My Taboo Harem!

Jab — slip.

Cross — slip.

A left knee driving upward, mist wreathing the kneecap like a censer trailing incense from the pits of hell — Phei took it on his forearm, the mist splashing sideways in an outward arterial spray that hissed where it landed on skulls forty yards away.

The skulls sizzled and blackened, tiny fractures racing across their domes like lightning in miniature graves.

A right knee — same, caught on the opposite forearm with the indifferent ease of a man brushing lint from his sleeve.

Kyle’s right leg unfurled in one long surgical extension, the polished boot driving forward at hip-height directly into the hollow between Phei’s floating ribs and his chest.

Phei turned a quarter-step and the kick passed him.

And the realm suffered for it.

The missed push kick detonated the loudest ripple yet — a concussion too immense to register as sound, a wall of displaced atmosphere hurling outward in a cardioid pattern warped by the direction of the strike.

The horizon-teeth slammed shut in a single great bite that shook the entire ossuary.

The red sky ruptured along its whole visible span in a jagged ivory line that ran from one horizon to its opposite, bleeding fresh arterial mist like a wound in the firmament. The continent-spine jerked eight inches out of its bed and settled back down with a tremor that Phei felt through his boots and up into the marrow of his teeth.

Some primordial vastness beneath the drifts turned over in its millennial sleep and exhaled, and the exhale came up out of the bone-floor as a low stygian moan that lasted three full heartbeats before it subsided into a whimper.

The realm was beginning to shed its composure.

Phei was already inside the kick.

The extended leg still hung in the air, the polished boot suspended at hip-height, and Phei’s left hand closed upon the captured ankle with the calm finality of a warden locking a cell door.

Fingers on tendon.

And pulled.

One sharp pull — no more effort than closing a ledger on a debtor’s fate — and Kyle’s whole balanced impossible frame pitched forward, his standing leg buckling, his torso tilting down toward Phei’s hip like a sinner dragged before the altar.

The realm tried to catch him. The ash-floor rose by a fingerbreadth in desperate supplication. It was not fast enough.

Phei’s right hand — dagger in it — released the blade’s hanging grip and shot upward behind Kyle’s skull in a five-finger grip on the back of the head.

Phei’s fingers spread wide across the crown. Thumb locked behind Kyle’s right ear. The dagger hung between Phei’s fingers, its violet-kissed edge running downward along Kyle’s spine like the promise of a slow execution.

And Phei drove his knee into Kyle’s forehead but he was not done and never let go.

The head-grip was the instrument. No lock, no wrestle, no technique. Merely Phei’s arm going straight, his hip engaging behind the extended grip, and the entire accumulated weight of a Cosmic Dragon’s plenipotentiary intention channelled through the single sovereign point of contact at the base of Kyle’s skull.

Kyle’s feet left the floor. His crimson coat streamed upward in an obscene ecclesiastical swoon. His free arm flailed once and found only the fallen air as his face met the ash-floor, and his face continued.

Into the floor.

Through the floor.

It all happened so fast in a matter of an instant.

The black stone beneath the ash yielded — a crater blossoming outward in a ring six feet across, the rock giving way like the skin of an overripe fruit split by a god’s thumb, Kyle’s face driven four inches below what had, one heartbeat ago, been the solid architecture of the realm’s bedrock.

Fragments of shattered stone fountained outward across the ash-floor in a ring of black shrapnel that hissed and smoked where they landed.

The impact-crater deepened a second time as the realm’s objection arrived too late to matter.

The realm convulsed.

The whole visible bone-field spasmed in one hard, wracked seizure. Skulls rolled untethered in every direction as though some subterranean muscle had cramped beneath the drifts and torn itself in half trying to escape.

The continent-spine snapped in three simultaneous places along its impossible length, visible even from this distance as a violent jerking of the whole ridge that sent fresh cracks racing through the red mist like lightning in a dying god’s veins. The horizon-teeth chattered against each other in an unmoored clattering seizure of their own, grinding and splintering with the sound of continents being chewed.

The red sky, already wounded, began to sag downward in long exhausted sheets, the strands of the archive drooping and curling as the realm lost the upright strength to hold them, bleeding slow rivers of arterial mist that hissed where they touched the bone-field below.

Kyle was face-down in the crater.

Phei’s right hand had never once let go of the back of his head.

Phei’s left hand came down and clamped flat across the crown of Kyle’s skull beside the right hand into a two-handed grip now in the same instant, his ten fingers interlaced across the sovereign architecture of Kyle’s head like the jaws of some final, merciless vice.

The dagger hung between Phei’s fingers against the base of Kyle’s neck, the violet edge pointing downward at the exposed vertebrae, cold and patient and still unconsumed, waiting for the word that would end everything.

Kyle was pinned.

His one red eye rolled sideways against the stone, seeking upward, seeking to see what crowned him like the final judgment of a god he had once believed himself above. His jaw — or what the crater had left him of a jaw — worked once against the shattered rock beneath his cheek. He produced a sound. It was not a word. It was not even a keening. It was the wet airless shape of a sound his body could no longer afford to make, and the shape drifted out of him like the ghost of an exhalation that had been denied its body forever.

Phei had already shifted his weight forward across both clamped hands.

Then Phei hopped upward with both knees up.

Light. Six inches of vertical. Both hands never leaving the crown of Kyle’s head — so that the hop, rather than releasing the pin, pushed Kyle deeper into the crater, Phei’s body rising while his grip anchored downward through the motion like the hand of an executioner driving the spike home.

The stone beneath Kyle’s face yielded another grudging inch with a wet, tearing groan that sounded almost like surrender.

Both knees came up.

At the apex of the hop, both palms still pressing Kyle’s head to the floor, Phei’s knees fell in a single finality both kneecaps accelerating toward the exposed side of Kyle’s skull that Phei’s two-handed pin had fixed immovably in place.

The first knee took Kyle’s temple.

The second took his jaw.

They landed half a heartbeat apart.

Crack.

CRACK.

The first impact drove Kyle’s skull further into the broken stone with a wet, meaty crunch that echoed like the breaking of a world. The crater deepened by three new inches, the rock beneath capitulating with a long tearing ecclesiastical groan as the force arrived, black stone splintering outward in a starburst of razor shards.

The second impact hit before the first had finished speaking — and the whole left side of Kyle’s face surrendered completely. The zygomatic arch collapsing inward with a sickening wet pop.

The mandible fracturing in two separate locations, the jaw folding upon itself along a diagonal no honest anatomy had ever countenanced, teeth shearing through ruined gum and tongue in a fresh fountain of arterial red.

The realm choked.

Every bone in the visible distance — every skull, every rib, every beast skeleton, every vertebra of the continent-spine, every tooth of the horizon-jaw, every ancient unidentifiable thing heaped upon the ossuary plain — cracked simultaneously along a single unified fissure. Fine hairline faults appeared in every bone at once, as though the whole place were a single vast skeleton and something had just driven a chisel into its parietal seam and twisted.

The red sky fell in earnest now, tendrils dropping in their thousands — a curtain of arterial mist collapsing downward in one final defeated descent, pooling across the bone-drifts, writhing along the shattered stone, coiling in useless grieving eddies around the edges of Phei’s boots like dying snakes.

Phei remained where he was.

Knees still upon Kyle’s skull. Both hands still clasped across the crown. The dagger pressed against the base of the neck, violet and waiting. His hair had settled around his shoulders in the long dark waves of a self he had not been permitted to grow into. His breathing was precisely what it had been at the beginning of the duel.

His amethyst eyes were clear, almost peaceful.

He looked down at the ruined hemisphere of face visible beneath his knees.

Kyle’s eye was open and wet.

Fixed upward upon him with the broken, helpless horror of a prince who had just watched his entire kingdom kneel and bleed for the charity case he had once dismissed.

Kyle could not speak. Kyle’s jaw was no longer architecturally capable of producing the intricacies of speech. The arterial red that had, at every prior injury, rushed up to realign him was pooling futilely at the edges of the damage — the realm too broken now, too structurally vitiated by its own prince’s humiliation, to feed him the repair that he required. The realm itself was failing its master, and the failure was absolute.

Phei leaned down.

Brought his face close to Kyle’s one open eye—

And smiled.