Chapter 15 The God-Eater
The God-Eater
Just as the couple prepared to leave the decimated quarry, a ripple went through the air.
Idan moved, fast as lightning, placing Sheba to his rear as he rounded on the source of the unseen energy.
The pressure surrounding the glade shifted as a localized vortex tore through the atmosphere just above them, in a screaming tear.
Idan’s internal compass spun into a void of static, but before he had the chance to escape with Sheba, a series of vortexes erupted from the distortion.
He just managed to shove his woman aside as a series of webbed nets fell over him.
Sheba hit the ground hard and rolled.
‘Get the hell away,’ he roared at her in a bellow that echoed off the cliffs around them.
She took off, slipping and sliding to hide behind a tree.
Idan tried to raise his hands to pull the offending meshes off him until he recognized what they were with a groan.
Fokkin’ null webs, he thought as his Sacran god potency leaked from him.
Idan collapsed to the ground as the nullification lattice tightened its grip, draining the reservoirs of his Ssignakht and Sukkanaght power.
He groaned as the divine current that pulsed within him became a leaden sludge.
He clawed at the filaments, his fingers tangling in the lustrous alloy.
The mesh was not physical; it was an energetic hexed parasite.
Every time he attempted to summon a spark of his celestial heritage, the ponderous weave throbbed with a dull, gray resonance. Absorbing the energy before it reached his limbs.
The iridescent fibers leached away his godhood, and for the first time, Idan experienced the hollow terror of being mere flesh and bone.
A man stepped from the center of the vortex.
He was a mountain of engineered muscle and tactical grime, encased in interlocking plates of vermilion carbon fiber.
His hair was a shock of bleached, cord-thin strands that whipped in the wind, and a cybernetic visor glowed with crimson light over his left eye.
His face, augmented with implants, was cruel, lined, and covered in hideous, spotted scars.
He carried a heavy-bore rifle slung over a shoulder guard scarred by a hundred firefights.
‘My name is Korsen Vane AKA ‘The Reaper’. I’ve been paid, quite well, might I add, to hunt you down, Sacran.’
‘Fokk off,’ Idan managed.
Vane threw his head back and let out a harsh crow of triumph.
He glanced at the slumped form of the Sacran and then at Sheba, who peered at him in horror from the trunk she hid behind.
‘My payday is fokkin’ finally here.’
‘How?’ Idan rasped.
‘I’ve tracked your kind through the gutters of the rim-worlds for a decade,’ Vane snarled, his lips unfurling to reveal crimson-stained teeth.
‘I’ve met plenty of Sacran warriors in the wild.
Some were even runaways fleeing the rigors of your military.
I learned from them about the null nets.
So I developed their technology, amping it up to dampen the spark.
You call yourselves freakin’ gods, yet you cannot even withstand a simple potency-draining mesh.
Tis absurd how simple it is to thwart a deity, nada? ’
Idan didn’t answer, not wanting to give the braggart any satisfaction.
Naam, his absent divinity was like a missing limb, but beneath the suppressed power, the ancient muscle-memory of a thousand skirmishes remained.
The Sacran army had not forged him in light alone; they sculpted his resilience and grit in pain and gore.
With a sudden, explosive heave that defied the mechanical dampening, Idan surged forward, tearing apart the nets, enough for his hands and legs to shoot through.
Using the raw, unadulterated leverage of his physiology, he leaped and caught the front of Vane’s carbon-fiber chest plate.
The metal shrieked as Idan’s fingers dented the armor, finding purchase in the seams.
Idan leveraged his heft in a terrifying display of kinetic force, slamming Vane to his knees.
Before the hunter got the chance to raise his weapon, Idan’s fists clamped onto the Reaper’s shoulders.
He twisted with a guttural roar, the sound of snapping sinew and grinding vertebrae echoing off the valley walls.
He tore the cybernetic visor from Vane’s skull with a sickening crack of synth alloy and bone. He then delivered a palm strike to the center of the man’s chest that collapsed the entire ribcage inward, the bones piercing the heart.
The Reaper slumped over, his eyes glazed in shock, his lifeblood staining Idan’s front and the white snow a dark, steaming crimson.
The bounty hunter’s breath became a wet, shallow rattle as he stared up at the man he thought he’d neutralized.
‘You might have nullified me,’ Idan whispered to the stunned, dying chaser, in a menacing hiss.
‘But you forgot one thing: once a warrior, always a warrior. Sacran abilities or not, I still fight like a freakin’ avenging angel.
Especially when it comes to protecting my woman from cockroaches like you. ’
Idan stood over the wreckage of the terminal assassin, his chest heaving.
Even without the glow of his sigils, he was now more the celestial executioner than the now-dead hunter.
He reached down and tore the remaining leaden filaments of the net from his skin, as the golden light of his Ssignakht began to throb afresh at the edge of his vision.
That’s when he caught sudden movement to his left.
Vane’s men; trying to sneak up on him.
With a smirk, he moved, becoming a localized supernova, a blur of silver-white wrath.
With a horizontal sweep of his arm, he unleashed a kinetic blade of pure Ssignakht energy that decapitated two of Vane’s soldiers before they let out a shot from their pulse rifles.
He descended on the remaining fleeing men.
His fists impacted with the force of tectonic plates, shattering matte-black plating into obsidian shards and liquefying the organs beneath.
The air filled with the metallic spray of ionized blood and the high-pitched scream of failing tech as he tore through the final survivors.
His hands glowed with a heat so intense it turned their tactical gear to ash before their bodies even hit the frost.
Moments later, silence fell as the last assailant breathed his last.
‘Salkia!’ he growled. ‘Ko’Sawa?’
‘I’m OK, honey,’ Sheba called out.
‘You can come out now,’ he commanded, his timbred grunt cutting through the mountain silence.
She emerged from behind the tree she’d been crouched, her pupils dilated with shock and awe against the honeyed luster of her face.
Her gaze raked over his frame, over the gore coating him, and the viscous remnants of the Reaper and his soldiers.
‘Clean up on one god warrior, please, so I can kiss him,’ she murmured.
Idan huffed, then willed the gold sigils on his body to ignite.
An incandescent radiance swirled around him, scouring the filth from his body in a wave of cleansing motes until he stood purified.
She ran to him, and he hauled her into his chest, his mouth crashing into hers with a grounding hunger.
‘I might not look it, but I’m a fokkin’ mess,’ he groaned against her lips. ‘I loathe the stench of war and need your kiss to cleanse my soul.’
They melded into each other, her hands sinking into his thick hair as he glided his touch over her.
Just as he was about to sink her into the grass and take her, his senses lit up with a pre-warning.
‘The fokk?’ Idan cursed as he tore his mouth from his woman and once more placed Sheba to his rear, bracing for battle afresh as yet another vortex appeared before them.
Ty Si’Rhix stepped from the roiling energy void, encased in an armored suit of midnight alloy.
‘If it’s not the cosplaying piss of gagshit himself,’ Idan snarled. ‘I eviscerated your attack dog, so you being here means you’re a sucker for punishment.’
‘The hunter was only a prelude,’ Ty gloated, but Idan caught the rage on his face at having lost his lead spear in his war on Idan.
He held a glowing silver cylinder in the shape of a cigar, engraved with otherworldly symbols, his digit hovering over a button.
‘I’m upping the ante with a new toy some Sacran rogue merchant sold to me,’ the magnate sneered on. ‘It’s called the God-Eater, and I plan to have it extract your divine essence until you’re a husk of ashen flesh.’
He depressed the button with his thumb, and a wild, electric field expanded from the device.
It hit Idan like a storm, delivering a crushing anguish, transforming his blood to lead and his inner organs to shards of glass.
The agony was so massive, he let out a gasped groan as the harrowing pressure forced his knees into the ground.
Every circuit in his celestial biology shorted under the strain of the revocation beam.
‘Stop!’ Sheba cried out, rushing toward her man.
‘Nada, woman, you come close, and we both get eviscerated,’ Idan growled, reaching out a hand in agony to stay her.
She skidded to a halt, chest heaving, eyes glaring at Ty.
‘Ah, Miss Munene,’ Ty continued, eyes slicing to Sheba. ‘Your lover now, I suppose, god warrior? She dared to defy me, so now you get to watch her die.’
‘Don’t touch her,’ Idan grunted, the words dragging from the static in his brain and the thickness of his lips.
He fought the gravity of the field, his muscles twitching at the torturous level of the excruciating pulse, but to no avail.
‘Care for her that much, ay?’ Ty snarled.
He rushed forward and swung his armored hand out to grip Sheba’s shoulder, the hydraulic force of his suit immobilizing her.
She screamed as he squeezed her deltoid, almost breaking her bones.
Ty turned to Idan. ‘You’re immortal, so why give a fokk about this sack of flesh?’
Enraged, Idan forced his leaden limbs into motion, a surge of raw, desperate willpower overriding the dampening beam.
He lunged at speed to wrench Sheba from Ty’s grip, his fingers digging into Ty’s gaps in the black alloy armor to tear her free.
He hurled her into a dense cover of the brambles, ensuring her body hit the soft snow drift and earth behind the bush.
Ty roared in fury, raising the brass-cased cylinder in his hand and cranking up its power so that it pulsed with an unholy violet glow.
The implement released a ray of obsidian energy aimed at the center of Idan’s chest.
The God-Eater began to harvest his essence, dragging the divine aureate quintessence in ribbons of gold light from his veins and feeding it into the cold machine.
Idan groaned, falling on both knees now, as his celestial architecture crumbled, the furnace of his soul cooling into a void.
He stared at the necromantic runes etched into the device, his mind reeling.
Ty scoffed in his face. ‘You’re asking yourself where I got this little plaything? Like I said, from a Sacran emir on Galicia, like you, a fallen god. He deals in forbidden tech stolen from the tomb-moons of the outer rim. I’m beginning to get quite fond of it.’
Ty twisted a dial, ratcheting the pain to a torturous threshold.
Even more unimaginable agony bloomed, as though a thousand white-hot needles were flaying through Idan’s nervous system.
He collapsed onto his hands and knees, his strength evaporating.
His skin shed its bronze luster, turning the flat, dead hue of spent cinders.
The world blurred into a haze of static and sulfur as the God-Eater drained the last of his resistance.
Ty stepped over him, his boot heavy on Idan’s neck. ‘Tis a sight for sore eyes when a deity falls from glory,’ he sneered.
Movement flickered in the periphery.
Idan jolted as Sheba surged from the shadows of the brush, her eyes burning with a cold, focused rage.
She lunged forward, gripping a barbed, serrated shard of carbon fiber pried from one of the soldiers’ shattered chest plates.
With a wild battle cry, she swung her hand with the full payload of her desperation, sinking the black splinter deep into the unshielded joint of Ty’s neck seal.
Ty let out a pressurized hiss of shock, his hand letting go of the God-Eater to clamp onto his bleeding jugular.
The siphon beam flickered as the device fell to the ground.
Sheba grabbed the silver cylinder and shoved it into her back pocket.
The sudden release of its pressure acted as a stimulant to Idan’s dying core.
He found a reservoir of strength in the depths of his fury.
He rose from the dirt, a specter of ash and vengeance.
He seized Ty’s armored forearms in a grip that crushed the internal servos.
Idan dipped down and whispered into Ty’s stricken face, speaking with such cold malice that the magnate shuddered and shook.
‘I promised myself that when I got the chance, I’d slowly rip your limbs off, one by one, Ty. The day has arrived for your fokkin’ reckoning.’
With a twist of his lips, Idan began to dismantle the man piece by piece.
He tore the shielded metal limbs from their sockets, the sound of snapping hydraulics, bones, and the hiss of blood spraying in the air.
Ty’s screams came to an abrupt stop as Idan hauled the mangled torso down slope, toward the lip of the pit, the collapsed steam-driven drill excavated deep into the earth.
He delivered a final, crushing blow to the center of the helmet and sent the remains of the tyrant hurtling into the black, bottomless depths of the shaft.
In a heartbeat, the valley fell back into a horrific silence.
The only sounds remaining were the dying hiss of ruptured power cells from the scattered armor and Idan’s heavy, ragged breathing.
He staggered to Sheba and wrapped his arms around her.
Surrounded by carnage, he exhaled in relief that the only other heart left beating aside from his own was that of the woman he would scorch the universe for.