“You aren’t going to duel him?” Barnaby Holt asked, his single scarred arm frozen in midair.
The chief steward stared at Kaelen Vance in sheer disbelief.
Beside him, Sera Thorne leaned forward over the table, her gray eyes narrowing with sharp curiosity.
“Cassian is fifteen miles away in the gorge,” Kaelen replied smoothly, sliding his feet into his soft velvet slippers. “The mountain road is full of mud, loose gravel, and horse dung. Why would I walk through horse dung just to hit someone who’s already dying of pill poisoning?”
Linnea adjusted her brass spectacles, her brow furrowing in confusion.
“Master Vance, Cassian has eighty berserkers,” Linnea warned. “The scout said they are preparing to set fire to the mine entrance. If the ventilation shafts burn, hundreds of miners will suffocate.”
“The mine has three-foot granite blast doors and an Earth-Fire defensive array,” Kaelen noted casually, waving a hand. “Orson spent twenty thousand stones fortifying those shafts. If eighty bandits with iron axes could breach it in an afternoon, the contractors should be hanged.”
Cassian wants a fight because his clock is ticking, Kaelen thought, feeling the tranquil warmth in his dantian. Every hour he breathes, that crude Blood-Boil poison rots another inch of his marrow. Fifty more hours of rest, and my cultivation vessel hits three hundred.
