Naeva-To Fight a Monster

Chapter 15

Orlando stared down at his chest. Unlike with his destroyed hand, he didn't shout in pain. He simply stared.

Naeva was in shock as well. She had killed in self-defense before—in was almost required for nomads in Finster—but she had never killed someone quite so brutally. Using her staff, she'd always focused on mercy kills: aiming at choice parts of the head or neck so the bandit was unconscious as they went.

After a good twenty seconds of silence, Orlando choked, "I... really wasn't expecting you to be this strong. It doesn't hurt, somehow... I think you disrupted my central nervous system."

He was probably right. Being made of stone, he could still move and merely looked like a statue with a hole in it, but biologically, Naeva had just shattered several vertebrae.

"It's funny," Orlando said through gritted teeth. "Golems can regenerate, so I might actually survive this if I can hold this form long enough. Just need to avoid breaking for a month or so and I'll be good as new."

Naeva froze. "You'll lure in more people..."

"And let them weaken themselves in the mountains until I can feed, yes," Orlando growled. "I've been at this a long time, Naeva. I know what I do, and I doubt you could understand that I have important reasons for doing it. If you let me go, I won't change. I'll just be more careful to ensure they won't escape me."

That was enough.

Gritting her teeth, Naeva pulled her staff from his chest and swung it as hard as she could. The swing shattered the stone man's head, which she could have sworn smiled just before she hit it. The body stiffened, its limbs no longer moving. It teetered on its feet before falling back and breaking its arms off at the shoulder. Now it lay there, looking like nothing more than an old, forgotten Gefroren statue.

Naeva shivered from both emotional discomfort and the cold. The steel buttons had torn from the coat, leaving the front open. It wasn't nearly as cold as it had been near the shack, but she wasn't ready to ditch the coat just yet.

She was about to continue down the road when she felt something she hadn't thought she'd ever feel again. She turned to face Orlando's body as something pierced into her core. Unlike phoenix healing, this energy felt cold, like ice water or a frozen snack moving down one's throat on a hot day. The chill felt completely separate from the Gefroren air; she didn't exactly feel any colder.

This feeling had only reached her once before, when she'd killed an adolescent griffin and taken its powerful sight and hearing. Zero had said that was the feeling of a conquered power making its way to its final master.

The power of a monster.

"Orlando..." Naeva whispered, wondering what horrible new power had just made its way inside her. "You were a monster?" Somehow, she didn't feel any better about this. All her guilt was replaced with unease. How had a monster been that intelligent? Even the smartest monsters attacked the moment they were sure their prey was alone. They didn't befriend their prey disguised as a kindly old man. They didn't wait for days on end to strike.

If Naeva hadn't been running through Finster her whole life, she would've been just another meal for whatever it really was that had been attacking her.

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Radley had explained while Valerian was setting up that healing magic didn't help with exhaustion, and he was annoyingly right. By the end of the day, in spite of the milder conditions, Naeva was more tired than she'd been since her days spent running in Finster.

Fortunately, she wasn't being hunted anymore, and she had reached a border town in Tierisch. Based on the signs around town, she figured it was called Altarraum. Most of the architecture and passerby indicated devout religious practice, though Naeva didn't recognize any of the depictions they used. She'd been a bit too preoccupied with survival to explore culture in her life.