Chapter 100: Attribute Theft To Victory

The pulse faded from my chest, and in its place the world went strange.

It was not that things slowed down. It was that I understood, all at once, that I did not have to move through the space between here and there. The knowledge arrived in my muscles before it reached my mind, the way a hand knows to flinch from a flame.

I lifted my eyes to the Kutur.

It was still screaming, the dagger buried to the hilt in its skull, its wings spasming against the broken flagstones. Smoke curled from its flanks. Blood the color of rust ran down its horns and pooled beneath its jaw. Theodore had dropped off its head and rolled clear, one knee on the ground, chest heaving.

"Edmund," he panted. "Whatever you are about to do, do it quickly. This ring is making me want to punch the sky."

"Hold on."

I let my weight settle into my heels.

’Move.’

The courtyard smeared.

There was no sensation of running. One instant I stood beside Theodore with the grease of the stairs still under my boots, and the next my feet landed on something that heaved and rippled beneath them. Hot skin. Hard ridges of muscle. I was standing on the Kutur’s back, the whole length of the beast bucking under me, wings flapping like torn sails on either side.

Below, the world had rearranged itself. Theodore’s face was turned toward the empty place where I had been, and his mouth was falling open.

"What the..."

’So it works.’

A grin tore across my face before I could stop it.

I did not give the Kutur time to understand what had happened. Light gathered in my right palm, white and fierce, crackling at the edges, and Thunder Sunlight formed in my grip with a sharp, bright snap that made the monster flinch beneath me. Its muscles bunched. It began to twist, trying to throw me, but the pain from the dagger had stolen its coordination. Its movements were wet and clumsy.

I raised the sword in both hands and drove it down between its shoulder blades.

Crack!

The blade bit. It did not slide through the way it had in the crab, or the Ferals. The skin held, stubborn as hammered iron, and the sword only sank a few inches before the resistance stopped it cold. Lightning raced along the steel and sizzled against the hide, skittering across it in thin blue veins.

The Kutur shrieked.

The sound was different now. Higher, rawer. Not the scream of something fighting. The scream of something that had realized it could be hurt.

’It is dazed. Its mind is a mess of pain. Now.’

I closed my eyes for half a breath and reached for the thing I had been aiming at since the moment the dagger went in. Not the creature’s body. Not its blood. The quality that made its body what it was.

I felt it. Cold, dense, heavy, like a stone sunk at the bottom of a river. Its hide. The thing that had snapped my dagger’s edge and rattled my teeth.

Using attribute theft, I stole its skin.

A shudder rippled through my body. My arms felt suddenly, impossibly dense, and a strange cold spread beneath my skin, like frost forming over a pond. I flexed my fingers and heard a faint, metallic scrape, as though each knuckle had been wrapped in a thin plate of armor.

Beneath my boots, the Kutur’s skin changed.

It softened. The dark ridged plates smoothed into ordinary hide, pale and slick, the texture of a plucked bird. It blinked its yellow eyes in horror, perhaps feeling, for the first time in its life, how thin the barrier was between itself and the world.

I looked down at my sword.

Thunder Sunlight was no longer stopped by anything.

It slid in, easy as a knife into warm butter, all the way to the crossguard. And the lightning poured into the wound.

Boom!

The creature’s body lit from within. Veins glowed bright blue beneath the skin, branching across its ribs, its wings, its throat. Smoke gushed from its mouth and nostrils. A smell rose, thick and sweet and sickening, the smell of meat roasting too fast.

The insides of the beast burned, and the lightning kept cooking whatever remained.

The Kutur tried one final, desperate surge. It hurled its whole body sideways, and I was flung from its back like a rag, spinning through the air. The courtyard wheeled around me. I saw the sky, the broken roof, Theodore’s wild-eyed face.

’Land. Feet first.’

I hit the stone in a crouch. Pain shuddered up my legs, but the skin along my shins did not so much as scrape. I stared at my palms. They were gray, faintly metallic, like polished slate.

"Wow," I breathed.

"Edmund!" Theodore shouted. "Behind you!"

I turned.

The Kutur had staggered upright, wings half unfolded, smoke leaking through its teeth. Its horns were lowered. It was charging, dragging one wing behind it, with blind, furious hatred in its yellow eyes.

I did not step aside.

I stepped forward, and when it reached me, I drove my fist into the center of its face.

Bang!

It felt like punching a sack of wet sand. The beast’s head snapped sideways, a tooth flew across the courtyard, and something cracked inside its skull. It stumbled, dazed, and I hit it again, in the jaw this time, and again in the throat. Each blow landed with a dull, heavy thud, and my knuckles, wrapped in iron skin, did not hurt at all.

"Is that," Theodore said, stunned, "you, doing that?"

"Apparently."

"Remind me never to make you angry."

"You do it every day."

"Then remind me to be better at it."

The Kutur swung a horn at me. I caught it in my left hand.

I held it there.

Its whole body trembled, straining, yet the horn did not move an inch. The creature stared at me, and for the first time since it had dived out of the sky, I saw something in its eyes that looked very much like fear.

"Theodore," I said calmly. "Now."

"With pleasure!"

He was already moving. The spikes on his knuckles gleamed like rubies as he sprinted across the stone, the ring’s pressure rolling off him in waves. He leapt, drew back his fist, and slammed it into the creature’s ribs, where the lightning had cooked the muscle soft.

Crunch!

Bones folded. Air gushed out of the beast in a rattling gasp.

I raised Thunder Sunlight and drove it through its throat.

Light flared. Thunder rolled across the ruins, shaking dust from the shattered arches. The Kutur’s eyes went wide, flickered, and then dimmed, one by one, like candles being snuffed out in a very large room.

Its legs buckled.

It collapsed with a long, rattling exhale, and its wings folded slowly over its body like a funeral shroud. Smoke drifted up from its hide. Then it was still.

Silence returned to the courtyard.

I stood over the body, my sword dripping, my chest rising and falling. Theodore leaned against a cracked pillar, pulling the ring off his finger with a shaking hand.

"Never again," he gasped. "Never again will I put that cursed thing on."

"You said that last time."

"I mean it this time."

"You said that last time too."

He laughed, wheezing, and slid down the pillar to sit on the cold stone.

I looked down at my gray, metallic hands and flexed them once more. Then I looked up at the pale palace on the mountain, far above us, glowing faintly against the dying light.

’If a single beast at the doorstep can do this to us...’

I let the thought hang.

Then I walked to the fallen Kutur and pulled my dagger free of its skull.