Chapter 156: What Was Good or What Was Bad

The blood sword came down, and I felt it before Eva moved.

It was a long cold line cutting through the dark, aimed at the space where my neck would be.

Then her thread tugged mine, sharp and sudden, and my body went where it was told. I dropped.

The blade passed over my head and bit into the floor behind me, and the stone parted around it like wet clay.

Eva had already stepped in. Her violet soul slid under his arm, and I felt her sword go in again, low and fast, into his side.

He did not slow down.

I felt the wound close around her blade. It did not bleed.

It simply stopped being a wound, the flesh pulling shut as if it had never been cut. He twisted, and his free hand came around in a backhand that I could not see, only feel, a wave of pressure rolling across the room like a thrown door.

Eva’s thread yanked me left.

The hand missed us by a hair’s width, and the wall behind us shattered into dust. I knew that because I could kind of feel it.

’Strong.’

That was all I could think. I had fought Beasts and Devils. I had put my sword through a Captain of the Glacier Order. I had never felt a single blow carry that much weight. If it had touched either of us, it would not have broken a bone.

It would have deleted the damn person.

I kept pouring power into the thread.

That was my part.

While Eva danced around him, reading each of his moves a moment before he made it, I stood at the other end of the thread and fed it. Pulse after pulse ran from Soul’s Screech into the dense dark of his soul.

I could feel each one go in. I could not tell what they were doing. His soul was so large that every pulse of mine landed like a pebble dropped into a deep lake, and I could only wait for the ripples.

There were ripples. Small ones. I held on to that.

Scharlott raised his hand again.

Eva’s thread pulled, and this time she did not duck me.

She threw me.

Her violet soul slammed into my side and we both went down, rolling across the broken floor, as a spray of thin red needles tore through the air above us. I could not hear them, but I felt them pass, a hundred small cold lines, and each one left a trail of hot pressure behind it.

They hit the wall and kept going. A row of holes, neat as stitches, appeared in the stone.

I rolled to my knees. My chains were still around his legs. They were cracking now, the spectral links splitting one by one. He had not even looked down. He had simply decided to stand up, and the chains were failing.

I let them go. They shattered into pale dust.

And then I felt the thing he was.

It was not his strength.

It was not the blood or the sword. It was the weight of him, pressing outward from the center of the room, a cold wide pressure that sat on my spirit like a hand on a candle flame. My sense of him flickered.

For a moment, I wanted to look away, and I did not have eyes to look away with. I wanted to run, and I did not have legs I could feel.

’Don’t. It’s only his presence.’

I said it to myself twice before it held.

Eva’s soul shuddered beside me. Then it steadied, and she pulled me upright, and we went in again.

I do not know how long we kept that up.

Time did not work properly in the dark. There was only the thread, the pulse, and the pull.

Eva moved ahead of him, always one step ahead of his next move.

I followed.

Every time he lifted an arm, she was already moving. Every time he swung, she was already gone.

She did not tire, because her eyes did not tire. They only saw.

But I felt how thin she had become. Her violet soul was flat and stretched, like a drawn bow. She had seven minutes with those eyes, and none of them were free.

And Scharlott was only growing more bored.

I felt that, too.

His soul did not tighten as a man’s does in a real fight. It only shifted, slowly, with the patience of a mountain.

Eva stabbed him through the throat, and the throat closed.

She cut a line across his chest, and the line healed before her blade came back. The blood sword swung. The blood needles fell. Each time he did something, he used a little more of what he had, and each time, there was no end to it.

I realized something then, standing in the dark.

We were not fighting a man. We were fighting something that did not run out.

My pulse went into the thread. The ripples came back. Small. Always small.

’It has to be doing something.’

I held on to that, because there was nothing else to hold.

Then something changed at the edge of the room.

I felt it in my spirit, a quiet that had not been there before. At first I did not understand what it was.

The gray little souls had been all around us, flickering like candles. I had stopped counting them without noticing.

I counted now.

Not many. Four. Then three. Then one, guttering beside the far wall.

Then none.

I turned my spiritual sense outward, searching.

The room was full of burned-out places where souls had been. Gray wicks, no longer lit. Forty-one Fighters. Gone.

And the two that had burned brighter, the Inferior Awakened, the one with the fire and the one with the spear. I looked for them in the dark.

I found two cold places. Two dead embers.

Then the others came back to me, one by one, as my sense settled.

Khan’s furnace had dimmed.

It still burned, but low and unsteady, and I felt it sink toward the floor, as though he had dropped to a knee.

The bracelet was still eating him.

Beside it, Petra’s silver streak had stopped.

It hung in the air above the corpses, flickering, with the quiet of a thing that has no more room to run. She still had some time left on her ring. Not much.

They were alive. Both of them. They had finished it.

The soldiers were dead. The Inferior Awakened were dead.

I felt the whole room go still.

Four souls stood in a ring around the black mountain in the middle of it.

Khan’s furnace, Eva’s violet lake, Petra’s silver streak, and my own thin thread. Four small lights against the dark.

And across from us, Scharlott’s soul, vast and patient, raising its blade.

He had stood alone this whole time. Nobody had come to help him. Nobody had needed to.

It was one against four now.

I did not know whether that was good or bad.