CHAPTER 9 — CHAPTER 9 — ASHEN WIND, BROKEN BLADE
Liam watched the eastern horizon as if it were a wound that would not stop bleeding.
The city smelled different that morning—smoke threaded through the usual bakery and rain-soaked stone scents, a metallic tang that made the back of his throat burn. Distant horns had already begun to call; hunters' armor clattered like an approaching tempest. Raylen Noir moved through it all with the terrible, calm efficiency of someone who had learned how to turn violence into habit. He tightened a strap here, checked a haft there; his one eye scanned while his missing arm hung in its leather sleeve like a folded history.
"Stay close," Raylen told Liam quietly as the family stepped toward the wall. His voice was the same voice that had steadied Liam when nightmares broke apart his sleep—a voice that felt like rules and shelter at once. "You're not a soldier. You are our son. You listen to me and your mother and Arin, and you do as you're told."
Liam nodded. He could not find the shape of the words he wanted—I will be enough—so he swallowed them like a stone. He followed Raylen to a vantage the guards had cleared: a higher parapet three ranks back from the main battlement, far enough the captain's men called it a "safe ring," close enough to see the eastern tree-line and the smoke rising like a black promise.
Below them, the ground buckled and breathed as beasts and men wrote their own chaotic language across the foothills. The first wave had already spilled through the broken gate before Raylen and the other A-rank hunters reached the field; Liam had seen the aftermath during the surge—flesh, flame, a steel staccato of winsome violence. Today he would see the battle unfold in real time.
What arrived beyond the treeline buckled the air itself.
An S-rank retainer—the kind of creature hunters whispered about and wrote in margins in trembling hands—slid from the forest like a shadow made of muscle. It was no single shape; it was a chorus of wrongness welded into form: six jointed legs like burned sticks, a maw layered with teeth like shreds of rune-stone; patches of chitin that reflected mana in sick, oil-slick patterns. Its core glowed not with a simple hunger but with a borrowed purpose, the signature of a sovereign's will stamped beneath its carapace.
Hunters moved in the plain like a chessboard rearranging itself into a kill pattern. A-ranks took forward; B ranks supported flanks; mages began to draw mana glyphs into the air, cords of light that would sing and snap like spiderwire on command. Raylen did not speak to them; he joined their rhythm.
Liam's chest tightened as Raylen stepped forward. The father's movements were a set of small revelations—how one missing limb did not make less of the man but rather more of him. Raylen's footwork was a living grammar: a hundred small positions practiced until they were reflex. Then he became music.
He began with wind.
Raylen's blade—or rather the empty space where his blade worked—cut the air with the practiced cruelty of a man who had learned to stitch wind into edge. He employed Wind Blade Art and Gale Footwork together with that odd, fluid synergy that belonged only to his style: a blade flicked in a parry sent a knife of compressed air into the retainer's flank; a step forward became a cyclone around his boots that lifted grit and smoke off the ground and batted away smaller thralls like a child swatting at fruit.
When he moved, the wind wrote calligraphy. The slashes were not visible but they carved silence from noise, and beasts stumbled where air became a wall.
Raylen's swift-style sword art—his Swift Styl—was poetry sped to violence. The way he held the sword hilt in his hand, the way his wrist directed arcs that ghosts might follow; it was not simply fighting. It was choreography with the intention to kill and to preserve. He never wasted motion. Every cut saved a comrade from harm; every parry set a gap in which another hunter could step and drive a spear into a beast's soft joint.
Liam watched, heart thrumming like a caged drum. Raylen's movements were an answer to every savage urge the retainer threw forward. There were moments when Raylen's speed made him look as though he were two figures at once: blade and shadow both. Wind curled at his back like a cloak, then cracked forward in razor crescents.
Across the field, other hunters made their own marks. A woman with an ice-sigil sent crystals like teeth into the beast's belly. A dwarf in rune-laced armor slammed a shockwave into the ground and threw the chitin aside. Mages chanted and drew mana in complex hand-phrases that made stars scream.
And the retainer adapted, as retainers always do. It bent, split, and its chitin regrew like angry fungus. Its core pulsed and the field around it writhed with corrupted mana, a sick mirror of Rayfall's clean hum.
Then the retainer lunged.
It closed distance like a falling tree, and for a flicker, the hunters' ranks looked fragile—lines of men willing themselves into whatever hope bounded by armor could hold.
Raylen moved like a blade and like wind simultaneously. He darted in, a cut; he feinted right, a gale burst left; his Swift Styl struck in sequences that swallowed the retainer's attention. For a moment, it seemed like the hunters would unmake the thing—until the retainer slammed an appendage down and cracked two hunters like dry branches.
There was a spot in the center of that slash—a place where the retainer's logic was cruelly sharp—and Raylen, in the sweep of saving another hunter, reached for it.
The world narrowed for Liam: gears clicking, wind roaring. He saw Raylen's face—set, utterly unyielding—lean into the gap. Raylen cut a rank of wind-blades that scattered smaller claws; he twisted, ran like rain, and pushed another hunter out of a falling arch with a sweep of his prosthetic bracer. Then the retainer lashed back.
Something long and spiked found Raylen's left side. The sound of metal and bone meeting was a hard, personal thing in the air. He staggered—he who never staggered—and there was an instant that seemed to widen and flatten, like a slow-frame painting of everything before a fall.
The retainer had thrown a spinning barb: a grafted limb of itself, glistening with the remnants of another struggle. It scraped along Raylen's arm and not only ripped cloth but stepped into the place where skin and hunger met. The barb gouged and the leather sleeve bulged with blood and mana smoke. Raylen's hand, fast as it had always been, tried to wrench free, but the retainer's hook bit deeper and a cry left his throat—one raw human sound that crumbled a dozen more composed things.
Raylen's eye—always the anchor—went white for a breath and then winked with pain. Blood traced the line of his cheek; his arm, that faithful instrument of blade and wind, twisted and then ceased to obey. The hunters nearest him howled an answer that was part anger, part horror. They had seen this before and knew how quickly a wound like that could become a chasm.
Someone drove a spear into the retainer's flank. It convulsed and thrashed, but the hook remained embedded. The retainer let out a metallic wail which made Liam's bones ache. A sorcerer opened a narrow vein of mana that seared the wound black; he sliced through what remained with a collapsing rune and then reached for Raylen.
But the damage had been done.
Raylen held his arm up like a shield while the retainer's barbed limb rent his flesh and finally, with a sound like old branches breaking, the limb tore away. The hunters cheered at the kill but the cry was bittersweet. Raylen's arm dangled uselessly, the radial hum of his mana bracelets stuttering and dying. Blood bled into the soil like ink into water.
His eye clouded as well—an aftereffect of the retainer's toxin that had scraped bone and nerve. For a second he blinked and the world overturned. It was the loss of the eye that made the watchers drop their swords: not only a missing sight but a last, visible proof of cost.
Liam wanted to go down, to run, to shove through the lines and take the wound in place of the man he loved. Instead he pressed to the strap of his chest and felt the tightness of a promised rule. He had been told to stay in the safe ring. "Stay far back," the captain had commanded. "There will be casualties."
Raylen swore then, a sound that was not fury but a simple human grief. A medic carrier shoved forward; hands tore at his sleeve; someone—Arin?—moved as if to push into the field and was held back by a hundred hands of protocol and fear. Liam recognized the formality: the hunters' order, Raylen's only shield now a line of men who would not break.
Blood slicked the grass where Raylen lay cradled on a stretcher; the medics chanted the old first-aid prayers—stitches, rune agents pulled tight, cauterized, binded. A field wizard took the eye's damage and sealed the socket with a pale mana sugar that tasted of iron. It was merciful in the mechanized way of hunter medicine, and it bought Raylen a life. But at a cost that lacerated the air.
Liam's knees gave then. He had been safe by instructions, but the sight unstitched something in him—something that had been held together by inertia and hope. He had watched the man who had found him and brought him back lose an arm and an eye for the world he had rescued him into. The father's sacrifice was no longer a story of remote heroism; it was a lived wound, exposed and bleeding.
"You must train," Raylen said later that evening, voice low but galvanized. His arm was wrapped in a rune-stiffened bandage. The eye socket was covered with a dark patch threaded with sigils. "Not because I demand it but because the world will not forgive those who are weak. Because if I could have been stronger—"
He stopped himself, anger collapsing into a tired, hollow sound. "Because we can't always stop fate, Liam. But we can make sure we are ready when it comes knocking."
Liam sat in the hush of the kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug too hot for comfort. He thought of the retainer's maw, of the way Raylen moved like storm and then like a man who had been rent in half. He thought of the hunters whose names would be read aloud later, and of those who would not come home.
Guilt burned into a new shape: not merely sorrow for being taken and then returned, but a fresh, hot culpability. He had been given back to a family that bled. He had been given a home paid for in body and bone.
He swallowed and met Raylen's single, fierce eye.
"I will train," Liam said. "I will learn. I will read every log you give me and stand where you tell me to stand and not be a weight."
Raylen's jaw flexed. The room smelled like iron and cooked herbs, as if all the blood had been tempered by the ordinary gestures of life. "Good," Raylen said finally. "Then we begin again. We begin properly."
Outside, the city whispered and the mana hum kept its steady, indifferent rhythm. But inside Liam, the vow was a new kind of flame—less the small flicker of his early practice and more a hard-burning coal that would not easily be smothered. He would study the retainer's patterns. He would learn to fold wind around steel. He would not let this wound be another ledger of sorrow.
He would be dangerous.
Liam watched the eastern horizon as if it were a wound that would not stop bleeding.
The city smelled different that morning—smoke threaded through the usual bakery and rain-soaked stone scents, a metallic tang that made the back of his throat burn. Distant horns had already begun to call; hunters' armor clattered like an approaching tempest. Raylen Noir moved through it all with the terrible, calm efficiency of someone who had learned how to turn violence into habit. He tightened a strap here, checked a haft there; his one eye scanned while his missing arm hung in its leather sleeve like a folded history.
"Stay close," Raylen told Liam quietly as the family stepped toward the wall. His voice was the same voice that had steadied Liam when nightmares broke apart his sleep—a voice that felt like rules and shelter at once. "You're not a soldier. You are our son. You listen to me and your mother and Arin, and you do as you're told."
Liam nodded. He could not find the shape of the words he wanted—I will be enough—so he swallowed them like a stone. He followed Raylen to a vantage the guards had cleared: a higher parapet three ranks back from the main battlement, far enough the captain's men called it a "safe ring," close enough to see the eastern tree-line and the smoke rising like a black promise.
Below them, the ground buckled and breathed as beasts and men wrote their own chaotic language across the foothills. The first wave had already spilled through the broken gate before Raylen and the other A-rank hunters reached the field; Liam had seen the aftermath during the surge—flesh, flame, a steel staccato of winsome violence. Today he would see the battle unfold in real time.
What arrived beyond the treeline buckled the air itself.
An S-rank retainer—the kind of creature hunters whispered about and wrote in margins in trembling hands—slid from the forest like a shadow made of muscle. It was no single shape; it was a chorus of wrongness welded into form: six jointed legs like burned sticks, a maw layered with teeth like shreds of rune-stone; patches of chitin that reflected mana in sick, oil-slick patterns. Its core glowed not with a simple hunger but with a borrowed purpose, the signature of a sovereign's will stamped beneath its carapace.
Hunters moved in the plain like a chessboard rearranging itself into a kill pattern. A-ranks took forward; B ranks supported flanks; mages began to draw mana glyphs into the air, cords of light that would sing and snap like spiderwire on command. Raylen did not speak to them; he joined their rhythm.
Liam's chest tightened as Raylen stepped forward. The father's movements were a set of small revelations—how one missing limb did not make less of the man but rather more of him. Raylen's footwork was a living grammar: a hundred small positions practiced until they were reflex. Then he became music.
He began with wind.
Raylen's blade—or rather the empty space where his blade worked—cut the air with the practiced cruelty of a man who had learned to stitch wind into edge. He employed Wind Blade Art and Gale Footwork together with that odd, fluid synergy that belonged only to his style: a blade flicked in a parry sent a knife of compressed air into the retainer's flank; a step forward became a cyclone around his boots that lifted grit and smoke off the ground and batted away smaller thralls like a child swatting at fruit.
When he moved, the wind wrote calligraphy. The slashes were not visible but they carved silence from noise, and beasts stumbled where air became a wall.
Raylen's swift-style sword art—his Swift Styl—was poetry sped to violence. The way he held the sword hilt in his hand, the way his wrist directed arcs that ghosts might follow; it was not simply fighting. It was choreography with the intention to kill and to preserve. He never wasted motion. Every cut saved a comrade from harm; every parry set a gap in which another hunter could step and drive a spear into a beast's soft joint.
Liam watched, heart thrumming like a caged drum. Raylen's movements were an answer to every savage urge the retainer threw forward. There were moments when Raylen's speed made him look as though he were two figures at once: blade and shadow both. Wind curled at his back like a cloak, then cracked forward in razor crescents.
Across the field, other hunters made their own marks. A woman with an ice-sigil sent crystals like teeth into the beast's belly. A dwarf in rune-laced armor slammed a shockwave into the ground and threw the chitin aside. Mages chanted and drew mana in complex hand-phrases that made stars scream.
And the retainer adapted, as retainers always do. It bent, split, and its chitin regrew like angry fungus. Its core pulsed and the field around it writhed with corrupted mana, a sick mirror of Rayfall's clean hum.
Then the retainer lunged.
It closed distance like a falling tree, and for a flicker, the hunters' ranks looked fragile—lines of men willing themselves into whatever hope bounded by armor could hold.
Raylen moved like a blade and like wind simultaneously. He darted in, a cut; he feinted right, a gale burst left; his Swift Styl struck in sequences that swallowed the retainer's attention. For a moment, it seemed like the hunters would unmake the thing—until the retainer slammed an appendage down and cracked two hunters like dry branches.
There was a spot in the center of that slash—a place where the retainer's logic was cruelly sharp—and Raylen, in the sweep of saving another hunter, reached for it.
The world narrowed for Liam: gears clicking, wind roaring. He saw Raylen's face—set, utterly unyielding—lean into the gap. Raylen cut a rank of wind-blades that scattered smaller claws; he twisted, ran like rain, and pushed another hunter out of a falling arch with a sweep of his prosthetic bracer. Then the retainer lashed back.
Something long and spiked found Raylen's left side. The sound of metal and bone meeting was a hard, personal thing in the air. He staggered—he who never staggered—and there was an instant that seemed to widen and flatten, like a slow-frame painting of everything before a fall.
The retainer had thrown a spinning barb: a grafted limb of itself, glistening with the remnants of another struggle. It scraped along Raylen's arm and not only ripped cloth but stepped into the place where skin and hunger met. The barb gouged and the leather sleeve bulged with blood and mana smoke. Raylen's hand, fast as it had always been, tried to wrench free, but the retainer's hook bit deeper and a cry left his throat—one raw human sound that crumbled a dozen more composed things.
Raylen's eye—always the anchor—went white for a breath and then winked with pain. Blood traced the line of his cheek; his arm, that faithful instrument of blade and wind, twisted and then ceased to obey. The hunters nearest him howled an answer that was part anger, part horror. They had seen this before and knew how quickly a wound like that could become a chasm.
Someone drove a spear into the retainer's flank. It convulsed and thrashed, but the hook remained embedded. The retainer let out a metallic wail which made Liam's bones ache. A sorcerer opened a narrow vein of mana that seared the wound black; he sliced through what remained with a collapsing rune and then reached for Raylen.
But the damage had been done.
Raylen held his arm up like a shield while the retainer's barbed limb rent his flesh and finally, with a sound like old branches breaking, the limb tore away. The hunters cheered at the kill but the cry was bittersweet. Raylen's arm dangled uselessly, the radial hum of his mana bracelets stuttering and dying. Blood bled into the soil like ink into water.
His eye clouded as well—an aftereffect of the retainer's toxin that had scraped bone and nerve. For a second he blinked and the world overturned. It was the loss of the eye that made the watchers drop their swords: not only a missing sight but a last, visible proof of cost.
Liam wanted to go down, to run, to shove through the lines and take the wound in place of the man he loved. Instead he pressed to the strap of his chest and felt the tightness of a promised rule. He had been told to stay in the safe ring. "Stay far back," the captain had commanded. "There will be casualties."
Raylen swore then, a sound that was not fury but a simple human grief. A medic carrier shoved forward; hands tore at his sleeve; someone—Arin?—moved as if to push into the field and was held back by a hundred hands of protocol and fear. Liam recognized the formality: the hunters' order, Raylen's only shield now a line of men who would not break.
Blood slicked the grass where Raylen lay cradled on a stretcher; the medics chanted the old first-aid prayers—stitches, rune agents pulled tight, cauterized, binded. A field wizard took the eye's damage and sealed the socket with a pale mana sugar that tasted of iron. It was merciful in the mechanized way of hunter medicine, and it bought Raylen a life. But at a cost that lacerated the air.
Liam's knees gave then. He had been safe by instructions, but the sight unstitched something in him—something that had been held together by inertia and hope. He had watched the man who had found him and brought him back lose an arm and an eye for the world he had rescued him into. The father's sacrifice was no longer a story of remote heroism; it was a lived wound, exposed and bleeding.
"You must train," Raylen said later that evening, voice low but galvanized. His arm was wrapped in a rune-stiffened bandage. The eye socket was covered with a dark patch threaded with sigils. "Not because I demand it but because the world will not forgive those who are weak. Because if I could have been stronger—"
He stopped himself, anger collapsing into a tired, hollow sound. "Because we can't always stop fate, Liam. But we can make sure we are ready when it comes knocking."
Liam sat in the hush of the kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug too hot for comfort. He thought of the retainer's maw, of the way Raylen moved like storm and then like a man who had been rent in half. He thought of the hunters whose names would be read aloud later, and of those who would not come home.
Guilt burned into a new shape: not merely sorrow for being taken and then returned, but a fresh, hot culpability. He had been given back to a family that bled. He had been given a home paid for in body and bone.
He swallowed and met Raylen's single, fierce eye.
"I will train," Liam said. "I will learn. I will read every log you give me and stand where you tell me to stand and not be a weight."
Raylen's jaw flexed. The room smelled like iron and cooked herbs, as if all the blood had been tempered by the ordinary gestures of life. "Good," Raylen said finally. "Then we begin again. We begin properly."
Outside, the city whispered and the mana hum kept its steady, indifferent rhythm. But inside Liam, the vow was a new kind of flame—less the small flicker of his early practice and more a hard-burning coal that would not easily be smothered. He would study the retainer's patterns. He would learn to fold wind around steel. He would not let this wound be another ledger of sorrow.
He would be dangerous.