Gilded Ashes

Chapter 413: One Single Cut

The tendril hit her in the side.

The impact was not what she had been training for. The Phalanx trained for being hit by things - they trained for it constantly, because being hit was the cost of the job and the cost had to be survivable. But the Phalanx trained against weights and against impacts calibrated to human scale. The thing that hit her was more than a building.

Blood came out of her mouth before her brain had finished processing that she was hit.

She was still in the air. The impact had not knocked her down - it had knocked her sideways. Her trajectory broke. The arc she had been travelling on disappeared, replaced by a new arc, this one moving across the sky in the direction the tendril had been swinging. The Anathema’s appendage continued past her. The hit had been a side-strike, a glancing connection between a moving tendril and a stationary midair body. If it had connected fully, she would have already been part of the air.

Her vision tilted. She had broken ribs. She knew which ones – she could feel them: three, maybe four, on her left side. Her left arm was still working though. Her right was still gripping the chain from her knives. She was now travelling at high speed through smoke-coloured air with no idea how far she would fall before something stopped her.

Slow it down.

Her Eon flowed. The amount left in her reserve was perhaps a tenth of what she had started with that morning. She did not have the budget for what she did next, but she did it anyway, because the alternative was hitting the ground at terminal velocity, and the bones she had left would not survive that.

Ice formed between her shoulder blades, slowly covering her back and extending towards the hands.

It grew outward in two broad sheets, fanning from her back like a pair of dead wings - but "wings" was the wrong word for them. They weren’t shaped for flight. They were shaped for drag. Thin – yet as thick and resistant as she could, wide, the cross-section of a parachute rendered in fast-grown crystal, the surface area maximized to catch as much air as it could. The ice was structurally weak. She didn’t have the time or the Eon to grow it dense. It would shatter the moment her speed broke any kind of threshold.

It did. Almost immediately. The left wing cracked across the middle within a second of forming, the air pressure exceeding what the brittle crystal could absorb. The second wing held for two seconds before it followed. But the two seconds had bled enough velocity from her fall that she was no longer travelling at killing speed.

She was now travelling at most-probably-killing speed.

Kori braced...

Then she hit something.

It wasn’t ground. It was solid, but it gave under her - not the way concrete gave or stone gave, but the way a body gave when it was absorbing an impact it had been waiting for. She heard a sound that was simultaneously a grunt, an exhale and a curse at the same time, and she felt two arms close around her. She felt the body holding her get pushed backward by her momentum even as it tried to absorb her landing.

Kenzo.

He had managed to catch her. Somehow he had managed to catch her, from wherever he had been after the throw - across rubble, across the field, across whatever distance had separated him from her trajectory. He had caught her, and the wings of broken ice she had grown at her own back had cut into him as she landed, because ice with thin edges did exactly what it always did when it was pressed against human skin.

The two of them flew.

His grip on her was absolute, and his feet had been planted when he caught her, but her momentum had still moved him with immense force - and now they were tumbling together across the battlefield, his body acting as the buffer between her and every surface they passed through. Walls. Concrete. The half-standing wreck of what was once a fountain. His head struck each of them in turn. She heard the sounds. She could not see his face. She could feel his chest still moving beneath her, his arms still locked around her, his body refusing to let go of her even as it absorbed the impacts she had brought with her.

The tumble eventually stopped.

They came to rest somewhere in the rubble of a collapsed wall. Kenzo’s body had taken most of it. He was breathing slowly, in rushed breaths, but the sound was wet – his lungs were probably punctured. His grip on her began to loosen - not because he wanted to release her, but because his arms were no longer receiving signals consistent with conscious control.

Kori couldn’t move. Her ribs were a single column of pain. Her vision was failing.

She turned her head, looking toward the Anathema one more time. It cost her everything she had left.

What she saw, in the moment before her vision finished collapsing, was the last thing she had expected.

The Anathema was held.

Above its lower body, where its back had been writhing and producing new tendrils throughout the engagement, something enormous and luminous had been pressing down across its shoulders like a huge meteor. Some kind of Eon construct shaped like a weight. Kori didn’t have the perceptual capacity left to identify the technique or attribute it to any of the remaining Phalanx members. What she could see was that the Anathema was no longer growing tendrils. It was no longer reaching outward. Its arms had collapsed, now pressing against the ground, barely holding its body up, and its head had been pushed down by whatever weight was sitting on top of it. The entire upper body was being forced toward a position the rest of it had not been designed to hold.

Plant girlie’s vines reached the neck.

The vegetation that couldn’t reach the standing Anathema’s neck, had finally found a path upward. Through the collapsed posture, through the pinning weight, through whatever the Anathema was no longer fighting against. The vines wrapped around the bent neck in dense, layered coils made of dozens of different plant species, each one as thick as a building’s structural pillar, anchoring the head in place against the body.

The remaining Phalanx were arrayed around the lower body. Osamu somewhere on the right, his shield still up but no longer projecting outward, the dome retracted to a defensive bubble around his own body, focusing all of his energy towards the extreme weight on the Anathema, probably. Plant girlie at the eastern flank, her hands extended, her face streaked with blood, sweat and bark dust. Old Fart visible now, his single thin rapier in his hand, coat torn open across the back.

She didn’t see clearly what happened – there was too much going on.

Then the yellow sky split.

A line of light cut across it with a blinding flash. What came after was like a single fracture in the cloud cover that opened for a fraction of a second and revealed, through the gap, a thin sliver of something pale blue.

Sky. Beyond the yellow fume, beyond the red of distant fires, beyond the black smoke from the Nyx swarms that had been clustering around the battlefield. Visible now for a heartbeat. Visible because something had cut the cloud cover open with one single technique. One single attack, so powerful it completely split the blanket above.

The Leader, Kori thought.