Chapter 17- Guts(2)

Chapter 17: Chapter 17- Guts(2)

Kael didn’t use a stance. He just pushed off the bottom step, and the concrete beneath his boot exploded into dust.

He was too fast.

A Late-Stage Cultivator didn’t move like a human; the lunar mist in their muscles acted like coiled springs. Before Sol could even bring his wrapped sword up to guard, Kael was already in front of him.

The broadsword came down.

Sol threw his blade up with both hands to block.

BOOM.

The collision sounded like a cannon going off in the cramped basement. The sheer kinetic weight of Kael’s strike crushed right through Sol’s guard, slamming the flat of Sol’s own silver sword back against his forehead and throwing him ten feet across the room.

Sol hit a pillar spine-first and slid to the floor, his vision fracturing into chaotic bursts of static.

"Sol!" Valera lunged from the side, sweeping her pipe at Kael’s ribs, a wave of white frost trailing the iron.

Kael didn’t even turn his head. He backhanded her with his gauntleted left fist.

Even though Valera got her pipe up in time to block, the force lifted her off her feet and sent her skidding across the blood-slick tiles into the vault door.

"Pathetic," Kael muttered, walking toward Sol. "You’ve got a weird core, boy. Smells like burnt meat. Let’s see what it looks like outside your ribs."

Sol pushed himself up, his ears ringing. His left collarbone was definitely broken now, grating horribly every time he took a breath.

He couldn’t parry that broadsword.

The weight difference was too huge, and the Late-Stage energy wrapped around Kael’s blade was so thick it snuffed out Sol’s heat on contact.

Kael swung again, a low, sweeping cut meant to take Sol’s legs off at the knees.

Sol threw himself backward, rolling over the freezing tiles as the broadsword sheared halfway through the solid silver-wood pillar behind him.

Sol came up on one knee, gasping. He needed the Energy Thrust. He needed to pack everything he had into the tip of his blade, or it wouldn’t even scratch Kael’s coat.

He closed his fingers around the hilt and pulled from his furnace. More. Push it all in.

His silver blade began to whine, turning from orange to a blinding, angry yellow-white.

Kael paused for a fraction of a second, his scarred eyebrow twitching as he felt the sudden spike of lethal heat.

"Oh, you know tehniques? Who taught a blind dog how to thrust?"

Sol lunged off his back foot, putting his entire weight behind the strike, aiming straight for the center of Kael’s chest.

Kael didn’t dodge. And he didn’t block with his sword.

At the last possible fraction of a second, Kael twisted his hips, just three inches to the left and drove his own massive broadsword forward with one hand.

Sol’s superheated blade missed Kael’s heart, tearing through the side of his silver-thread coat and carving a deep, smoking trench through his left lat and shoulder blade.

Kael grunted in pain as his flesh cooked.

Simultaneously, five inches of wide, freezing steel punched straight through the center of Sol’s stomach.

The breath left Sol’s lungs in a wet gasp.

The broadsword went in right below his navel and came out through his lower back, pinning him in place. The Late-Stage lunar frost inside Kael’s weapon flooded straight into Sol’s guts, trying to freeze his intestines and rupture his organs.

"Got you, rat," Kael growled, his shoulder smoking, his face inches from Sol’s.

He twisted the hilt of the broadsword to widen the hole.

"Sol!"

Valera’s scream tore through the basement. It didn’t sound like a noble anymore. It sounded like someone watching the only thing they had left in the world get butchered.

Sol dropped his sword. It clattered onto the tiles.

His hands came up and clamped onto Kael’s wrists.

"You... missed my core," Sol choked out, black and red blood pouring over his chin.

If he pulled back, he would bleed to death in three seconds. His guts were cut open. So Sol didn’t pull back.

He pulled himself forward a fraction of an inch along the blade, keeping the steel plugged in the wound, and let the mental dam around his Sun’s Believer core shatter completely.

He didn’t send the fire into a weapon. He sent it straight into his own torn stomach, and straight through his palms into Kael’s wrists.

ROAR.

Sol’s torso lit up like a lantern in the dark. He literally cooked his own insides around the cold steel of the sword, cauterizing the torn arteries and boiling his own blood into a thick, charred seal to stop himself from bleeding out.

The agony was so white-hot that his teeth cracked from clenching his jaw, steam screaming out of his mouth and nose.

At the same time, the heat from his hands melted Kael’s silver gauntlets straight into the skin of the Captain’s forearms.

"What the- let go, you lunatic!" Kael roared, trying to yank his sword back.

He couldn’t. The sheer heat of Sol’s burning stomach had expanded the metal and fused his charred flesh and leather coat to the flat of the blade.

Sol was dying, cooking himself alive just to hold the Late-Stage Captain in place for two seconds.

"Valera!" Sol screamed, his voice nothing but steam and blood.

Across the room, Valera stood up in front of the vault door.

She wasn’t shivering anymore.

The air around her didn’t just get cold; the moisture in the room simply ceased to exist, dropping straight to the floor as fine white dust.

Her eyes weren’t blue anymore. They were solid, blinding white, glowing with a terrifying, ancient light that had nothing to do with the slums.

The bloodline that the inner city had burned an entire Great House to erase finally woke up.

[BLOODLINE THRESHOLD BREACHED: THE PURE MOON.]

[LEGACY SKILL UNLOCKED: ICE SCULPTURE.]

"Get your hands off him," Valera whispered.

Her voice didn’t echo. The air was too cold to carry the vibration properly.

She dropped the rusted iron pipe. She stepped forward, her torn boots leaving footprints of cracked, brittle stone in the floor, and placed five bare, pale fingers against the back of Kael’s shaved head.

Kael tried to turn, his eyes wide with sudden, primal terror as he felt the weight of a Godblessed legacy touch his skin. "Wait-"

Snap.

There was no explosion of frost. No dramatic wave of snow.

The cold went entirely inward.

From the point where Valera’s fingertips touched Kael’s skull, a web of translucent, diamond-clear blue spread downward through his body at the speed of sound.

It bypassed his armor. It bypassed his clothes. It froze the water in his brain, the blood in his heart, the marrow in his bones, and the Late-Stage lunar mist in his core, turning him from a living human being into a solid, unmoving statue of pure blue ice in less than half a second.

He didn’t even get to finish blinking.

Valera pulled her hand back. Her entire right arm was pitch-black with severe frostbite from the backlash of the skill, the skin splitting open and weeping frozen droplets of blood.

"Kick him," Valera gasped, her legs trembling as she dropped to her knees.

Sol, half-conscious and suffocating on the smell of his own burnt stomach, let go of Kael’s wrists. With his last ounce of strength, he lifted his boot and shoved it against Kael’s chest.

The broadsword snapped cleanly in half right at Sol’s stomach, the blade inside him staying put while the rest of Captain Kael tipped backward.

When the frozen Captain hit the silver-wood floor, he didn’t bounce. He shattered into ten thousand dry, bloodless pieces of blue glass. Not a single drop of red touched the floor and because there was no flesh left to dissolve, the Silver Eye above couldn’t even claim the body.

Only a massive, blindingly bright Late-Stage crystal rolled out from the pile of ice shards, clinking softly against Sol’s boot.

Sol collapsed onto his side, his hands clutching the broken stub of steel still sticking out of his cauterized gut.

"Val..." Sol wheezed, his continuous thermal vision flickering out, plunging him back into the terrifying, pitch-black grave of his blindness. "Cold... it’s cold..."

In the dark, he heard her dragging herself across the floor through the shattered remains of the Captain.

A second later, her freezing, trembling body curled tightly around his burning, broken torso, her head pressing against his chest.

"I’m here, you idiot," she sobbed, her tears freezing to his shirt before his body heat melted them away. "Don’t you dare close your eyes. Eat the crystal. Eat it right now."