Chapter 119: Chapter 119: A deal.
’Ohh....the elf attack, the giant monsters and this, do I have the main character’s bad luck or some shit?’ he thought.
The thought was a joke and a prayer, both thrown into the thin night air and both landing awkwardly on his ribs.
Both of them stepped back, as the stench of blood reeked more, when the gate now opened fully.
Aiden was confused, what the fuck was happening? Was this also in the story, why was a bastard here?
Yes, mixed races were discriminated against as bastards. Suitable name if he had to say.
But he knew more about them. He saw him, with those draconic horns, red eyes with slit pupil, with elven ears. His beauty not matching his but looking good all the same.
The first thing Aiden noticed —, before the muscles in his neck tightened — was the way the light fell on the creature’s face.
It caught the cheekbones like thrown metal and made a map of angles. He’d never seen an ugliness so precise that it read like a promise.
The horns curled back, red as bone-polished iron; the ears tapered with the cruelty of elven craft; the eyes slit like a blade’s edge. Beauty and wrongness braided together.
His armor which looked like his skin, with many scales covering every coronor of his body.
Aiden felt at once an ugly bubble of envy and a colder, more immediate panic. He looks like something born in an artist’s fever dream and raised on violence.
He remembered a page from some old book — a rumor more than history — about children of dragons and elves being cast into the margins, made into monsters by the very hands that birthed them.
’He has four fingers...mean his daddy ain’t no Nobel dragon. Mean his lower blooded, weak, but still stronger than me, much much stronger than me.’ he thought, as more questions rose in his mind.
"Bastard!!!" Aiden roared.
The word left his mouth like a blade. The sky flinched. It was ugly and small and true.
Arina looked at aiden in shock. Her eyes looking at him ’what the fuck...’
She had that look — the one that gathered everything she did not say into coiled light behind her teeth.
For a second Aiden saw the fatigue there, the hot flush beneath her collarbones as if her fever had settled into the bones.
He wanted to tell her to shut up, to breathe, to not draw attention — and then he wanted to laugh at himself for thinking he could order silence out of a war-belled forest.
Their lives had never been about clever plans; they were about improvisation and stubbornness.
The call caught his attention instantly, his split eyes opening wide, focusing on Aiden.
"Hmmmm...brave little one..." he voiced. "...The name is Aros, son of Ares, don’t call me names... little human..."
The voice carried as if scraped across a cavern mouth: smooth, amused, grave.
Aros — the name like a coin flipped by fate — carried a promise of lineage and of violence. Son of Ares. War in a pedigree.
Aiden paced forward, while Arina took a step back.
His body moved before his head could tell it not to. Pride is bone-deep; courage often lives in the same marrow as stupidity.
He felt ridiculous and critical and dizzy all at once. Step forward. Don’t be a coward. Don’t let fear do the naming for you. The words in his mind were older than sense.
"Aros, son of ar...whatever, we don’t have bad blood with you, we just want something that’s inside. So you if you dont mind..." he gestured, his hands saying get out the way.
It was a terrible bargaining tone — casual, almost jocular — meant to buy wiggle room.
He half-hoped the arrogance would parachute him out of this. That someone with horns and scales would be distracted by flippancy.
It was a foolish hope and he knew it. Still, the human capacity for bluster is stubborn; Aiden used it like a shield.
Aros stepped forward, and with that one step , he was already near Aiden, his seven feet height looking down on him.
Proximity carried a new temperature. The air felt heavy, pressed. Stench thickened into a kind of atmosphere that made thinking harder.
Aiden could feel the warmth of the creature like a burn — not the fire of dragon, but the body heat of a predator content with its own potential.
Sniff..sniff..
"What is this? I don’t smell fear on you, interesting.." he voiced.
Aiden locked his golden eye onto his red blood eyes. ’Haha, no fear, maybe, but I can hear my own heart beating like crazy....’
A heartbeat is a small, traitorous drummer. It made a noise like a distant bell tolling a warning.
Aros’s nostrils flared, tasting at the saga of Aiden’s pulse as if it were a map to his interior.
There was something in the way the bastard sniffed — curiosity wrapped in contempt. He was tasting not only blood but story: human, elven, fever, proximity to death. The bastard was an archivist of wounds.
"aros...." Arina whispered, gaining the courage as she stepped forward. "like my partner told, we mean you no harm...we just want to enter inside and take what we need.."
Arose sniffed again.
"A dead woman walking and a man fearless of death. What is this combo..." he voiced.
"You know what....your bravery hit me, child, I might leave you lot alone...but, you called me a bastard, human...I have to erase that ....disdain, with a punishment..."
Aiden smiled, yes, he had dealt with all high and mighty people. Many times, like the Nobels, and the company bosses.
A touch of theater — he’d learned that from bosses and kings.
There was a performative language to surviving commerce and court: a wink, a slash of humor, a mock-bow.
"...A deal then," he said.
"A deal?" Aros questioned.
"You already know I’m weak. You’ll have no fun shredding me apart. And as you can see, my partner is on her deathbed.
So I propose a deal. A postponement of my punishment." His voice was steady as he drew the blade across his palm, reopening the lines of old scars.
Aros took a step back. The nerve—the utter nerve—of this frail human. To postpone his punishment, as if he truly believed he could grow strong enough to resist him in the future. As if this were some fairytale.
"Hahahahaha....."
His laugh, echoed, echoed louder. So much so, it created a burst of wind itself. All the animals and birds chirping and scared away.
The world held its breath. The forest became a living thing pressed tight around a secret.
Aros grabbed his bloodied hand, as his scales absorbed the humans blood. Like a spong soaking water.
There was a sensation like static in Aiden’s veins when the scaled hand closed around his palm.
It was intimate and invasive all at once — like being read aloud. The bastard’s scales drank in the warm iron, and Aiden felt an obscene sense of being known, catalogued. Aros’s gaze dipped to the fresh scar and then to Aiden’s face, folded over with something that could have been amusement, recognition, or hunger.
"Deal then, I now know the taste of your blood, I will come back, brave little one.." he voiced. And before Aiden could say anytging, he was gone.
Aros left like a shadow peeled away. In the hollow where he had stood, the air felt colder, emptied as if the world had been exhaled. The taste of his hand lingered like a curse — metallic and sweet.
There was silence for a while, clear silence, only the win and the stench of blood seeping from the gates.
It was a silence that fractured Aiden. It folded him inward until he felt like he might break.
Aiden finally fell down in his knees, his heart beat ready explode, his body shaking from weakness, feeling his pure mana upclose.
He felt the mana as a humming under his skin — something more than blood, a thing alive and nervous. It was near to panic, the sensation of a coiled thing wanting out. He had always thought of himself as patched-together courage and cheap luck; now he understood that luck was a currency and it could be spent, cashed out by a touch.
"Aiden...you okay?" Arina called, quickly coming near him, holding his shoudler.
"Haaa....are dungeons really this exciting?" He joked.
It came out thin but genuine. Humor was an old coping mechanism; he wielded it like a blade to clean the rust off their terror. Laughter quieted the nervous tremor in his limbs for a second — a temporary anesthetic.
Arina smiled. "...you still joke? God, Aiden you are really something else...." She voiced, as both of them stood up.
Her smile was a small sun in winter. It made the world plausible again for a breath.
"well....we avoided certain death, give or take.."
"indeed lover boy, somehow, your wit crushed your bad luck, but what will you do later?"
The way she said lover boy was a secret—half-awake affection and half-scold. It was dangerous and small and honest. A spark. A seed. A fracture forming in the shape of something better.
"...I don’t care for now, I will see the problem of later, later in the future.." he replied.
His answer was true and false. He meant it in the small practical way — survive now, worry later — but a part of him always lived inside those later days. Later held his anxieties like a lover: present and patient. The bargain he’d just struck with blood would not remain a private ledger forever.
Arina holding his shoudlers, they finally entered, entered the mighty city of the elves, or once a city of elves...