Novel Full Chapter 427: Survive!
Chapter 427: Survive!
"Good thinking, Bruce I’ll take this third. You take yours. Scythe, try not to die in the first minute."
"I’ll try," the young man snapped back, and swung.
With that, the real fight began.
The young man’s scythe, now that Bruce could see it used properly, was vicious in close quarters.
He swung it in wide horizontal arcs, the curved blade cutting through hollow after hollow, and the reach of the weapon kept the dead things from ever getting their hands on him.
He was not skilled, exactly, his technique was raw, born of pure desperate practice, but he was strong and fast and absolutely committed, and the scythe carved a clear space around his point of the triangle. Hollows fell apart in halves wherever the blade passed.
Bruce fought his own third with the ink.
And he discovered, fighting properly for the first time, just how versatile his talent could be.
When hollows came at range, he wrote.
He drew his finger through the air and the ink followed it, black lines hanging in the grey, and the lines hardened into bullets that fired where he pointed.
When hollows came close, he changed the shape entirely.
He poured the ink down and out into long, whipping tentacles, a half-dozen of them, rooted at his shoulders, lashing out to crush and fling and tear the dead things that pressed in on him.
When the tentacles felt too slow, he reshaped them again, condensing the ink into a cluster of thin black blades that hung in the air around him and flew at his thought, darting out to spear hollows and snapping back to circle him, ready, like a flock of obedient knives.
He was not just fighting. He was experimenting.
Every few seconds he tried something new, a shape he had not made before, a use he had not tested, and the talent gave it to him, and he kept what worked. Bullets for range. Tentacles for the press. Flying blades for everything in between. Each success made the next one come faster.
Kael held the last third, and he fought like a man at a festival.
His flame was as versatile as Bruce’s ink, only louder.
He threw fireballs to break up the hollows at distance.
He wrapped his fists and elbows and even his shoulders in flame to make every part of his body a weapon up close.
Once, when too many hollows came at once, he simply spread his arms and released a ring of fire outward from his whole body, and the front rank of the horde on his side was thrown back burning. He laughed when he did it.
"This is the most fun I’ve had since I died!" he shouted, to no one in particular... He was clearly enjoying the thrill of the battle...
The three of them held.
For a while, they held well. The triangle did not break. The hollows that reached them died, to scythe, to ink, to flame, and the circle, though it never stopped pressing, never broke through.
But the horde did not run out.
That was the problem. Bruce saw it clearly even as he fought. They were killing hollows by the dozen, and there were always more.
The cloud that had been chasing the young man had not been the whole of it, as the fight went on, more hollows came drifting and lurching out of the deep mist, drawn by the noise, drawn by the three bright living selves at the center of it all.
Every hollow they destroyed was replaced. The math was wrong, and Bruce knew it, and he kept fighting anyway because there was nothing else to do.
And their soul energy was running out.
Bruce felt it first as a thinning.
His ink, which had come easily, started coming slower. The constructs took more effort to shape. The bullets came out a little smaller, a little less dense.
He pushed harder to make up the difference, drew more deeply on his reserve, and the deep draw answered, but each answer was weaker than the last, and he could feel the bottom of himself getting closer.
"Running low," he said, tight, over his shoulder.
"Me too," Kael called back. The fireballs he was throwing had shrunk noticeably. "We’re all newly awakened. We don’t have much of a reserve. Should’ve expected this, our bodies’ natural energy recovery rate can’t keep up with our expenditure..."
The young man with the scythe said nothing, but his swings were getting shorter, his arcs less wide. He was tiring just as fast.
They kept fighting. They had no choice.
At some point, Bruce dropped the energy-hungry constructs, no more tentacles, no more flocks of blades, and went back to plain bullets, the cheapest shape he had, firing them in small careful volleys, trying to make every drop of soul energy count.
Kael did the same, switching from flashy bursts to small tight fireballs, conserving, conserving.
It was not enough.
The bottom came.
Bruce reached for the ink and there was nothing there. His reserve was dry, scraped empty, the last of his soul energy already spent. He pushed anyway, on reflex, and not even a wisp of black came to his hand.
At the same moment, the young man’s scythe vanished.
It did not break or fall. It simply ceased, dissolving out of his hands into nothing, because the soul energy that had been holding its shape was gone, and a construct with no energy to sustain it could not exist. The young man stared at his suddenly empty hands.
"My scythe, I can’t, I can’t make it again," His voice climbed toward panic. "Damn it. We’re dead. We’re dead."
Bruce said nothing.
He stepped forward and hit the nearest hollow with his fist.
It was a plain punch. No talent, no ink, no energy.
Just his soul-body’s arm and hard-earned experience behind it, every fight, every drill, every brutal lesson from the physical realm carried over into the way he moved.
He hit the hollow at the joint of its neck and shoulder, where even a thing with no proper anatomy was weakest, and it staggered. He hit it again and it came apart.
Beside him, Kael was doing the same. No flame now, just fists, just elbows, just the demon’s heavy frame thrown into every strike.
He was still grinning, though it was a thinner grin now, the grin of a man who has decided that if this is the end, he is going to spend the end fighting.
The young man with the scythe watched the two of them, energy gone, talents dead, throwing bare punches into a horde of monsters without a flicker of hesitation, and something in him steadied.
He could not condense his scythe anymore. So he raised his fists too. He stepped back into the triangle. He kept fighting.
"You’re both insane," he said.
"Probably," Kael agreed, and broke a hollow’s jaw.
It could not last.
A soul-body, Bruce was learning, ran on soul energy the way a real body ran on food and rest, and theirs was empty.
Fighting on with nothing left was like running on a leg already broken.
He felt his consciousness begin to drag, the edges of his thoughts going soft, his focus slipping, the world starting to come to him slowed-down and underwater. His punches landed weaker each time. His vision narrowed.
He pushed through it. He made himself keep moving. Beside him he could hear Kael’s breathing turn ragged, could hear the young man’s blunt plain attacks landing softer and softer.
The three of them were swaying on their feet. The triangle still held, barely, three exhausted souls pressed back to back in a sea of dim hungry things, and all of them knew, without saying it, that they had perhaps another minute before one of them went down, and the moment one of them went down, the triangle broke, and the moment the triangle broke, it was over for all three.
Bruce hit another hollow. His knuckles barely registered the contact. His thoughts were a long grey tunnel now.
He set his feet to throw one more punch.
And then, through the shrieking, through the grey, through the fog closing over his own mind, he heard something else.
DING!!!
A bright, clear, single sound.
The ding of a bell.
It rang out somewhere not far off, cutting through the noise of the horde, clean and high and utterly out of place in this miserable expanse. It rang once, and then a moment later, again.
DING!
All three of them heard it.
Bruce felt the change go through the triangle like a current. The young man’s head came up. Kael’s ragged breathing caught. None of them knew what the bell was, but all of them, in the same instant, understood the same thing.
The bell meant something was coming.
And whatever was coming, it was the only chance they had.
Bruce planted his feet. He drew his exhausted fists back up. The grey tunnel of his fading mind narrowed to a single hard point of will, and the will held one thought above all the others, simple and absolute:
’Survive until it gets here!’
The bell rang a third time, closer now.
DING!
Gritting his teeth, Bruce threw the punch.