Chapter 43- Six Months(2)

Chapter 43: 43- Six Months(2)

Six months outside the walls of Hearth City had changed both of them.

Valera wasn’t the starved, shivering girl from the Meat Pen anymore.

The gray wolf-fur coat they had bought from Old Marrow at the Slag-Heap was patched in four places with boiled boar-leather and stitched with gut-twine, fitting snugly over shoulders that had filled out with hard, lean muscle.

Her white hair was braided tightly down her back, tied off with a strip of sinew so it wouldn’t catch the wind.

And Sol didn’t look like a slum cripple.

Half a year of eating High- and Peak-Stage beast meat every single day, washed down with dozens of raw shards, had rebuilt his frame from the marrow out.

He was broader across the chest, his skin a deep, weathered bronze that didn’t steam or leak light anymore unless he wanted it to.

Across his right hip hung the same six-pound, old-world carbon steel hatchet, though the raw-hide grip had been replaced three times with braided hide from beasts they had killed together, and the five-inch bearded edge was honed so thin it could split a falling snowflake.

In Sol’s thermal vision, the world outside their hollow tree was crystal clear for two hundred yards in every direction.

They were three miles north of the old highway, a sprawling basin of frozen peat bogs, black water channels, and jagged limestone crags where the Low-Stage trappers from the holds never dared to walk.

Because once you crossed the highway ridge, you weren’t in Blighted territory anymore.

Out on the frozen bog forty yards in front of their tree lay a dead Level 1 (High-Stage) snow-elk.

Sol and Valera had killed it two hours ago, cut its throat so the blood pooled on the ice, and wedged two heavy iron spikes through its ribcage into the frozen peat so the Silver Eye couldn’t immediately dissolve the carcass into mist.

It was bait.

"Look at the water channel on the left," Sol said quietly, his glowing orange eyes narrowed behind the narrow slit in the bark.

Valera squinted through the gray fog.

To her normal eyes, the black water channel thirty yards from the dead elk looked completely still, covered in a thin skin of morning ice.

To Sol, the mud at the bottom of that six-foot-deep channel was moving.

A massive, undulating ribbon of deep, bruised violet, twenty-five feet long and thicker around the middle than an oil barrel was sliding silently through the freezing silt beneath the water.

Unlike the chaotic cores of the Level 1 beasts they had been slaughtering all winter, the core inside this creature’s chest wasn’t a fuzzy ball of mist.

It was a solid, walnut-sized sphere of compressed, dark-blue crystal that pulsed with a cold, rhythmic intelligence.

Level 2: The Crowned (Low-Stage).

A Silt-Serpent. And growing right out of the flat, triangular bone of its skull was a literal crown, three curved, four-inch horns of translucent blue ice-bone that marked it as the ruler of this entire five-mile stretch of marsh.

"It stopped," Sol whispered, his right hand sliding down to wrap around the steel tang of his hatchet.

"Right under the bank. Ten feet from the elk."

"Why isn’t it striking?" Valera asked, flexing her fingers inside her matte-black Night-iron gauntlets.

Over the past six months, she had learned how to keep a permanent, razor-thin shell of compressed frost over the knuckles without draining her core, turning her hands into iron claws.

"Because it’s not stupid," Sol said, watching the serpent’s cold blue brain-stem pulse in the mud.

"A Level 1 beast smells blood and charges with its mouth open. This thing knows snow-elk don’t break their own necks and stake themselves to the dirt. It’s looking for the hunter."

As Sol watched, the black water at the edge of the channel parted without making a single ripple.

The serpent’s head rose six inches above the bank. Its scales were the color of wet slate, overlapping like heavy iron shingles.

Two long, needle-sharp fangs dripped a pale blue mist that froze the marsh grass solid on contact.

Instead of crawling toward the dead elk, the twenty-five-foot serpent turned its horned head slowly from left to right, tasting the wind with a forked black tongue and began slithering around the clearing in a wide circle, heading straight toward the downwind side where their tree sat.

"It’s circling to check the trees," Sol said, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet inside the cramped trunk.

"If we let it get behind us in the deep water, we lose the solid ground. We hit it now, while half its body is up on the peat bank."

"Same plan as the ridge-bear?" Valera asked, her white-blue Peak aura already rising to meet his heat, the familiar, sharp chill filling the hollow tree.

"No," Sol said grimly, pulling the six-pound hatchet free from his belt ring.

"The bear was a Peak Level 1. We could trade hits with it. If this thing wraps a coil around my ribs with Level 2 strength, it’ll pop my spine like a dry twig before I can even use Override. You take the tail and anchor it to the bank. I’ll take the head."

"Don’t let it kill you," Valera said.

"Don’t let it drag you down first," Sol replied.

He didn’t wait for the serpent to get closer.

With a single kick of his boot, Sol blew the rotten bark door of the hollow oak outward and launched himself across the frozen peat.

Thirty yards disappeared in three seconds.

At 14% Peak-Stage, Sol didn’t run like a normal human anymore.

Every stride of his boots cracked the frozen mud down to the bedrock, propelling him forward like a stone shot from a catapult.

Down on the bank of the water channel, the twenty-five-foot Silt-Serpent reacted with terrifying speed.

It didn’t panic.

The moment the tree bark shattered, the massive reptile whipped its rear twelve feet out of the water, coiling its tail around a jagged limestone boulder for leverage, and snapped its horned head around to meet Sol’s charge head-on.