Chapter 155: Chained

His soul was strange.

I noticed it the moment I stopped being afraid of it. Dense, yes, the way a mountain is dense.

But that was not the strange part. Unorthodoxity ran through it like veins through marble, the raw stuff of the Realm itself, woven into every layer. I had felt that in the creatures we had killed. It was what made them what they were.

But under it, there was something else. Something I had no business recognizing.

It was humanity. Interwoven with unorthadoxity.

I did not understand it at that time. There was no time to.

We already knew what we were going to do.

Eva and I would take Scharlott.

Petra and Khan would take the soldiers and the two Inferior Awakened.

The split was simple, and it had made sense the moment it formed.

I was going to damage his soul, and Eva, who could now see every move he would make before he made it, could dodge what he threw.

Petra had the speed to finish the soldiers before they could regroup. And Khan had his affinity, which was most terrible when it had a crowd to work on.

None of us said it. We moved.

Petra went first, and I felt it more than I understood it.

Her silver thread flickered across the room in a streak, and every soldier in its path went dim, one after another, like candles snuffed by a passing wind.

They fell like grass under a scythe.

Above her, Khan’s furnace-soul flared, and I felt him leave the ground.

He hung in the air at the top of a jump, and the bracelet in his arm bit down, and waves of Chaos rolled out of him in every direction.

Where they touched, the small gray souls shook and came apart.

The two Inferior Awakened burned brighter than the rest, and I felt both of them turn toward him, and then felt Petra’s silver streak turn toward them.

That was their fight. This was ours.

Eva’s violet soul brushed against mine. It was a small touch, just the warmth of a shoulder against a shoulder. Then we ran...

Straight toward him...

I could not feel the floor. I could not hear our boots or my own breath. I ran by memory, by the pull of her thread beside mine, one step after another through a darkness that had no ground in it.

All I had was the mountain in front of me, growing larger.

He was alone.

That was the thing that frightened me most. No guards, no shield, no wall of soldiers between us and him.

A man who stood by himself in the middle of a room while his people died around him, because he did not think they mattered.

’Arrogance,’ I thought.

The plain, quiet kind. The kind that has never been taught otherwise.

I gathered my spiritual power and poured it into the earring.

Soul’s Screech took it like a dry cloth taking water. A single thread unspooled from it, thin and pale, and reached out across the dark.

I guided it with my will. It slid through the air, past the blood and the broken bodies, and touched the great black column rising from the top of Scharlott’s soul.

It connected.

For a heartbeat, I felt him. Not his body, but the inside of him, vast and cold and crowded. Then my thread was tied to his, and the first pulse of my power ran along it into the dense dark of his soul.

He lifted his hand.

I did not see it. I did not have eyes. But I felt it in my spirit, the way you feel a blade being drawn in a quiet room. Something was about to happen, and it was going to kill me.

"Duck."

Eva’s voice reached me through her thread. I could not hear it, and yet I understood it all the same, the word forming inside me as clearly as if she had spoken it into my ear.

So I ducked.

Something passed over my head. I did not feel it, but I felt the shape of it in the air, hot and bright and sharp.

Streaks of blood, thin as needles, fanned out in rays and tore through the space where my skull had been. They hit the wall behind us and cut it like paper.

I was alive.

Of course I was. I had ducked.

My heart was racing, though I could not feel it, and I did not stop.

I raised my foot and slammed it down on the ground.

I used an ability of my affinity: Chained. The stone cracked under my heel, and spectral chains rose out of the floor, long and pale and silent. They coiled up Scharlott’s legs and locked around his ankles, his knees, his thighs. Each link was thick as a man’s wrist.

He did not react.

That was the first wrong thing. Anyone else would have looked down.

Anyone else would have flinched, or snarled, or pulled. He only stood there with the chains around his legs, as if a child had tied a ribbon to him and run off.

Next to me, Eva’s violet soul rippled.

Her eyebrows had gone up. I could feel it the way you feel a draft, a small sharp lift in the shape of her.

She had seen something. Something about the next few seconds, and it was not good.

I knew then that something was wrong.

But Eva was already moving.

She jumped.

I felt her leave the ground, a violet streak rising over the black mountain of his soul. She came down on him with her sword in both hands and drove it into the center of his chest, all the way to the hilt.

Blood came out.

It poured down his front, dark and thick, and it should have been the end of something. A wound like that should have ended anything standing.

Scharlott looked down at the sword in his chest.

He looked bored.

I could not see his face.

But I could feel the shape of his soul, and it did not tighten or flare. It did not even stir.

It only settled slightly, with the weariness of a man who has been interrupted by a fly. He raised one hand, wrapped it around the blade, and pulled it out of his own body like a splinter.

Then he threw it.

The sword left his hand and flew across the room with a force that I felt in my bones.

It struck the left wall and tore straight through, stone and brick bursting outward, and kept going into the mountain beyond.

A long tunnel appeared in the rock behind it, and somewhere in the dark, I felt the sword stop.

Eva did not panic.

She unsummoned it. It left the mountain and returned to her Core, and in the same breath she summoned it again, and the blade was in her hand, whole and clean.

Her violet soul trembled once. Then it steadied.

And I felt it happen.

The blood still pouring from Scharlott’s chest changed direction. It stopped falling.

It rose, curling through the air in a red ribbon, and flowed into his open hand. It gathered there, thickened, took shape. A long blade of blood, dripping at the edges, grew out of his fist.

"..."

And while I stood there, I felt the hole in his chest knitting shut. The flesh closed over the wound as though it had never been opened. In a single heartbeat, there was nothing there at all.