Lacuna - N.R. Walker Page 0,93

But Tancho was alive. A gasping mess on the ground, much like Crow, but alive.

Crow groped for him, feeling his chest, his arms, his face, and pulled Tancho in for a kiss. “Thank the blue skies,” he murmured.

“Soko saved me,” Tancho whispered. He had lines of tears down his face. “I thought I’d lost you.”

“The pain is worse,” Crow mumbled.

Tancho nodded. “I wanted death.”

“We cannot be separated again.”

Tancho shook his head and wiped his sleeve across his face, smearing dirt and green blood across his cheek.

Karasu threw Crow’s sword to the ground beside them. “Stay together, for the love of the abyss.”

Crow looked up at her and Kohaku. “Thank you. I owe you my life.”

“Thank me by getting on your feet,” Karasu said, turning to fight another creature. Kohaku was already pulling his sword out of the gullet of another.

Crow got to his feet, not even sure they’d hold him, and helped Tancho get to his. They picked up their weapons and Crow searched for Soko . . . he looked for his black uniform but couldn’t see him. “Where is Soko?”

Tancho spun to search for him, just as a huge creature fell slowly to its knees, revealing a green-splattered Soko behind it. His chest was heaving, but he grinned at them, just as another beast came up behind him.

“Soko, look out!” Crow cried.

Before Soko could raise his sword, before he could ready his stance, the creature swung for him. Its huge talons aimed for Soko’s head, and Crow’s breath caught in his lungs . . .

Not like this.

Tancho’s arm flung outward and a small blade hit the creature right in the eye, the handle protruding from its socket. It fell to the ground and Soko turned to face him, a shade paler than before and his eyes wide, and gave Tancho a nod.

Karasu flew in and ripped the blade from the creature’s skull and pointed it at Soko. “Never turn your back, you damned fool. I’ll be so pissed if you die out here, you’ll be glad to be dead, you hear me?”

He nodded woodenly, still shaken. He took his sword in hand and when she’d turned back to fight another creature, Soko gave half a smile at Crow and Tancho. “She likes me.”

Karasu swung around, aiming her sword at Soko. “I’ll show you how much with my blade up your—”

Kohaku had to leap in and finish off her kill. “Are you all done trying to die?” he roared. He waved his sword around them. “Look where you are.”

Kohaku was right. It had been too close a call for all of them.

“Stay close,” Crow murmured to Tancho. And they took down more monsters, not risking more than an arm’s reach between them. It wasn’t ideal, but Crow liked having Tancho at his back. They were stronger together, that much was very clear.

Though he could hardly spare the attention, he loved watching Tancho fight. He moved like water, smooth and with deceiving force. He might have been smaller and lean, but he bore the strength of a tidal wave.

But Crow noticed that Soko, Karasu, and Kohaku were fighting more cautiously now. Thinking smarter and not taking risks like before. But these Ascii creatures didn’t seem to stop coming.

“Can we use the smoke bombs out here?” Crow asked.

“No,” Tancho said. “If the open air didn’t make it useless, it would take down as many of us as it would of them, and they’d slaughter those of us who went to ground asleep.”

Crow growled. “How many of these do we have to kill?”

“I think we are besting them,” Kohaku said. “I see more of us than them.”

“Look!” Soko said, pointing back to the stairs. Some of the creatures were escaping, retreating. “They know they’re beaten.”

“They’re not beaten yet,” Tancho said, working his two swords through a beast as it charged.

But they were thinning, Crow realised. There were more human soldiers than rancid beasts now, and they killed them quicker working in teams. Other beasts ran for the stairs and soon enough it was only a mass of bloodied white, black, red and green.

There were bodies everywhere though, human and Ascii, some injured, mostly dead. Soko, sweaty and bloodied, knelt by a slain Northlander, his hand on the dead man’s chest. He hung his head for a moment before he stood, meeting Crow’s gaze. “Keissi,” he claimed, and Crow’s heart sank.

He knew that man.

They’d laughed with him a time or two in training rounds, and looking around at the carnage, Crow was certain