Chapter 28: The Final Blow (Part 2: Finale)

Steel thrust Milo aside.

Leaving an afterimage in his previous spot, Aldous tanked the red-specks with his own chestplate, the volley hissing over the metal.

"Kid, what are you doing here?!"

The wave had driven the specks down to his exposed skin in places, and yet, the man swung his flail at the entity like nothing had happened. He took a leap backward, hauled Milo out of the danger zone, and sprang into the fight again.

Up close, the man’s image finally became clear. The tracked flail was as distinct as outlines came, but his face Milo had only ever watched from a whole schoolyard away, slurping noodles behind the curtains.

It was a young adult with strands of bronze hair gone messy in the fight. His eyes, cheekbones, and jawline matched the sharpness of the spikes on his weapon’s head.

"Breathe OUT when it sings!" Aldous yelled over the roar of the Calamity.

Sharp senses, too.

The Warden heard it first. Milo, only now getting to his feet, recognized the distant whistles. The smile-shaped ripple was already charging.

Full exhale, making his lungs burn as much as possible. Lips closed. Though he did not even turn his back to it, the pressure front passed over with no damage done.

Milo wheezed for a full breath and found his lungs capable.

So he sprinted over the spongy turf, back behind the well, where his job as a distraction bought Aldous much greater accuracy.

From the corner of his eye, Milo watched the Host re-read the field.

Coff!

Inevitably, it picked a teenage boy with a Common Iron Turnhook to target.

Coff! Cough!

"DOWN!!!" Aldous bellowed.

Milo halted, heels skidding, and dropped to his back.

GONG!

Red-specks streaked over him in an uneven rhythm, a narrow margin of air between them and his face. The flail had vaulted the entity as it cast.

"You wanna get yourself killed?!"

He met the man’s eyes in the transient moment the Host was holding onto its knees.

Sweat plastered more of the bronze hair with every attack, his lips cracked in new places, and the rims of his eyes were going red.

Was he sacrificing his theatre for a kid?

Maybe I misjudged.

"I’ve been helping!" Milo answered.

"Just run," Aldous insisted.

"I threw all those bricks!"

"For real?"

"What did you think?!"

"...Thought it was the wind."

Aldous swung the flail at the entity and struck it without doing anything extraordinary.

It was getting tired.

Right, nothing conjured skin-tearing red-specks out of nowhere one after another forever!

The Calamity marked Milo as the interference, one costing it way too much of its focus, and now of its energy. If he took the role of living bait, this ended sooner than later.

Or his life ended sooner than later.

What he did see was the strategy’s results. The fight was becoming more and more one-sided, the flail flying up and down, left and right, beating the living hell out of the avatar.

Huddling into a ball, Milo rolled tight to the stone well. As the cyclone pulsed, he threw the brick right at the head. It landed. As the singing whistled, he threw the next brick right at the head, and that one struck too.

"Fast learner." He winked at his reflection in the brick’s moisture.

In the next second, the stone disappeared from his hand.

Milo looked up to find only a hole in the ground where the stone well had been, and the Host a stride from his boots.

Aldous dashed in from behind and struck the entity’s back, sending it straight at him.

As the Eye followed its avatar, the wind quieted around him. His nerves, however, did not.

"ARGHHHH!!!"

On contact with the avatar, his whole skin scorched as though corrosive acid had been spilled all over him, eating away at the tissue and bone.

"W-WHY W-W-WHY A-ALWAYS SO MUCH P-PAIN WHY—"

A hand grabbed his leg and flung him over to the Eye’s edge, where one half of his head lay outside, exposed to all the whistling and thundering, while the other listened to the peaceful rustle of the hero getting up to perform his Turning at last.

The Host clambered upright when Aldous planted his boots in the ground.

Lash after lash, desperately trying to hunt the most humiliating part of its manifestation, it had exhausted its power.

It was its own stupidity, really. The credit was hardly even Milo’s to claim.

The scorching corrosive acid subsided to lava churning in his veins.

He managed a broken scoff. "H-Haha."

For one finishing blow, Aldous was burning the Longevity of his weapon down to nothing. Either it landed now, or the flail died guarding him and a boy, leaving the storm to walk the road home to the academy.

The man lifted the Nimble Flanged Flail over his head.

Gold light shone through the weapon, the flange pitting, the haft graying, the whole outer layer shedding to golden sheets that slowly drifted down in the lull of the Eye.

"Recede," Aldous declared. "And be recorded."

Every month the flail had left, every last season or year of it, he dumped into a singular strike.

With one grand motion, the flail plummeted down onto the helpless Host. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

WHAM!

The entity folded. Knees into dirt, arms drawing in under the collapsing shroud, it went into the receding posture.

Every Warden alive knew this bow. Aldous had farmed it over his entire career.

The veil spiraled into its center like water finding a drain. Outside, the wind died. All the coughs died. The omen-fall thickened. Gray amber droplets crystallized in the hush, ticking onto the soil like the world’s richest rain.

The murk punctured, the calm running out beyond the Eye’s old walls. Like any other, it had not opened to a blue sky to begin with.

Yet the bow stalled.

The Host shuddered, pushing for its own departure.

It could not.

The Blessing of Authorship.

For the first time in history, a Calamity had been denied. Panicking, it convulsed, the skin doubling wetly at the edges, trying to split—to shed a fragment small enough to slip from the pin—but the doubling snapped back like cut elastic. It could not even flee in pieces.

It scrambled to the Eye’s wall and raised its shrouded head, but the man who had done every bit of the beating might as well not have been there. It fixed on the boy in the dirt.

One-two-hhk.

The cough came useless.

Milo stood and crossed the ten paces of dead calm left.

Steel thrust Aldous aside.

Speechless, the man settled where he fell and looked up at the Iron Turnhook.

The avatar continued to shiver, one-two-hhk, one-two-hhk, as if begging with the only noise it could make.

"I know what denied resolution feels like."

Milo planted his boots and raised the hook over his head.

The final blow landed.

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⋆˚࿔ Coming right up: "The Winner and The Loser (Part 1)" ... ⤵︎ [!]