Chapter 34-The Escape(4)

Chapter 34: 34-The Escape(4)

"What is that?" Cassian hissed, his pale eyes narrowing as the heat hit his face, melting the microscopic snow in the air into warm rain.

In the center of the crater stood Sol.

He looked like a demon dragged out of the bottom of a blast furnace. His dark hair was standing on end from the rising thermal updraft, the ends smoking.

The skin across his chest and shoulders had split open along his scars, leaking not blood, but tiny, blindingly bright tongues of orange fire as his core literally chewed through his own Late-Stage progression-11%... 9%... 7%-to simulate the physical force of a Level 2 monster.

And in his hands, the thirty-pound pig-iron butcher’s axe wasn’t stove-red anymore.

The eighteen-inch wedge of black iron was glowing a blinding, screaming yellow-white, dripping tiny beads of molten slag onto the limestone that burned holes straight into the rock.

"Grab my belt!" Sol roared, his voice sounding like tearing sheet metal.

Valera lunged from her knee, locked her left Night-iron gauntlet through the heavy leather belt at the small of Sol’s back, and held her short-spear out to the side with her right hand.

Sol didn’t run around Cassian.

He lowered his shoulder and charged straight at the Level 2 High Lord, dragging Valera in his wake inside the three-foot pocket of boiling air around his body.

"Insolent animal!" Cassian snapped, abandoning his calm demeanor.

He thrust both palms forward, pouring a massive wave of Silver Blood ichor into the air to drop a ten-ton wall of solid, reinforced glacier-ice directly in front of Sol’s charge, while simultaneously snapping his fingers to freeze the blood inside Sol’s eyeballs.

The four-foot-thick wall of blue glacier-ice erupted from the limestone right in front of Sol’s face.

Sol didn’t slow down. He didn’t try to find a geometric weak point.

He swung the thirty-pound, white-hot butcher’s splitter with both hands from right to left, putting every ounce of his burning, self-cannibalizing muscles behind the wedge.

KRA-KOOM!

When two thousand degrees of pig-iron moving at Late-Stage Override speed hit sub-zero glacier ice, thermal shock did the rest of the work.

The four-foot wall of Level 2 ice exploded like agrenade made of glass, showering the Bone-Yard with shrapnel.

Sol burst straight through the flying ice shards one meter in front of Cassian.

Cassian’s eyes widened. He raised his left hand to summon a second wall and stepped back to pivot-

And in Sol’s blazing white eyes, the ten-second clock inside Cassian Vane’s chest hit zero.

Nine... ten...

For a fraction of a second, having just dumped a massive burst of silver ichor to build the glacier wall, Cassian’s slow, cold heart hadn’t pumped fresh blood back into his extremities yet.

In Sol’s thermal sight, the silver light in Cassian’s left knee and right shoulder went completely dark and sluggish.

Stagnant Heart.

Cassian tried to step back, and his left boot caught on the stone for half a heartbeat as his knee joint seized up.

"There!" Sol howled, blood and fire spraying from his mouth as his progression ticked down to 3%.

Sol leaped off the cracked limestone, raising the massive, melting butcher’s axe above his head with both hands, and brought it down straight toward the crown of Lord Cassian Vane’s head.

Cassian’s heart finally beat-Ba-dump-restoring his movement just in time for him to throw both forearms up in front of his face, wrapping his silk sleeves in a dense, panicked shield of pure Level 2 Silver Ichor.

He expected to block the boy’s swing. He was a Level 2 High Lord, no Level 1 in the history of Hearth City had ever cracked a Silver Blood’s guard.

CLANG-CRUNCH.

The thirty-pound pig-iron splitter smashed straight through the outer layer of Cassian’s frost-shield, sheared cleanly through his silk robes, and bit half an inch deep into the radius bone of Cassian’s left forearm, cooking the silver ichor in the wound until it hissed like boiling mercury.

The sheer kinetic force of Sol’s downward chop blew Cassian’s feet out from under him, sending the High Lord skidding backward on his heels across the limestone, blood, pale, shimmering silver blood spraying across the stone for the first time in twenty years.

Cassian stared at his smoking, gashed forearm in absolute, stunned silence for one second.

And Sol didn’t swing a second time.

Because he was already past him.

Using the rebound of his axe bouncing off Cassian’s arm to propel himself sideways, Sol grabbed Valera around the waist with his left arm, tucked the smoking butcher’s axe against his chest, and threw both of them headfirst over the low iron railing at the edge of the cliff.

"Kill them!" Cassian’s voice tore across the Bone-Yard, the aristocratic calm completely shattered into a high, furious shriek as he clutched his bleeding silver arm. "To the railing! Shoot them out of the air!"

Thirty retainers reached the iron railing three seconds later, leveling crossbows and pikes down into the swirling gray fog of the two-hundred-foot abyss.

They couldn’t see a thing.

Halfway down the vertical limestone cliff, Sol and Valera slammed hard onto the angled stone surface of the offal chute, sliding through years of frozen beast-grease at sixty kilometers an hour before shooting off the lip of the chute into empty air, a hundred andtwenty feet above the roaring black rapids of the Slag River.

As they tumbled through the freezing fog, Sol killed the Override.

[OVERRIDE TERMINATED.]

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

[CRITICAL WARNING: CORE EXHAUSTION. UNCONSCIOUSNESS IMMINENT.]

The fire in Sol’s chest went out like a snuffed candle. His eyes rolled back, his fingers loosening on the haft of the butcher’s axe.

Falling through the fog with her arms locked around his waist, Valera saw his head go limp against her shoulder.

She grabbed the wrist of his right hand, locking his fingers around the axe haft so he wouldn’t drop it, spun their bodies in mid-air so her back was facing the black water rushing up to meet them, and pointed her Night-iron spear straight down at the river thirty feet below.

"My turn, you idiot," Valera hissed into the roaring wind, and dumped every last drop of her ninety-six-percent Late-Stage Pure Moon core straight into the water below them.

She didn’t freeze the river solid-hitting solid ice from a hundred feet up would have broken every bone in their spines.