Valen didn’t wait for his knights to retreat back into formation.
He had passed through the tattered remnants of his own soldiers with his blade already lifted, trailing golden light along its length in a slow, creeping glow that dulled the torches lining the chamber walls.
Any pride that might have been bruised by the way debris had caught and scraped along his breastplate was swiftly buried under the impression he intended to leave large enough that all who witnessed it might remember it.
“This ends now,” Valen’s voice rang clear over the guardian’s grating snarl, and he drove the flat of his palm forward, cutting a solar disc of light through the very air.
The guardian’s sternum caved inward.
A scattering of splintered bone and rusted chain links shot outward in all directions, and the concussive force that followed sent furniture, screaming guides, an already wounded scout vessel hurtling backward against the stone floor in a thunderous explosion of shattered furniture and panicked yells.
[WARNING: Catastrophic Impact Sustained.]
[Spinal Fracture Detected.
Vessel Structural Decay: 71% → 89%.]
Kaelen didn’t feel the force of the impact, not really.
The dull, wet echo of a final, fatal crack reverberated up Corin’s spine and settled in his bones somewhere behind Kaelen’s borrowed ribs as a condemnation.
Eighty-nine.
Kaelen curled weakly against the floor, a hand already slipping from his arm and a second clinging by little more than nerves that refused to let go, and tried to focus past the sting in his lungs.
This vessel’s failed, this vessel’s not going to make it.
Not eventually.
Now.
Whatever happens next, it happens in the next several minutes or it happens in a new vessel.
“Confirmed,” Nix said, and didn’t bother disguising the grim note in her voice.
“Vessel failure is imminent regardless of further injury.
I recommend objective completion must be prioritized.”
Just working on it.
Kaelen watched through the ringing in his ears and the gray static smudging the edges of his vision as the guardian’s great bulk finally pitched backward, chains scraping uselessly against the stone floor as it collapsed in on itself.
Valen stood, panting, over the wreckage with a still glowing sword in one hand and a thin ribbon of blood carefully running down the side of his other arm.
A gash that hadn’t opened his eye to the fight.
Real blood.
High-tier, divine tipped, all the things Kaelen had observed from a careful, fearful distance over the past weeks.
Dripping, drop after excruciating drop, from the end of Valen’s forefinger to the stone floor no more than six feet distant.
Six feet.
Kaelen’s entire being focused on that distance, that space between him and the town square where he was planning to be dead within the hour.
Six feet between the living and the dead.
Standing wasn’t an option.
Not with a spine snapped in at least two places and a good arm gone.
Crawling was, however, and was a remarkably unremarkable thing to do in a room full of soldiers and celebration and blood.
Kaelen gritted his teeth and pushed himself forward just as another wave of vertigo threatened to send him into another fit of unconsciousness.
[Vessel Motor Function: 19% and falling.]
Doesn’t matter.
Nineteen percent is enough to get six feet.
It took every ounce of willpower to get the first inch.
Every scrap of determination to get the second and third and fourth.
The strain of pushing his one remaining hand against the blood slicked stone sent fresh waves of static electricity lancing up and down Kaelen’s failing vision, and somewhere behind him Talia’s voice rose in frantic panic, calling his name and cursing at the same time, too far away and too preoccupied with keeping herself alive to come to his aid.
Good.
Stay there.
Whatever happens, you don’t need to see it.
Kaelen reached the blood pool just as the final drop fell from the tip of Valen’s arm, the Knight-Commander turning away already to accept the praise of one surviving knight who had barely managed to live through the battle.
Kaelen pressed his remaining hand against the stones.
[Ding!
High-Tier Divine Bloodline Detected.]
[Analyze Composition?]
Yes.
Of course I want to know what kind of blood–
[Analysis Initiated: 4%…
11%…]
[Estimated Analysis Duration: 90 seconds.]
Ninety seconds.
Kaelen’s stomach turned over and over again as he carefully shifted his fingers.
Ninety seconds lying perfectly still in a room full of people who would take far too long to notice that one of the scouts currently laying motionless two feet from the edge of this pool of blood was supposed to be screaming in agony.
“Interface diagnostics confirm analysis functions remain operational, even despite prior feedback damage,” Nix said, at least, offering him the small mercy of that much.
“Evolution and skill selection remains locked and Passive data collection is unaffected.”
Whatever it is, I’ll take it.
Thank you.
[Analysis: 27%…
41%…]
The blood under his fingers was warmer than it had any right to be, humming with something that reminded him, unpleasantly, of music at too high a pitch.
He knew, in some fundamental way, what the host who had given this blood to him had gone through to ascend beyond this petty ceiling of mortality, and why they had come to this place seeking purpose beyond blood and bone.
[Analysis: 58%…
73%…]
Come on.
Come on, come on–
A shadow fell across Kaelen.
Kaelen’s borrowed eyes tracked slowly up through the static in his vision to find Selene watching him with a circlet of silver hair loose around her shoulders and a slender dagger already in her grip, the sharp angle of her jaw set in something that might have been sympathy if not for the sheer exhaustion in her gaze.
She was tired.
Tired of this, tired of the night, of the deaths and the fighting and the screaming that had filled these halls for the past several hours.
She had lived through one tragedy already and she was watching another unfold with nothing but the thinly veiled patience of someone who wanted it to be over.
“You’re finished,” she said, almost kindly.
“No sense in letting the infection set in slowly when I can end it quickly.
Hold still.”
The dagger pressed against his neck.
[Analysis: 84%…
91%…]
Not now.
Not when I’m this close…
Kaelen’s remaining arm wasn’t quick enough to stop him.
His legs didn’t obey.
Every last scrap of motor function that the System had left him was currently engaged in keeping that second hand pressed against the blood pool while the second his heart beat out its final few seconds.
[Vessel Motor Function: 6%.]
Selene’s blade caught the firelight, the angle of it tipped just so to cut through the fabric of Corin’s ruined skull and–
[Analysis: 98%…
100%.]
Kaelen was dead.