Chapter 425: Bad Habits
“Make me…”
Altharion certainly was not pleased with the response he got. And my defiant stance before him.
He stood in the silence for a long time.
Then he took a step.
And another step.
And another…
He was walking towards me, casually flipping both axes in his hand.
“You see there’s a kind of person in this world,” he began, his voice carrying across the cold night like it owned it, “who mistakes the fact that they are still breathing… for the fact that they are strong.”
He stopped spinning the axes.
“I find them fascinating.”
Then he set them down.
Both axes touched the snow at the same time, planted deliberately upright, like markers. He straightened up and looked at me with that small, patient smile of his, and rolled the bones of his neck from one side to the other.
The sound it made was grotesque.
“Let’s have a conversation then.”
I summoned my sword on instincts and immediately, sparks flew around and formed the delicate Frostfang but when it came… it was broken.
‘Oh damn… thank you Kassie.”
As if to give me a joyful response, the diagonal blood stain across my chest burned again, making me wince slightly.
I sighed and let go of the sword and slowly folded my hands.
‘Okay… we’re doing this the ugly way.’
I gave him a crazy grin then broke into a run.
I closed the gap between us at a dead sprint, driving my shoulder low, aiming to push through his center. It was basic, brutal, with no announcement.
And yet he side stepped it cleanly, barely moving his feet, and my shoulder caught nothing but the cold air where he had been standing.
The momentum nearly took me forward into the snow.
I pulled out of it, spun, and was already swinging a straight right hand at the side of his head before I had fully turned.
He caught it.
His palm closed around my fist in mid-air with a grip that felt like iron cooling around my knuckles, and for a half-second, we stood frozen like that, my fist inside his hand, his eyes finding mine with a kind of quiet amusement that was worse than anger.
Then he squeezed.
The sound that came out of my throat was not one I was proud of. Something inside my knuckles ground against itself in a way that made my vision blur white at the edges. I dragged my arm back and he let me go, more out of boredom than effort.
I backed up two steps and shook my hand out.
‘Alright. That’s what we’re dealing with.’
He came at me this time.
He moved differently than I expected. Without any wind up or telegraphing he crossed the space between us in three steps and his first strike came at my throat, open-handed, fingers pressed together like the edge of a blade. I ducked under it, felt the air from it brush the top of my head, and drove my elbow hard into his ribs on the way down.
His knee came up and caught me in the chest before I could get out of his range and I went back, boots dragging through the snow, trying to find my footing. The impact knocked the air clean out of me and I stood there for a second doing nothing useful, mouth open, lungs refusing to cooperate.
His foot caught me before I recovered.
He planted it into my side while I was bent forward and it drove me sideways into the ground, face first into the snow. Cold bit into my cheek. My ear was ringing.
I rolled before he could follow it up.
I came back onto my feet and spat red into the white.
Lady Ilse had not moved behind me. I didn’t know if she was too drained to run or simply watching. Either way, she wasn’t my concern right now. My concern was the man standing about four meters away, brushing snow off his sleeve with a look that bordered on disappointment.
“You hit hard,” he said. “But you don’t hit smart.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Give me a minute, I’m warming up.”
He almost smiled.
He came again and this time I didn’t wait for him. I stepped into it, took a hit on the forearm that nearly dead-weighted my whole left side, and got inside his reach where the leverage was mine. My right hand found his jaw, hard enough to snap his head to the side, and I felt that one land properly, felt it go through.
He stumbled a step then turned his head back and looked at me the same way a man looks at a fly that has successfully landed on his arm.
He hit me three times before I hit the ground again.
The first caught my temple. The second drove into my stomach and folded me. The third came down on the back of my neck like a hammer and the snow came up to meet me fast.
I lay there for a moment.
The world was doing something it was not supposed to be doing, which was spinning. The trees above me were tilting at angles that trees did not normally tilt at. The cold had stopped biting and was now just… there. Which I understood to be bad, because it meant my body was busy with other things.
I heard his footsteps crunch towards me, slow and unbothered.
His voice rang from somewhere above me.
“This is what I meant. Breathing is not the same as being strong.”
I pushed myself up.
Nothing about me in that moment was graceful. My elbows slipped twice before they held and I dragged one knee underneath me and then the other and stood up in a way that could generously be described as standing up.
Blood was running freely from somewhere above my eyebrow now. I could feel it tracing a warm line down past my eye, along the ridge of my cheekbone, dripping off the edge of my jaw. My left arm was responding at about half capacity. My ribs on the right side had an opinion about every breath I took, and that opinion was consistently negative.
He watched me stand.
Something in his expression shifted and his voice sounded with contempt.
“You keep getting up…”
“Annoying habit,” I said with a shameless grin.
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