Chapter 724: Soul Form
Kruel laughed.
And laughed.
And then his legs gave.
Not dramatically. Not a collapse. Just his knees hitting the alien stone one after the other, the weight of him coming down slowly, his hands finding the ground in front of him, and he was on all fours in the crater he had made and the laughter was still coming out of him in short bursts, each one shaking his frame, black blood dripping from his mouth and hitting the alien stone beneath him in a steady rhythm.
The hole in his chest was still there.
The void didn’t close. That was the thing about erasure. It didn’t damage. It removed. And what was removed didn’t come back the way damaged tissue came back, the regeneration finding nothing to rebuild because there was nothing left to build from, just absence where something had been.
He was still laughing.
He started to crawl backward.
Away from Noah. Away from the crater. His hands and knees moving through the alien stone, the four horns on his skull catching the alien light, and the laughter was becoming something else now, still in his chest, still shaking him, but lower, the sound of it changing register.
It was slowly reducing, getting weaker like he was dying.
Then everyone moved at once.
Sophie saw it from the ground.
She was still on her knees where the three horn had put her, trying to get air back into her lungs, her hand finding the King’s Gaze on the alien stone beside her. She wrapped her fingers around the handle and the eye opened and the blue came into her irises immediately, flooding from the edges inward, and she stood up.
A two horn turned toward her.
"Fall," she said.
It fell. Not stumbled. Its legs stopped working mid-stride and the alien ground came up and met it and it was still processing that information when she drew the King’s Gaze across its throat in a single clean motion and kept walking.
Another one ahead of her.
"Fall," she said.
It fell.
She kept walking toward Kruel.
Aurelius hit a three horn at full output and the alien coastline registered the impact before either of them finished moving. His fire came out at a temperature that the Ares bloodline had been refining across fifty years of deep space travel, not the scattered kind, focused, and the three horn’s chest opened and the inside of it was briefly visible before the three horn decided that was unacceptable and reached for him.
He stepped inside the reach and hit it again.
Two of his wives hit it from either side simultaneously and it went down and stayed down.
A second three horn came from the water.
Three Ares soldiers hit it before it cleared the shallows, fire abilities running at output levels that turned the shallow water around the engagement point into steam, and the three horn fought through all three of them and kept coming and Aurelius met it and the exchange that followed reshaped a section of the alien coastline that had been stable for centuries.
Jayden had the Descending Dragon running at the seventh consecutive hit and the chain between the staffs was deep into plasma ignition territory, the heat coming off it visible in waves that distorted the air around him in a radius that made approaching him an exercise in commitment.
A three horn committed.
It came at him fast, the speed that three horns moved at when they had decided forward was the answer, and Jayden let it come and at the last moment swung the hot staff low and the cold staff high and the chain between them wrapped around the three horn’s lead arm and the Polarity Break activated at contact, maximum heat to maximum cold in the same location in the same moment, and the three horn’s arm didn’t break. It shattered, the rapid expansion and contraction of the dense grey tissue producing a crack that ran from wrist to shoulder in under a second.
The three horn looked at its arm.
Jayden hit it in the chest with both staffs simultaneously and the plasma discharge at point blank turned the impact site into something the three horn didn’t recover from.
He was already moving to the next one.
Angel was at the center of it.
Her blood armor was running at full density across her shoulders and forearms and her blood discs were orbiting in opposite directions and anything that got close to her found out quickly that close was the wrong distance to choose. A two horn got a hand on her shoulder and she let it, let it grip, and the Tidal Rebound from the grip released into its palm at the point of contact and the two horn’s hand came apart at the wrist.
It looked at where its hand had been.
Angel drove a blood spear through its throat before it finished the thought.
Three more coming.
She didn’t move back. She opened both palms and the blood fog came out in volume and she spread it across the space between her and all three of them and then hardened it, not the glass that would be too much like Noah’s void ability, just dense, dark red solid material, a wall of it forming between her and the three incoming, and she ran at the wall and went through it at full speed using it as a battering ram, the hardened blood driving into all three simultaneously.
The two that survived that got what came after.
Lila didn’t move.
She stood in the middle of the engagement and extended both hands and the telekinetic field went out in every direction from her position simultaneously and everything in the field that wasn’t Eclipse or Ares lifted slightly off the alien ground, just enough, just the half second of no traction, and in that half second everyone on their side who needed it had the opening they needed.
Two horns and three horns coming from three directions at once all found their footing gone at the same moment and in the moment after that they found what Eclipse members did to things that had lost their footing.
A three horn pushed through the field.
Lila looked at it.
She grabbed it with the full field and compressed. The chronokinesis shaved the last half second of its forward momentum down to nothing, a surgical sliver of time taken from the instant before contact, and she redirected everything it had been building into the ground beneath it.
The ground expressed an opinion.
The three horn did not as it was slammed so hard it died instantly.
Seraleth found Noah.
She came down from the air and landed beside him and her wings folded around him, the layered feathers of the Guardian Plumage coming together overhead, and she looked at him and what she saw made something happen in her face that she didn’t have full control over.
His wounds weren’t closing.
The damage underneath it, the ribs exposed through the gap in the E.N.D armor, the darker wet of the internal damage visible, the intestines partially outside where the armor had blown, all of it sitting exactly as it had been when she landed beside him. The regeneration was working, she could see it working, the tissue at the edges of things moving in the slow methodical way of biology doing its job, but the rate of it was wrong.
It was losing ground.
"It’s okay," she said. Her voice came out almost steady. "It’s okay, Noah. We have you."
He looked up at her.
His eyes were open.
Blood in his mouth. When he breathed it moved and he looked at her and she looked at him and neither of them said what they were both looking at.
"Why isn’t he healing," she said aloud, to anyone who could hear her. "Why isn’t he healing faster."
[HP: 8,400/147,600]
[CRITICAL — CASCADING ORGAN FAILURE]
[REGENERATION ACTIVE — INSUFFICIENT VS CURRENT DAMAGE RATE]
[VOID ENERGY: 12,000/320,000]
[VOID ENERGY DEPLETING — REGENERATION CONSUMING ALL AVAILABLE RESERVES]
[WARNING: VOID ENTROPY SYNDROME THRESHOLD APPROACHING]
The numbers kept moving. Every second they moved. The void energy going to regeneration and the regeneration not keeping up and the HP following the void energy downward in a slow steady decline that wasn’t fast and wasn’t stopping.
He couldn’t move his fingers.
He tried and the signal went somewhere and didn’t come back.
He looked at the alien sky through the gap in Seraleth’s wings.
"How is this happening after everything?"
Kruel had stopped crawling.
He was on his knees in the alien stone twenty meters from Noah’s position and the laughter had become something else, something lower and more internal, and his hands were flat on the alien ground and his head was down.
The three horns that had been blocking the approaches to his position were still there. Still holding. Still making sure nothing reached him.
He looked up.
The nearest three horn was two meters from him.
Then he did something sudden and erratic.
He grabbed it.
The three horn turned and Kruel pulled it toward him and opened his mouth and bit through its neck at the base of the skull with a sound that carried across every engagement happening within fifty meters and produced an instant stillness in everyone who heard it.
He swallowed.
He grabbed the next one.
Same thing.
The three horn fighting him for the half second it took and then not fighting anything.
And as he ate, he changed.
Not slowly. Not subtly. The shoulders widened. The chest expanded. The grey hide darkened fractionally and then settled at a new tone, denser somehow, the texture of it different from the texture of thirty seconds ago. His height increased, not dramatically, maybe two inches, but present, measurable, the frame of him occupying more space than it had been occupying before he started.
He murdered a third one.
He was getting bigger.
"Oh no," Kelvin said from somewhere in the chaos. His voice had a quality to it, the quality of someone who had run a calculation and arrived at a result they had been hoping not to arrive at. "Oh no no no."
Sophie grabbed her head.
Both hands, the King’s Gaze still in her right, the eye running full blue, and the blue in her own irises was so bright it was visible from meters away, and whatever the weapon was showing her hit her all at once like something that had been trying to get through a door and had finally found it open.
"WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE," she screamed.
Not the whisper from before. Not the fragment she’d been hearing since the Eternal Pyre. The full thing, her voice at full volume, carrying across the engagement.
"WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE!"
A fourth three horn died in Kruel’s hands.
He was standing now. Fully upright. Bigger than he had been. The hole in his chest from the null strike was smaller than it had been, the edges of it closing, the tissue rebuilding around the absence at a rate that was visibly faster than his previous regeneration had been running at.
The wound itself hadn’t closed, but it looked like his body was plastering over the hole.
And there was a bulge on his skull.
Between the second and third horn. Small. Just present, pushing against the grey hide from below, the shape of something that hadn’t been there at the start of this fight.
"Oh no," Kelvin said again.
"That’s a horn," Lucas said.
Everyone looked.
He had just come to and the first thing he was seeing was this nightmare.
Lucas was on the ground fifteen meters from Noah’s position, on his side, one eye open, the collarbone still wrong, his body having done what bodies did when they had been beaten for forty minutes and been saved from further beating only because someone else swapped into the receiving position.
He was looking at the bulge on Kruel’s skull.
His hand moved across the alien stone.
Valor came to it. The axe crossing the distance between the crater where it had been embedded far away and Lucas’s open palm, the metal humming when it made contact, the stored charge from before the fight had separated them still sitting in the blade, still waiting.
Lucas spit blood.
He got his hand under him.
His body levitated.
Not from effort. The electricity simply lifted him, his entire frame running blue from skin to outline, the charge that lived in him and in the weapon building together until the boundary between Lucas and the electrical field around him stopped being a useful distinction.
He rose from the alien stone.
"It’s not done," he said. His voice was hoarse and wrong and completely certain. "It’s not over yet."
Seraleth’s wings spread.
She unfolded them from around Noah and stood and looked at what Kruel was becoming and her wings spread fully, the full span of the Faithful Feathers opening above Noah’s body, and then something happened that had nothing to do with the wings.
Dark purple tendrils began to wrap around Noah.
The void energy came from somewhere below.
Not from Noah. Not from his hands or his intentions or any direction he had chosen. From the E.N.D armor, from the gaps in it, from the wounds in his body, tendrils of deep purple void energy emerging and spreading outward across the alien stone around him like something that had been waiting inside him for a condition he hadn’t known he was building toward.
They spread.
Outward from Noah’s position in every direction, thin at first and then thickening, the purple deepening, the tendrils finding the alien stone and passing through it and finding what was in it and underneath it. Dead Harbingers where they had fallen. Ares soldiers who hadn’t made it. Eclipse members. Task force personnel. Bodies that had been here since the fight began and had been cooling in the alien air.
The tendrils reached them.
The bodies shriveled.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that looked like anything recognizable. Just the shrinking of matter from which something essential was being drawn, the tissue collapsing inward as the void energy found what it was looking for and took it and carried it back along the tendrils toward the source.
Spontaneous Entropy. Moving through the alien ground like roots finding water.
The stone where the tendrils passed turned grey and then darker than grey and then crumbled at the edges.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[CRITICAL THRESHOLD REACHED]
[VOID ENTROPY SYNDROME: ACTIVE]
[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ENGAGING]
[UNKNOWN ABILITY DETECTED]
[RULER BLOODLINE: RESPONDING]
[DRACONIC HALFLING: BIOLOGICAL INTEGRATION ACCELERATING]
[OVERDRIVE: INITIATING]
[WARNING: BIOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES UNKNOWN]
[WARNING: SYSTEM CANNOT PREDICT OUTCOME]
[SOUL FORM: IMMINENT]
