Chapter 11-The Lockdown(4)

Chapter 11: 11-The Lockdown(4)

She tapped his boots with hers until he shifted his stance.

Standing sideways felt unnatural, unbalanced. But as he settled into it, he realized he could suddenly pivot off his back foot with a fraction of the effort it usually took him to turn.

"A Cultivator’s duel is a conversation of tehniques and energy," Valera explained, stepping back. Her voice drifted through the dark, bouncing off the curved walls. "You are trying to find the shortest distance to their vital organs while making the distance to yours as complicated as possible. That silver blade is an extension of your arm. It is a piercing weapon, Sol. Not a hacking one."

Sol pulsed his vision. Flash.

He saw Valera standing a few paces away. Her posture was flawless. Even holding a rusted, bent iron pipe, she looked like a deadly, aristocratic duelist. Her white-blue thermal signature was perfectly aligned, her center of gravity entirely under her control.

Darkness.

"Now," Valera said, her tone growing deadlier. "Let’s talk about your Gift. It burns hot, and it burns fast. Right now, when you attack, you just flood your entire arm and the entire weapon with heat. You bleed power into the air, into the hilt, into the base of the blade where it does absolutely no damage to the enemy. It exhausts you, and it destroys your weapons."

"How do I fix it?" Sol asked.

"The nobles of the inner city train for years at the Academies to master techniques for energy channeling. The one i’ll teach you is called the Energy Thrust,"

Valera said. "They learn to take the chaotic, sprawling mist of their lunar cores and compress it. They force it down the length of their arm, trap it inside the steel of their weapon, and eventually, condense it entirely to the tip of the blade."

She stepped forward in the dark. Sol felt the icy chill of her pipe press lightly against his chest.

"You aren’t ready for the tip yet. That takes months of meditation," she whispered. "But for now, you must learn to gather the energy inside the sword. Don’t let it bleed into the air. Don’t let it heat the hilt. Trap the fire inside the silver steel."

Sol breathed out, a puff of warm air in the freezing dark. He raised the wrapped silver blade, leveling it parallel to the ground. He closed his eyes beneath his closed eyelids, looking inward.

Inside his chest, the defective, burning core of the Sun’s Believer was churning. It wanted to explode outward, to bathe his skin in orange light and superheat the air around him.

No, Sol thought, gritting his teeth. Condense.

He forced the energy down his right shoulder. It felt like trying to push a raging river through a narrow pipe. His bicep burned as the heavy, unrefined thermal energy resisted his control.

"Don’t fight it with your muscles, Sol," Valera’s voice came from the dark, calm and steady. "Fight it with your will. Tell the fire where to go."

Sol exhaled sharply. He stopped tensing his arm and focused entirely on the flow. He pushed it past his elbow. Down his forearm. Through his wrist.

The silver blade in his hands began to vibrate. It was a high, terrifying hum. The metal was resisting the sudden influx of alien energy. Sol pushed harder, forcing the molten heat past the heavy, wrapped guard, driving it into the core of the steel blade.

He could feel the heat trying to escape, trying to bleed out of the edges of the sword and superheat the air. He clamped down on it, visualizing a seal around the metal.

The hum of the silver blade turned into a sharp, violent whine.

"Hold it," Valera ordered. "Don’t let it leak."

Sol opened his eyes. The pitch-black sewer was illuminated in a harsh, glaring orange light. But the light wasn’t coming from Sol’s skin. His body was completely dark.

The silver blade itself was glowing a fierce, molten orange from the hilt to the tip. He hadn’t managed to condense it to a microscopic point, the entire length of the steel was radiating intense heat, but it wasn’t bleeding into the air, and it wasn’t melting the hilt in his hands. He had gathered the energy inside the weapon.

"Now," Valera whispered. "Thrust."

Sol stepped forward, pivoting off his back foot. He threw his arm forward, driving the glowing blade in a perfectly straight, horizontal line.

The sword struck the damp, curved brick wall of the sewer. The stone hissed and cracked violently, glowing slag bubbling around the edges as the superheated steel punched a jagged, blistering hole six inches deep into the wall.

Sol released his breath, cutting off the flow of energy. The blinding orange light instantly snuffed out, plunging them back into absolute darkness.

He pulled the sword free. He didn’t need to see it to know the blade was perfectly unharmed. No warping. Just a flawless containment of power.

"You trapped it in the steel," Valera said softly into the dark. "My father used to say it took the acolytes of the Academy weeks just to keep their energy from bleeding off the edges. You didn’t condense it to the tip, but the blade didn’t warp. It’s a massive improvement."

"It’s a start," Sol rasped, sliding the silver blade back into the makeshift rag scabbard on his back.

He leaned against the wall, preparing to sit back down in the muck to conserve energy, but froze.

A wet, heavy scraping sound echoed from the deeper darkness of the tunnel.

Valera tensed instantly, her iron pipe frosting over with a sharp crackle. "Did you hear that?"

Sol pushed a violent pulse of heat to his eyes.

Flash.

Ten yards down the curving tunnel, a chaotic, sickly mass of red and bruised-purple thermal energy was clinging to the ceiling. It was massive, half the size of a starved wolf, its anatomy warped and twisted by raw lunar taint. A Blighted sewer rat.

It had been perfectly camouflaged in the ambient cold, but the sudden, intense spike of thermal radiation from Sol’s sword practice had drawn it out of the deep rot like a moth to a flame.

Darkness.

"Blighted," Sol whispered, drawing the silver blade in a fluid motion, his thumb slipping over the wrapped guard.

The beast didn’t growl. It just dropped.

The heavy splash of its claws hitting the sewer water echoed loudly. Sol didn’t need his vision to know where it was. He stepped into his newly corrected stance, right foot forward, left foot back.

He didn’t flood the blade with heat this time. He gathered the energy inward, trapping a concentrated surge of Level 1 fire directly into the steel edge.

As the beast lunged through the dark, its jaws unhinging to snap his neck, Sol pivoted smoothly off his back foot. He let the rat’s own momentum carry it forward, bringing the silver sword up in a tight, controlled upward slash.

The superheated blade sheared cleanly through the mutated rat’s ribcage, cauterizing the flesh as it parted the bone.

But as the beast’s body split open, the dying creature let out a deafening, metallic shriek. The sound was unnatural, a high-pitched, grinding squeal that tore through the quiet of the underground and echoed violently up the vertical drainage shafts.

Sol ripped his sword free as the two halves of the carcass splashed into the muck.

The rat was dead, but the damage was done.

High above them, through the iron grates of the surface streets, the heavy, rhythmic marching of armored boots suddenly stopped.

"Down there!" a sharp, aristocratic voice shouted, echoing perfectly down the shaft. "In the drains! The heat signature spiked!"

Sol pushed a pulse to his eyes, looking at Valera in the strobe of orange light. Her icy blue aura was flaring with adrenaline.

The Enforcers had found them.

"Run," Sol said, gripping his sword. They turned their backs to the surface shafts and sprinted deeper into the pitch-black labyrinth of the undercity.