Chapter 16- Guts(1)

Chapter 16: Chapter 16- Guts(1)

The four Enforcers didn’t charge. They knew better.

They locked their shields and stepped forward as a single wall of interlocking silver-wood, their four halberds leveled at chest height.

In Sol’s thermal vision, their cold blue cores beat in a rigid, trained rhythm. They were waiting for him to throw himself onto their spikes.

"Left flank, Sol!" Valera snapped.

She didn’t wait for him to acknowledge it. She slammed the butt of her rusted iron pipe into the floor.

A jagged line of pure white frost raced across the tiles, catching the leftmost Enforcer’s boot before he could lift it. The ice climbed up his ankle, locking the heavy greave to the floor.

The formation stuttered. The frozen Enforcer cursed, trying to wrench his leg free, opening a six-inch gap between his shield and his neighbor’s.

Sol was already moving.

He didn’t swing wide. He kept his elbows tucked, his weight low on the balls of his feet, and slid across the slick frost Valera had laid down.

The second Enforcer thrust his halberd into the gap to cover his partner, the heavy silver point whistling toward Sol’s face.

Sol parried with the flat of his glowing blade.

CLANG.

The impact numbed his fingers through the cloth wrappings, the sheer mass of the halberd forcing him half a step to the side.

"Hold him!" the trapped Enforcer barked, raising his own weapon with one hand.

Sol didn’t give him the room. Instead of pulling back, Sol stepped inside the reach of the halberd shafts, crowding the men.

He let the fire in his chest pour down his right arm, packing the energy tight inside the silver steel until the blade screamed like a kettle on a stove.

He drove the sword forward. Not at the breastplate, but at the throat guard.

The superheated tip punched through the overlapping silver slats under the man’s chin. There was a wet, muffled pop as the heat boiled the man’s windpipe.

The Enforcer went limp, his armor clattering against the ice as the sky immediately began pulling his corpse apart into rising silver mist.

"One," Sol grunted, wrenching his blade free.

"Push them back!" the remaining three shouted, abandoning their wall.

Two of them swung their halberds in heavy, overlapping arcs at Sol, while the fourth broke off, charging straight at Valera with his shield raised like a battering ram.

Valera didn’t back up. As the heavy shield slammed toward her, she exhaled a cloud of freezing white mist and ducked low, sliding under the man’s high guard.

She didn’t have a blade to pierce his armor, so she used what she had. She jammed the end of her iron pipe straight into the leather-strapped joint behind the Enforcer’s knee and let her core loose.

CRACK.

The moisture in the leather and the flesh beneath it froze solid in half a second.

When the Enforcer tried to pivot, his own momentum snapped his frozen kneecap like dry kindling. He hit the floor screaming, and Valera brought the iron pipe down across his helmet with two hands, over and over, until the frost creeping from her grip stopped his heart.

Across the room, Sol was trading brutal, clumsy blows with the last two.

His swordsmanship was still rough, three days of sewer lessons didn’t erase a lifetime of chopping meat. A halberd shaft caught him hard across the collarbone, the blunt force cracking the bone and sending him stumbling back with a mouthful of copper-tasting blood.

"He’s just a Low-Stage!" one of the guards yelled, pressing the advantage. "Bleed him out!"

The man lunged, overextending. Sol spat the blood onto the floor, planted his back foot, and caught the halberd’s blade against his left shoulder guard, the thick layers of scavenged leather and rag taking the brunt of the cut.

The steel bit into his meat, cold and sharp, but it got stuck in the heavy cloth.

"Got you," Sol hissed.

He stepped in and drove his burning sword straight through the man’s visor.

Before the body even dissolved, Valera was behind the last guard.

She grabbed the back of the man’s silver collar with her bare, freezing hand. The Enforcer stiffened, gasping as the Permafrost sank straight through his neck guard, paralyzing his spine.

Sol pivoted and took his head off at the shoulders.

For three seconds, the only sound in the sub-basement was their ragged breathing and the hiss of steam rising from Sol’s blood-soaked shoulder.

"Grab the shards," Sol panted, leaning on his sword as four Mid-Stage crystals clattered onto the tiles from the vanishing mist. "My shoulder’s messed up. I need a second."

"We don’t have a second," Valera said, her voice dropping an octave.

She wasn’t looking at the shards. She was staring at the heavy iron stairs leading down from the upper levels of the Harvest House.

The temperature in the room was dropping again.

Sol frowned, pulsing his vision. At first, he thought Valera was losing control of her core. Then he looked at the stairwell.

A man was walking down the steps. He wasn’t running, and he wasn’t wearing a helmet. He had a shaved head, a thick scar running through his left eyebrow, and wore a heavy coat of woven silver-thread over plated armor.

In his right hand, he dragged a massive, broad-bladed executioner’s sword, the kind they used in the Harvest House to take the heads off adult Blighted bulls.

In Sol’s thermal sight, the man didn’t look like a blue star. He looked like a black hole. His core was so dense, so tightly packed at the very edge of Level 1 (Late-Stage), that it sucked the ambient heat right out of the air around him.

"Four Mid-Stage retainers," the man said. His voice wasn’t aristocratic; it was flat, dead, and bored. Like a man who had worked the night shift in an abattoir for twenty years.

"Voss sends a bunch of gutter trash to burn my gates, and two rats slip up the drainpipe to chew on my vault."

He reached the bottom step and raised the massive broadsword with one hand, resting the flat of it against his shoulder.

"I’m Captain Kael," he said, his pale eyes locking onto Valera. "That’s Fyrn frost on the floor. Thought we killed all of you ten years ago."

"You missed one," Valera said, her knuckles white around her iron pipe.

"Looks like it," Kael grunted. "I’ll fix that."