Chapter 163: Stomp

I looked at Sera for a moment, and then I looked at the floor.

She was sitting a step away from me with her coat pulled tight. I could not read her. For once, I did not try.

’I am doing it all for you people and yet...’ I gritted my teeth until my jaw hurt.

Truly, the world played its own hypocrisy.

Behind me, the survivors were still confused.

They had been standing in a loose crowd for several minutes, looking from the hovering king to the pool to us, and waiting for someone to tell them what they had just survived.

Lee walked over to them. He had a twisted version of the story ready, and he told it in his slow, heavy voice.

He told them that we had won. He told them that Culex was now our puppet.

For a second nobody moved. Then the survivors raised their weapons in joy.

Maces, swords, axes, crossbows, all of them went up over their heads at once. Somebody laughed, a cracked and shaky sound. Somebody else began to cry. The metal flashed under the red light of the windows.

I watched them and felt like a thief standing at a funeral.

Then the air changed...

Divinity, in a huge amount, was released from where Culex was. There was no sound. It simply arrived, all at once, like someone had thrown open the door of a furnace.

My eyes closed on their own because of the unbearable radiation, and it did not help at all. The light came straight through my eyelids. I saw red, then white, and my skull rang as if someone had struck it with a hammer.

I heard the first body hit the floor. A dull thud, then the clatter of a mace rolling away.

Then another. Then three at once.

The survivors began to fall unconscious, one by one. I counted them by the sound, without wanting to.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Their weapons rang on the stone, and the joy that had filled the hall a moment ago was gone, as if it had never been there.

Beside me, something fell hard. I could not look. I heard the soft scrape of boots and the weight of a body folding up. Charolette, Theodore, Arthur and Mary were knocked unconscious as well. I did not see it happen. I only heard it, and I could not help any of them.

A hand caught my sleeve and held on tight.

The only people conscious were me and Sera.

The radiation stopped.

It did not fade. It ended, cleanly, like a candle snuffed between two fingers.

My ears were still ringing, and my skin felt tight and hot, as if I had been standing too close to a fire. I stayed still for a few seconds longer, afraid of what I would see.

Then I opened my eyes.

I saw King Culex...

He had stopped hovering. He was standing where the pool of blood had been, and the pool was gone, and the air around him was still, which was somehow worse than the pressure had been.

His jet black hair was swayed back from his forehead. His skin was the same paleness I remembered from the execution.

But his eyes had changed.

They were not only extremely red. Inside the red there was a second thing, a small red ball that seemed to be floating in his eyes. It was constantly revolving around the pupil, slow and steady, like a moon around something it could not leave.

He tilted his head to look at me. "Edmund Rhys?"

My heart stiffened. ’How does he know my name?’

Nobody in this palace had ever heard it. I had been Peter here. A frightened, naive boy who practiced his face in a mirror. I had given my real name to one person, and I had given it less than two days ago.

He did not explain. He only revealed a mocking smile, small and tired, as if he had been waiting a very long time to say those two words.

At the same exact moment, a shadow came out of his body.

It slid out of his chest and stood beside him on the floor, long and thin and shapeless, shaking at the edges.

[You Are Looking At a Devil Fiend: Scharlott]

The system was saying this about the shadow that came out of his body.

The word Devil should have made my stomach drop. But the shadow seemed... harmless. It swayed in place with no weight to it, and the pressure that came off it was so thin I almost could not feel it at all.

Sera’s grip on my sleeve tightened. She had felt it too. We did not look at each other.

Culex looked at the shadow and snorted. "What are you going to do now?"

Scharlott replied. "Find purpose."

His voice was rough and quiet, and it sounded almost like a man who had been woken from a very long sleep.

Culex nodded, and for a brief moment they looked at each other. I did not understand what passed between them.

Culex smacked his lips, then put his hand forward.

The shadow reached out, accepting the handshake.

However...

Bang!

The whole shadow exploded into tens of thousands of pieces.

They flew in every direction, small dark fragments that hung in the air for a second before they dropped. Every one of them seemed to be in an unbearable amount of pain. They jerked and twisted on the floor like cut worms, and the worst part was that they were not even dead.

The shadow screamed from its different positions.

A hundred mouths, a thousand, all of them screaming at once, from every corner of the floor. I could hear every one of them.

It was not a human sound, but it was close enough that I put my hands over my ears, and it did nothing at all.

It wass pain, as I could hear, and it was more than unbearable.

King Culex raised his hand, and the pieces of the shadow gathered in three different areas, dragged along the stone as if by invisible hooks.

Three small dark piles. They kept moving, kept screaming, kept trying to reform into something that could escape.

Culex raised his right leg, and suddenly his height grew to 35 feet.

The room shook. His head rose into the high dark of the ceiling, and his shadow fell across the whole hall. I felt the wind of his growing push at my hair. Sera pulled me back a step, and I let her.

He stomped, and the floor cracked outward in a web. "This is for Eva."

The first pile of shadows went silent, then flickered and screamed again.

He stomped on the second area.

"This is for Khan."

The shadows screamed, begging for mercy. They were beyond pain. I did not know the words they used, but I knew what begging sounds like in any language.

I did not know these names. Eva. Khan. I had never heard them before in my life, and my mind was racing, trying to understand, and getting nowhere.

He breathed heavily as he went for the third area. For the first time, I saw his shoulders shake.

He raised his leg and held it there, over the last pile. The red ball in eyes started to revolve at a very high speed.

"And this...

This is for Petra."

He stomped his leg.

Scharlott died while experiencing the severe pain.