[Ashborn-B1] 90. Swap (Patreon)

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Judith.

The call reverberated through her mind like the resonant notes of a harp. There was a pleasantness to it. A familiarity that shouldn’t have been formed this soon but had anyway.

But, despite the alluring nature of the voice, she didn’t want to acknowledge it. Because she was already where she wanted to be.

The blank space around her mind morphed into the living room inside her parent’s estate. Replicas of famous blades passed down in their clan hung from the walls. Their auras suffused the chamber in a light and warm hue. The rocking chairs around their fire place were well-maintained, so they didn’t creak as they wobbled. Only the leafing of a page joined the orchestra of crackling sounds from the hearth.

Mother pinched the paper between her fingers so precisely her skin barely touched it. “Here comes your favourite part.”

Judith couldn’t see Mother because she was sitting in her lap, but she could hear the smile. She also heard herself shouting when the page flipped to show a knight in shining armour battling a dragon.

The Seven Battles of Knight Artorias. A romanticised tale of who most in their clan considered their earliest ancestor. Facts of everything to his cultivation stage, age, and direct lineage had faded. All that remained were these seven retellings of key battles, written down by a bard.

Despite what her mother taught, Judith didn’t think the stories were anything special. If anything, she considered them quite over the top. In this battle with the dragon, for example, Artorias ripped off the dragon’s tail after the monster broke his weapon, and used that to pierce the beast’s skull.

If you were strong enough to rip off the beast’s tail barehanded, there was no reason to use its appendage as a weapon.

No. The stories were not why she enjoyed this time. She shut her eyes and let her head fall back in her mother’s bosom. Then she let that sharp tone, not at all built to read children’s tales, was over her.

Moisture slipped past her eye sockets.

Judith… the familiar whisper came again. You need to wake up.

Did she have to? What good would it do? There was nothing a cultivator like her could change in the outside world.

“Let Caelia handle it,” Judith whispered. Her niece would take care of everything—

The book snapped shut and Judith’s eyelids burst open. Now that she was leaning back in her mother’s bosom, she could see her face. Her mother wasn’t as young as she should’ve been given the memory. It wasn’t something you could catch just looking at her—cultivators aged strangely. The change was found in her demeanour.

The pupils had lost their light. Their stare was the wind rolling down the mountaintops of Everwinter.

Her mother’s exhale made her bangs flutter. “I feel sorry for her.”

Caught off-guard by the change in situation, Judith couldn’t help but mutter: “Sorry?”

Mother set down the book, then turned to the window. “That she will have to shoulder the burden of our clan alone.”

The fireplace crackled. Residual heat caressed their cheeks.

“I wasn’t strong enough to help my sister,” Mother mumbled. “So I’d hoped…” She trailed off, and her brows drooped. Shaking her head, she stood and put Judith down. “You should go. Artorias wouldn’t ignore a call, would he?”

Standing between the rocking chairs with her mother looming over her, the waves coming from the hearth were no longer warm. She stared at her mother’s hand, which loitered at her side, and reached out…

But the gap between them was too large to cross.

And so Judith pulled back. When she turned away, her child-like appearance had exchanged for that of her older self.

She strode out the door without another word.

Black spots blinked from Judith’s vision. She stared up at the sky, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

A thick limb drooping with dark goo slammed into the ground and kicked up the earth. Light whirred, cut the arm in half and hurled higher into the air, where it collided with a mass of writhing worms.

She blinked again. The man darting between tentacles was Tirion. Two holy blades at his side each cleaved through the limb of the eldritch monstrosity.

Another blade was standing to her left, shield and sword raised in case anything tried to get near her.

Despite her delirious state, her mind whirred on the most important factor of the battle.

‘Where is Vyke?’

She couldn’t spot his flying form anywhere—

A gargantuan shout made her turn. A broad man with lion heads for shoulder pads swung a broadsword.

‘Garen…’

Blood covered his armour but it didn’t seem to be his. Her second fought off a slew of Fallen Immortals. Aedan wasn’t among them.

‘He must’ve eliminated her.’

That must be why she could feel more power than ever leeching from the shrine into her being. Glancing in the direction of the pillars showed they’d manage to activate four columns. That was more than the Immortals had managed.

“Judith, you’re awake!”

She didn’t need to whirl around to recognise the voice.

Duke abandoned his song and ran towards her. “Are you alright? There’s something happening with your body and I didn’t know what to do…”

This was the first time in years that she’d heard him so worried.

‘Happening with my body?’ she frowned.

Now that he mentioned it, the pain in her stomach had disappeared. She looked down. The hole was gone. As was the writhing sensation of the leech.

No flesh had taken the place of the cavity. Instead, a film of light linked the edges of her flesh together. The red streaks pulsing through the web like a heartbeat must be blood.

What in the world was this? Her voice echoed in her mind without an answer.

‘Dorothy?’ she thought again.

The spirit hadn’t said a single thing since she woke up. And though she called again, more firmly this time, the jovial, kind-hearted spirit didn’t answer.

The flametalon released me and curved back up in the air.

My soles kicked up clouds of earth and my boots dug through the ground and skirted to a halt. My gaze spun on the king.

He’d grown so much smaller that I could see his head with a crick in the neck.

[Frost Giant King - lvl. 52]

Around the king, the world froze over as if it entered an ice age. The very essence floating aimlessly through the air stilled, afraid of its icy wrath…

‘He can no longer keep it his power inside.’

I took off the moment my momentum stopped. Saber was some ways behind me but the distance was nothing a quick portal couldn’t overcome.

Saber stepped out next to me. His hairs raised as I pushed essence through our connection.

‘Let’s hope this is enough.’

Tendrils of flame trailed from his physique and merged overhead. A blast wave of heat rushed out of my belly into the rest of my body.

I controlled my breathing and shaped another portal.

The sweat dripping from my forehead cauterised with Skul’s exit. Liquid flames dripped down his fangs and to the ground. As the vertical slits in his eyes passed over me, the screams of a dozen lesser drakes pierced my skull. I could see them on the other side of his pupils—the souls burning in the sea of flames that was his inner world.

The rise and fall of my chest stopped. The king had linked its hands in front of its chest in an effort to gather as much power as possible.

“We’ll disrupt it,” I said, jumping on Saber’s back. “Skul, you take the lead.”

The balekin darted forwards before my sentence finished. Saber roared in anger at the false start and rushed after him.

‘Should we climb up his leg?’

I got the sense that cutting off both its legs and toppling it wouldn’t break its focus now that it was in range of the pillar. This was the king’s final gambit. If he didn’t succeed in destroying the pillar now, it wouldn’t be able to with how much power it was losing. I had to disrupt the power where it was building:

Its arms.

Saber jumped. Flaming nails dug into the ice like hooks as he scaled the leg. Skul hurled up the other side of the limb like his life depended on it.

I shook my head. Even in a scenario like this they were still competing. I turned my attention on the king’s arms. The energy had reached such a terrifying degree the buffeting waves of power rolling from the king’s arms slowed our ascent.

My gaze narrowed. ‘His arms are trembling.’ Shards of ice also let loose from his skin.

Was he gathering more power than he could handle? Or was Aurille’s injection finally working?

‘Could be both.’ Either one worked in my favour.

Once we got within range, I slung a branch around the king’s right arm like a grappling hook and pulled myself from Saber’s rear. My two summons entered the garden as I flew forwards. Taking a straight path like this instead of the roundabout route along the king’s torso was quicker.

Saber and Skul roared back out once I slammed down on the monster’s arm. Saber exited faster, which brought Skul no small amount of irritation.

“Get out of your hairs, you two,” I snarled.

Despite being where we needed to be, I had no idea how we were going to cut off these arms. He may have shrunk, but his forearm was still as thick as a castle’s tower.

‘Is flame horizon even going to work—’

A heavy thud sounded behind me. The beast of a thousand eyes rose to his full height. The way his talons were clamped into the king’s flesh reminded me of an owl.

“Gaje,” I said, spinning back to the king. “Good timing. Let’s cut through his limbs and disrupt the power flow. That should settle this.”

My blade freed its sheathe and whispered of the frost with longing. Though there was no guarantee Saber’s ultimate skill would work, I had no choice but to use it…

But I shot a look back over my shoulder when there was no guttural response from the Nightmare. My brows furrowed. Not a single one of his eyes was trained on the king—

“Gaje?” My tone lowered.

—they were all glued on me.

Saber and Skul had already repositioned themselves to face the new threat.

A single, long claw slithered from within Gaje’s cloak of feathers. The three talons that were his fingers linked.

“Dreamshift.”

My summons’s aura flared but a curtain of darkness blanketed the world and smothered their presence. I dismissed them before they vanished completely.

In a blink, the shrine around me was no more. What had taken its place was a night air. Stars loitered in the sky, their lights brightened because of the deep, void-like darkness they swam in. Lower to the ground, a rocky plane extended as far as I can see. Corpses in all manners of decomposition littered. Some of the skeletons were big enough they must’ve given the king a run for its money when they were still alive.

Gaje was standing next to me, his beak was angled at the sky.

The barren plane full of nothing but remains…was this—

The Nightmare faced me. In this place, a deep sheen entered every single of his slit pupils. It was a light you’d find in the eyes of any who returned home after a long voyage.

‘I see.’

So this place was his nightmare.

That realisation finished settling in my mind when the world shifted again. The shrine returned. In front of me, a pillar towered, blazing in all its glory.

This wasn’t the central pillar I was looking at. Half-molten and frozen corpses lied scattered. Golems had been reduced to stumps if not mere puddles of water. Steaming holes dispersed the odour of burning meat into the air.

The dark-skinned cultivator I’d met before pulled a blade of pure lightning from a Dawnflame’s skull. Behind them, bonded beasts ripped the flesh from disciples too tired and broken to fight while they were still alive.

“A—Ashe…”

I turned. Raven was lying on the ground and clutching his stomach. There was so much blood pouring from the wound his hand was no longer visible.

“Oh, you weren’t dead yet? You’re certainly tough.”

The speaker was a woman. The one with the whiskers and cat-like demeanour. She raised her boot over his head—

Her ears twitched before the gate spawned behind her, and she laughed as she leapt out of the way of the claw.

Skul’s disappointment travelled across our bond as he stepped in front of Raven.

“Say,” I whispered.

Slowly, I rotated back to Gaje. He was standing in the centre of a glowing circle whose light faded with each moment.

“Was there a reason to go after the others?” I asked. “You could’ve solely targeted me.”

His many eyes blinked. The Nightmare tilted his head. “Why not?”

At that, I closed my eyes and huffed. “I suppose you’re right.”

Saber waltzed out of the garden and all three of us stared down our enemies.