The Predator Crown demanded that the choice of owner be completed.
Two equal voices could not exist at its centre. One had to absorb the other and receive the remaining bonds.
Two actions appeared before me.
"Absorb Kane Li."
"Transfer ownership rights to Kane Li."
The System showed no third option.
Kane gathered what remained of his armour. It held only part of the forty-one thousand bonds: after the voices were restored, many people and beasts had left the circuit. But those he still held were enough to cut across the central platform with a white blade.
I dodged with the Crown. The System stopped Kane's muscles for a fraction of a second.
He smiled.
"Controlling bodies again."
I withdrew the command. The white blade struck my shoulder.
Kane advanced while I opened the bonds one by one.
Lily called out the names of people in the archive, Rem confirmed the rewritten contracts, and Mira separated living bonds from artificial seals. The captains at the outer wall showed where their cores ended. Cole relayed the numbers of fighters Kane had registered as property after the first warrant.
Each name turned one shadow behind Kane into a separate person or beast.
I did not take them for myself.
I opened a way out.
Kane answered with blows. One cut open my side, another broke my sword. The System offered to shut out the pain and strengthen my body with the freed bonds. I left them outside.
The armour grew thinner on both of us.
"They'll return to a master," Kane said. "At the first hunger. The first winter."
"Some of them will."
"And you'll refuse again?"
"I don't know."
The honest answer angered him more than an argument would have.
Kane seized the last major bond.
The chain basilisk raised its head beyond the wall. The golden circlet had gone dark, but the memory of the contract remained in its body. Kane reached out to it.
"I raised you."
The beast's answer came through the Crown.
A cage. Its first feed from Kane's palm. The pain of the golden circlet. Victories after which its master stroked the white plates. The night beside the sick Leon's bed, when the basilisk had warmed the room with its own body.
The bond was real.
Kane felt hope.
"Get up."
The basilisk tried. Its foreleg twitched.
The basilisk did not hate Kane, nor had it forgotten the rare touches over their years together. That was precisely why the refusal was not simple.
The beast looked at its former master and lowered its head to the stone.
It stayed down.
The last white line went dark.
The Crown stripped Kane of his armour.
He stood opposite me in torn clothes, without beasts or anyone else's strength. I could have ended the fight with one blow, but the System had already named the victor.
The owner's right opened before me.
Open in the reader