"Over here." Andrea led Damien away from the cliff. "We simply give ourselves a running start, then jump. Surely you’ve done something like this in high school."
Damien’s lips pressed together as he stared at her. "Yeah, actually, I did some long jumps. But I must say, jumping over a cliff is not the same thing."
"You won’t really know until you try it."
Before Damien could respond, Andrea suddenly shot forward at breakneck speed. Her boots kicked up snow as she accelerated, her body moving with enough force to make Damien’s expression change as he watched her rapidly approach the edge.
She didn’t slow down.
When she reached the cliff, Andrea leapt with all her might. The force behind the jump was so great that she was able to propel herself across the enormous gap, her body sailing through the air before she finally reached the other side.
She crash-landed into the snow, her boots digging into the frozen ground as she absorbed the impact. After steadying herself, Andrea casually dusted the snow from her armour and looked across the gap at Damien.
"Great. Now you try."
Damien didn’t hear a word.
He could only see her mouth moving from the other side of the abyss, the distance between them making her voice impossible to hear. Even if he had heard her, however, he already knew what she was about to say.
He would jump over as well, except he wasn’t nearly as physically strong as she was. Just because Andrea had managed to make the jump didn’t mean he would be able to do the same. Her strength was already ridiculous enough without adding a kilometer-long jump over a bottomless abyss to the list of things she could casually accomplish.
Damien looked down at the darkness below, then back at Andrea.
On a perfectly normal day, there was no way he was doing this.
He cursed inwardly and took another step back, putting as much distance between himself and the cliff as possible. The ice cracked beneath his feet as Damien suddenly took off, pushing himself forward with every ounce of raw power he could muster.
His speed was slightly inferior to Andrea’s, but he knew he could make up for it with his Dormant ability. As he approached the edge, black miasma began trailing behind him, spreading through the air in his wake.
Even after Damien launched himself into the air, the miasma continued to follow. He was already halfway across when the undead priest suddenly emerged from the darkness below and grabbed both of Damien’s hands.
With a powerful roar, the undead priest launched Damien forward once more.
The extra force was enough to carry him the remaining distance, and his body finally cleared the cliff before he crashed down right next to Andrea.
Except his landing was nowhere near as graceful.
Damien rolled across the snow before finally coming to a stop. He lay there for a second, staring at the sky as he caught his breath, then slowly pushed himself upright.
"I almost died. Next time you have a crazy idea, how about you run it by me and wait until I actually agree to it before you proceed?"
Andrea simply shrugged, completely indifferent to his complaint. "It sounded like you already did. Besides, I’m pretty sure you’re the one benefiting from this the most."
Damien was speechless.
"Are you seriously pulling the ’I’m doing you a favour’ card?"
Andrea glanced down at him. "Yes, I am. And I’m well within my rights, considering you threatened to kill me not too long ago."
Damien was speechless again. "You wanted to kill me too. Wasn’t that why you tried isolating me from the rest of the camp?"
She shook her head. "That wasn’t me. That was the other Round Table members. Besides, you seem to have dealt with the problem. Naomi is dead, Ryan admires you, and Vincent is your ally. God knows how you pulled that off."
Damien stretched after rising to his feet, but he wasn’t done with Andrea. "You sent me on that tag-team murder mission that almost got me killed."
Andrea stopped walking, but didn’t turn back. Not because she couldn’t face Damien, but because she really wanted to focus on finding the Therizon.
"Yeah, well, you seem to have found a way out of it. You even killed Paige and significantly weakened Leslie. The bitch wasn’t that strong, but that Dormant ability of hers was annoying to deal with. Thanks, by the way."
Damien opened his mouth, but paused, swallowing whatever he was about to say. "You killed Leslie? Why am I even surprised? Anything to stay in control, isn’t that right, Andrea? What next? You’re gonna make us actually jump into a bottomless abyss?"
She shook her head with a deep sigh. Damien had clearly misunderstood her intentions.
"Yes, Leslie was killed under my orders, but it wasn’t to get back at Naomi or anything. Leslie herself was a danger to the camp. She frequently fed on the blood of weaker people. At first, I thought it was just a requirement for her to use her ability, but later I found out she was doing it to get stronger. I couldn’t allow such injustice, not under my watch."
Damien was genuinely confused, so he barked loudly.
"So she drank some blood to get stronger. Isn’t the whole point of the camp to create stronger Awakened humans? Seems worth the sacrifice to me."
Andrea turned and faced Damien.
"She was a psychotic killer who had a choice. She could take a little blood and let her victims go, but instead, she sucked them dry, killing them without remorse. If you think I should’ve let her get away with it, then you’re no better."
Damien exhaled a breath of warm air. He actually understood what Andrea was getting at. He just saw things differently. To him, it looked like she had chosen the weak over the strong, and Damien wasn’t in the Tower to protect weak people.
He was here because he had no choice. That was all there was to it.
But now that he had accepted his circumstances, there was only one thing that mattered to him. He would become stronger, and greater than everyone else, even Andrea.
So Damien looked back at her before saying coldly.
"Who said I wanted to be better?"
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