Chapter 752: Life Can Vanish In An Instant [Bonus - ]

Chapter 752: Life Can Vanish In An Instant [Bonus Chapter]

Silas blinked as his jaw slid sideways in pure surprise.

"Injure me...?" he echoed, his eyebrows climbing.

She’d asked it as casually as if she wanted to borrow an apple from the kitchen basket.

He looked at her delicate frame, then at the burning aura wrapped around her tiny wrists.

A sudden instinctive flare of confidence lit up in the back of his mind.

He had fought high-tier monsters and traded blows with elite fighters, and his Mythic Gold Core could pour enough mana into his body to make his skin as hard as tempered granite in an instant.

"Sure..." he said slowly, sounding distinctly amused.

’Even though Rika used to be the Goddess of Beasts, and still is,’ Silas thought, watching the shift in her golden aura as he started pulling mana into his chest on instinct. ’I’m confident I can at least make it har—’

CRACK!

There was no wind-up... before the last syllable of his thought could finish, Rika vanished from the rug.

BOOOOM!

A blinding streak of white-gold fire detonated right against his chest as Silas’s eyes bulged in pure frozen shock.

SHRRRRK!

Rika’s flame-wrapped fist didn’t simply hit him... It went straight through his jacket, melted through the mana he’d packed into his chest like it was tissue paper, and bored a fist-sized hole clean through his left ribs and out his back into the splintering wood of the wardrobe behind him.

For a single stretched-out heartbeat the whole room seemed to stop.

’Ah...’

He could see every glowing mote of fire drifting in the air between them, he could see the splinters of the wardrobe door hanging in midair behind him where her fist had come out the other side, Silas could even see Sunny on top of her head, completely calm, blinking its little golden eyes at him like this was the most ordinary thing in the world.

...Then the heartbeat ended as a sudden white-hot flash of total agony that filled his vision with blinding static.

Silas stood frozen with his breath locked in his throat, staring down at the petite black-haired girl whose arm was buried to the wrist in his chest.

Around the edges of the wound there was no blood... The flesh was sealed by glowing golden embers that hissed against his bone.

Rika looked up into his stunned breathless face. Her molten gold eyes held no anger at all though she did frown a bit.

"Your guard was wide open, Master," she said calmly. "You stood there with your weight on your heels, thinking about how you were going to brace... You thought that because I asked first, I’d give you a count but I just assumed you were ready."

She pulled her arm back out in a smooth effortless blur as Silas staggered backward with a ragged gasp.

Behind him, what was left of the wardrobe door gave up, sagged off its top hinge and crashed to the floor.

CLATTER!

He caught himself against the shattered wardrobe, planted his boot hard on the floorboards and clamped his left hand over the glowing hole under his ribs.

The heat pouring off his own chest was terrifying, and sweat ran down his forehead in thick streams.

"That..." he wheezed, his voice raw and strained as he fought through the shock. "That was... really fast, Rika."

Rika didn’t move to help him.

She stood exactly where she’d landed with her small hands loose at her sides, her golden eyes following every shaky breath he took... the way a teacher watched a student who’d just fallen off the practice beam to see whether he’d get up on his own.

"This is how deities fight, Master," Rika said coldly, taking a single step forward as the fiery aura around her flared with sharp thin arcs of golden sparks. "Real divine combat doesn’t have speeches or posing, and nobody gives you three breaths to put up your barriers... If you’re ever forced to fight someone who’s a deity, even a minor one, letting your guard down for a single heartbeat, even with someone you know, is the quickest way to die."

Then her expression softened... The stern ancient goddess vanished as quickly as she’d appeared, and the devoted gentle girl was back.

"Now," she said softly, lifting her right hand toward his chest. "Watch the fire."

She laid her open palm flat over the glowing sealed wound in his ribs.

FZZZZZZT!

Instead of searing heat, a wave of cool liquid warmth washed through his torn flesh.

It felt like sinking into a hot spring after a week in the snow... It flowed through the hole in his chest and out into his ribs and shoulders and down his arms, and everywhere it went the screaming in his nerves just stopped, as if someone had laid a hand over a ringing bell.

The golden embers around the hole didn’t eat at him.

They began to spread and knit together with impossible terrifying speed... Silas watched in stunned silence as fresh muscle, white bone and fine blood vessels wove themselves back together out of pure light, sealing the wound from the inside out as neatly as a master seamstress mending a silk shirt.

Within three seconds the hole was gone, and the last golden ember on his skin winked out like a tiny candle being blown out.

His skin was smooth and completely unmarked.

Only the scorched tear in his jacket was left to prove that a fist had gone through his ribs a few seconds ago as even the lingering ache had vanished, and a strange fresh energy filled him that made his lungs feel clearer than they had all week.

"These flames don’t just burn, Master," Rika explained, smoothing the torn edges of his jacket with her fingertips. "They carry the Phoenix’s essence... What they burn with one hand, they can heal with the other. They can mend shattered organs, set broken bones and burn out rot in the blink of an eye."

Silas let out a long shuddering breath and pressed his palm hard against his ribs to test them.

The bone was solid as rock, without so much as a crack.

"Thanks, Rika," he murmured, his voice full of genuine awe and a healthy dose of lingering shock.

He leaned back against the broken wardrobe and ran a slightly shaky hand through his messy dark hair.

’Damn...’ he thought, as a cold sobering chill washed through him and the reality of that strike sank all the way into his bones. ’I really have a lot to learn... Who knew? I was standing there feeling cocky with my Gold Core, thinking I’d at least be able to react, and she put a hole through my ribs before I could blink.’

His jaw tightened as a far darker memory surfaced.

’Even though it’s nearly impossible,’ he thought, his dark blue eyes going hard, ’what if I actually have to fight a deity in the near future...? There’s that Death God from Northern Khemet who already wants to kill me after I cut off his hand.’

He remembered the icy suffocating dread that had rolled off that enormous severed hand and the way the mana around it had rotted.

He looked at the scorched tear in his jacket and imagined it again, only this time without the healing.

Without Rika smiling at him afterward... Just a fist of fire coming out of nowhere and a hole where his heart used to be, and no time at all to even be surprised.

His stomach turned over.

’But as long as I don’t go near the Underworld or anything like that,’ he thought, flexing his fingers, ’I’m pretty much okay. Still... Rika just showed me exactly how fast it can all end if I hesitate.’

He looked down at the petite dark-haired girl.

She was looking up at him with wide slightly anxious eyes, fidgeting with her sleeve as she waited for his verdict.

"You can stop now, Rika," he said with a relaxed smile with the tension draining out of his shoulders. "I like what I’m seeing... You’re terrifying, and having that kind of speed on our side makes me feel a lot safer."

The moment the words left his mouth, the blazing golden aura vanished completely.

Rika’s black hair settled softly back onto her shoulders.

The molten gold in her eyes snapped back to bright vivid emerald, and her body relaxed with an enormous happy sigh.

"Yes!"

She pumped her small fist into the air in pure triumphant glee and hopped on the balls of her bare feet.

"I’m so happy you like it, Master! I was worried the strike was too much, but you took the lesson like a real warrior!"

Silas couldn’t help laughing.

He reached out and rested his palm on top of her head, just behind the sleepy golden hatchling, and gave her hair a firm affectionate pat.

Rika leaned into his hand and closed her eyes with a radiant blissful smile spreading across her face.

’I swear,’ Silas thought with a grin, ’if she had a tail, it’d be wagging so hard it’d knock the furniture over...’

"Alright," he said, stepping away from the wardrobe and turning toward the open space between the bed and the hearth. "We’ve got actual business to settle, and it’s sitting right here in my Inventory."

He cleared his throat and focused on the part of his Inventory where their Central City haul was waiting.

VUUUUUUM!

With a chord of spatial mana, a cluster of heavy shimmering eggs appeared out of thin air and settled onto the thick woolen rug with soft dull thuds.

All twelve beast eggs, the clutch they had grabbed from Selvane’s nursery in Central City, now sat in two neat rows in front of them...

The collection was breathtaking.

There was the deep crackling azure shell of the Thunder Drakeling, pulsing with tiny rhythmic arcs of blue lightning that hissed against the wool.

There was the jet-black egg of the Abyssal Shadow-Stalker, wrapped in its own curling mist, which seemed to swallow the lantern light into a pool of pure darkness.

There was the huge molten-gold egg of the Magma-Core Behemoth, pulsing with the slow heavy heat of living earth and there was the emerald-green shell of the Void-Winged Roc, humming with a high spatial wind that made the air around it shimmer.

Around them sat eight more rare high-tier eggs, each one marked with its own patterns and thrumming with its own dense heartbeat of mana.

The moment the eggs appeared, Sunny’s head shot up out of Rika’s hair.

The little bird craned its neck and stared at them with its bright golden eyes, and let out a soft curious trill.

Silas stepped around the cluster and rested his hands on his hips as he looked down at them.

"Well, here are these," he said, his voice turning practical. "We’ll need to upgrade them before you can try to bond with them. But first..."

He paused and looked over at Rika with a thoughtful frown.

"Do we need to put them in an incubator? The spiders needed pedestals and mana to crack their shells... Do these need the same kind of setup?"

Rika let out a soft musical laugh and shook her head with complete regal confidence.

"Not at all, Master," she said, stepping forward until she stood right at the edge of the eggs.

The eggs reacted to her before she even touched them.

The little arcs of lightning crawling over the Thunder Drakeling’s shell bent toward her and crackled softly against the air near her ankle.

The mist curling around the Shadow-Stalker’s egg drifted across the rug and wound itself around her bare toes like a cat.

The Magma-Core Behemoth’s molten glow brightened, dimmed and brightened again, faster now, as if a heart inside had started beating harder.

...Even the quiet eggs at the back gave the faintest shiver in their places.

Silas stared.

’They know what she is,’ he realized. ’Even inside the shell, they can feel her.’

She dropped gracefully to her knees on the rug and let her small pale hands hover over the crackling shell of the Thunder Drakeling and the black shell of the Shadow-Stalker.

"Incubators and pedestals are tools for tamers who can’t feel their beasts the way I do," She said. "I can use Sunny’s power and my own soul to incubate them. I’ll pour the Phoenix’s warmth through me and straight into their cores... It’ll hatch them much faster than any incubator."

She looked down at the dormant glowing shells, and her emerald eyes softened with some deep distant memory that Silas couldn’t begin to guess at.

A quiet shadow passed behind her gaze for just a moment, ancient and unreadable.

’I can’t say the same about my first time...’ Rika thought, and a faint old ache tightened somewhere deep in her immortal soul.

She watched the pulse of life beating under the thick hard shells on the rug.

’Truly, the first beast a Beast Tamer chooses to bond with is their lifeline.’