Chapter 749: Severance & Savoring
Phei’s vision blackened and he lost his balance.
His hearing had been the first to betray him.
The cathedral hollow swam in a slow concussive smear that he could not, for the next four seconds, parse into discrete objects.
He felt, dimly, the broken stone arrive against his cheek.
He felt, dimly, blood pouring from both ears and his nose and the corners of his mouth, streams of blood from his very eyes like two red endless rivers.
He felt, dimly, the halberd slipping out of his fingers.
He could not move.
He was a body that had, briefly and concussively, ceased to be a person.
The Titan dragged him by one ankle.
Thirty feet of broken stone passed beneath his face. He felt his cheek tear open along the dragging path. His cracked rib on his right side caught a stone-edge and snap further, the broken end of the bone now scraping against the inside of his own skin from within, while tongue, half-severed earlier, now also frozen by the cold-dropped air, becoming a foreign object in his mouth.
He felt all of this in dim distant register — a body unable to currently understand that he was the body feeling it.
The construct stopped dragging and lifted his ankle.
It held him upside-down at full arm’s length.
Shook him.
His broken body swung, blood running the wrong direction up his face.
The chest-wound from collarbone to thigh redistributed its bleeding in obedient response to gravity, hot dark red running across his face and into his already-blood-filled eyes.
His vision came back briefly in patchy red-and-black slices.
He saw, upside-down, a second Titan stepping forward.
This one drew its saber back.
Slowly.
Theatrically, before it brought it down across the back of Phei’s exposed shoulder.
The saber severed his right arm at the shoulder.
Phei felt his arm leave his body — the strange weightless absence where weight had been, the sudden lateral shift of his upside-down body’s mass distribution leaving only a stump — and the Titan dropped his ankle.
He hit the broken stone face-first, the impact closed two of his teeth around his half-severed tongue and finished severing it entirely.
He spat the tongue onto the broken stone in a wet mass of his own blood.
It was the second piece of his own he had spat out of his own mouth in this engagement.
The bond moved, it engaged along the severed shoulder and the severed tongue. New tongue began compiling in his mouth in a slow patient correction he could feel as a foreign warm growth at the back of his throat.
New shoulder-stump flowering with frost light. New arm extending into the air at three inches per second.
The pain of the regrowth was worse than the pain of the severance.
He made a long high noise he did not recognize as his own voice.
’The lesson is the pain.’ Eira thought sagely to herself.
The arm finished compiling. The tongue finished compiling.
He flexed the new fingers. Tested the new tongue against the new teeth that were also slowly growing back in the gaps where the cymbal-clap had shattered them.
He pushed himself up but boot the size of a small car descended on his right hand.
His new fingers crushed in a wet crackling sequence.
The Titan ground its boot side-to-side.
Two of the new fingers separated at the second knuckle.
Phei screamed.
The Titan stepped off.
A halberd-haft arrived in his lower back at full swing — used as a club, not a blade — and the impact lifted his prone body six inches off the broken stone and slammed it back down flat.
His lower spine compressed in a sequence he could not name.
A rib that had been cracked broke fully through the skin of his side and emerged through the ruined remains of his tunic as a small white splinter.
He coughed blood.
A crystalline hand the size of a small refrigerator wrapped itself around the back of his skull its fingers fisting his hair within a tight grip, even pulling his hair so hard.
He felt the construct pick him up by it by hair, the pain was so much, — the construct’s grip patient, the construct’s faceless head tilted in slow consideration, his head a tool the Titan had decided would be useful — and his entire bodyweight hung from the roots of his own hair for one long impossible second before the construct slammed.
KKKRAAAKKK.
His face met the broken stone.
His nose broke for the second time in the engagement. Three of his front teeth — the ones the cymbal-clap had only cracked — fully shattered along their roots and sprayed forward across the cracked floor in small white-red fragments.
The construct lifted him again up.
KKKRAAAKKK.
His face met the broken stone again and the bone above his left eye fractured along a hairline and his eye-socket filled immediately with hot dark blood.
His vision in the left eye reduced to a slow red blur.
The construct lifted him a third time.
It paused — a slow patient pause, the construct savoring the count — and then slammed his face down a third time. His jaw, the one the mace had broken hours ago, broke again, this time along the opposite hinge.
His face was now caved in on both sides... he could feel, barely, his lower jaw sitting at a wrong angle inside his own skin.
The construct dropped him.
He fell.
His face on the cracked stone. Teeth in pieces. Hair pulled bloody at the roots. Both sides of his jaw broken.
The bond did not heal it.
Breaks were not severances.
Another Titan stepped forward and reached for his face.
Crystalline fingers gripped his lower jaw.
Its fingertips pressed into the soft tissue beneath his chin.
The construct pulled in a slow, unhurried, the grip dragging his already-broken jaw outward away from its hinges, his mouth distending unnaturally far open in the obscene shape of a face being un-faced — and held the pull for two full seconds.
The jaw’s left hinge half-separated.
He felt the bone slip in its socket.
The construct released and his jaw snapped back into approximate position with a wet click.
He tried to scream but his tongue, the one that was still in the process of regrowing from earlier, was caught in the wrong position by the snapping jaw and bit through — half-severed again.
The fresh growth wasn’t fully consolidated yet.
He spat the new tongue piece onto the broken stone.
Three Titans stepped forward together.
The first stomped his already-shattered right hand; what remained of the bones in his hand collapsed inward in a wet final crackle.
The second drove a halberd’s spike-end through his left shoulder and into the broken stone beneath him, anchoring his shoulder to the cathedral hollow’s floor, the construct then leaning its full weight on the haft to keep him pinned.
The third put its boot on his head.
Just placed it. The size of a small car, settling on the side of his face, the construct’s faceless skull tilted in the slow patient consideration of a being deciding how much pressure to apply.
It applied the pressure.
Slowly.
Phei’s skull began to register the load. The bone above his left eye, already fractured, cracked further.
The bone of his temple began to flex; his vision in the unobscured right eye went briefly flat — the periphery dropping out, the centre narrowing to a pinhole — as the cathedral hollow’s afternoon light filtered through what remained of his concussed sight.
He could not move his head.
He could not move his pinned shoulder.
He could not move his stomped hand.
He could not summon Void-Ice.
He could only feel his fingers, on his still-good left hand, turning black at the tips.
