Chapter 103: Saved By Determination

There were no weapons, no reinforcements and no time left at all.

’Move,’ Leo thought, grinding his teeth until he tasted copper. ’Move, damn you... Think of something.’

A cold certainty settled into his chest.

There was exactly one thing left in the universe that could close the distance between him and them, one thing that had ever been able to defy the physics of a dark suffocating grave.

He closed his eyes.

Leo reached down into the deepest core of himself, into the locked vault where the golden embers of his SSS-Rank skill lay sleeping under layer after layer of safety that the system had wrapped around them after the last time...

He took hold of the lock.

...Universal Determination.

’I don’t care if it tears me apart,’ he thought, and his heart slammed against his ribs like a pile driver. ’I don’t care if every bone I’ve got breaks again... They are not dying down here.’

He gathered his will, the same will that had dragged him back through the freezing vacuum to his ship with an empty chest, and threw it against the lock with suicidal force.

CLANG!

A shockwave of golden conceptual light detonated inside his nervous system.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

A violent strobing red panel tore into existence across the dead black glass of his helmet.

[Target Skill: Universal Determination (SSS-Rank)]

[Status: Locked]

[Compatibility Check: Fail]

[Assessment: Forced Activation Will Cause Catastrophic Internal Rupture... Probability Of Fatal Cellular Failure: 94%]

"I don’t care," Leo growled through his clenched teeth as he shoved anyway.

CRACKLE!

Behind his visor, his dark eyes flickered then they began to burn with a fierce blinding celestial gold, like two small suns kindling behind his pupils.

DRIP!

Warm blood burst from his left nostril and spattered across the inside of his visor, and a second stream followed from his right.

The pressure inside his skull climbed to an explosive pitch as his eardrums popped and white static swam across his vision as the god’s blood sleeping in his body began to boil under the strain.

SHING!

Lines of golden light burned out through the sleeves of his suit and crawled up his forearms like ivy made of fire, scorching through the carbon fiber and lighting his veins from inside his skin.

Around his boots, the gravity bent... The basalt dust lifted off the floor and floated upward in a slow spiral, and the laws of the universe began to creak and bow around one human being’s refusal to lose...

’Come on... I want to kill it!’

Faces burned through the static behind his eyes.

Aoi, in a loose robe with her hair down, holding out a small box in both hands... Camila, smoothing the collar of his suit that didn’t need smoothing... Harper at twelve, behind Henderson’s garage, grease on her nose and a carburetor in pieces in her lap... Chloe asleep on his chest with her fist knotted in his shirt... Elena saying I will never forgive you and Jin-Ah saying that isn’t how probability works...

All of them... Every one of them was a reason. He was going to tear the Matriarch out of the air with his bare will, even if his heart burst and his lungs turned to foam!

"LEO, STOP!"

Harper’s voice cracked through the stone.

She was still on her knees with Aoi held in her lap, twisted around to stare at him, and her grey-blue eyes were wide with mind-shattering horror as she watched the golden light burning through his suit and the blood running down his lip behind the glass.

"DON’T DO IT!" she screamed, and her voice broke into a ragged sob that tore through the rock. "YOU’LL BURST AGAIN! YOU WON’T SURVIVE IT THIS TIME! PLEASE, LEO, PLEASE STOP!"

He heard her... The words came up through the soles of his boots and into his bones, and he heard every one of them however he didn’t stop.

If he stopped, the thing above them would fall, and Aoi and Chloe would be under it, and there was nothing in any universe he’d ever lived in that he wouldn’t break to keep that from happening.

High above, the Matriarch reached the top of its rise.

Its crown flared one last blinding violet, and its whole enormous bulk tipped forward and began to fall, straight down toward Chloe’s trembling body.

’BEND!’ Leo screamed inside his own head, and the gold exploded up his arms toward his shoulders, ready to shatter the seal and tear him to pieces right along with it...

And in that exact split second, the feeling between his shoulder blades changed.

It rang in a high crystalline shriek like a silver bell struck by lightning.

’...Huh? What the hell...?’

It was a completely different note.

He’d never felt it in his life, not against the pirate wing, not diving past the Void Leviathan’s jaws, not even in the Boiling Belt with the rocks closing in.

It was electric and ecstatic as it seized his spine and yanked his head straight back, so hard that his burning gold eyes tore away from the falling Matriarch and locked on the ceiling forty meters overhead.

On the jagged crack in the iron crust that opened onto the stars and something was coming through it.

It was screaming down out of the starlight at an impossible velocity, wrapped in a blazing continuous trail of neon-violet fire.

WHOOOOOSH!

It came through the crack in a blinding halo of lilac exhaust, seventy meters of seamless iridescent hull that shifted from liquid amethyst to neon violet in the starlight.

Its delta wings were swept back to a razor taper, and along its spine six racing thrusters burned with a snarling torrent of lilac plasma that boiled the cavern dust into purple steam as it passed.

...It was the purple needle.

The realization hit Leo harder than any kinetic round... It was the racer from the Boiling Belt, the ship that had matched his madness turn for turn through four gravitational shears and then eaten a five-hundred-ton rock when the chasm closed behind them.

’It didn’t die?’

It was here, plunging straight down the throat of the cavern at a speed that ignored every safety margin ever written.

The Matriarch felt it. Its six eyes snapped upward mid-fall, and its broken wings thrashed as it tried to abort the dive and turn its crown toward the thing coming down on its skull...

FLASH!

A blinding ripple of pure violet light burst outward from the falling ship.

The pilot poured something through it, a talent saturating every bulkhead and coil and micron of that shining hull as the universe seemed to stutter.

In the space of half a heartbeat, the racer split into a cascade of glowing violet afterimages that burned down the cavern like ghost ships made of frozen lightning.

The first afterimage grazed the lip of the crack... The second flared thirty meters lower through the drifting silver dust... The third, the real one, solid and screaming at thirty kilometers per second, drove its needle-thin prow straight down into the center of the cavern.

KRA-KOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The needle bow hit the Matriarch’s crystal crown dead center.

The brow plates that had shrugged off Harper’s rounds like thrown gravel shattered like fine glass under seventy meters of hull at terminal velocity.

The Mirage punched straight through the crown, pulverized the glowing spines into a blizzard of purple shards, sheared clean through the buried nerve core and tore out through the far side of the chest cavity in an eruption of black ichor, boiling sulfur and blinding violet plasma.

The ship didn’t even slow down to admire its work... It pulled a ninety-degree yaw that threw an arc of lilac fire across the walls, killed its descent ten meters above the floor and hung there in the faint gravity with its thrusters hissing while the gore rained down behind it.

For one long moment, Leo could see straight into its cockpit.

The canopy was clear crystal, lit from inside by a soft violet glow, and there was someone in the pilot’s couch leaning so far forward against her harness that her face was nearly pressed to the glass.

He caught a flash of wild purple hair, a pink cheek and two enormous violet eyes, wide and shining and locked directly on him across the cavern with an expression he’d only ever seen on someone opening a present they’d wanted their whole life.

The feeling in his back sang... It was a deep steady chord, like two strings tuned to the same note and struck at the same time.

’Who are you?’ he thought, dazed. ’What are you...?’

Then the Matriarch moved... or rather, what was left of it moved. High above the floor, the Matriarch hung frozen for one fragile heartbeat.

Its six golden eyes flickered and dimmed from blazing suns to dull dead yellow glass.

The violet fissures across its mantle flared once in dying spasms, then went out forever into cold ashen grey.

CREAK-SNAP!

The huge carcass folded in on itself like crumpled sheets of lead and fell, and it landed thirty meters wide of Chloe and Aoi, nowhere near them, as if the needle’s angle had been calculated to push it clear.

THUD-CRASH!

The impact shook the entire living heart of the megalith and threw clouds of glittering silver dust thirty meters into the air.

Across the whole labyrinth of the Obsidian Vein, the swarm answered.

SCREEEEEECH! SCREEEEEECH!

From every breeding chamber and honeycombed tunnel and crevice in three kilometers of stone came thousands of high-pitched shrieks of pure blind panic.

The nerve core was severed and the will that had bound hundreds of mantas into a single hunting organism had dissolved into nothing.

Through the crack in the ceiling, Leo could see them pouring out of the megalith’s northern vents in a huge billowing black cloud, scattering into the drift and fleeing into the deep lanes in mindless terror.

On the ledge, the golden light crawling up Leo’s arms began to crack.

HISS!

The fire that had been about to tear his cells apart flickered and dimmed and drew back down into his marrow like a tide pulling away from a scorched shore.

The crushing pressure in his skull drained away and left behind a hollow bone-deep exhaustion that turned his knees to water.

’Ah... I didn’t use Universal Determination after all.’

Leo dropped hard onto one knee, and his gauntlet slammed flat on the iron dust to catch himself.

Fresh blood traced down his lip and pooled at his chin inside the helmet but his ribs were whole, his chest rose and fell, his lungs pulled cold clean oxygen out of the manual rebreather, and his body was still in one piece.

The system panel that had been screaming red at him a moment earlier was simply gone, as if it had never been there.

He’d stared straight into the abyss of his own refusal, and the universe had held together.

"LEO!"

Harper had left Aoi propped against the wall and covered the twenty meters of broken ledge in three wild bounding leaps.

She grabbed his armored shoulders and hauled him upright against her chest, pressing her visor right against his so she could see the blood smeared across his mouth through two layers of glass.

"You’re alive! You’re whole! Don’t you EVER pull that crazy shit again, you hear me?! EVER!"

Her voice was shaking with fury and relief in equal parts, she was crying, and she didn’t let go of him... Her gloved fists were knotted in the back of his suit so tight they creaked.

"I thought..." she choked. "I thought I was going to watch you die. Again. I can’t do that again, Leo. I can’t..."

Leo got one arm around her and held on, too.

Over her shoulder, he could see the floor of the cavern, where a small black-suited shape had started crawling.

Chloe was dragging herself across the gravel on her elbows, centimeter by agonizing centimeter, toward the ledge.

She had nothing left in her... Every movement shook her whole body but she kept coming, because he was up here and she was down there, and that was simply unacceptable.

"Chloe," he breathed, though she couldn’t possibly hear him. "Stay put, I’m coming..."

Across the cavern, Aoi had somehow gotten herself sitting up against the platinum wall.

She lifted one hand toward them and through the white web of her broken visor he could see her smile.

Every one of them was alive... Every single one.

He didn’t understand how, and in that moment he didn’t care, and a laugh came up out of his chest that was half a sob.

Before Leo could answer Harper, his internal vision exploded.