Chapter 205: Past the Limit [BONUS]

Sixty seconds.

Encrid felt the horde move before he saw it.

It came through Attunement like a wave through water. Thousands of bodies pushing forward at once, a single enormous surge of weight rolling down the road toward the Span. The Reevers were first. They always were. A grey flood of them, running flat out, their split jaws open.

The roamers were just a hundred paces away.

Encrid opened his status window.

[ Inventory ]

[ Temporary Realm Limit Breakthrough Token (Lv: Max) - 1 ]

[ Temporary Proficiency Token (Lv: Max) - 1 ]

He had looked at these two lines a thousand times in the last year and a half. On nights when he could not sleep. On the morning the horde appeared. On the night the strike team left. He had looked at them and closed the window again every time.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Eighty paces. ℴ

He selected the first one.

[ Use: Temporary Realm Limit Breakthrough Token (Lv: Max)? ]

[ For one minute, you can break through a single Star into the highest realm possible. ]

[ Target Star: Azure Star (Ascendant) ]

[ Confirm? ]

Sixty paces.

"Yes," Encrid said.

? ? ?

[ Token activated. ]

[ Azure Star - Breaking through. ]

It began in his throat.

The Azure Star had always been a small, cool presence there. A quiet point of blue that he felt when he cultivated, when he was very still, when the world was quiet. For fourteen months, it had been stuck at three channels. Then, one night, it had opened all the channels and it had reached the Ascendant realm.

He had been so proud of that.

Now the Star did not open.

It burst.

Cold rushed out of it. Not the cold of winter, not the cold of ice. Something deeper and cleaner, like the water at the bottom of a mountain lake. It poured down through his chest and out along his arms and down his spine, into channels he had not known were there.

And they opened.

[ Realm: Ascendant → Apex ]

Encrid gasped.

The world went sharp.

It was the only way he could describe it. Everything around him was suddenly clearer. The Reevers running toward him were not a grey flood anymore. They were individual animals. He could see each one. He could see the muscles moving under their hides, the way their feet struck the road, the saliva stringing from their jaws.

Forty paces.

The Star did not stop.

The cold pushed deeper. It went into his bones. It filled his lungs, tightened his fingers, and made every breath feel impossibly clear and painfully slow.

It went into his blood and found every channel in his body, the forty or fifty that every person had, and it did not clear them the way cultivation cleared them, patiently, one grain at a time.

It flooded them.

[ Realm: Apex → Master ]

The Reevers slowed down.

No. That was not right.

The Reevers were not slower. Encrid was faster. Not his body. His mind. The world around him had begun to move the way a heavy thing moves through water, and he could see everything happening inside it, every step and every twitch, as if he had all the time he wanted to look.

He knew this feeling. He had seen it from the outside.

This was how Ysolde had moved on the eighth mile. This was how Ulrich Vance had stood between the tusks and waited. This was how Rael had looked in the tunnel with the bull pinned against his sword.

This was what it was like to be a Master.

Thirty paces.

The first Reever was in the air. It had leaped from thirty paces away, the way Reevers did, jaws open, forelimbs reaching. Encrid watched it come. It seemed to hang there, in the red evening light, turning slowly.

He had time to count its teeth.

And the Star went deeper still.

It did not stop at the channels. It went past them. Beneath them. Into something Encrid had never felt before and could not name. A place in the middle of him where the Star touched something that was not his body at all. Something that ran through the air around him and the stone under his feet and the water roaring at the bottom of the gorge.

[ Realm: Master → Grandmaster ]

Encrid’s heart beat once.

It sounded like a drum.

He had seen Grandmasters. He had watched Garrick Dane stand at the western gate and kill two hundred Roamers without taking a step back. He had watched Ysolde Marr walk into a line of Talljacks and walk out the other side.

He had thought he understood what that meant.

He had not understood anything.

Being a Grandmaster was not like being very strong. It was not like being very fast. It was like being much bigger than he was. As if his body was only the smallest part of him, and the rest of him stretched out in every direction, thin and cold and clear, touching everything.

He could feel the Reever in the air in front of him.

Not through Attunement.

Through himself.

He could feel its weight. Its heat. The beating of its heart. The pull of the ground beneath it.

Twenty paces. Fifteen.

The Reever turned slowly in the air, its jaws open, reaching for his throat.

Encrid raised one hand.

He did not draw his sword. He did not think about it. He simply put his open palm in the air between himself and the Reever, the way a man puts up his hand to stop a door from swinging closed.

The Reever hit his palm.

And stopped.

It did not bounce off. It did not fall. It simply stopped, in mid-air, its whole weight against his hand. And then, very slowly, frost spread across its grey hide from the place where his palm touched it. Across its face. Down its neck. Along its back.

It fell to the stone of the Span and shattered like glass.

Encrid looked down at the pieces.

Fifty-eight seconds.

The Star was still going.

? ? ?