Chapter 592: The Dead Are Going Home

Far in the distance, rising out of the pitch-black swell, was a colossal jagged shape.

It was the only landmass in a world made entirely of water, a lightless mountain of black rock jutting up from the endless sea toward the unseen cavern roof. It was our only destination. There was nowhere else to go.

But the ocean wasn’t going to let us reach it.

The black water directly below our flight path began to churn. The smooth swell broke apart as dozens of shapes breached the surface. They were sea-dragons, the same breed that had swarmed our floating slab, but their anatomy had already adapted to our escape.

They had wings.

Sleek, eyeless beasts of dense, glassy black liquid launched themselves out of the sea. Their water-flesh stretched into wide, bat-like wings that rode the pressurized drafts of the Precipice more than they flapped. They rose in a silent cloud to cut us off.

Above my head, White Feather let out a sharp cry.

The phoenix was buckling under the load. She had my weight and Kassie’s Calamity-tier iron armor in her talons, and at the same time she was hauling the full length of Maggie’s silver chain with the nun, Light, and Ilse hanging off it. It was too much mass for a single aerial spirit, and the dark toll was making it worse.

The black rust of my vessel corruption was eating into her manifestation. The creeping decay had spread from the tips of her primary feathers halfway up her thirty-foot wingspan, choking off her celestial light. With every heavy beat of her wings, flakes of rusted divinity rained down on my dark mantle.

She was losing altitude.

’We’re going down. We’re going right back into the water.’

My Tactical Omniscience mapped the descent. The red vector lines didn’t lie. At our current rate of decay, we would hit the black ocean a full two miles short of the island’s cliffs.

And the apex leviathan was still down there. I couldn’t read it with Death Sense, but the water parting beneath us in a long, heavy bulge told me exactly where the monster was pacing our flight, waiting for us to drop.

I gritted my teeth and braced my snapped collarbone against the wind. My well was an empty, cracked bowl sitting at zero. I couldn’t cast a single miracle. But the Nave still had banked resting time. I just had to make a swap.

Twisting in her grip, I roared up at the phoenix over the wind:

"Lily! Drop us! Get back in the Nave!"

White Feather didn’t argue. She knew her wings were failing.

The phoenix banked sharply, her rusted feathers shrieking against the air. She released Kassie’s pauldron and my mantle, opening her talons to let Maggie’s silver chain slip free. As we plummeted toward the black, churning sea, the great bird dissolved into a flash of white light and pulled herself back through the rusted threshold of the Soul Sanctum.

I fell through the dark, the freezing ocean rushing up to meet my boots.

I reached into the Nave and called the only woman who could build a floor out of water.

The air twenty feet below me shattered like a mirror.

Brunhilde stepped out of the threshold, fully manifested in the physical world for the first time since the upper layers. The Frost Valkyrie simply arrived, quietly, and a heavy, absolute winter arrived with her.

She was tall, clad in white-and-black regalia, her glacial-cyan hair whipping around a pale face that stayed perfectly still. She didn’t look at the falling party, and she didn’t look at the winged sea-dragons swarming toward us.

She looked at the ocean.

Brunhilde fell toward the black surf with both hands wrapped around the long hilt of a greatsword forged from unmelting frost.

She hit the sea point-first, driving the frozen blade straight down into the living black water.

The ignition of her cold made no sound at all.

A bloom of cyan light burst from the point of impact. The black water of the Precipice simply stopped being liquid. A lattice of thick, crystalline ice raced outward in a perfect, widening ring, freezing the cresting waves solid mid-swell. The cold went deep as well as wide, packing a glacial foundation under the surface thick enough to hold an army.

Then the ice shot forward, carving a gleaming highway across the pitch-black sea, running perfectly straight toward the distant island.

My boots hit the ice a second later. I rolled across the hard, slick surface and jarred my broken collarbone so badly that black spots danced across my vision.

Kassie landed in a heavy crouch beside me, her greaves cracking the surface frost. Maggie dropped lightly a few paces away, anchoring Light and Ilse as they scrambled onto the glacial road. Devant stepped down out of the air, his thin boots touching the ice without a sound.

I pushed myself up onto my knees, my breath misting in the sudden sub-zero air.

’She actually did it. She froze the ocean.’

Brunhilde stood a few yards ahead of us, her hands resting on the pommel of her grounded frost-blade. She looked neither tired nor impressed.

Still on my knees, staring at her back, I managed:

"You just froze a piece of the ocean."

Brunhilde didn’t turn around. Her voice came back dry, old, and perfectly flat:

"I called it Tuesday."

Kassie ripped her greatsword off her back, her red eyes fixed on the swarm of winged water-dragons diving toward our exposed highway, and barked:

"Move, fossil! We are entirely exposed!"

Brunhilde pulled her blade free of the ice and rested it against her shoulder. She took a single, measured step forward. Then another. Her pace was deliberate, ancient, and utterly unhurried.

Without looking back, the Valkyrie stated dryly:

"I am walking. There is a difference."

"Run!"

"I do not do well hurried. It is your job to keep the sky clear while I lay the road. Do your job, Temple Slave."

Kassie let out a sound that was half growl, half shriek, but she didn’t argue with the division of labor. The Tyrant Empress planted her boots on the ice, gripped her iron greatsword with both gauntlets, and looked up at the diving swarm.

The first winged sea-dragon swooped down, its split jaws aiming for Brunhilde’s neck.

Kassie swung. She ignored the beast’s grain and put pure Calamity-tier force into a brutal upward arc. The iron slab hit the liquid dragon like a freight train and blew its cohesion apart. The beast shattered into a thousand freezing black droplets that pattered harmlessly against the ice.

Maggie stepped up to cover Kassie’s right flank.

The nun’s silver chain whipped out in a humming blur. It wrapped around the neck of a diving beast, and with a single yank, Maggie crushed the dragon’s glassy skull into mist.

We fell in behind Brunhilde, held to the pace of her slow, glacial march.

I gripped Wren tightly in my right hand and fed my Tactical Omniscience outward to read the fault lines in the ice and steer around the slick patches. Light kept beside me, his burned black arm dead against his ribs, using Maggie’s dagger to slice the wings off any sea-dragon that slipped past the vanguard.

Ilse brought up the rear. Her Dragonborn form was still holding, her amber scales slick with freezing rain, her hands covered in her own blood from clawing at her horns. She moved without a word, her amber eyes scanning the dark water beneath the clear cyan ice.

The ice is stable. Keep moving, Boss.

Wren’s voice hummed through the leather wrap. I didn’t have the breath to answer her.

Suddenly, Brunhilde stopped.

She planted her boots, grounded her greatsword on the ice, and stared straight down into the glacial highway she had just made.

Cleaving two dragons out of the air in a single swing, Kassie shouted over her shoulder:

"What are you doing? Keep moving!"

Brunhilde ignored her. The Valkyrie’s azure eyes lost their focus, her pupils spreading wide as she tuned in to something none of the rest of us could hear.

[Hidden Attribute Active: Chooser of the Slain]

The system text flared briefly in the corner of my vision. It was the hidden attribute she had unlocked not long ago, finally waking up. Brunhilde was the Chooser of the Slain. Frost was only half of her domain. The other half was the honored dead.

Her dry voice came out low, so low the wind nearly took it:

"The currents are thick."

I stopped behind her, chest heaving.

"What currents?"

She pointed a pale finger straight down into the black depths below our boots.

"Under the ice. Everything that dies in this chasm. Every dragon, every beast, every soul that is broken in the Precipice. They do not fade. They drift."

She raised her head slowly toward the black island looming on the horizon, and her voice dropped into an older, heavier register:

"The water carries them all to that rock. The dead are going home."

The ice beneath Ilse’s boots exploded.

It burst upward in a geyser of cyan shards and freezing black brine. A winged sea-dragon three times the size of the others punched straight through the glacial road from underneath.

Its glassy, eyeless head snapped forward, and its jaws clamped shut around Ilse’s waist.

Ilse had no time to scream. The beast kept its bite loose, only firm enough to lock onto her amber scales, and threw its wings wide, launching itself back into the sky.

She was ripped clean off the ice and hauled twenty feet into the air in half a second.

Lunging forward with an empty well and nothing to throw, I roared:

"Ilse!"

Devant was standing on the edge of the shattered ice crater, his tin cup balanced loosely in his left hand, his purple scarf gone. He watched the dragon carry Ilse into the dark with mild, unhurried interest.

Tilting his head up at the beast, the boy remarked pleasantly:

"I will not help."

His right hand didn’t blur. It didn’t even look like he moved fast.

Kurotsuki left its scabbard in a single, impossible arc of violet light. The range made absolutely no sense. The dragon was thirty feet in the air, but the violet cut carried through the empty space like a physical razor.

The winged sea-dragon simply fell apart.

It came down in perfect, geometric ribbons of black water. The beast lost all cohesion at once and dropped Ilse from its jaws as it collapsed into a heavy downpour of brine.

Ilse plummeted toward the hard ice.

Devant caught her by the back of her scorched collar before she hit the frost and set her firmly on her feet without spilling a drop from his tin cup. He sheathed his katana with a soft, wet click.

’...I’m going to pretend I understood any of that.’

Brunhilde broke her stillness at last, lifting her blade off the ice:

"Run. The ice is failing."

The leviathan that had been pacing us from the deep had finally decided to breach. The black water on both sides of our highway began to bulge upward into towering walls of pressurized ocean, ready to fold over the road.

We ran. We sprinted the last two hundred yards, boots slipping and skidding across the cracking cyan frost.

The black cliffs of the island towered over us now, a sheer wall of volcanic rock rising straight out of the churning sea.

Kassie hit the shore first, her iron boots slamming into the black stone. She reached back, grabbed me by the mantle, and hurled me onto solid ground. Maggie vaulted onto the rocks dragging Light with her, while Devant stepped casually off the collapsing ice road with Ilse in tow. Brunhilde crossed last. Her boots touched the black rock just as the walls of ocean crashed down behind her and ground the glacial highway into powder.

I lay on my back on the hard stone, gasping for air.

My spine pressed against the black rock, and I went still.

’It’s warm.’

The basalt shelves above had been cold. This stone radiated a deep, unnatural, living heat, exactly like the scales of the sleeping dragon we had walked across on the way down.

I rolled onto my side, pushed myself up to my knees, and looked down the length of the shoreline.

Iron chains jutted from the black cliffs, bolted directly into the bedrock of the island. They were unimaginably huge, with links of black iron as wide as rivers, stretching out from the stone and plunging deep into the boiling black sea to hold the island in place.

There were dozens of them.

And as I traced those iron rivers down toward the surf, I saw the twisted metal.

Several of the chains stopped short of the water. They ended halfway down the beach in shattered links, the iron warped and torn apart by some sky-splitting force.

They were the chains that had snapped in the dark while we were climbing down the Throat.