Chapter 122: Exceptional

The thing that saved Theo’s life was not the sword.

It was that his body was learning while it happened.

He noticed it somewhere around the two minute mark, when a backhand caught him across the chest plate and put him thirty feet down the ring and he got up out of it faster than he had got up from the last one.

Then he noticed it again.

And again.

[Limitless Body — Adaptation in progress]

[Foreign attribute: Kinetic shock]

[Resistance: forming]

He took the next one across the shoulder and felt it land softer than the last.

The forty-first strike went through his guard and broke two more ribs, and the forty-second broke none at all.

Theo laughed inside the helm with blood in his mouth and let it hit him again on purpose.

Then he did the thing he had been putting off since the first minute.

He was standing in a dungeon with no water in it.

Eight inches of ash. Ninety-six standing dead trees. Four thousand four hundred and eleven bones, and a hearth-warm floor, and not one drop of moisture in four hundred feet in any direction.

Except him.

’Rain Cutter needs it wet. Right. Fine.’

He turned Raindrop’s edge in against his own left palm, inside the gauntlet, and closed his fist on the shadow-wrapped steel and pulled it through.

The glove went warm from the wrist down.

The blue patterns came up the blade like something waking.

They ran the whole length of it out of the hilt, wave over wave, glowing under the black of Shadow Sword, and Raindrop got sharper in his hand than an Uncommon-rank blade had any right to be.

’There we go.’

The glow lit the inside of the helm and the blood running down the outside of the gauntlet.

’Water Affinity, and only a little of it. So it goes in one place, once.’

He let the Warden come.

[Enraged Mode: 0:31 remaining]

Darkness came up out of the ash in front of it, and it came up in spikes.

Eleven of them, black and wet-looking and taller than he was, standing in a crooked line across the thing’s path. Not a wall. He did not have a wall in him.

The Warden went into them at full stride.

Four broke on its chest. Three more caught it across the thigh and turned it half a step off its line, and for about a second and a half the biggest thing in the dungeon was going backwards.

’It’s working. It’s actually—’

The Warden put its shoulder down and walked through the rest.

They came apart around it like smoke off a snuffed wick. The ash went up in a wave that took the light out of everything, and the arm came through the middle of it and caught him across the chest plate and took him fifty feet down the ring on his back, with the wet blade held up and away from the floor the whole way, because dropping it meant doing the palm again.

He came up on one knee in the shadow of the standing timber with the inside of his chest scraped out and his arms shaking on the grip.

He parried the next four, and lost ground on every one, and the last of them nearly took his arm off.

Then the white fire started to gutter.

It went at the extremities first, the fingers and the ends of the jaw, dimming in patches like a lamp with the oil going, and the strikes came a half beat slower, and the great chest heaved, and it had not heaved once in five minutes.

[Enraged Mode: has ended]

Theo pushed off the floor and went at it for the first time since the ash got up.

The Warden swung and he did not parry it. He stepped inside it, and the arm went over his shoulder, and he came up under the ribs with the wet blade and put Rain Cutter and every drop of Water energy in an Uncommon sword through the plate of its chest and into the seam where the fire lived.

Water went into Dark Fire.

The scream that came out of that thing was the first sound it had made all day.

Steam came out of the wound instead of flame, a white jet of it eleven feet long, and the burn that should have closed the cut did not close, with nothing left in that seam to close it with.

Theo tore the blade sideways and opened it from sternum to hip.

Then he took the head off.

He did it standing on the ash with both hands on the grip and the obsidian blade going through the neck at the angle Uthed had made him practise behind the lake house, and the head came away, and the body went down on its knees, and stayed there.

The white fire went out of it a piece at a time, from the feet upward.

Then it came apart into ash and did not get up again.

Theo stood in the middle of it with his arms hanging and watched the ring to make absolutely sure.

He counted to sixty.

He counted to sixty again.

Nothing came up out of the pile but more ash, sifting off the top of it where the shoulders had been.

’Okay. Now I’m going to sit down, and I would very much like nobody to argue with me about it.’

He sat down.

Sitting was worse. Everything that had held together while there was still something in front of him to hit came apart at once, the two ribs first, then the cheekbone, then the hand he had opened on his own blade. He got the helm off and breathed dungeon air, which tasted like a fireplace nobody had cleaned in a hundred years.

[Cinderfall Warden — defeated]

[You can harvest Warden Core]

[Dungeon Reset Time will start after Warden Core has been harvested]

[Limitless Body — Adaptation complete]

[Resistance acquired: Kinetic shock]

[Limitless Body: 67% → 67.9%]

[Limitless Flow: 15.42% → 17.08%] [Combat Skill: 35 → 44]

Theo looked at that last line for a long moment with his cheekbone broken and his own blood drying in his left glove.

’Nine. It gave me nine!’

He read it a third time in case it said four.

The grin that came up inside the helm was a horrible thing, all blood and no dignity in it anywhere.

The dusk came back into the bowl, and the Shadow Fragment went off him in smoke, and somewhere behind him three women were coming out of the treeline at a run through the ash.

And out where he had left him, face down and unable to stand, Donzo Varrdia had started to laugh, high and wrong and entirely to himself.

’I’m stupid! I really am stupid!!’