Exiled Prince and Hi Chapter 46: Soul Ranks

Chapter 46: Soul Ranks

The carriage rocked gently with the rhythm of the road, creaking and groaning like it had been doing this too long and knew it. Through the gaps in the wooden walls, mist curled between the trees in slow, lazy drifts. The forest had been the sa for hours now — tall, dark, indifferent.

Renji had his legs stretched across the opposite bench, arms spread wide across the backrest. Comfortable. Unbothered. A man at peace with the world.

His arm found Rei’s shoulder slowly, the way a tide cos in. She didn’t notice until it was already there.

She gasped.

"R-Renji—"

"Renji." Kaede’s voice ca from the front without her turning around, flat and certain, the way soone speaks when they’ve already had this conversation. "Whatever you’re doing back there, stop."

"I’m not doing anything," he said. "I’m sitting. Rei is sitting. We happen to be sitting near each other. It’s a small carriage, Kaede. This is geography, not intention."

"Your arm is on her shoulder."

"My arm got tired."

"Move it."

"It’s resting."

A pause. Then Kaede’s voice again, drier this ti. "You know, for soone who claims to be so exhausted, you have a remarkable amount of energy for being insufferable."

"That’s just talent." He smiled at the ceiling. "So of us are naturally gifted. Can’t help it."

"Mm." Ayra’s voice drifted back from beside Kaede, gentle, almost amused. "Rei, are you alright?"

Rei, who had gone very still under Renji’s arm, cleared her throat quietly. "I’m— yes. I’m fine. It’s fine."

"She said she’s fine," Renji said.

"She sounds like soone who is very much not fine," Kaede said.

"She’s a grown woman, Kaede, she can speak for herself."

"She’s too polite to tell you to move."

"Then she should work on that."

"Renji." Kaede finally half-turned on the front seat, one eye finding him through the gap in the partition. It was not a warm eye. "Move your arm or I’ll co back there and move it for you. And unlike Rei, I will not be polite about it."

"Ah." He looked at her for a mont with great seriousness. "Now see, that’s a threat with a very different energy. I want you to think carefully about what you just offered."

The eye disappeared. A long silence followed from the front of the carriage.

Renji closed his eyes and pictured her face. Ears red. Jaw tight. Staring at the road like it owed her sothing. He held the image for a mont, thoroughly satisfied, and moved his arm.

So victories didn’t need pushing.

The carriage rolled on, and the forest deepened around them, the trees growing older and taller the further they went. After a while, Renji stopped looking at anything in particular. His gaze drifted to the mist between the branches, and then sowhere further than that.

The palace ca back to him whether he invited it or not. High ceilings. Cold stone. A courtyard he could map from mory with his eyes closed. Faces he hadn’t asked to rember, attached to nas he couldn’t afford to forget.

I’ll co back.

He had said it simply. Like it was the kind of promise the world had any interest in letting him keep.

He had never been this far out before. The trees here had no nas in any book he’d read, the roads had stopped being roads so miles back and beco suggestions instead, and they were still moving deeper. Every hour put more distance between him and everything he recognized, and what unsettled him wasn’t the distance itself — it was how fast it had all happened. How recently his life had looked completely different. How thoroughly it had stopped looking like his life at all.

Co back and burn it down.

The other half of the promise. The part that lived in a quieter place.

"Renji."

Rei’s voice, careful and soft, like she was testing whether it was a good ti. He turned. She was watching him with that particular look she got, the one that asked a question without wanting to impose by actually asking it.

"You’ve gone quiet," she said. "Are you— is everything alright?"

He opened his mouth.

The world tilted.

Not gradually. Not with warning. The carriage lurched violently sideways, the whole fra screaming against itself, and then sothing enormous hit it and the sound was enormous too — not a crack but a crash, the kind that goes through the floor and up through your spine and arrives in your teeth before your mind has caught up. The horses weren’t neighing. They were screaming.

The door was already open before he’d decided to open it.

He hit the road and rolled, ca up with his hand on his hilt, eyes moving. The others landed around him. The carriage sat crippled behind them, one wheel lifted entirely off the ground, still shuddering with the mory of impact.

In the road, two things waited.

Enormous. Wrong in the specific way that predators are wrong — bodies built entirely around the purpose of ending other bodies. Black fur, coarse and thick, over fras that were too dense, too deliberate. Down their spines and across their shoulders, bone-white plating had grown up through the hide like the body itself had decided armor wasn’t optional. Their eyes were crimson. Not animal red. Lit. Burning with sothing that looked, uncomfortably, like awareness.

Renji went still.

One breath.

"naces."

The word ca out quieter than he’d ant it to.

In this world, there were seven soul ranks, Seven steps, each one further from human and closer to sothing else entirely. Threat. nace. Calamity. Destroyer. Dominus. Oblivion. Cataclysm. Each rank is not rely stronger than the one before it — it is more. At every new stage, a fighter earns an additional soul, and with it a vast expansion of essence, of presence, of what they are capable of surviving and dealing out in equal asure.

Renji had one soul. Rei had one soul. Ayra and Kaede each had one soul. Threat rank, all four of them. Capable fighters, by any normal asure.

The creatures in the road had two souls each.

naces. One rank above. One soul more. And the distance between one soul and two is the distance between a candle and a fire.

They didn’t wait.

The larger one ca straight for Renji and he threw himself sideways as a claw tore through the air where his chest had been. He felt the wind of it against his face. He got his sword up on the backswing and caught the blow on the flat of the blade, and the force of it drove him back three steps across the road before he planted and held.

"Kaede," he called, already moving, "take the second one with Ayra. Don’t let it get to Rei."

"I wasn’t planning to stand here and watch," Kaede said, and she was already gone.

He breathed out and let the essence build through his arm, through the blade, and cut. Three tis, fast and overlapping, each strike riding the montum of the last — Triple Sword Slash — the lines opened dark and deep across the creature’s bone plating. It reared back with a sound that resonated in his chest. Blood. Not enough. The armor had eaten most of it. The beast settled back onto all four limbs and looked at him again with those burning eyes, making a slow, considered decision about him.

It wasn’t afraid.

Behind him the second fight was already loud.

"Its left — Ayra, left!"

"I see it, Kaede, I have eyes—"

He risked a glance. Ayra had her hands raised, the air around the second beast’s limbs shimring and warping as she pushed her telekinesis to its limit, pulling its weight apart, fracturing its montum. A chunk of broken road spun up and cracked across its jaw hard enough to snap its head sideways. It shook the hit off like weather. Ayra’s jaw was set and her eyes had gone sowhere colder than her usual expression allowed, the gentleness burned off entirely, replaced by sothing efficient and furious.

Kaede moved in behind it, essence bright along her legs, her strikes landing in the exact places they needed to land — joints, gaps in the plating, the base of the neck. Precise. Every hit placed like she’d planned it three moves ago.

The beast took it all and kept moving.

"It’s not going down," Kaede said. Not panic. A report. "Keep it busy," Renji called back. "Wear it—"

His own beast hit him mid-sentence, lower this ti, smarter, going for his legs instead of his center. He read it a half-beat early and sidestepped, dragged his blade across its shoulder as it passed. Another wound. Still not enough. He could feel the bottom of his essence reserves getting closer, the way you feel the floor approaching when the water drains.

Rei was behind everyone, hands moving constantly, her face pale and tight with concentration. She wasn’t fighting. She was keeping everyone else capable of fighting, which was its own kind of battle, and she was losing ground on it slowly and steadily and without complaint.

Then Kaede made a sound.

Not pain. He’d heard her in pain before. This was sothing else — harder, settled, the sound of soone making a decision they aren’t going to revisit. He looked.

Ayra had the beast locked. Barely. Both arms extended, her whole body shaking with the effort, every last thread of her essence poured into holding it suspended for one more second — limbs churning uselessly in the air, wounds running dark down its fur, crimson eyes blazing with sothing between fury and disbelief at being held by sothing so small.

Ayra’s teeth were showing.

Kaede’s sword went through its skull.

The sound it made was final in a way that sounds rarely are. The body dropped. The silence that followed lasted exactly one mont.

Then Renji’s beast hit him from behind and sent him skidding ten feet across the road on his hands and knees.