Chapter 475: The Green Inferno

With my words, the Scripts on the inner walls of the pyramid glowed so brightly it was as if I had cut a piece of the sun and set it inside every line I had made. The pen moved in my hand as though it had a life of its own, and every burning Script in those walls went dark in sequence, from the corners to the apex of the whole structure.

The light gathered at the peak of the pyramid, and for about half a second the only light in twelve miles was a single point two miles up... then it came down as a column.

All that pressure and weight, gathered and amplified and compressed into a beam of bluish white about forty feet wide.

It had taken half a second to activate, and the beam fell almost instantaneously, and it made a sound like the sky being torn in half length ways.

Every crow flying within ten thousand feet of the column simply ceased to exist, and the stranger only had time to stand before the beam touched the ground and everything went white.

I had made one line of defense, linking it to the Scripts I had embedded in the ground, and even so the shockwave pushed me back sixty feet. Without that line I would have been thrown for miles, and I would have been lucky if any part of me remained, since I would most likely have been a bloody stain in the air.

My legs dug two trenches in the ground. The nib of my pen glowed red as it heated to a thousand degrees almost instantly, and the wind rushing past me shrieked at speeds that scoured the ground to bedrock and wiped out every crow left standing.

I got my head up and saw that the column was still coming down, and inside it, at the centre of a forty-foot circle of white, there was a shape on one knee.

My eyes widened in shock. I had expected that this stranger would be nothing but vapour, and instead I could still see his shape inside the column. Looking closer, I could see that he was coming apart.

The weird white robes were gone, and his skin was peeling off him in long ribbons that went up the beam instead of down. My eyes tightened when I thought I saw those pieces of flesh making strange configurations like nets before they turned to ash... perhaps that was how the stranger was surviving.

It was not enough. All of his skin had been shredded, and underneath the skin there was flesh, and under the flesh there were organs, and all of it was being pulled out of him a layer at a time, unwinding into the column like thread off a spool.

I was frozen in place as I watched the unreasonable tenacity of a creature sacrificing every piece of his own body just to survive my attack. I saw a length of something that had been his spine go up through the light, and his left arm twisted to the side before it was torn out of his body and disintegrated.

The column ended, and there was barely any flesh left on him. The stranger was on his knees, but the bastard was alive.

∞

The silence afterwards seemed to have a shape to it. All the crows had been crushed to blood and feathers, and for a moment I thought the Necromancer, or at least her minions, were gone. Then small green flames began to rise from the remains of the dead. At first there was one flame, and then a hundred, and it kept spreading.

In front of me, directly under the apex, was a crater, perfectly circular, forty feet across and about eight deep, with a rim of fused stone and the Scripts around it glowing dull red where they had held the floor together. Without those Scripts to isolate the power of the impact, the earth would have shattered for miles, and everything I had created here would have been destroyed.

It was a complex and delicate operation I had set up, and it was almost a miracle that everything was going the way I had planned.

Keeping part of my perception on the growing green flames, I looked at the middle of the crater, where what was left of the stranger lay.

There was not much, and for me that was too much, since I knew that even in my Adamantium Titan form I doubted there would have been anything of me left. The stranger still had a torso with most of the back gone. One arm. A head, with most of his bloody skull showing through where the flesh had been taken off.

And both legs, which was strange, because they looked untouched.

He put his remaining hand flat on the stone, and he pushed himself upright.

I have seen a great many things get up that should not have, and I have been most of them. This was worse, as there was nothing dramatic in it. After everything I had just thrown at him... he simply stood up.

He lifted what was left of his head and turned his empty face towards me, and his jaw worked, and I understood that he was about to say something.

I did not want to hear it.

∞

"Crush."

∞

The word left my mouth before the stranger could finish whatever he was going to say. I did not want to give him the chance to speak, since I did not understand all the abilities of a god, and it was foolish to give him time to recover.

The Scripts on the inner walls flared again, the light gathered at the apex, and the column came down.

I had shortened the circle. Forty feet became twenty. The pressure that had been spread across the crater was focused into a smaller circle, and the smaller circle was centred directly on what was left of the stranger’s body.

It hit him standing, and what the first column had started, the second one finished. His remaining arm went first. His chest opened and emptied upward. There was a moment when I could see the whole architecture of him laid bare in white light, and it was not the architecture of a man. For an instant it was as if I were looking at a gigantic spider caught in the middle of the light, and then it was covered over, and the stranger screamed.

I have never heard a sound like it in my life. An insect and a man fused together, and the cry went round the pyramid four times, and I almost screamed myself as my eardrums burst, not just from the volume of it but from the nature of it, which was so unnatural that nothing on Terra should ever sound that way.

The beam stopped, and three seconds later the cry ended with it. The crater was deeper and wider, sixty feet across, with a second rim inside the first and a ring of stone fused to glass, and everything in the middle of it had been scoured down to bare rock.

The dust came down slowly in that dark, lit green by a fire that was becoming an inferno all around me.

I coughed blood and straightened, hearing my ears pop as they healed, and I waited to see if the stranger would rise from this.

Something glowed at my feet and I turned to look, and I saw the head of Ines. The flesh was surprisingly undamaged, and the hunger in my chest dulled a little as I looked into her eyes, and then something strange happened. The head began to glow and slowly unravel, and in that glow I saw something I recognized... the light of Dorrik’s flame.

My eyes widened as I realized what was happening. I looked around and saw the rest of the heads disintegrating under that white light, and I muttered, "Coin..."

While every weapon Dorrik created for the warband was made for melee, Coin’s was different, and even though I had asked her about it when we traveled, I could not say I understood what she told me, mostly because she treated her words like gold and tended to talk in a roundabout manner.

What I understood was that her weapon was focused on memory, and with that she could do a great many things. If what I was seeing was right, Coin and the warband had outsmarted the Necromancer and the stranger.

A chuckle escaped my chest and I broke down laughing for a few seconds. She had been able to deceive even me. If not for the magic inside her working degrading from the impact of my Inscrfiption, I may never have realised that the warband survived. This was one of the most unexpected surprises of my life, and suddenly I no longer wanted to die. The warband were alive, and I could...

"NECROMANCER!!!"

A cry erupted from the crater, and the green inferno surrounding me roared and began to pour itself into it.