Brute 273

Chapter 273 

Atasha’s POV 

“I heard the King grew up with Nicho,” Grace whispered as she handed me a piece of bread. 

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I took it and nodded, even though my throat felt too tight to answer properly. The bread was dry and slightly stale, but it grounded me, something solid to focus on while my thoughts threatened to spiral back to the chamber we had left behind. 

Despite Nicho’s sacrifice earlier, we kept moving. 

The cave stretched on without branching. By now, we had been inside for nearly six hours, and the sense of time had started to blur. There were no markers down here, no daylight or sky to measure against, only the steady rhythm of boots against stone and the slow rise of heat as we went deeper. 

The beasts were fewer now. 

Aside from the large bears that had nearly overwhelmed us earlier, most of what we encountered were small, skittering creatures that clung to the walls or crawled across the floor in uneven bursts. Cassian and Rio dealt with them quickly, often before they could even reach striking distance. Grace stayed alert, her gaze constantly moving, while I remained close enough to heal if needed, my senses stretched thin and ready. 

It should have felt like progress. 

Instead, the quiet made everything worse. 

The King walked ahead of us, shoulders squared, his pace unbroken. He had not spoken about resting. He had not acknowledged the blood still staining his armor. He had not said Nicho’s name again. Whatever grief he carried, he had locked it behind the same walls he used to hold everything else that might slow him down. 

him 

The tension among us thickened with every step. 

Nicho’s use of the fae stone lingered in all our minds. I understood now why the capital had been able to rescue us during the first surge. This was not improvised magic. This was something developed with intention, tested, and then deployed when nothing else could hold. 

The knowledge unsettled me more than the beasts did. 

We walked on, deeper into the cave, the glowing insects along the walls thinning as the stone grew darker and warmer. The air pressed in around us. 

I reached into my pocket and felt the edges of the fae stone again, the surface smooth and cold despite the heat around us. It sat there like a promise and a threat at the same time. Each of us had been given one before we entered, not as reassurance, but as an instruction they did not need to say aloud. If you cannot win, you make sure the enemy does not win either. 

Then my gaze drifted to the King’s back, to the way he moved through the tunnel like he belonged to it, like grief could be pushed aside as long as his feet kept going forward. 

The fight earlier had revealed something I could not ignore. 

Cassian and his men were on a different level than warriors from the capital. 

It was not arrogance. It was not posturing. It was simply how they moved when something tried to kill them. They did not flinch when the beasts charged. They did not hesitate when steel niet bone. They did not waste energy shouting or scrambling, because they had been trained in the kind of survival that did not allow theatrics. 

A normal soldier would not last long in a place like this. 

15:49 Sat, Jan 31 

Chapter 273 

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Even with sharp senses and combat training, most would panic once the walls closed in and the air turned thick, because the danger here did not come from one enemy or one direction. It came from exhaustion that crept up without warning, from poison that did not announce itself until lungs started burning, and from beasts that hit hard enough to shatter ribs against 

stone. 

The North was different. 

Northerners grew up with beast tides the way southern packs grew up with politics. They did not hear stories about beasts and imagine nightmares. They saw them. They learned early that beasts did not always look like wolves and that size did not matter when something was built to crush you. They were trained to deal with creatures three or four times their size, not as some heroic trial, but because failing meant your village was gone by sunrise. 

I had seen it during the fight with the bears. 

The capital’s warriors were skilled, but most of them had not been shaped by the same kind of constant violence. 

Nicho had been brave. He had been capable. He had also been human in the way bravery could not always compensate for experience. 

I drew a slow breath through my nose, forcing the thought down before it turned into guilt again. There was no space left for guilt. It would not bring him back. 

We kept walking. 

The tunnel continued to slope, the air growing warmer and heavier, the stone underfoot changing from rough rock into something smoother, as if the passage had been worn down by countless movements. The glowing insects clinging to the walls became fewer now, their faint light thinning until the shadows thickened again. Our senses adjusted, and the darkness did not blind us, but it still made every movement beyond our immediate space feel like a threat waiting to step forward. 

Then I stopped. 

It was instinct, not a decision. My feet planted before my mind fully formed the reason. 

Everyone else stopped too. 

Almost immediately, Cassian was beside me, close enough that his shoulder nearly touched mine, his hand hovering near his sword. He did not ask what was wrong. He simply shifted into position like he expected something to explode out of the 

stone at any moment. 

The tunnel had ended. 

In front of us, the cave opened into a wider space, and from that chamber, three different pathways stretched forward. Three openings, three mouths in the stone, each one leading into darkness. 

I stared at them and frowned, my pulse tightening. 

Three paths. 

Three chances to be wrong. 

Three chances to waste time we did not have. 

Grace stepped closer, her expression tightening as she looked from one tunnel to the next. Rio’s jaw clenched, his eyes narrowing as he tried to scent what lay beyond, but the air down here was thick with damp heat and old stone, and whatever poison lingered in the caves made it harder to separate one smell from another. 

The King moved forward a few steps, stopping near the center of the chamber. He studied the tunnels with a calm that did not match the moment, as if he had already prepared himself for this outcome. 

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“There are five of us now,” I thought. Six had entered. Five remained. And the one who was missing had bought us time with blood. 

The King finally spoke. “I guess we have to go to each pathway one by one.” 

My stomach tightened. 

If we chose wrong, we would lose hours. If we split up, we would die. So the only option was to test each path, one at a time, until we found whatever we came for. 

But wouldn’t that mean it would take even longer? 

No one knew how deep this place truly went. We had already been walking for nine hours, and the air felt heavier now, like the cave was pressing down harder the further it dragged us in. My body remembered the surge cycle, the four hours of active emergence, the twenty hours of false calm, and that knowledge sat in my chest like a ticking threat. 

The next surge was coming. 

If we were still in this place when the surge began again, then it would not matter how strong Cassian was, or how sharp the King’s blade could be, or how many times I could heal before my body gave out. A surge meant volume. It meant being buried in enemies that did not stop pouring in. 

It would spell our deaths. 

AD