Chapter 720: Blood to pay 3
Sophie was killing things.
Not strategically. Not with the tactical assessment that usually preceded her engagements. Just killing them, the King’s Gaze active in her hand, the Sovereign Sight reading every incoming attack before it arrived and the Royal Decree landing on targets with the weight of something that didn’t ask.
"Fall," she said to a two horn mid-charge.
It fell. Not tripped. Not stumbled. Its legs simply ceased to cooperate and the ground came up and met it and it was still trying to understand what had happened when Sophie drove the King’s Gaze into the base of its skull.
The eye blinked.
A one horn came from her left and she said "miss" without looking at it and its strike went somewhere other than where it had been aimed and she used the gap to put the King’s Gaze through its throat.
Three more coming.
"Halt," she said.
Two of them stopped. The third one kept coming, its will strong enough to push through at the gap she had described to Noah, and she met it properly, the mace coming around in an arc that had the Tyrant’s Dominion running through it, the invisible pressure of the weapon’s aura making the one horn hesitate for half a second at the worst possible moment.
Half a second was enough.
The eye watched everything. Read everything. The probability field that had been a fog bank for her entire career was focused now, the King’s Gaze pointing it at whatever it was looking at, and what it was looking at was a battlefield full of things that wanted to kill her and everyone she had ever cared about.
She had things to say to all of them.
---
Diana was bleeding.
Not badly. A cut above her eye from debris that the shield hadn’t covered because the shield covered what you pointed it at and she had pointed it at Kruel and the debris had come from the other direction. The blood ran into her eye and she blinked it clear and kept moving.
Kruel was hitting harder.
Not because he was getting stronger in the moment. Because he had finished his assessment and had arrived at a strategy. The first ten minutes of the engagement he had been reading her, watching how the shield responded, watching how Shade moved, watching the pattern of their coordination. Now he had enough information to do something with it.
He wasn’t trying to get past the shield.
He was trying to shatter it.
BOOM.
The first hit landed on the Coral Fortress face and Diana felt it differently from the earlier strikes. Not pain. But something. A vibration that traveled through the shield and into the arm behind it, the Living Reef absorbing everything but the shock of absorbing that much at once producing a physical response that it hadn’t produced before.
BOOM.
Second hit. Same location. The shield surface showed something she had not seen it show before. A hairline fracture, running from the impact point, extending three centimeters before stopping. She stared at it.
BOOM.
Third hit. Faster than the first two. No space between the second and the third, Kruel not pulling back to wind up, just hitting continuously at a speed and force that made the individual impacts start to blur into a sustained pressure that the shield was designed to handle but had not been tested at this volume.
Her boots were leaving marks in the stone. Not jumping back. Just being pushed, incrementally, the force of each hit moving her despite the shield taking it.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The fragments scattered. Not from damage. From the sheer turbulence of the impacts sending them off their orbital paths, the fragments struggling to maintain their circuits in the pressure environment Kruel’s strikes were creating around her.
She was shaking.
That shouldn’t be possible. Noah had hit this shield and she hadn’t felt it. She had told him she hadn’t felt it and she had meant it completely. And now she was shaking, not from the force getting through but from the accumulated weight of blocking force at this volume, her body registering the effort even when the shield was doing the work.
BOOM.
A crack ran across the shield face. Longer than the first one.
BOOM.
Another.
She was screaming something. She wasn’t sure when she had started screaming. It was coming from somewhere that didn’t require her conscious input, just pressure finding its outlet while everything else focused on holding.
"KELVIN!" she heard herself yell. "KELVIN!"
But the comm was in the water somewhere behind her and Kelvin couldn’t hear her and she couldn’t hear him and the shield was cracking and Kruel was hitting and her arms were burning from the sustained effort of keeping the shield up and she had one thought that was clearer than everything else happening simultaneously.
’I’m going to die here.’
KROOOOOM!!!!!!!
Shade hit Kruel from the sky.
Shade came back from orbit like something that had decided the sky was a suggestion.
The sound of him reentering reached them before he did, a shriek that built from nothing into something that shook the water around their feet, and then he broke through the cloud layer as a dark streak with his wings pinned flat against his body and his eyes open and every scale on him catching the alien light as he fell and he was not slowing down.
He hit Kruel across the back.
The impact carved a trench through the ruin floor six meters long, stone and old mortar and dark water erupting sideways from the point of contact, and Kruel went into the trench face first and Shade was on him before the debris had finished moving.
Diana watched it from her knees.
Her hands were still shaking. She had given herself three seconds and she was still shaking after them because three seconds wasn’t enough for what her body had just been through but it was all she had and she spent them looking at her hands the way she looked at them every morning and then she got up.
She looked for the comm. Scanned the ground around her. The water. The debris field from the last ten minutes of movement and shield strikes and the twenty meters she had traveled in directions she hadn’t chosen. Nothing. Gone somewhere she wasn’t going to find it.
She looked at Shade and Kruel.
Shade had him in the trench. Both forelegs driving him down, claws working at the grey hide in long channels that opened and bled and healed and opened again, the acid burst coming in pulses, each one hitting Kruel’s back and shoulders and the back of his skull, the compound doing what it did, eating through the regeneration faster than the regeneration could keep up at this concentration.
Kruel pushed up.
Not fast. The weight of Shade on him and the depth of the trench working against him. But he pushed. His hands found purchase in the broken stone and he drove upward and Shade’s position shifted as the thing he was standing on started moving in a direction he hadn’t planned for.
Kruel got to his knees.
Shade adjusted. Hit him from the side, full body impact, shoulder into Kruel’s ribs, and the sound it produced was the sound of two things that had no business existing at those sizes hitting each other at those speeds. They went through the trench wall and into the open ruin floor beyond it and the crater they made on impact spread outward in a ring that cracked the stone for fifteen meters in every direction.
Kruel came up first.
He was bleeding from forty points. The acid had done something serious to his left shoulder, the grey going wrong there, the tissue unable to keep up, and he was moving that arm differently from the right one.
Shade came up half a second later.
They looked at each other.
Then Shade hit him again and Kruel caught him this time, both hands finding Shade’s forelegs and using the momentum of the charge to swing him, and Shade left the ground in a horizontal arc that covered sixty meters before he hit the ruin wall and the wall didn’t stop him, he went through it, and the sound of the impact traveled across the water.
He came out of the rubble immediately. Dust falling off his scales. Already moving back.
They went again.
Diana watched it.
She should go in. She knew she should go in. Two years of building toward this, two years of recovery, of pent up anger and frustration at her own situation. Time spent in training with the shield and Shade, all of it, and it was right there in front of her and she should go in.
Her feet didn’t move.
Because Shade was handling it. Sort of. He was moving, still fighting, still hitting, the acid still running. And Kruel was bleeding. Kruel was actually bleeding from multiple points and the shoulder was still wrong and the regeneration was working but it was working against a genuine volume of damage for the first time in this engagement.
And if she went in and Kruel stopped focusing on Shade and focused on her instead, the shield was cracked and her arms were still burning and the three seconds she had given herself had not been enough and she had nothing left to absorb another barrage like the last one.
She knew all of that.
Her feet still didn’t move and she told herself it was tactical and not fear and she wasn’t sure which one was true.
Then Kruel’s hand closed around Shade’s throat.
He had caught him mid-lunge, the timing of it precise in a way that suggested he had been waiting for that specific lunge, had watched Shade’s pattern and identified the moment that was coming and prepared for it. His grip locked and Shade’s forward momentum stopped and he was just held there, four claws working at Kruel’s arm, tail striking at his legs, boom boom boom, each hit landing hard enough that the water around them jumped.
Kruel held on.
He reached his free hand up and worked his fingers into the gap between Shade’s upper and lower jaw.
Diana felt it in her chest before she understood what she was seeing. The fingers finding the gap. The grip establishing. The intention of what Kruel was about to do sitting in the image in front of her with the clarity of something that didn’t need explanation.
She thought about the Eternal Pyre.
About Shade appearing in the training space, the first time she had seen him properly, those pale amber eyes looking at her with the head tilted at an angle that suggested genuine curiosity about what it was looking at. About learning his patterns. About running every morning with something invisible beside her that she had stopped needing to look for because she just knew where he was. About holding her fist out and him touching his nose to it. Cold and deliberate. Every morning.
Her feet moved.
"No," Diana said.
She extended both hands.
Everything slowed. Not everything on the battlefield. Just everything in the radius she threw the null zone into, the absolute zero field expanding from her hands and crashing into the space around Kruel and Shade and making every molecule in that space reconsider its current velocity.
Kruel’s hands slowed.
The fingers working at Shade’s jaw slowed. Still moving. Still trying. But through something that was actively converting every joule of force he was producing into friction and then into nothing, and the jaw was not opening at the rate it had been opening.
Shade felt the change.
The acid burst came out immediately, full output, no spacing, blast after blast hitting Kruel’s face at the distance of half a meter with nowhere to go except in. The grey went lighter. Went wrong. The patches spreading fast, faster than the regeneration could address simultaneously, the compound eating through the surface and what was below the surface and what was below that, and Kruel’s face became something she had never seen a face become and she kept pushing the null zone harder.
His tail swept.
Shade went. Launched sideways and upward and out over the water and the splash when he hit was visible from two hundred meters.
Kruel turned to Diana.
His face was wrong. The acid had done what acid did when it had enough time and enough concentration and nothing stopping it, and Kruel’s face was the record of what Shade had spent the last thirty seconds putting into it, raw and dark and healing but not healed, not yet, the regeneration catching up but not caught up.
He started walking toward her.
She was screaming.
She didn’t know when it had started. At some point the effort of holding the field at this level and the two years of everything that had brought her to this specific moment in this specific ruin on this specific alien planet had found their outlet and what was coming out of her was not words exactly, just sound, just the raw unprocessed output of a person who had been holding something for two years and had finally found the thing she had been holding it for.
"DIE! DIE! DIE ASSHOLE! DIEEEEEEEEEE!"
Her nose went first. She tasted it before she felt it, the copper flooding the back of her throat, and then the warmth on her upper lip and she didn’t stop.
Her eyes went next. Not vision. She could still see. But she could feel the warmth running from them the way warmth ran when something had ruptured that was not supposed to rupture and her vision had a red quality at the edges that hadn’t been there before.
She kept pushing.
Kruel was walking toward her.
She held the field.
He pushed through it.
Not fast. Not easily. She could see the effort of it in every step, the null zone fighting him, her ability screaming through her body at a level that made her nose bleed and her vision pulse at the edges. He was moving through absolute zero momentum by sheer will and the biological capability of a four horn Harbinger and she was throwing everything she had into keeping the field active.
But he was getting closer and closer.
She gritted her teeth and held on.
"DIEEEEEE"
"DIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"
She kept screaming, holding on, squeezing at his tugging heart, slowing the movement down second by second. She could see him slow down but the monster that he was kept pushing through.
Her eyes were beginning to bleed too.
Her nose and eyes were bleeding.
"DIEEEEEEEE"
"JUST DI–"
He reached her.
Boom...Boom!
He hit her twice.
The first one took her sideways. The second one she barely processed as separate from the first, her body trying to catch up with what was happening to it, the shield absorbing most of both hits but most was not all and she had already been running at her limit before he started hitting.
She hit the ground.
He picked her up by the throat.
He looked at her face.
"I remember you now," he said. His voice was completely level. Not angry. Not triumphant. "One of Earth’s soldiers. You’ve been somewhere between our last meetings." The acid scarring on his face was regenerating as he spoke, grey returning to the damaged areas in slow spreading patches. "It’s a shame. Your development has to end here."
He squeezed.
She grabbed his wrist with both hands and held it and pushed everything she had into the null zone around his hand, trying to slow the squeeze, trying to buy seconds.
He smiled at her through the healing face.
"Pity," he said, squeezing.
Then there was purple light.
It hit her all at once, covering her from feet to head in the colour that she knew better than almost anything, and her hand was on Kruel’s wrist and then it wasn’t and she was somewhere else, landing on something that gave under her feet, and she looked down and she was standing on a pile of dead Harbingers. Dozens of them. Hundreds. All of them with clean circular holes through their chests and skulls, the edges of the holes smooth, the darkness inside them going deeper than the physical anatomy should have allowed.
Void erasure. Noah had been here.
She looked up.
Far across the ruined shoreline, at the point where Kruel was standing, a figure she knew appeared in a burst of purple light.
Noah. Where she had been. His fist extended, glowing purple, the null strike committed, the void energy already moving toward Kruel’s face.
[Reciprocal Swap : Activated]
That was the last notification disappearing from Noah’s field of view.
Kruel’s hand closed around Noah’s forearm at the elbow.
The fist stopped inches from his face.
They stood there, Noah’s arm in Kruel’s grip, looking at each other across the distance of an extended arm.
"You," Kruel said.
Noah looked at him.
"Nyx," he said, his voice completely level. "Ascend."
