Chapter 148 – Towers (7)
(Julia)
My lord's bed felt… wrong without him.
Not "cold." Yggdrasil didn't do cold. Stone remembered heat. Wards kept air moving. Even the lanterns felt stubborn.
But the bed felt unfinished, like someone had stopped a sentence halfway through and expected me to live with the silence.
I sat on the edge and let my fingers drag lightly over the sheets, the way I did when I was tired enough that my body reached for comfort before my pride could intercept.
It still smelled like him.
Steel and ink. Forge smoke. That faint clean bite he carried after he'd been thinking too hard and sleeping too little.
And underneath it, threaded through the same fabric like it belonged there…
Nyxa.
That was what unsettled me.
She didn't smell like an outsider.
She didn't smell like a visitor.
She smelled like him.
Like the world had stamped her with the same invisible mark: Milton.
I hated that it made my chest loosen.
I hated that it made me want to press my face closer just to be sure I wasn't imagining it.
So I did.
A quiet, humiliating inhale.
I was sniffing like a starving animal.
The door opened.
"Julia," Ethan said brightly, as if he hadn't just walked in on something that would haunt me forever.
I snapped upright in one movement. Spine straight. Expression neutral. The Jarl slid back into place like armor.
"What is it," I asked, voice flat enough to shave with.
Ethan grinned, eyes glittering with that particular madness he got when he'd made something that shouldn't exist yet.
"We did it," he announced.
I stared at him. "Did what."
He looked offended that I wasn't immediately celebrating. "The weapon. The one our lord designed for you. It's complete."
A cold little weight settled in my stomach.
"The musket?" I asked cautiously, because that was the only "gun" concept the world had started to digest. Long barrel. Slow reload. Smoke, thunder, terror. The early kind the Empire had begun fielding like a rumor that became real.
Ethan made a face like I'd called a warhorse a donkey.
"No," he said, almost gently, like I was a child he didn't want to insult. "Not that. That's what we sell. That's what the Empire thinks is the ceiling."
I blinked. "Ethan. Nobody has anything beyond muskets except maybe some Imperial ranks, and even then it's mostly theory and bragging. What are you talking about."
He stepped closer and lowered his voice, like the walls might gossip.
"I'm talking about something that fits your hands," he said. "Something you can use the way you fight. Something that doesn't require you to stand still for half a minute while you reload and pray no one cuts your throat."
He reached into his coat and pulled out an object wrapped in cloth.
My pulse ticked faster.
Weapons didn't scare me.
Unknown weapons did.
Ethan unfolded the cloth with theatrical care and placed the thing in my palm.
It wasn't long.
It wasn't heavy like a musket.
It sat in my hand like a compact crossbow grip would, except there was no stock, no bow-limbs, no string. Just a short metal body with a carved handle, smooth and practical, and a blunt, squared top where the "firing" part lived.
I stared at it.
Then I looked at Ethan.
"This is…" I began, then stopped, because my brain kept trying to categorize it and failing.
Ethan leaned forward, delighted. "Think of it as a hand-crossbow that throws thunder."
"A hand-crossbow that throws… Ethan," I hissed, "don't be poetic. Explain."
He laughed softly and pointed at the top.
"This part," he said, tapping the squared section, "holds the shots. Not from the front like a musket. Inside. Stacked."
I frowned. "Stacked?"
"Yes," he said, eyes bright. "You don't load one, fire one, load one again. You load once and it gives you multiple releases."
That sounded like a lie.
It also sounded like exactly the kind of lie Erynd would force into truth.
"How many," I asked, carefully.
Ethan's grin widened. "Twelve."
I went very still.
"Twelve," I repeated. "Without reloading."
"Yes," he said, practically vibrating. "Twelve. In one compact frame. You draw it, you point, you press, it spits a shot. Again. Again. Again. No ramrod. No powder horn fumbling. No standing there like an idiot while someone charges you with a sword."
My fingers tightened around it.
A weapon that could release twelve times without reload was… not just an upgrade.
It was an entire category shift.
It was unfair.
It was terrifying.
It was exactly the kind of thing that would make the Empire's "early musket" era look like children learning to throw stones.
I swallowed.
"Ethan," I said slowly, "if the Empire learns we can do this, they will either try to buy us or burn us."
Ethan shrugged. "Then we make sure they don't learn. That's what you're for."
I glared at him.
He only grinned wider and tapped a small latch-like piece on the side.
"And because our lord is infuriatingly thoughtful," Ethan added, "there's more."
"Of course there is," I muttered.
Ethan's finger rested on the latch. "You see this? This is like a safety catch on a crossbow. A little lever you flip when you're ready to kill something."
I narrowed my eyes, instinctively comparing it to what I knew. Crossbows had triggers. Locks. Simple mechanical truth.
This thing had… a more refined version of that idea.
"What happens when I flip it," I asked.
Ethan leaned in, voice dropping again.
"If you run out of the physical shots," he said, "you don't become helpless. You flip this, and it changes the way it fires."
I stared. "Changes how."
He watched my face with the glee of a man about to drop a rock into a pond just to see the ripples.
"It uses mana," he said.
My breath caught.
Not in the "spellcasting" way.
In the "my world is rearranging itself" way.
"It's not a spell focus," I said quickly, because I had to anchor the concept somewhere. "It's… it's a mechanism."
Ethan nodded vigorously. "Exactly. It's a mechanism that can either throw physical shots or throw condensed mana bursts. Not as elegant as a mage's proper artillery, but consistent. Reliable. You can treat it like a crossbow that never runs out of bolts as long as you have mana."
I stared down at the weapon in my palm.
A hand-crossbow analogy helped, but only barely.
Because a crossbow didn't hum faintly with contained potential.
A crossbow didn't have a lever that promised a second nature.
I looked up. "Why me."
Ethan's grin softened into something almost sincere.
"Because you don't fight like a noble," he said. "You fight like a knife in a crowd. You fight close. You fight fast. You fight while running a kingdom in your head."
That… was unpleasantly accurate.
"And," Ethan added, eyes darting briefly to the bed as if he could smell what I'd been doing, "because he likes you."
My throat tightened.
I hated that sentence.
I hated how much it mattered.
I set the weapon down gently on my desk, as if it might bite.
"What do you call it," I asked, because naming things made them less frightening.
Ethan shrugged. "I call it 'don't die.' He didn't give it a name."
Of course he didn't.
Naming was intimacy. He avoided intimacy the way other men avoided drowning.
I stared at the weapon again, then at the lever, then at my own hands.
A compact thunder-crossbow with twelve releases, plus a mana fallback.
It was insane.
It was genius.
It was… a personal gift disguised as a tactical recommendation.
I inhaled once, carefully, and made my voice calm again.
"I will test it," I said. "Quietly. In controlled conditions. With proper logs."
Ethan saluted with two fingers, too cheerful. "Yes, Jarl. Quietly. Controlled. Logs. Minimal explosions."
"Preferably none," I said.
He winked. "Preferably."
When he left, the room felt empty again.
I looked at his bed.
Still smelled like him.
Still smelled like her.
And now my hand held a weapon that didn't belong in this era, built for my hands by a man who refused to stay still long enough to be loved normally.
I hated…. how much I wanted him back.
So I picked up my pen.
Because if I didn't write, I'd start feeling.
And feeling was harder to control than logistics.
***
(Erynd)
The next morning, the Tower felt like it had decided to pretend it was normal again.
Crowds returned. Vendors smiled. Duelists strutted. The Crystal Heart of Zotal glittered behind its ward-cage like a promise you could hold in your hand.
The green wards pulsed beneath it all.
Steady.
Patient.
Hungry.
Nyxa walked beside me in the courtyard with a new ring on her finger and the smug satisfaction of someone who had successfully convinced a father to waste money.
She kept lifting her hand to admire it.
"It's still round," I noted.
Nyxa nodded solemnly. "Very round."
I snorted, then my attention snapped toward the ring as the announcer's sigil flared.
SEMIFINAL MATCH.
Right.
Top four.
Goldwynn asleep in the infirmary, crying even in dreams.
And me stepping back into the circle.
My opponent was already there, bouncing on his heels like the world was a stage and his pain was a performance.
Tier Five, at least.
His mana core looked swollen when I let mage-sight brush across him, swollen and unstable, like a lung overfilled until it started tearing.
Lightning affinity.
Electrical mages always had a particular arrogance. They liked the way their spells looked. They liked the way people flinched when the air smelled of storm.
This one was worse.
He wasn't just using the green ward.
He was feeding on it like a starving man at a feast.
The green lines flared when he stepped into the circle, and I felt the ward respond, amplifying him, smoothing his output, letting him cast beyond what his core should have tolerated.
His grin was too wide.
His eyes were too bright.
Nyxa leaned close to my ear. "He's going to pop."
"I know," I muttered.
"Will it be funny," she asked.
"No," I said. Then, after a beat: "It will be tragic."
Nyxa's expression soured. "Tragic is boring."
"Tragic is what happens when idiots play with systems they don't understand," I replied, stepping into the ring.
The bell rang.
And the lightning mage moved like he'd been waiting for permission to be a disaster.
Bolts erupted from his hands, cracking across the circle in jagged lines. The air snapped and stank of ozone. The green wards flared brighter in response, feeding him more, like a drunk patron shouting for another round.
The first bolt hit the ward barrier around the ring and scattered into a web of sparks.
He laughed.
He did it again, wider this time, careless, letting electricity crawl across the ward lines like fingers searching for nerves.
I felt the pulse of wrongness behind it.
Not visible to mage-sight.
Visible to the part of me that had learned how corruption hid.
I didn't have Melody.
I didn't have Gungnir.
I had my body, my brain, and a spell that ate oxygen.
Fine.
He threw another bolt, this time shaping it into a spear meant to pierce, not scatter.
I raised my hand and cast Vera Flamma.
Not a gentle version.
Not a polite one.
A full-force weave, but controlled, segmented into short bursts so the flame didn't escalate into plasma and turn the ring into an execution.
Blue fire snapped into existence.
Not the theatrical orange of common pyromancy, but a hotter, tighter burn that made the air thin.
The lightning spear hit the flame and didn't explode.
It got swallowed.
The electricity tried to crawl along the heat and found nothing stable to cling to. It fractured, scattered, died in a hiss.
The crowd made a sound like they'd seen a miracle.
My opponent's grin faltered.
"Fire?" he shouted. "You're using fire against me?"
"I'm using physics against you," I replied, and pushed another burst.
The flame didn't just block.
It advanced.
It forced him back, step by step, because he couldn't breathe properly near it without his lungs tightening. Because the oxygen was being eaten faster than it could replenish in the warded circle.
He panicked and threw lightning harder.
The green ward flared.
His core flared.
I felt his stability crack.
He didn't notice.
He only noticed that his spectacle wasn't winning.
So he did the predictable thing.
He drew deeper.
He forced more.
He tried to become a storm.
And the green ward loved him for it.
I kept Vera Flamma in short, savage bursts. Blue flashes. Controlled. Relentless.
Every time he tried to build a wide-area field, the flame chewed the air and broke his rhythm. Every time he tried to anchor a bolt into a sustained channel, the heat disrupted the lattice and made it fizzle into sparks.
He was powerful.
He was also stupid.
He overcommitted, threw a bolt meant to end the match in one dramatic strike, and I stepped sideways, let it pass, then slammed a final burst of Vera Flamma across his casting hand.
Not enough to incinerate.
Enough to teach.
His sleeve caught. His skin blistered.
He screamed.
His next cast stuttered.
And I felt the green ward tug at his core again, trying to give him what he wanted.
His core didn't just wobble.
It shrieked, silently, the way unstable structures did before collapse.
He staggered, eyes glassy, trying to pull mana again despite everything.
I snapped Vector into his lattice like a slap.
His spell broke in his hands.
The recoil knocked him backward.
He hit the stone.
And the ward chimed.
WINNER: ERYND MILTON
It wasn't close.
Not even remotely.
I walked out of the ring with the faint smell of burnt cloth clinging to me, and Nyxa clapped politely like she'd watched a puppet show.
"That was neat," she said.
"Someone's going to die today," I replied, staring at the green wards.
Nyxa blinked slowly. "Not you."
"I'm not worried about me," I said.
***
The finals were the next day.
The Tower made it an event, of course.
More crowd. More announcements. More "patrons" in fine robes watching from the elevated platforms like nobles at a public hanging.
The green wards glowed brighter than before.
My opponent this time was already twitchy before the bell rang, eyes too wide, breathing too fast.
Not Tier Five naturally.
Tier Five with help.
Tier Five with a core that looked like it had been inflated beyond safe limits and was now held together by denial and the ward's hungry pulse.
He stepped into the circle and the green lines lit up like veins under skin.
He smiled at me.
It wasn't a human smile.
It was the kind of expression people wore right before they did something unforgivable and called it destiny.
The bell rang.
And he cast.
Not one spell.
A field.
Something wide and wrong that reached for the air and the crowd and the very geometry of the courtyard. It wasn't lightning this time. It was something harsher, more chaotic, as if he was tearing mana straight out of the environment and forcing it into shape with brute will.
The ward screamed back.
I felt it in my teeth.
The crowd cheered anyway, because crowds were stupid and loved spectacle right up until spectacle started eating them.
His magic expanded.
It licked at the ward barrier like acid.
People on the outer ring flinched as the air grew heavy, charged, wrong.
Then he laughed, and the laugh cracked into something that wasn't laughter at all.
His eyes rolled slightly.
His core surged.
And I saw it.
The residue.
The thing the green ward slid into people.
It wasn't passive anymore.
It was awake.
It threaded into his pathways and pulled.
He jerked like a puppet on new strings.
His skin rippled in places it shouldn't ripple.
His shoulders hunched as if bones were trying to rearrange to fit a different blueprint. Fingers elongated, then snapped back, then elongated again. His jaw trembled, teeth grinding like he was chewing glass.
He screamed.
The scream turned into a wet gurgle.
I didn't have time to feel sick.
He threw his field wider.
The ward flared brighter.
And all around the courtyard, I saw the chain reaction begin.
People who had been using the ward boosts earlier, greedily, recklessly, laughing as they forced higher output.
They weren't laughing now.
One by one, they stiffened.
Clutched their chests.
Stumbled like drunk men.
Then started… changing.
Not uniformly.
Not cleanly.
Deformation in different directions, as if the same seed was blooming differently depending on what kind of mana core it had found.
I counted without meaning to.
One.
Two.
Five.
Eight.
Twelve.
Twelve that I could see.
There were probably more hidden behind bodies and booths and the thick press of the crowd.
My opponent's magic surged again, now less "spell" and more "uncontrolled discharge."
If he kept going, the entire courtyard would become a disaster zone.
So I stopped treating him like a competitor.
I treated him like a core about to explode.
I cast Vector.
Full intention.
Not to interrupt a spell.
To strike the structure beneath it.
To shove against the unstable core, to force the micro-fractures to fail all at once, to collapse the engine before it could detonate outward and take everyone with it.
His eyes locked onto mine for a single lucid heartbeat.
There was fear there.
And underneath the fear, something like relief.
Then Vector hit.
His core seized.
The field collapsed like a snapped net.
He dropped.
Hard.
Silence slammed into the courtyard.
A horrible, ringing silence filled with the sound of panicked breathing and bodies shifting and someone far away vomiting.
The green wards kept pulsing.
Still hungry.
Still pretending they were "enhancement."
I stood in the center of the ring, staring at the glowing lines carved into the stone, and felt my anger sharpen into something cold.
Nyxa's voice drifted to me from the edge, light and sweet, like she was commenting on the weather.
"Father," she said. "It's not the wind."
I didn't laugh.
I didn't breathe out the tension.
I just stared at the ward lines and whispered the only honest sentence left in me.
"What the fuck is this green ward."