NOVEL NEXT Chapter 380: 380: Rush Killing!
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Kai roared then. Not long. Not loud enough to waste breath. Just enough to tell the part of the world that listens to a king that it was time to move. He drove forward and broke the line in the middle with his body. Men fell sideways. Men went to their knees. Men grabbed at him and found chitin and heat.
Azhara's arrow flew at that exact beat and passed through the seam of a man's shoulder guard and lodged deep. He screamed and went down into a friend's legs. The friend fell too. The gap widened.
"Now!" Azhara hissed through the road.
Kai took the gift. He broke through the last tight place and came out the other side of the crescent like a knife coming out of cloth. He did not stop to gloat. He pivoted to face them again so they could not pull him from behind. He kept his spear in motion, a circle around him, a wall that moved with him.
Rauk stared at him across six steps of churned sand. He panted. He spat. He grinned. He raised his spear point in salute, blood running down his wrist, and then he pointed it at Kai again.
"Again," he said.
"Again," Kai said.
They met in the middle of the saddle as the moon slid behind another thin cloud and the light went gray.
Behind Rauk, men shifted and looked to the east. They could hear the small drum. They could feel the pull that meant help or a trap or both. They held. That was their job. Hold the cliff. Keep the cliff busy. Make him bleed time.
Kai did not give them time. He used what he had fed. He gave them speed and pressure and the kind of focus that makes a man seem bigger than he is. He wanted the line to crack, not just bend. He wanted Rauk to have to choose men or pride. He wanted him to pick wrong.
He feinted high and struck low. He stepped right and hit left. He used the butt twice in a row and then the blade when they expected the butt again. He threw sand with his heel into two men's eyes and then did not look at them to trick their friends into thinking they did not matter. He hit the ones who mattered. He made Rauk turn his head at the wrong time.
Rauk turned his head. Kai struck. The spear butt cracked Rauk's jaw. Rauk's head snapped. He did not fall. He staggered. He shook his head and laughed again, mute this time, because his jaw hurt when he tried to speak.
"Drop," Azhara's voice came, very soft.
Kai did not ask why. He dropped. An arrow hissed over him and took a four-star in the eye who had stepped up to put a spear in Kai's exposed neck. The man fell without a sound. Rauk's eyes widened for one beat. Azhara did not exist again.
The line buckled. It did not break yet. It would. It knew it would. You could hear it in the way men breathed.
Rauk set his feet and raised his spear. He was going to make one more try at pride.
Kai stepped in to take it from him.
The dunes held the echo of their clash like a bowl holds water. The camp to the east kept humming, too far to see in the gray. The night had not chosen yet who would own it. It would soon.
And the runner, small against the long face of the sand, sprinted down into the rows of carts where Mardek waited with his grin and a new idea.
The fight on the saddle sharpened to a point.
Rauk lifted his spear for the thrust he liked best, the one he had used in a dozen duels to finish men who were sure they had him. Kai saw the stance. He knew what came next before Rauk's arms moved.
He stepped forward into the thrust instead of away from it.
It is a terrible choice if you get it wrong. It is the end if you get it right.
He slipped his left arm under the spear head as it came and jammed his elbow up, trapping the haft against his armor so the point could not finish its path. At the same time he drove his right palm into Rauk's chest with everything the cores and the night and the mountain had given him. Rauk flew back. He hit two men and took them down with him in a tangle of legs and metal.
The line gasped. It was the sound a line makes when it knows the next breath will be taken on the ground or not at all.
Kai stood over them, chest heaving, spear in hand, eyes red with light and rage and love for a small girl in a cage under a canvas roof.
"Move," he said.
No one moved.
"Then fall," he said.
And he stepped in to make it so.
[System Notification: You have slain a Four-Star Soldier. +40 Experience.]
[System Notification: You have slain a Four-Star Soldier. +40 Experience.]
[System Notification: You have slain a Four-Star Soldier. +40 Experience.]
The line tried to harden. Kai didn't let it.
He surged into the gap like a hammer through weak glass. The first four-star in front of him raised his spear a hair too slow. Kai knocked it aside and put the point of his own spear through the man's throat guard with one clean shove. The body went limp.
[System Notification: You have slain a Four-Star Soldier. +40 Experience.]
He ripped free and stepped through before the corpse hit sand. A second four-star slashed low. Kai stamped the blade flat, drove the butt of his spear into the ant man's face, then finished with a fast thrust under the chin.
[System Notification: You have slain a Four-Star Soldier. +40 Experience.]
A third came from the right. Kai didn't turn. He let the man's shadow tell him angle and distance, slid his left palm along his own shaft, and back-thrust behind his hip. The point punched armor and found soft.