Many say: if nothing hurts a person in the morning, it means they are most likely dead.
Well, Saigo was definitely alive. Everything hurt—absolutely everything.
Every muscle fiber, every joint, every centimeter of skin burned with a merciless, dull fire. Even simply opening his eyelids felt like trying to lift lead curtains, and the light seeping through the cracks seared his retinas like a red-hot poker.
He stared dumbly at the cave ceiling—uneven, soot-blackened, reeking of smoke and blood.
Move. Have to move. He tried to wiggle a finger.
"Yeowtch!" Pain shot through his arm like electricity—a sensation as if the limb had been torn off, its veins and tendons twisted, sewn back on backward, and then high voltage was applied.
Not good. Not good at all. Gritting his teeth until they creaked, he tried to sit up.
"Graa!" a hoarse cry escaped his lips before he could stop it. His vision darkened, the world swam. His body became an immovable boulder, and his soul, tormented, immediately longed to shed this burden, to fade into nothingness.
But he braced his elbow against a rock, forcing himself to sit up. He assessed himself with a cynical, evaluating gaze: charred rags instead of clothes, the skin beneath them a continuous bloody-purulent leopard pattern, fingers trembling with a fine shiver.
He quickly scanned the cave: devastation, soot, the dragon's corpse, from which a sweetish-putrid spirit already rose. The guy summed it up: Won? Whatever... Time... Damn, time! How long was I out?
His internal clock, like his entire tormented body, was malfunctioning. On trembling, feverish legs, he shuffled at the speed of a sick snail to the dragon's huge carcass.
With a shaking hand, he reached for his belt... Empty.
Huh? His knife was gone. The realization of this simple fact hit him belatedly: he was standing almost naked, save for the pitiful, stinking scraps soaked in his own charred flesh.
Fine... Let's use nature's gifts. He picked up the first sharp stone fragment he found on the floor, the size of a fist. Without further ceremony, he drove it with a crunch into the edge of the dragon's eye, which protruded from a skull the size of a wagon.
…
The guardsman was counting crows. Seemingly unacceptable while on duty. But, as his sergeant used to say: "The post dictates the service."
He had relieved the previous watch three hours ago. And nothing, complete silence. In this backwater, the most you'd get is a sparrow shitting on your polished cuirass.
He had conveniently dismissed the information that Linsi von Altshtadt himself, the empire's richest man, had passed through these cursed gates of the Black Mountain a day ago.
He didn't give a damn. He and his partner had already placed a bet for ten gold coins: how quickly would the fat cat come running out of this stone maw screaming "Help!"?
His partner, a naive idealist who sometimes even believed in people, gave him two days. He, more honestly expressing his disgust for Linsi, bet on one. The one day that was about to expire. This made his nerves jump like fleas on a dog.
And Linsi's men, standing further away—a pair of mercenaries and a clerk with a lute—made him even more nervous.
Maybe shoo them away? flashed through his mind, but after a moment's thought, he answered himself. Nah.
First, he was lazy.
Second... —he listened to the quiet, sad melody that brightened his idle time— "...the guy can play the lute. If only he didn't sing about his pig-faced master—he'd be priceless."
Thump... thump... thump...
The sound came from the black maw of the cave behind him.
No, not footsteps—a stomp. Muffled, uneven, heavy. The guards spun around instantly, halberds clanging into a combat stance, points aimed into the impenetrable darkness.
Linsi's mercenaries raised their swords, the clerk fell silent, pressing the lute to his chest, and the stomping grew louder.
With every second, it became louder, heavier, merging with the frantic beating of the guards' hearts.
Various things lived in the cave—trolls, carrion eaters, ghosts. But what slowly emerged from the gloom was more terrifying and majestic than anything they could have imagined.
Limping on both legs, hunched over, but with incredible willpower dragging something huge behind him, emerged... Linsi.
His expensive, ornate armor shone as if fresh from the forge, unscathed. But that wasn't the main thing. The main thing was what he was dragging over the stones behind him: an eye—huge as a barrel, ominously shimmering even in the semi-darkness, with a bloodied stone fragment sticking out of it.
The dragon's eye.
Reaching the boundary of sunlight falling before the entrance, Linsi dropped the trophy onto the ground with a crash and collapsed onto one knee, leaning on his sword.
"What are you standing there for, you scum?!" his voice, hoarse from exhaustion but full of inhuman fury, cut through the silence. "Help me!"
Everyone scurried into action at once. The guards, drooling from surprise and greedy curiosity, rushed to lift him, not taking their eyes off the monstrous trophy. One cautiously poked the eye with his halberd. Solid and real. The smell of blood and magic hit his nose.
"It's really it..." whispered Mark. "No doubt... But... how?" escaped him, full of silent admiration and horror.
Linsi (or rather, the one pretending to be him) raised his head. The helmet hid his face, but two embers glowed in the visor's slit—tired, but filled with a wild, predatory strength.
"Simple, sonny," the voice sounded raspy but with an icy smirk. "I know how to think."
"But I also..." Mark began.
"You're too young to think," "Linsi" cut him off, pushing off the guard's shoulder. "Not grown yet. And now, gentlemen—I must leave you. Broken legs... oh, how they hurt." He took a step and swayed.
"One moment, sire!" The second guard jumped in front of him, peering into the visor slit. "Could you show your face? For formality's sake..."
Fuck... Saigo cursed mentally under the mask. But he couldn't hesitate. Click! The helmet's lock unlatched. Shluck! The helmet fell to the stones with a dull clang.
Instead of Linsi's usual bloated face, the guards saw the same face, but gaunt, mutilated, with incredibly hard eyes burning like hot coals.
His lips were drawn into a vicious, tired smirk, and his gaze conveyed only one simple, primal thing: a thirst for blood and death for anyone who stood in his way.
"U-understood! Understood!" Tom stammered, jumping back, pale. "We'll send a runner now! Right away!"
But Saigo was no longer listening. Linsi's men (now his men, at least for the moment) deftly caught him under the arms, preventing him from falling, and almost carried him, hastily stuffing him into the luxurious carriage waiting in the shadows.
The door slammed shut. The horses shot forward. The guards were left standing at the entrance, watching the dust cloud from the departing carriage and the giant, eerily shimmering dragon's eye lying at their feet—a silent rebuke to their doubts and a symbol of the incomprehensible strength of the one who had just left.
"Do I owe you ten gold?" the guard asked, not yet over the shock. After a short silence, his partner answered.
"If anyone deserves that money, it's him, but I suspect our coppers are of no use to him."