NABC Chapter 173: One Less Divine Beast
Chapter 173: One Less Divine Beast
The notifications came all at once.
[You have slain a Level 156 Divine Beast: Naga Sovereign]
[New Monster Index Bonus: +102 Strength, +77 Vitality, +92 Dexterity, +83 Mana]
[You have reached Level 115.]
[You have reached Level 116.]
The levels kept coming.
He stood over the fallen Naga Sovereign and let them run, watching the numbers climb past 120 before they finally stopped.
[You have reached Level 127. You have received 1 Stat Point.]
Damon was about to dismiss the screen before a final notification appeared.
[New Soul has been added to the Dark Legion]
His brow raised. He wanted to check what it meant immediately, but before he could do so, he suddenly realised the sudden silence around him and dismissed the screen.
He slowly looked around, the fallen Naga fighters, the fallen Kitsune clan members, the scorched stone where his lightning had touched ground, the massive blade the Naga Sovereign had planted and never reclaimed.
The surviving Kitsune clan members were watching him.
There weren’t many left standing.
Six, maybe seven, their fox ears oriented toward him with the particular attention of people who had processed a sequence of events and arrived at a conclusion that didn’t match anything they had a reference for.
A human arrived in the midst of a battle between two divine beasts. A human had killed three Naga Clan fighters with a single strike before killing a divine beast with a follow-up.
None of them spoke, and none of them moved.
Raiden was on the ground where he’d been since Damon arrived, his silver-white hair still matted dark, his four tails flat.
He was conscious, his eyes were open, tracking Damon across the clearing with the look of someone whose entire framework for a situation had just been dismantled and hadn’t yet been replaced with anything.
He didn’t say anything either.
Ayame was moving.
Slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone managing a wound that didn’t want to be managed, her weight distributed to the right side and limping on the left, her nine tails dragging slightly behind her.
Each step carried the visible effort of someone running on nothing but the decision to keep moving, her mana reserves still empty, her left side still bleeding through the darkened silk.
Seeing her cross the clearing toward him, Damon met her halfway.
She stopped in front of him and looked at him for a long moment. It was the same look she’d given him in the small hall when he first arrived, the one that covered more ground than it appeared to, reading things that weren’t on the surface.
Then she looked at his forearms.
The cuts were still bleeding. Slow and steady, the distinct persistence of wounds that had been reopened too many times to close cleanly.
Her expression shifted.
She reached out and took his arm gently, turning it slightly to see the damage properly.
Her fingers moved carefully across his wounds, cataloguing everything he had been through despite her own injuries.
Yuki was still on the ground near the treeline where Damon had lowered her.
She was conscious, her eyes open, and her expression carried the look of someone in complete discomfort despite her efforts not to show it.
Three tails moved slowly behind her where four had been. The space where the fourth had been wasn’t empty exactly, just absent, the way a room felt different after furniture was removed, even before you could identify what was missing.
It took a while for everything to be sorted.
The surviving clan members helped their fallen, carrying those who couldn’t walk and supporting those who could. Raiden was helped to his feet by two clan members and managed to stay upright, though the effort showed in every line of his body. He didn’t look at Damon again after the first time, which told Damon more than any conversation would have.
Damon carried Yuki inside.
She didn’t protest, which told him how badly the loss of her tail had hit her. The Yuki he’d spent weeks crossing wrong worlds with would have had something to say about being carried. This one simply let it happen, her head resting against his shoulder.
He settled her into a room on the second floor and left her with a clan member who seemed to know what they were doing.
Then he found Ayame.
She just about made it to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, with her hands pressed tightly against her left side, her expression showing more pain than she would like to show.
He sat beside her.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The waterfall was audible through the narrow window, the same constant sound it had been the first night he arrived, the world outside continuing its business regardless of what had happened in the clearing below.
"How bad is it?" he asked.
"I’m fine—" she tried to say, but at that moment a sudden sharp pain flashed across her face.
He looked at her. "Is that so?"
She held his gaze for a moment before her composure shifted slightly. "It’s deep... But it’ll heal on its own. I just need some rest."
He nodded.
"Yuki," she said quietly. "Her tail..."
"She offered it willingly," Damon replied before she could even properly ask.
Ayame was quiet for a moment.
A tail wasn’t just an appearance.
It was directly linked to strength. Losing one wasn’t simply cosmetic. It was something more fundamental, a reduction in something that mattered to Kitsune Clan members more than anything.
"She’ll recover," Ayame said finally. More to herself than to him.
"She will," he agreed.
Another silence settled between them, this time the comfortable kind, the kind that didn’t require filling.
"You were gone a long time," she said.
"I know."
"I didn’t know if—" She stopped for a second before continuing. "The summoning connection tells me if my champion is alive. I felt it the entire time you were gone." A pause. "But I didn’t know where you were."
He looked at her.
"We got lost between worlds," he said. "But I’m here now."
She looked at him with the expression that carried countless emotions, and just as many questions.
"...Lost between worlds," she echoed the words before chuckling softly. "You might be the only person who could say something like this so lightly."
Damon shrugged. "Just another day."
Her body shifted closer toward him, her head resting against his shoulder as she let out a soft exhale.