Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The palace gates came down in one punch.

Not a spell. Not a technique with a name attached to it. Hollow Tide simply planted both boots in the courtyard dust, drew her arm back until the muscle and sinew stretched taut and impossible, rubber-thin, and drove it forward with a sound like the whole world inhaling.

DOOOOM.

Sixty feet of reinforced ironwood iron-banded gate folded inward like wet paper, and through the settling dust and screaming splinters, Hollow Tide’s crew poured into the courtyard behind her, whooping, weapons already drawn, exactly as loud and exactly as reckless as every single fight Milo had ever watched her walk into.

She didn’t wait for the coalition’s careful, coordinated eastern and southern pincer to catch up. She never did. None of them even knew a mad woman was already doing what they had hesitated to do.

"OI!" Her voice rang clear across the whole shattered courtyard, aimed straight up at the throne room’s high, open balcony, where a figure sat sprawled sideways across a chair that had never once needed to be a throne to become one. "You’re the King who writes mean letters and kills people for asking nicely! I Heard all about you! Come down here and fight somebody who actually wants to hit you!"

The King looked down at the chaos unfolding in his own courtyard with the same mild, faintly curious expression he’d worn watching a Sect Leader tear his own dais apart, and said nothing at all.

He simply stepped off the balcony.

He didn’t fall. He descended, unhurried, the same loose-limbed ease he brought to everything, and landed in the courtyard’s center without so much as a settling puff of dust disturbed by the impact, directly between Hollow Tide and the first wave of her own crew.

"You’re the pirate," he said, sounding, if anything, mildly amused. "I did wonder which idiot would arrive first."

"THAT’S ME," Hollow Tide announced, delighted, already surging forward.

SHING.

Her first mate’s blade cleared its sheath somewhere behind her, and the entire courtyard dissolved into a single, roaring collision of steel and flame and rubber-quick limbs against a wall of the King’s own guard, who fought — Milo would have told her, had he been anywhere near enough to say it — not out of loyalty, but out of a will that had never once been fully their own to spend.

Hollow Tide didn’t care about the guards. She went straight for the King himself, both arms already coiling back, snapping forward in a blur of stretched, whipping motion —

DOING — DOING — DOING!

Three strikes, each one carrying enough force behind it to have leveled the sea monster she’d killed with a single punch, landed against absolutely nothing at all. The King had simply, unhurriedly, stepped a half-pace to the left each time, letting each blow crater the flagstones beside him instead, watching her overextend with the mild, patient interest of a man observing an animal perform a trick it hadn’t quite mastered yet.

"Hold still," Hollow Tide said, grinning wide, entirely unbothered by three consecutive misses.

"Why would I do that," the King asked, genuinely curious, and caught her fourth strike between two fingers, exactly the way he’d caught the Sect Leader’s black flame days earlier — the impact simply arrested, absorbed, gone, her whole rubbery arm straining uselessly against a grip that didn’t so much as flex.

She grinned wider. Milo, had he been watching from anywhere close enough, would have recognized the specific shape of that grin as trouble.

Her free hand shot forward, fingers hooking into a claw, and the flagstone beneath the King’s own feet simply tore itself free — not through any Talent Milo had ever catalogued from her, but through sheer, brute leverage, a wedge of broken stone the size of a wagon wheel ripped loose and swung like a club into the King’s exposed side.

CRACK.

For the first time since Milo had ever watched this man fight, he actually moved to block something.

He caught the flagstone on one raised forearm, and it shattered against him in a spray of gravel and dust — and Hollow Tide used the half-second of his attention diverted to wrench her captured arm free and drive her boot, stretched and rubbery and moving faster than the eye should reasonably follow, straight into his ribs.

THWOMP.

He staggered. Actually staggered, a half-step back, robes shifting, and for one bright, electric moment the entire courtyard — crew and guard and King alike — seemed to hold its breath at the sight of it.

"There it is," Hollow Tide said, delighted, bouncing back onto her heels, both arms already coiling for another strike. "See, I knew you could feel things. Everyone kept telling me you were unbeatable and I was like, nah, everybody bleeds eventually, you just gotta hit hard enough—"

"You misunderstand," the King said, straightening his robes with two idle fingers, and something in his voice had gone, very slightly, colder. "I felt that. I am not incapable of feeling. I simply hadn’t yet decided it was worth the effort of minding."

He moved.

Milo, watching this account secondhand later, pieced together what happened next from a dozen different terrified survivors’ descriptions, none of which fully agreed on the details, all of which agreed entirely on the shape of the horror.

The King crossed the space between them in less time than a blink required, and where Hollow Tide’s rubbery, unpredictable strikes relied on momentum and stretch and sheer improvised leverage, his own single strike carried none of that theater at all — no windup, no telegraphed motion, simply a fist that was somehow already connecting before the eye had finished registering it moving.

BOOM.

Hollow Tide hit the courtyard’s outer wall hard enough to crack the stone behind her, and came up laughing, blood streaming from one temple, utterly, gleefully unbothered.

"There we go," she said, spitting blood, grinning wider than before. "That’s what I wanted!"

Her first mate went down behind her a moment later — Milo would learn the name only afterward, too late to matter, would carry the guilt of that too-late learning for a long while after — caught mid-strike by a guard whose own will had been spent thoughtlessly, cruelly, in service of a Claim he’d never chosen, and the courtyard’s chaos swallowed the loss almost before Milo’s coalition, still fighting their way through the eastern approach, had even breached the outer wall.

One by one, through that long, terrible afternoon, Hollow Tide’s crew began to fall.

Not because they lacked courage. Milo would insist on that point, later, to anyone who suggested otherwise, with a fierceness that surprised even himself. They fought with everything they had, loud and reckless and entirely without regret, exactly the way they’d fought a sea monster and a village’s raiders and every other danger they’d ever met head-on together — and it simply, brutally, wasn’t enough, because the man standing in the center of that courtyard had never once, in his entire long, unbothered life, encountered a ceiling he actually needed to fear.

"You keep smiling," the King observed, once the worst of the courtyard’s chaos had thinned, once enough of Hollow Tide’s crew lay scattered and broken across the flagstones that even her own boundless energy had gone, finally, quiet and focused. "Even now. I find that curious. Most people stop smiling considerably earlier than this."

"Why would I stop," Hollow Tide said, breathing hard now, blood matting one side of her hair, still standing, still grinning despite everything. "This is the best fight I’ve had in years."

"Is it," the King said, and something in his voice shifted into a register Milo would later recognize, from every account he gathered, as genuinely, coldly interested — the specific tone of a man who had finally found something worth actually examining. "Tell me, then. What exactly are you fighting for, out here, bleeding in my courtyard, watching your own people fall around you one at a time. Freedom, I understand, is the word you use for it."

"That’s the word," Hollow Tide agreed.

"It’s a child’s word," the King said, unhurried, circling her now, slow and patient, the way a teacher circles a student who has almost, but not quite, grasped the lesson. "Freedom doesn’t exist, not the way you mean it. Every single person in this world answers to something — hunger, mortality, the specific, structural weight of whoever happens to hold more power than they do. You call yourself free because you’ve never once stood in front of someone strong enough to make that word meaningless. I have simply removed the illusion you were living inside. That isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity."

"That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say out loud," Hollow Tide said, and there was no anger in it at all, only a genuine, uncomplicated pity that seemed to land harder against the King’s composure than any of her punches had. "You think being free means nobody’s ever stronger than you. It doesn’t. It means doing what you want anyway, even when someone bigger tells you that you can’t. My brother taught me that, back before any of this. He never got to be free, not really — spent his whole life scared, and tired, and taking care of somebody who kept forgetting to take care of herself back. But I get to be free for him now. Every single day I choose it anyway, no matter how big the thing standing in front of me gets." She wiped blood from her mouth with the back of one hand, and her grin, impossibly, widened. "You didn’t remove an illusion, Your Majesty. You just handed me a bigger reason to keep smiling."

The King went very still.

"How disappointing," he said, quietly, and something in the air around him changed — a pressure building, patient and total, the specific, terrible calm right before a held breath finally, completely breaks.

"I was hoping," he said, "you’d be interesting enough to remember."

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