Chapter 6
His left arm was a slab of dead meat.
Drystan Harrow stood over the cratered ash, the deafening echo of the kinetic blast still ringing in his ears.
The heavy brass plating of the Glitched Weave-Gauntlet strapped to his forearm was warped and smoking, the enchanted needles buried in his flesh radiating a sickening, numb heat.
He tried to clench his fingers. Nothing happened.
The ligaments were completely torn, severed by the impossible recoil of parrying a hard-light halberd.
The corporate ghost in his mind waited for the world to pause. It waited for the executioners to drop their weapons in awe of his overwhelming power. It waited for a cutscene, a reprieve, a chance to hit the pause menu and catch his breath.
Kaelen-D?r did not offer victory screens.
The illusion that he could fix his problems with a single, dramatic show of force was violently pulled out from under him.
The two remaining Luminous executioners did not mourn their fallen comrade crumpled against the petrified ironwood tree.
They did not hesitate. Their smooth, featureless crystalline visors simply tilted, recalculating the threat level of the anomaly before them.
"Target localized," one of them synthesized, the Eldritch-Cant grinding like shattered glass in Drystan’s skull. "Engage cross-strike protocol."
They moved with terrifying, mechanical synchronization.
Drystan’s eyes widened. Pure, unadulterated panic flooded his nervous system, momentarily drowning out the excruciating agony of his broken rib.
He had no weapon. He had one functioning arm.
He was a man who used to get anxious filling out tax forms, currently staring down fourteen feet of combined, genetically engineered muscle and humming lethality.
The executioner on the left thrust his halberd forward, a blinding spear of concentrated hard-light aimed directly at Drystan’s sternum.
Drystan threw his weight backward, his heavy leather boots slipping wildly in the thick, calcified ash.
He fell hard onto his back, the breath rushing from his lungs in a ragged gasp.
The blade of pure light sheared through the empty air where his chest had been a fraction of a second prior, the heat so intense it singed the silver-white hair falling across his face.
The air tasted intensely of melted brass and charred sage.
Get up, get up, get up! his mind screamed.
He rolled frantically to the right, burying his face in the white dust just as the second executioner brought his halberd down in a crushing vertical chop. The blade struck the bedrock beneath the ash, sending a geyser of white powder and shattered stone directly into Drystan’s eyes.
He was blind. He was suffocating. He scrambled backward like a terrified animal, his right hand clawing at the dirt.
His attempt to play the arrogant villain was over. The rug had been yanked, leaving him entirely exposed to the brutal, visceral reality of the Arch-Realm. He couldn't talk his way out of this. He couldn't bluff. If he didn't find a way to kill them, he was going to die in the dirt.
A heavy, golden boot stepped onto the hem of his blood-red duster, pinning him to the ground.
Drystan blinked rapidly, clearing the stinging dust from his icy gray eyes. The executioner towered over him, the hard-light halberd raised high against the bruised purple canvas of the twilight sky. The humming frequency of the weapon reached a fever pitch.
This was it. The execution mandate fulfilled.
Suddenly, the ambient temperature plummeted. The scent of charred sage was violently wiped away, replaced by the suffocating, heavy odor of dry rot and frozen soil.
"Move!" a raspy, breathless voice shrieked.
Nymeria Shade threw herself into the fray.
She did not look like a helpless victim.
She looked like a cornered apex predator.
Her torn black velvet corset was smeared with ash, her extraordinarily large bust heaving with absolute exertion.
She had dragged herself from the dirt, her bare, bleeding knees shaking, but her hands were thrust forward, her fingers hooked like talons.
She wasn't trying to blast the executioner backward. She knew her chaotic twilight magic was too weak for a kinetic strike against their armor.
Instead, she weaponized the environment.
A jagged, liquid shadow erupted from the base of the petrified ironwood tree.
It snaked across the white ash with terrifying speed and slammed directly into the executioner’s armored right knee.
The twilight magic acted as a localized absolute zero.
The heavy golden plates of the knee joint instantly frosted over, encased in a thick, creeping layer of black ice.
The executioner’s forward momentum was violently arrested.
As he brought the halberd down, his frozen knee locked entirely.
With a sickening sound of groaning metal and snapping synthetic tendons, the massive zealot pitched forward, losing his balance and crashing heavily into the ash beside Drystan.
It was a messy, desperate synergy.
Drystan didn't pause to thank her. The hesitation that had plagued him in the damp corridor was gone, burned away by the sheer proximity of death.
He ripped his coat free from beneath the fallen executioner’s boot and scrambled to his knees. He couldn't use his left hand. The glitched Weave-Gauntlet was dead weight. He needed a weapon, and he needed it now.
His right hand flew across his chest, his fingers scrabbling blindly against the thick leather pouches of his alchemical bandolier. He bypassed the empty slots where he had kept the raw Memoria Cores. He found a heavy, cylindrical glass vial.
It was the beast-blood. The dark, viscous fluid he had painstakingly harvested from the slain Ironwood Chimera back in the starting courtyards, mixed with traces of raw, unrefined aether.
The executioner was already pushing himself up, his golden gauntlets planting firmly in the ash, the hard-light halberd humming as it swept horizontally toward Drystan’s waist.
Drystan didn't try to dodge. He threw his entire body weight forward, diving inside the arc of the massive weapon.
His shoulder slammed into the executioner’s armored chest plate. The impact drove the breath from Drystan’s lungs and ground his broken rib against his sternum. He bit through his lower lip to keep from screaming, tasting a fresh flood of warm copper.
With his functional right hand, he drove the glass vial directly into the narrow, exposed gap between the executioner's featureless crystalline visor and the heavy golden gorget protecting his neck.
Drystan didn't just place it there. He smashed it.
He brought the heel of his hand down on the thick glass. The vial shattered. Razor-sharp shards of glass bit deeply into the meat of Drystan’s palm, but the contents—the thick, highly volatile mixture of chimera blood and raw mana—poured directly into the executioner’s helmet.
The chemical reaction was instantaneous and horrifying.
The raw aether did not burn; it mutated.
The beast-blood acted as a corrosive catalyst against the pure light magic of the Luminous armor. A violent, localized hiss filled the air. Thick, bubbling black smoke poured from the seams of the visor.
The executioner dropped his halberd. The weapon hit the ash and instantly deactivated, the blade of light vanishing with a soft pop.
The massive zealot fell to his back, his heavy golden gauntlets clawing frantically at his own helmet.
He didn't scream—the synthesized voice box only emitted a terrifying, high-pitched screech of digital static as the corrosive alchemy ate through his genetically engineered flesh.
Drystan rolled away, clutching his bleeding right hand to his chest.
He scrambled backward on his heels, his chest heaving, his icy gray eyes wide with shock. He watched the massive, invincible monster writhe in the dirt, the golden armor buckling and melting under the sheer, visceral violence of his makeshift bomb.
It was ugly. It lacked all the elegance of the magical duels he had imagined in his old life. He felt a wave of profound nausea wash over him. He gagged, spitting a mouthful of blood and bile into the white dust.
I did that, his mind whispered, the horror absolute. I just melted a man's face.
There was no returning to the cubicle now. The bridge to his peaceful, cowardly life had just been burned to ash.
"Behind you!" Nymeria’s raspy voice cracked.
Drystan whipped his head around.
The third and final executioner was charging. He had bypassed Nymeria entirely, recognizing the heavily bleeding, gasping anomaly on the ground as the primary threat. The hard-light halberd was raised, humming with the promise of a swift decapitation.
Drystan had nothing left. His left arm was paralyzed. His right hand was shredded by broken glass. His bandolier was empty of offensive reagents. His lungs burned, and his vision was swimming with dark, encroaching spots.
He braced himself for the end.
Suddenly, the grand portcullis on the far side of the courtyard—the heavy rusted iron gate Drystan had slid under minutes ago—exploded outward.
BOOM.
The deafening crash was accompanied by a shower of twisted iron shrapnel and pulverized stone. The courtyard trembled violently beneath their feet. The final executioner halted his charge, his featureless visor snapping toward the cloud of dust billowing from the archway.
From the shadows of the corridor emerged a nightmare of living stone.
The Inquisitor-Gargoyle had broken through.
It dragged its massive, articulated obsidian wings across the broken iron, its heavy stone joints grinding and shrieking. The vertical slit on its featureless face wept thick, viscous black fluid.