
A piece of bloodied cloth.
He followed the trail, one foot after the other, pushing branches and ferns aside.
More blood, more scraps of clothing. Then, he saw it. A twisted, half-buried torso. The knight's face was crushed, but his gloved hand still clutched a torn pouch.
Ren crouched, reaching forward...
Snap!
His fingers froze in the air.
The faint crack of a twig behind him made the hairs on the back of his neck stand.
He turned sharply.
Two figures emerged from the treeline. Cloaked, armored, and fast.
Before he could move, the one in front surged forward, scooping something from the dirt a few feet to Ren's right, just beyond where the dead Knight's lower half had landed.
A crimson glow pulsed.
Fwoom!
A pillar of red light burst into the air, straight from the Knight's palm. It soared above the forest, splitting the canopy with its intensity.
Ren's eyes narrowed.
"You've got to be kidding me."
The two Knights didn't wait around. They bolted into the trees, vanishing between the trunks like smoke in the wind.
Ren stood, fingers clenched into a fist.
"I just killed a whole damn Rosefield squad for that, and you vultures want to swoop in and snatch it? Over my dead body."
He didn't wait.
He shot after them.
Fortunately, the red pillar of light still pierced through the canopy above, marking their position like a beacon.
His eyes burned with frustration, and his blood still ran hot from the fight with the Rosefields.
The two knights below were fast, he'd give them that, but they weren't nearly fast enough.
He dropped from the trees with a crash, hitting the ground in a crouch just ahead of them, vines already curling from his arms and shoulders.
They skidded to a halt.
"Back off." The taller one barked, drawing a curved axe from his back. "You're only one person and there's two of us. You won't win this fight."
Ren said nothing. His eyes were hard and flat, his fists clenched at his sides.
The second knight, a woman with jagged armor and silver tattoos on her neck, threw a blade of air toward him.
"Don't ignore—"
"Push."
Ren's resonance erupted before she could finish.
The blast slammed into both of them, hurling them backward. The woman smashed into a thick trunk with a pained gasp, her ribs crunching, while the man tumbled into a patch of thorns, already bleeding from his cheek.
They struggled to stand.
Ren was on the woman before she could blink.
His fist crashed into her jaw, then again into her sternum. She tried to raise her weapon, but his vines shot from his palms and wrapped around her arms, pulling them wide.
"Please—" She gasped.
He slammed her against a tree hard enough to splinter the bark. The vines twisted, then snapped her spine with a whipcrack. She slumped to the ground.
The man roared and lunged forward, swinging his axe in a wide arc. Ren ducked under the blow, grabbed the man by the throat, and drove a Push into his chest at point blank.
The impact caved in his armor and launched him skyward. He hit the ground thirty feet away, rolled twice, and didn't move.
Ren approached, vines hissing around him.
The knight was still breathing.
"Stop... wait... we didn't know it was yours..."
Ren raised a hand.
Push.
The man's chest caved inward with a wet crunch, and he fell silent.
Ren exhaled, finally feeling the tension in his shoulders start to fade.
Blood dripped from his knuckles, and his muscles ached, but it was a good kind of ache.
He walked over to the fallen ruby fragment where it had landed during the fight, gleaming with an inner red glow.
He picked it up.
Fwoom!
Another pillar of red light burst into the air. It streaked into the sky, marking his possession for all to see.
"My precious..."
Ren stood beneath it, holding the ruby fragment, his silhouette bathed in red.
"One down." He muttered. "Two to go."