Chapter 32- The Escape(2)

Chapter 32: 32- The Escape(2)

"Come here," Sol said.

Valera ran over to the table. She didn’t ask questions.

As Sol crushed the rest of Lyra Vane’s Peak crystal against his own bare sternum, letting the freezing, razor-sharp flood of a ninety-nine-percent Vane genius pour straight into his overloaded furnace.

Valera vaulted onto the iron table and wrapped both arms and legs around his torso from behind like a vise.

Sol didn’t roar this time.

When the final two percent clicked into place, the sound that came out of his chest wasn’t human, it was a deep, bass-heavy HUM, like a twenty-ton foundry furnace catching draft all at once.

[THRESHOLD BREACHED.]

[VESSEL RECONSTRUCTION COMPLETE.]

[STATUS: Level 1 (Flesh and Bone) - Late-Stage (12% Progression).]

[GIFT: Sun’s Believer - Skeletal Density Increased.]

The heat that washed out of Sol’s skin didn’t blister him anymore.

As he stepped into the Late-Stage, his skin hardened, taking on a faint, dark-bronze undertone as the carbon from the burned lunar taint fused permanently into his muscle fibers and bone marrow.

The raw blisters on his forearms from the fight with Lyra dried up, flaked off like dead bark, and left behind smooth, tight skin that didn’t even itch.

And in his head, the world snapped into terrifying focus.

His thermal vision didn’t stop at the brick walls of the slaughterhouse anymore.

Looking straight through two feet of solid masonry, Sol could see the thirty-two glowing blue cores of the Vane retainers forming a semi-circle in the alley outside, their heartbeats ticking fast and nervous.

"Get off my back," Sol said quietly, patting Valera’s gauntleted wrist. "You’re freezing my neck."

Valera slid off the iron table, letting out a shaky laugh as she flexed her fingers, the overflow of his breakthrough pushing her own Late-Stage core up to ninety-six percent. "Look at your arms. The burns are completely gone."

"They’re not gone, they just moved inside," Sol said, rolling his right shoulder. His joints didn’t pop; they glided like oiled iron.

He looked down at his empty hands, then turned his head toward the heavy oak chopping block sitting at the end of the slaughter-line, right beneath the hanging carcass of a four-ton Blighted bull.

Buried four inches deep into the oak block was a weapon the Vane guards hadn’t bothered to confiscate because no noble would ever be caught dead lifting it.

It was a two-handed Master Butcher’s splitter, a massive, wedge-headed cleaver-axe forged from thirty pounds of black pig-iron, with a three-foot haft wrapped in greasy bull-hide and a blade eighteen inches long and half an inch thick at the spine.

Sol walked over to the block, wrapped his right hand around the thick haft, and pulled it out of the oak with one arm.

In his Low-Stage days, it took both hands and his whole back just to lift the big splitter off the rack to clean it. Now, at Late-Stage, the thirty-pound slab of pig-iron felt like a wooden spoon in his palm.

"You’re taking that?" Valera asked, pulling her Night-iron spear out of the door handles as they prepared to break out the back loading dock toward the cliff. "Pig-iron doesn’t conduct lunar mist well, Sol. It has terrible energy efficiency compared to silver."

Sol rested the massive, blunt spine of the butcher’s axe against his shoulder and pumped a tiny trickle of Late-Stage solar fire into the black iron.

Unlike the delicate silver sword, which had whined, warped, and shattered the moment he put too much heat into it the thick, ugly slab of pig-iron just drank the fire in greedily, turning a dull, heavy stove-red without bending a fraction of a millimeter.

"I don’t need it to be efficient," Sol said, looking toward the back doors that led out to the canyon edge. "I just need it not to break when I hit someone with it."

Behind the abattoir was the Bone-Yard, a hundred-meter strip of flat, wind-swept limestone that ended abruptly at a low iron railing.

Beyond that railing was nothing.

A two-hundred-foot vertical drop straight down the sheer canyon wall into the roaring, black waters of the Slag River, which carried the city’s waste out into the freezing fog of the Deep Wastes.

Sol kicked the back loading doors off their hinges, stepping out onto the limestone with Valera right on his heels. The wind coming off the canyon cliff hit them in the face, smelling of wet snow, pine needles, and the wild, untamed rot of the Wastes below.

"There!" Valera pointed with her spear toward the iron railing sixty yards away, where a wide stone chute used for dumping offal angled down over the cliff face. "If we slide down the chute, it cuts fifty feet off the drop! The river’s deep enough in the center channel to take the fall if I freeze a cushion under us right before we hit!"

They made it twenty yards across the limestone before the air stopped moving.

Sol didn’t hear footsteps. He didn’t hear armor clanking.

The wind coming off the cliff simply died, and the temperature in the Bone-Yard plummeted so violently that the breath in Sol’s throat turned to ice crystals before he could exhale it.

From around the corner of the brick slaughterhouse stepped a single man in crease-less, pale-gray robes, his aluminum-colored hair barely shifting in the dead air.

In Sol’s new Late-Stage thermal vision, Lord Cassian Vane didn’t look like the retainers, or Kael, or even Lyra.

Every Level 1 cultivator Sol had ever seen had a core in the center of their chest and warm red blood in their veins.

Cassian had no warm blood at all.

From the crown of his skull to the soles of his boots, the Lord of Vane was a terrifying, uniform silhouette of blinding, radioactive silver-violet.

His veins weren’t red; they were filled with circulating liquid frost that pulsed only once every ten seconds in a slow, heavy, unnatural beat.

Ba-dump.

And thirty feet around Cassian’s boots, a faint, shimmering ring of microscopic snow hung suspended in the air, moving with him as he walked into the center of the Bone-Yard between them and the cliff railing.