Chapter 451: Flesh And Bone

It was hot inside the god, far hotter than it had any right to be, and the air in there was not really air but a red mist that came off the walls of the chest in slow waves.

Jumping inside the body of a god was risky, but fighting it from outside was more dangerous.

The red mist settled on my skin, and my skin began to smoke. I looked down at my arms and watched the outer layer of me going grey and soft where the mist touched it, and then peeling, and underneath it the Law of Flesh was already pushing new skin up to replace what was lost, so that for a while I stood there being eaten and rebuilt at the same time.

Without the strength of Adamantium, I would have melted into a puddle of goo in a second. Acid and decay, I thought. I had watched that blood turn the valley floor to glass, and now I was practically swimming in it.

The heart was in front of me. It was the size of a temple, dark red and veined with black, and it was lit from inside by a glow that came and went with every beat.

Great vessels as thick as mighty oaks ran out of it in every direction and vanished into the walls of the chest, and when it beat, the whole cavity beat with it. The first time it happened I was thrown against the ribs so hard that I heard one of them crack, and I honestly could not tell whether it was the god’s or mine.

The fucking heartbeat was like a weapon, and whether it was deliberate or just the natural side effect of an organ pumping blood across a body a freaking mile long, I could not say.

I got my feet under me, braced my back against the bone, and waited for the next beat, and it came like a battering ram, but I held. Already I could see that the massive chunks I had carved out of this god were slowly healing, and if I did not want to be buried inside the serpent, I needed to push forward.

The serpent felt me inside it. Of course it did. Its whole body convulsed around me, coils slamming against the earth, chains screaming as they held. The ribs I stood between trembled, and for a moment I thought they would close and crush me into paste. But I wrote Hold on the air, and the Law of Sharpness drew a line that the bones could not cross. They strained, but did not close.

I knew that I could not hold on forever. There was no essence inside the serpent but blood, and there was a limit to how far my Anima could take me.

"Kill a god... how hard can it be?"

∞

I wrote Sever across the largest of the vessels, the one that ran up towards the neck, and the heartbeat stuttered.

The gold line crossed it and the vessel came apart, and what came out of it was a solid column of blood as wide as a street, and it hit me across the left side before I could move. I lost the skin there at once and most of the muscle a heartbeat later, and I looked down and saw my own ribs through what was left, silver and wet, while the Law of Flesh howled and rebuilt and the acid took it again.

I think I screamed. I know I cursed a great deal, and I will not repeat what I said, since you may be eating. The blood of a god, especially this close to its heart, was ridiculously corrosive, and I wondered how much my body could take before it collapsed.

[Adamantium Titan: 155 → 157 (Sovereign)]

I must be the only mage in existence crazy enough to jump inside the body of a god, and it seemed this skill rewarded exactly that kind of madness.

The growth in my Adamantium Titan sent a fresh wave of vitality flooding through me, but I did not grow, almost as if every scrap of growth and power I gained was being dedicated to keeping me alive.

Perhaps I would not be dying very soon... then I watched the vessel I had just severed in two begin to move.

The two ends found each other across the gap, and they touched, and the flesh at the edges melted together like wax and closed, and the flood of blood stopped. The heartbeat became steady again.

I knew the god could heal, but this was almost too fast, as if the serpent had a way to accelerate its healing... and that was not good for me.

However, cutting the vessel had given me the window I needed to move closer to the heart itself, bracing against the relentless waves of power pouring from it.

I pressed the nib to the wall of the heart, piercing the divine muscle, and drew Divide.

The power I placed into this Script was the same power I had used to slice off a chunk of flesh the size of a small city, but the line that appeared at the tip of my pen went in perhaps the depth of my hand and no further.

The muscle of the heart was dense beyond anything I had cut tonight, and it pushed back against the Law in the pen, and I felt the pen strain and yet could find no way to cut deeper. The shallow cut I had made closed almost instantaneously behind the nib as I drew it, like a furrow dragged through water.

This close to the heart, I could feel a pressure under the muscle so vast and old that it made my teeth ache. It was as if whatever made Raktanāgeya a god lived in this heart.

There was so much power inside it that I did not know whether, even with access to all my Anima, I would be able to destroy this god.

∞

The god had been struggling against its bindings for a while, and it would not be long before it freed itself, but the fact that I was able to cut into its heart must have threatened it, because Raktanāgeya shrieked for its blade.

Above me, through the opening I had made, I heard the sound of stone tearing. I knew that sound. It was the canyon the Natal Weapon had cut when I turned it aside, and the blade was coming out of it, because it came when its god called.

The blade tore through the air with a scream and punched itself into the body of the serpent. It went tearing through the chest two hundred feet from where I stood, but for a blade of that size, it might as well have been plunged into my own chest.

I barely got a line up in time, holding the edge of the blade back from slicing me in two as space screamed around the point of impact, and the blade stopped with its tip close enough to my face that I could see my own reflection moving in the flowing blood that made up the blade.

Then the wound the blade had just made in its own master began to weep blood, and all of it was drawn up into the blade. The serpent screamed in pain and rage as the blade brightened and pushed against me, and the line holding it back began to bow.