Novel Full Chapter 428: The Bell Of Salvation
Chapter 428: The Bell Of Salvation
DING!
The bell rang a third time, closer now.
Meanwhile, Bruce threw the punch.
His fist hit a hollow at the side of its skull-like head, and the impact was so weak that for a moment he thought he had missed entirely. But the hollow staggered. It was already half-cracked from earlier blows. It came apart slowly, mist rising off the place where its head had been.
Bruce pulled his arm back. The arm did not want to come. Every muscle in his soul-body was telling him to stop, sit down, close his eyes. He told it no. He raised the fist again.
Beside him, Kael was making sounds Bruce had not heard from him before. Not laughter. Not banter. Just heavy, ragged breaths between punches — the breaths of a man who had been at the bottom of his reserves for too long and was now operating on something other than soul energy, something older and meaner. He was still fighting. But he was not fighting well anymore.
His punches were landing in the wrong places. Hollows that should have fallen in one strike took two, three, four.
On the other side of the triangle, the young man was the worst off. He had been running before the fight began.
He had used more soul energy than either of them to maintain his scythe. He had nothing left now, and it showed. His fists were swinging slow and short.
His eyes were half-closed. Twice, in the last minute, his knees had buckled and he had only kept his feet because the press of hollows around him was too thick to fall through.
And the hollows kept coming.
That was the thing Bruce could not stop thinking about, even as his thoughts slowed down. They had killed so many.
The grey expanse around the triangle was littered with the slow-dissolving mist of every hollow they had broken.
By any normal count of battle, they had won several times over. They had crushed the original cloud that had been chasing the young man, and then they had crushed the second wave that had drifted in to replace it, and then the third.
The fourth wave was on them now, and Bruce could see, through the thinning gap between hollows, that there was a fifth wave coming behind it.
Drifting in out of the deep mist. Lurching forward with empty eyes and reaching hands. More and more of them, walking out of the grey like the grey itself had decided to send everything it had.
There was no end to them.
The Mistlands had been full of hollows. Bruce had walked past them for hours on his way to find Kael. Every one of those hollows, every drifting empty soul he had passed, was apparently capable of being woken up by hunger if the bait was loud enough — and the three of them, fighting at the center of this mess, were a beacon.
They were three bright living selves in a sea of nothing. Of course the hollows were coming. They would keep coming until there were no more hollows left in the Mistlands, or until Bruce and Kael and the young man were dead. Whichever happened first.
It was going to be the second one. Bruce could feel it now in his arms and his lungs and the grey tunnel of his fading mind. Whichever happened first was going to be them.
He punched a hollow. The hollow did not come apart this time. He had to punch it again. His hand was shaking when he drew it back.
DING!
The bell.
It came again, and it was definitely closer this time — much closer, the sound of it crisp and clean and almost near, somewhere just past the edge of the horde. Bruce could not see what was making the sound.
The hollows were too thick around him. He could see only the dim shapes of them and the grey mist between them and the small glimpses of empty expanse beyond.
But it was coming. Whatever it was. It was coming.
"Hold on," Bruce said. His voice came out cracked. "Hold on."
"Trying," Kael grunted.
The young man said nothing. He was past words.
The hollows pressed in.
Bruce hit one. Hit another. Missed a third entirely, the swing going wide, and the hollow he had missed reached his shoulder before he could pull back. Cold fingers closed on his soul-body. He felt them pull — felt his identity tug under the grip, felt something at the center of him try to peel away under the hollow’s hunger — and he wrenched his shoulder free with a snarl and broke the thing’s wrist with the side of his fist.
It came back at him. Wristless. Reaching with the other hand.
He hit it again. It went down.
Two more took its place.
He could not keep up. He knew he could not keep up. He kept fighting anyway, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping was the same as dying. Beside him, Kael had been backed up half a step. The triangle was deforming. Not broken yet, but pressed in, smaller, the three of them squeezed into less and less space as the horde closed.
Bruce felt a second pair of cold hands at his back — or thought he did — and only realized at the last instant that the hands belonged to Kael, who had stumbled and caught himself against Bruce’s spine.
"Sorry," Kael grunted, pushing himself upright again. "Slipped."
"Don’t slip."
"Working on it."
The young man on the third point of the triangle made a small sound — a half-cry, half-grunt — and Bruce risked one glance over his shoulder and saw the young man on one knee, swinging up at a hollow that was bent over him. The hollow caught the young man’s arm in both hands. It started to pull.
Bruce did not have the energy to shout. He did not have the energy to do anything. He threw himself sideways instead, breaking his point of the triangle, and slammed his shoulder into the hollow that had the young man’s arm.
The hollow let go. It fell, came apart at a seam Bruce had not aimed for.
The young man got back to his feet. His arm was hanging strangely. Something at the elbow had been wrenched.
"Thank you," he whispered.
"Get back in line," Bruce said.
They reformed the triangle. The horde pressed in. Bruce had to fight from a worse angle now, with one shoulder lower than the other. He did not have the strength to fix it. He just kept swinging.
The grey tunnel of his consciousness narrowed further. He had to constantly remind himself to hold himself together.
DING!
This time the bell was right there.
And through a gap between two hollows, for the first time, Bruce saw it.
A carriage.
It was floating at the far back of the horde, slowly approaching, and Bruce had only a heartbeat to take in the shape of it before the gap between hollows closed again. But that heartbeat was enough. Long, dark body. Tall wheels. The shadow of figures up on its high seat. And somewhere on it, a bell, ringing as it came.
A grey carriage.
The older woman’s words from hours ago came back to him with terrible clarity.
’They come on carriages. The wheels do not touch the ground.’
The harvesters.
He did not have time to feel about it. He did not have time to wonder whether their arrival was good news or bad news. He did not even have time to warn the others. The carriage was still far away, behind a wall of hollows, and Bruce’s arm was rising for another punch he was not sure he could land —
DING!
The bell rang once more, and this time, something else happened with it.
A wave of energy erupted from the carriage.
Bruce saw it before he felt it. A pulse of pale, dense soul energy spreading outward in every direction from the carriage’s body, sweeping across the grey expanse in a slow expanding ring. The wave was thicker than the mist by far — Bruce could see the difference, could see how the mist itself looked thin and weak next to this — and where the wave touched, things happened.
The hollows it reached dissolved.
It was not a violent dissolution. There was no explosion, no scattering. The wave passed through them, and they came apart — quietly, completely, in the time it took to blink. One moment they were standing. The next, they were mist, drifting upward and outward, indistinguishable from the rest of the grey expanse.
The wave ate the entire horde.
It happened so fast that Bruce, in his exhausted state, had trouble tracking it. The hollows pressing on the back of his shoulder simply stopped pressing. The cold fingers that had been clutching at him released, and the hands that had been holding them fell away into nothing, and the bodies the hands had belonged to fell away after them, and then there were no bodies at all. The horde at the edge of the triangle thinned, thinned more, vanished. The wave continued outward past them, sweeping the further hollows in the same way, until there were no hollows left within sight.
And then the wave passed Bruce.