Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader
Chapter 18: Three Ways to Want Something

Chapter 18: Three Ways to Want Something

They rounded the last corner already running, and for one frozen, endless half-second, Milo’s entire world narrowed down to exactly one image: Aria, on her knees, blood-soaked and swaying, chin still level, eyes still flat, staring down a raised blade like she had already decided not to be the one who flinched first.

"NO—"

He didn’t remember casting it. His hands simply moved, the way they’d learned to move without asking permission first, and gold light bloomed around her a half-breath before the Knight’s blade came down.

[MANA SHIELD CAST — TARGET: ARIA THORNE]

[ABSORPTION: 38 DAMAGE FOR 60 SECONDS]

The impact rang out like a bell struck underwater, and the Knight reared back, armor plates shifting with the specific, offended surprise of something that had been entirely certain this kill was already finished.

"We’re here," Hadjer said, already between Aria and the Knight, fire climbing both fists. "We’re here, we’re not letting go of here, hold on—"

"I wasn’t planning on going anywhere," Aria said, and her voice came out thinner than either of them had ever heard it, but it came out steady, which was somehow worse.

Milo watched the Knight reset itself — shoulders squaring, blade rising, the same disciplined, patient stance Aria must have been fighting for however long she’d been alone in here — and made himself watch instead of just reacting, because reacting was what had gotten her this close to the edge in the first place.

The rippling script along its blade caught the torchlight again, shifting, reforming, and this time Milo let himself really look at it instead of being unsettled by it. Every time the Knight took damage, the script along its blade thickened for a moment before the wound closed — new words pulled from somewhere, patched into the gap like a scribe copying over a torn page.

"It’s not healing," he said, out loud, fast, the way he thought best. "It’s borrowing. Pulling material from the blade itself to patch whatever we open up. That’s not an infinite well. That’s a budget."

"So we spend it faster than it can refill," Hadjer said, understanding half a second behind him and moving on it anyway.

"Exactly. Two wounds at once, opposite sides, far enough apart that it can’t patch both from the same reserve fast enough. Hadjer, left flank, loud as you can make it. I’ll take the shield and the right." He looked at Aria, still on her knees, still bleeding, still refusing to look anything less than furious about it. "You rest."

"Absolutely not," Aria said.

Hadjer hit first, hard and unmissable, driving a wall of fire into the Knight’s left side exactly where its plating overlapped thinnest — and the script along the blade thickened there, frantic, patching the scorch before it could spread. Milo came in from the right a breath later, Mana Shield holding just long enough to eat the first counter-swing, sword driving into the seam at its shoulder joint while the golem’s attention was still split between two fires it hadn’t finished deciding how to answer.

[MANA SHIELD CAST — TARGET: SELF]

[ABSORPTION: 38 DAMAGE FOR 60 SECONDS]

The Knight staggered, script thinning visibly along the blade now, patching two wounds at once and falling behind on both — and that was the exact moment Aria moved.

She’d crawled, low and silent, around the fight’s edge the entire time everyone assumed she was resting, DEX and instinct and a year of dungeons all narrowing down to one single, focused idea: behind it, unseen, now. Every flanking maneuver she’d ever landed, every time she’d dropped low and let a monster’s attention slide right past her toward someone louder — all of it had been building toward this exact shape, and something in her chest simply clicked into place, the way a lock finally accepts the right key after a hundred wrong ones.

[SKILL DISCOVERED THROUGH EXPERIENCE: BACKSTAB]

[TIER D — ROGUE]

[UNDETECTED — DAMAGE MULTIPLIER: x2]

She drove Milo’s old, forgettable spare sword up under the Knight’s own patched seam with everything she had left in a body that had already given most of it away, and the blade — hers, not the golem’s — went in clean, and the Knight didn’t have anything left in its budget to answer with.

It came apart the way all of them eventually did: pages and ash and burning parchment, collapsing into a drift that lit the corridor gold one final time before going dark and still.

[GOLEM DEFEATED — "BOUND KNIGHT"]

[EXP GAINED: 1,200]

[LOOT: SKILL BOOK — TIER B — GOLEM SUMMONING (DOMAIN-BOUND)]

Aria sat down hard, right there on the ash-dusted floor, and let herself, finally, for the first time since the portal took her, stop pretending she wasn’t shaking.

Milo checked her wounds first, hands steadier than he felt, Hadjer crouched close on her other side saying nothing useful and everything necessary all at once — you’re fine, you absolute menace, you’re fine, stay still — and it was several long minutes before any of them had room left over to think about the book sitting a few feet away in the ash.

Milo picked it up eventually, carefully, and pressed his palm flat against the cover — not to learn from it, not yet, just to listen the way his passive had always let him listen, without spending the one charge his talent gave him each month.

[POWER OF KNOWLEDGE: PASSIVE INSIGHT]

What came back wasn’t a lesson. It was closer to a warning dressed up as information — the specific, unsettling clarity of understanding a thing’s shape without yet understanding whether that shape was safe to hold.

"It’s a summoning skill," he said slowly. "Golem summoning. But not generic — whatever you call up isn’t fixed, it’s bound to the caster. It pulls from whoever’s actually casting it. Hadjer, if you ever mastered this, you wouldn’t get some random construct. You’d get fire. A golem built out of your own domain." He turned it over once, frowning at whatever else the passive had shown him. "It’s also apparently very difficult. The kind of difficult that gets people hurt learning it."

"How difficult," Hadjer said, and something in her voice had already started sharpening into something Milo recognized and didn’t love.

"I don’t know exactly. I only got the shape of it, not the details." He looked at her properly then, and saw the answer already forming behind her eyes before she’d said a single word more.

"Give it to me."

"Hadjer—"

"I want to burn it." She was on her feet now, fire already climbing both hands, voice raw in a way that had nothing to do with the fight they’d just survived and everything to do with every single golem this Archive had thrown at the three of them tonight. "I hate these things. I hate what they’re made of, I hate what they almost did to her, and I am not interested in finding out what ’very difficult’ means the hard way, from the inside, the way she just did with a sword nobody trained her to use."

"That’s not a reason to destroy knowledge," Milo said, and his voice had gone into the register it went into when a principle mattered more to him than the argument’s outcome. "We don’t get to decide other people never get the chance to learn something dangerous, just because it frightened us tonight. That’s exactly the logic every book-burning king in this Kingdom uses to justify every single thing that’s ever been taken from people like Denner, like Tomas—"

"This isn’t a fine for a fairy tale, Milo, this is a monster factory—"

"It’s a tool. Tools are dangerous by nature. That doesn’t mean—"

"Both of you, stop."

Aria’s voice cracked on the word, but it landed anyway, hard enough that both of them actually did.

She was still sitting in the ash, one hand pressed to her ribs, and she looked, for just a moment, entirely too tired to be doing what she was about to do anyway.

"Hadjer, you want to burn it because you’re scared, and because you’re angry, and because you love us both enough that watching me almost die made you want to make sure nothing like this book ever gets the chance to hurt anyone again. I get it. I feel the exact same thing right now, if it helps." She turned, slower, toward Milo. "And you want to keep it because destroying knowledge scares you more than the knowledge itself does, because you’ve spent your whole life watching what happens when people in power decide which ideas get to survive, and you can’t stand being the one making that call instead of them."

Neither of them argued with that. It cost Milo something to hear it laid out that plainly, and he suspected, watching Hadjer’s jaw tighten, that it cost her something too.

"You’re both right," Aria said. "And neither of you is thinking about what actually happens five minutes from now if we do either of the extreme versions of what you both want."

She held out her hand, and after a long moment, Hadjer put the fire out and set the book into it instead of burning it where she stood.

"We don’t destroy it," Aria said, "because Milo’s right that we don’t get to be the ones who decide nobody else ever learns this, and because knowledge that dangerous is exactly the kind of thing that’s actually useful if we’re the ones holding it instead of leaving it for the next person who finds this Archive by accident. And we don’t experiment with it tonight, or tomorrow, or anywhere near this maze, because Hadjer’s right that ’very difficult’ plus ’exhausted and half-dead’ is exactly how people end up as one more cautionary story nobody survives to tell properly." She tucked the book into her own pack, wincing as the movement pulled at her ribs. "We carry it out. We study it somewhere safe, slowly, on our own terms, when nobody’s bleeding and nobody’s furious. That’s the version of this where all three of us get to still be having opinions about it next week."

Hadjer looked at her for a long moment, then at Milo, then let out a breath that had entirely too much relief tangled up in it to still qualify as a sigh.

"When did you get so annoyingly reasonable," she said.

"Somewhere between the golem and almost dying," Aria said. "I’m allowed one good decision a day. Don’t get used to it."

Milo helped her up, careful of her ribs, and didn’t say out loud how close five minutes from now had actually come to not existing at all for any of them — but he thought it, the whole quiet walk back toward wherever the Archive intended to make them go next, and held onto it the way he held onto everything that mattered too much to say plainly in the moment it happened.

But just before they could take a breath, something was looking at them—he didn’t know what, but he could feel it.