Chapter 44- The Slit Serpent(1)

Chapter 44: 44- The Slit Serpent(1)

Before Sol was even within ten feet, the serpent unhinged its three-foot jaw and exhaled.

SHHHHH-KRAK!

It wasn’t venom like the centipede in the highway ditch.

It was a pressurized cone of Level 2 Foundation-grade freezing mist, so dense and heavy that the air itself turned into a hailstorm of jagged, two-inch ice needles flying at the speed of buckshot.

"Left!" Valera’s voice rang out right behind Sol’s shoulder.

Sol didn’t slow down.

He threw himself into a low, sliding tackle to the left as Valera vaulted straight over his back, slamming both of her Night-iron gauntlets together in mid-air.

She didn’t try to match the Level 2 serpent’s powers head-on, a Level 1 Peak couldn’t overpower a Crowned beast’s raw output.

Instead, using her Pure Moon control, she created an angled ramp of slick, mirrored ice right in front of Sol’s slide, deflecting eighty percent of the needle-storm harmlessly up into the dead tree branches overhead.

Three of the stray ice needles still clipped Sol’s right shoulder as he slid past the ramp, tearing straight through his wolf-fur coat and punching half an inch deep into his deltoid like crossbow quarrels.

Sol didn’t even flinch.

Six months in the Wastes had taught him how to ignore anything that didn’t cut a tendon.

His furnace flared, not into Override, just a clean, ninety-percent burn of his Peak-Stage core, instantly melting the three ice needles inside his meat into harmless water as he popped up off his knee right beside the serpent’s thick neck.

He gripped the steel tang of his hatchet with both hands, packed a blinding, yellow-white sphere of condensed solar heat into the five-inch bearded edge, and swung horizontally with his whole hip and back behind it.

He expected to take the serpent’s head clean off. That swing had split the skulls of three Peak-Stage boars in the last month.

CLANG!

The sound that rang across the bog didn’t sound like an axe hitting meat.

It sounded like a sledgehammer hitting an iron church bell.

Sparks and a cloud of scorching white steam exploded from the side of the serpent’s neck.

The superheated carbon-steel blade sheared halfway through the outer layer of slate-gray scales, bit a quarter-inch into the corded, steel-hard muscle beneath, and bounced back with enough recoil to numb Sol’s elbows.

The scales of a Level 2 Crowned beast weren’t just horn; they were infused with crystallized lunar ichor.

Before Sol could pull his hatchet back for a second swing, the serpent didn’t bite him, it simply flexed its six-hundred-pound neck sideways like a whip.

The side of the beast’s skull slammed squarely into Sol’s ribs.

THUD.

Even with his maximized Ash-Forged skeletal density, the sheer mass of a twenty-five-foot Level 2 predator lifted Sol clean off his boots and threw him fifteen feet sideways across the frozen peat.

He hit the ground rolling, skidding to a halt on one knee with blood in his mouth and two cracked ribs grating on his left side.

"Its scales are plated!" Sol shouted, spitting red onto the gray snow. "My edge only went halfway through!"

Down by the water channel, Valera was already in a life-or-death wrestling match with the rear half of the monster.

She had landed on the limestone bank and driven both Night-iron gauntlets straight into the mud on either side of the serpent’s tail, unleashing a localized burst of her Ice Sculpture legacy skill to fuse the last four feet of the beast’s tail directly into the frozen bedrock so it couldn’t dive back into the deep channel.

The serpent hissed, a deep, vibrating bass note that shook the loose peat into the water and whipped its massive midsection around in a sweeping arc to crush Valera against the limestone boulder.

Valera couldn’t let go of the ground without breaking her ice-anchor and letting the beast escape into the river.

"Hold the anchor!" Sol roared, launching himself back across the bog before his ribs even finished complaining.

As the barrel-thick wall of muscle and slate scales swept toward Valera’s back at forty miles an hour, Sol leaped between her and the coil.

He didn’t swing the blade of the hatchet this time.

In mid-air, Sol flipped the heavy tool in his right hand so the flat, square hammer-poll on the back of the head was facing forward, and braced his left palm flat against the back of the steel tang like a battering ram.

He dumped every drop of heat he could safely pull from his chest straight into that two-inch square of solid iron.

CRACK-THOOM!

Sol’s hammer-poll met the sweeping coil head-on.

The kinetic collision stopped both of them dead in their tracks.

Sol’s boots drove four inches deep into the frozen peat from the impact, blood bursting from his split knuckles as the shockwave traveled up his arms, but the concentrated, white-hot square of iron didn’t bounce off the scales like the sharp edge had.

The blunt, heated hammer-poll shattered three of the overlapping slate scales into burnt powder and bruised the deep muscle underneath so badly the serpent’s midsection spasmed and recoiled.

SCREEEEE!

The Silt-Serpent reared ten feet into the air, furious now. Its tail was still locked in Valera’s pure blue ice at the edge of the creek, and a two-legged rat had just cracked its armor.

In Sol’s thermal vision, the walnut-sized blue crystal in the serpent’s chest suddenly flared a blinding, violent indigo.

The temperature in the clearing dropped thirty degrees in a single heartbeat.

The black water in the channel didn’t just freeze on top; it froze three feet thick from bank to bank with a deafening groan of expanding ice.

"Watch the crown!" Valera gasped from the bank, frost creeping up past her Night-iron gauntlets onto her elbows as she fought to keep the thrashing tail pinned against the beast’s Level 2 strength. "It’s channeling through the horns!"

Up in the air, the three curved horns on the serpent’s skull lit up like lightning rods.

Instead of breathing mist from its mouth, the Crowned beast whipped its head down like a striking cobra.

A six-foot blade of condensed, crescent-shaped black ice , the beast’s natural version of a Level 2 technique detached from its horns and slashed down through the air toward Sol’s head.

Sol threw himself sideways.

The black ice-crescent missed his skull by two inches, shearing the wolf-fur collar clean off his left shoulder and burying itself three feet deep into the frozen peat behind him, where it immediately exploded into a ten-foot patch of razor-sharp frost spikes.