Chapter 135: Time To Move On
The city answered Triss's roar with its own noise, brick settling, glass ticking, concrete sloughing down in slow avalanches. The sound carried far, a warning pressed into the streets. From his vantage, Seo-jin watched the aftermath spread and felt a flicker of disbelief harden into focus. He had misjudged the boy. Badly.
'Where the hell was he hiding that?'
[Probably wasn't. Bet Ash didn't know this was possible. This isn't him—it's the ghost.]
'Doesn't matter. Leech looks like he's about to fold. Let's see how a father handles losing control.'
Below, the street lay gutted. Asphalt split open, trash ground into paste, bones of old buildings clawing up through dust. At the center of it stood Ash, half-buried in the wreckage, shoulders slack, posture loose. Blue light leaked from his eyes like smoke from a furnace, threading upward to braid with Triss's aura. The damage radiated outward from him in rings, as if the city itself had recoiled.
McLeach was still upright, though only just. Shock rippled through him in visible waves, muscles twitching, breath hitching. His face couldn't settle, fear bled into anger, grief into denial, then back again, each emotion tearing through him too fast to hold. He looked like a man trying to outrun a collapse already inside his chest.
"Ash—my son. Easy. Slow down. Remember what I taught you. Don't let your ghosts—"
"Silence."
He was reaching, scrambling for words that might still mean something. One syllable ended it. The voice that cut him off wasn't just Ash's. It carried another tone beneath it, female, steady, cold, both fused into a single command. Four eyes locked onto McLeach with the weight of judgment, and in them he wasn't a father or a threat. It was his turn to be small.
"You have harmed this child for the last time, human. Your sins are heavy. Your death will answer them."
Ash moved. Triss moved with him, drifting forward in lockstep, the ground groaning under their advance. Something inside McLeach finally snapped. Fear drained out of him, grief burned away, leaving only raw anger wrapped tight around a core of loss.
"My sins?"
He shouted, voice cracking but loud.
"What about yours?! You killed her! You! Where's your punishment? Where's her justice?!"
He snapped his arms across his chest, palms down, and black aura poured off his hands in thick sheets, spilling into the air like oil.
"You won't kill me! You can't!"
The words tore out of him alongside a bark of laughter as the pressure inside his body compressed.
"I'm all you've got!"
He flung his arms wide. The energy ripped free and slammed into the street at six separate points, splashing outward like thrown paint. Each impact buckled the ground as if something detonated beneath water, sending vertical jets of black sludge screaming into the air.
From above, Seo-jin felt the pull of it immediately. For a D-rank, the output was ugly and dense, packed with intent. The sludge writhed with embedded maws, rows of grinding teeth forming and dissolving, the whole mass chewing at itself like it wanted to bite through steel.
Ash and Triss didn't flinch.
"Fool."
The word hit first. The attack stopped a hand's breadth from Ash's face, frozen mid-surge. The black-and-purple bands bleeding off Triss's body slid forward, stretching like living straps, wrapping the stalled mass and crawling back along it toward McLeach.
The moment his skill locked, panic detonated behind the man's eyes. His aura spiked hard as he dumped everything he had into the construct, veins standing out as he forced mana into dead flesh and borrowed souls. Without Joanna, this was it...his last real weapon.
When the mass still wouldn't move, he screamed and slammed both hands into the pavement.
On impact, the sludge convulsed and turned, crashing straight down instead of forward. The sound came all at once, wet and heavy, like bodies being hurled onto concrete by the hundreds. The street answered by erupting, dust and debris blasting outward in a violent wave as the ground gave way beneath the strike.
He pivoted to run and never made it a full step.
The moment the intent broke, Triss's black-striped bands snapped forward, fast and precise, slamming into McLeach and punching through him without tearing skin. No blood. No visible wounds. He still screamed as his body jerked off the ground, spine arching as if yanked by hooks.
Dark veins surfaced beneath his flesh, black and blue lines swelling and crawling upward. The pressure climbed from his chest to his throat, forcing his head back, eyes bulging as his jaw locked and his body went rigid, shaking under something that clearly hurt far worse than a blade.
"Aaaasssshhhh!"
The shout tore out of him just before his eyes rolled black. Whatever was holding him cut the lights, and his body slackened mid-air.
Triss's bands eased him down, slow and deliberate, lowering him until his knees touched the ground. He stayed upright, suspended, limp like a puppet with its strings still tight.
[What kind of attack is that?]
'I think she put him under. Those bands are flooding him with mana. Could be overload. Could be poison.'
[Maybe.]
Seo-jin shifted to move closer, then froze as the broodlink flared hard.
'Report.'
Pain's voice came through thick and eager.
'Two Users. Orders?'
'Strength?'
'Weak.'
A smile crept in.
'Enjoy your meal.'
Three sharp spikes of hunger rippled back through the link. Far off, bloodlight flashed and fire bloomed against the skyline as Pain, Panic, and Snare made contact, the city edge briefly lighting up with the sound of screaming steel and burning flesh.
A rush of satisfaction from his brood rolled through the link as Seo-jin peeled himself off the ruined façade and dropped to the street below. He kept space between himself and the center of it, boots crunching glass and rubble while he watched. No reason to interfere. Family business had a way of resolving itself when given time.
It was instructive for Seo-jin, something to observe and catalog about how humans broke under pressure. Unfortunately for McLeach, he was the lesson, not the student.
Darkness closed in all at once on Ash's father. Sight vanished. Sound followed. Even the sense of having a body slipped away, leaving only a cold, thoughtless void that pressed in from every side.
He floated inside it, trapped in something that felt like sleep but carried weight and intention. A dream shaped by someone else's hand.
Light tore open the black. A woman screamed. A newborn cried, thin and raw, the sound cutting through him.
Heat seeped back into the world as the brightness stabilized, resolving into a memory he hadn't touched in years. One he had buried deep enough to forget.
He saw himself there with her, arms shaking as they held their son between them. Tears on both their faces. Smiles breaking through the fear. For a brief moment, they were whole.
Even without a body, he reached for her. The fog thickened around his thoughts, but her face stayed clear. Gentle. Alive. Looking at him like he mattered.
'Laura.'
The name cracked the memory apart. The warmth detonated into noise, the illusion shattering as if the world itself had ruptured.
Pinned inside the dark, stripped of control, he tried to turn away from what came next. No plan. No thought. Just instinct clawing at dread.
Then the next image hit, brown and red flooding the void, a violent blur that crushed his chest with terror. Through the haze, through the paralysis, one sound cut clean and unmistakable.
His own scream, torn apart by regret and loss, echoing back at him with nothing left to soften it.
The source of his pain still hadn't formed. His voice lingered as pressure without direction, a constant hiss behind the image assembling around him, behind him, inside him.
The forgotten graveyard took shape. The hunting ground. The place where he found Joanna. The place where he lost his wife.
His eyes refused to shut. He watched because he couldn't look away, watched because he already knew what was coming. His wife running. His son too far to reach. He had warned her again and again, told her not to bring the boy, told her the risk wasn't worth it. She never listened. She never left him behind. That same smile met him even as she ran, soft and certain, the one that always dulled his fear and made danger feel unreal.
The moment her body was shredded to paste instead of their son's, the screams finally matched the image. He saw himself sprinting, arm outstretched, lungs burning, tears cutting lines down his face, and still arriving too late. He watched himself fail her.
He watched himself bind Joanna. Watched himself turn away from his son's cries. Six years old. Just a child. A child who lost his mother in front of him...and his father.
Light slammed into him. The traumatized scream cut off mid-breath, replaced by heat and the sound of sobbing.
There were no images now. No mercy in sight. Only sound and sensation. He knew them instantly. The impact of flesh on flesh. The rhythm of violence. He had heard it too many times not to recognize it.
Ash crying.
Crying because he was being hurt.
His own voice filled the void. Shouting. Spitting curses. Words thrown without thought or restraint. There were no ears to cover, no distance to hide behind. Every blow, every insult, every sob detonated around him, then inside him, each sound striking with the weight of memory made physical.
Time lost shape. Seconds stretched thin, bled into minutes, minutes into long, suffocating spans that refused to end. Nothing looped. Nothing repeated or softened. It was simply Ash's life, played straight through, hour by hour, pain without mercy or cause.
Somewhere in the middle, the fog began to thin. Awareness crept back in pieces, slow and unwanted. A few more hours scraped by before clarity finally tore through the numbness like cold water.
The darkness broke apart, reality blinding him for a moment.
Blinking away the pain, his eyes cleared, and Ash still stood before him. Triss hovered overhead. Blue smoke still leaked from the boy's eyes as he stared past him, not at him. The beast above hadn't changed either, stripes pulsing with a hatred that pressed down like a sword in the chest.
A hand lifted. Weak. Shaking. It reached out anyway.
"You look just like her… how did I never see it?"
A single tear slipped free from his son. Ash's hands trembled, just enough to show they were still his own.
Then Triss struck once more. A final surge through her tendrils. The light vanished from McLeach's eyes.
"Mother… I'm sorry."
The words left him, and that was all. His gaze went empty. His body slackened. Ash crumpled where he stood, Triss shrinking with him, her massive form collapsing down until she lay beside him, both of them spent.
From above, the scene held still. Breath caught as if watching the end of a film, Seo-jin remained silent until it was truly finished. Then he moved.
"Beautiful! Truly moving."
Grinning wide, he stepped closer, eyes glancing between the unconscious boy and the fallen ghost. He had planned to feed her to Grimm, planned to tell the child she died under Snare's watch. That plan dissolved on the spot.
He was keeping them. Both of them.
Three presences dropped in behind him. Pain. Panic. Snare. They bowed low, auras settling.
Snare lifted his head.
"What should we do with the body?"
Seo-jin's smile sharpened.
"I promised you a human. He's all yours."
Snare straightened, bloodlight leaked from his eyes, then folded himself into an even deeper bow.
"Thank you, Broodfather!"
A dismissive flick sent the broodling away. Envy rolled off Pain and Panic in thick waves, ignored as they were ordered back into the Growths, leaving Snare time to finish feeding.
Chewing and wet tearing followed as background noise while Seo-jin crossed to the boy. He lowered himself, pressed a palm to Ash's head, and held it there as a few seconds passed.
[He's stable. Just unconscious.]
'He exceeded expectations today. With time and proper pressure, he'll become dangerous. A silent killer. I just hope his shard rank isn't trash.'
[It's B.]
His grip tightened slightly as he lifted the boy.
"You can tell that now? Since when?"
[Only because I had direct access to scan him. It's not exceptional, but B-rank is workable.]
"That's plenty."
His gaze drifted to Triss's diminished form. The possibilities began to stack immediately. Ghosts used as blades. Kill zones no one could see. Invisible pressure, precise and lethal. The thought sent a faint pulse through his spine.
"With gear, we can push him far past his baseline. After that, it's just a matter of partners. The third layer of hell is saturated with ghosts. We might even find a way to bind a User's spirit. Ooh, or a demon's!"
[That could be interesting.]
"Right?"
Behind him, Snare pried a piece of a molar loose from between his fangs and tilted his head, watching with quiet fascination as his father continued speaking to the mysterious voice.
"Grab the cat."
The order snapped Snare upright. He scooped Triss without hesitation, slinging her over his shoulder as he fell in behind. The route registered immediately as they started running. They were cutting back toward the docks.
Anyone stumbling onto the scene would see a man carrying an unconscious child, trailed by a small demon, and draw the wrong conclusions fast. Seo-jin's expression only made it worse.
"When we're back, you'll spend time with him."
A slight tilt of the head.
"The child?"
"Yes."
The Woon tower stood in the distance. For a breath, crimson bled into Seo-jin's eyes.
"I need him conditioned. I want loyalty to the Dead Hands burned in as deep as yours is to me. Can you do that?"
There was no pause. Snare's smile spread, sharp and eager.
"Easily, Broodfather. The boy will revere you. That much is simple."
"Good...very good."
They moved unseen, slipping across rooftops and down alleys, shadow to shadow, until the docks rose to meet them and Dead Hand territory swallowed the night. The moment Seo-jin arrived, the quiet shattered. Shouts, laughter, Min's fury, Gregor's questions.
All of it predictable. All of it irrelevant.
The capsule was secured. Grimm was fed. The ghost tamer claimed. Only one thought mattered now, the only pressure keeping Azakh-Tur from stillness.
It was time to enter the freelands.
It was time to evolve.