by Gage Lee
Minutes passed in a delicate dance that required me to constantly adjust my stance and position in the circle of spirits. I hardened my aura with aspects I stole from the creatures and relied on the Thief’s Shield to ward off the worst of the attacks my enemies launched from my blind side. That tactic allowed me to push my attack against the spirits, killing several of them and weakening their circle. It also cost me a dozen minor injuries to my back and legs.
In the midst of the battle, something grazed my core. It was a gentle touch, gone almost before I registered it. My brow furrowed at the distraction. I didn’t have time to worry about something so minor when I was surrounded by hungry spirits.
The spirits became cannier as the fight wore on. They faded away from my assaults and surged in to claw and bite in concentrated attacks that penetrated the Thief’s Shield. The painful injuries they inflicted slowed my reactions and forced me to spend precious jinsei to stop the bleeding and restore my flagging strength. A trio of the foul creatures slammed into my left leg, howling with glee when their concerted effort staggered me.
“You need to fight,” I shouted to Tycho. That last attack had nearly brought me to my knees. “I can’t kill them all on my own!”
“We’re trying,” the sage called back. “We were ambushed, and they drained the jinsei from several of us. The hungry spirits are consuming the sacred energy from the area faster than we can cycle it into cores.”
Oh. That sucked.
I hadn’t noticed the drain because I’d stolen power back from the Locust Court killers through my serpents and with my Thief’s Shield. While the monsters’ attacks had physically weakened me, they’d bolstered my stores of aspects and jinsei.
I’d have to carry the weight of the fight.
That called for a new strategy. The Thief’s Shield was a powerful defense that stole from the spirits when they attacked. The sacred energy and aspects I gained from it let me fill my jinsei channels to harden my body against damage and accelerate my reflexes, and the aspects further reinforced my aura to strengthen the technique. Unfortunately, my enemies had figured out they could overwhelm the Shield with brute force.
I changed tactics, dropping back into a defensive posture, my fusion blade held before me. A series of wide sweeps cleared a gap in the circle of spirits, and I darted through it to put my back against a wall. My new position traded mobility for a narrower battle front. The spirits had to come at me head-on, now, and that meant they’d have to get past my weapon to do any damage.
The Locust Court proved too smart to fall for that. They pulled back into a cordon of teeth and claws, then raised their heads and howled a repetitive series of alien syllables. The sound tore at my ears and nerves, and even my Eclipse nature recoiled at the horrifying cry.
At first, I thought it was some sort of assault. Then the orange borders around the portal grew brighter and widened.
They weren’t attacking. They’d called for reinforcements.
Locust Court monsters poured through the portals into the courtroom. Their chitinous forms crashed into dead bodies and splintered furniture in a cacophonous hailstorm. They howled eagerly, ready to rip and rend.
“Jace,” Tycho called, his voice weak and ragged, barely audible over the battle cries of our enemies, “there are too many. They’re draining our jinsei faster than we can replenish it. Get out of here.”
“Too late,” I shouted back.
The wall of spirits around me had doubled, then tripled in strength. There was nowhere for me to run even if I wanted to. This was my last stand.
Last stand...
I remembered one of the stories I’d read about the Utter War. How a single Eclipse Warrior had held off unit after unit of Locust Court killers to save a retreating force of Resplendent Sun shock troopers. How had they done it?
A spirit leaped at my head, jaws wide and claws stretched out to flay my skull open, and I slashed its head off its shoulders. A cloud of jinsei blinded me for a moment, and two more of the creatures took advantage, rushing my flanks. The one on my right screamed when I cut its arm off, and it staggered away with sacred energy spurting from the wound. The one on my left, though, got past my blade and punched through the Thief’s Shield to open a shallow gash across my ribs.
The pain drove me back to the wall behind me, my hand clutched over the injury. It burned like fire. My Eclipse nature urged me to tear and shred. Nothing would have made me happier, but all I could think of was healing the pain with a flow of jinsei through my channels.
The spirits smelled weakness and moved in. Their mere presence drained the jinsei from the air and pulled threads of it loose from my core. There were too many. I needed more sacred energy to fight them. I activated my Borrowed Core technique to connect to more creatures, and a cascade of thoughts clicked into place.
That technique bound itself to cores, not creatures.
If I wasn’t careful, I could drain the cores I connected to.
I understood how that Eclipse Warrior had held off the Locust Court.
The technique didn’t want to do what I needed, and it took me precious seconds to force it to make the first connection.
The monsters had evolved to become the most efficient and ruthless devourers of jinsei in the many worlds. Their cores were perfect at taking jinsei into themselves, wasting not a drop of the precious energy.
They had no defense as a thread of sacred energy from my core slid into the closet Locust Court spirit. The Borrowed Core connection snapped into place.
The spirit was mine.
The monsters screeched when my sacred energy touched them, furious at the unaccustomed violation. Ten of the creatures were mine, then twenty, thirty. My breath became a whirling blur of power through our united cores. Jinsei filled me to bursting, and aspects of hunger and horror clotted in my aura. And when I thought I’d reached my limit, my advanced adept core proved me wrong.
I bound forty, then fifty of the spirits to my core.
Every breath I took drained more of my foes. The first batch vanished in puffs of gray dust, and I lashed fifty more to my technique. My core swelled and stretched to accommodate the sacred energy I’d stolen.
The spirits panicked and howled for more of their brothers and sisters to come aid them. There was no answer.
Realizing what they faced, the monsters screamed and scrambled away from me. I consumed more and more of them, until my aura couldn’t hold any more aspects, and the power I stole leaked away and evaporated into nothingness. My Eclipse nature gloated over the destruction, encouraging me to kill more, to take them all. For once, I didn’t fight it.
The sages let their barrier fall and greedily cycled the jinsei that had returned to the room as I mopped up the battle’s remnants. The weight of the powerful Empyreals’ attention crashed against my aura, then slipped away like a wave pounding against a beach. Their curiosity slowly turned to fear and confusion, and I wondered if any of them really understood what, exactly, I was.
And what they’d do about it once they did.
The last of the spirits screeched and came apart. I’d done it. I’d destroyed the spirits and saved the survivors of the initial assault.
The dark urge I’d unleashed, though, was still inside me. It wanted more. The death and hunger aspects and jinsei I’d stolen didn’t satisfy it. Those had only whetted its appetite. It needed to consume the bubbling vibrancy of life.
This was what the Empyreals feared. A hunger that couldn’t be stopped. A threat that made the Locust Court look like nothing more than a passing annoyance. The dark urge told me I could kill everyone in the room. I could devour the elders and the sages. All I had to do was let it go. It would do the rest.
“Mr. Warin,” Tycho said, his voice tinged with the faintest threads of concern, “thank you for what you did here. Are you quite all right?”
My teeth ached with the need to bite and tear. The Empyreals before me would fill me with power. Maybe enough to advance my core to the dis
ciple level. Or further. It would be so easy...
“No,” I whispered. “That isn’t happening.”
It took a monumental effort of will to shut down the feral greed for life that flowed from the dark urge in a heady stream. I clenched my fists, gritted my teeth, and begged the Empyrean Flame for the self-control to beat this thing inside me. Finally, I trusted myself to speak.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just need a few minutes.”
I turned away from the sages, my eyes locked on the far wall of the courtroom. The patterns of blood there seemed to shift and writhe, though I knew that was impossible. It was just my supernatural senses showing me the churning currents of jinsei that teemed within the red splatters. They were merely echoes of life, the remnants of the people they’d spilled from.
Emergency personnel and guards burst into the courtroom behind me. They went to work with quiet efficiency, searching the fallen to separate those who could be helped from those who were far beyond the reach of technological or mystical medicine. Guards shouted over the clatter of their beeping and flashing equipment, and the confusing flood of Japanese made it hard for me to concentrate on keeping my Eclipse nature at bay.
“Leave him be. He saved us,” Tycho said, and then let fly a string of syllables in a language the guards could understand. For once, I was grateful to have him speak for me.
Despite the tragedy that had occurred, a sense of relief flooded the room. There’d been an attack, but now it was over. The bad guys had been driven back, and the good guys could start putting the pieces of their worlds back together. It wouldn’t be easy, and the survivors would remember what had happened here for a very long time. For the moment, though, we were safe.
So why couldn’t I relax?
I pushed back against my Eclipse nature. Its hungry demands had distracted me from the real danger.
The droning hum I’d heard during my mad rush to the courtroom hadn’t stopped.
It was growing stronger.
“Do you hear that?” I asked no one in particular.
I turned to face the disaster. Emergency medical technicians and jinsei artists loaded the fallen onto gurneys or into body bags. The courthouse guards stood around, looking ineffectual now that there was no immediate danger to deal with.
“Hear what?” Tycho asked from his position near the witness stand. It looked like Grayson wasn’t dead, which was a relief. I wanted to see him punished for what he’d done.
“That humming noise,” I said, distracted by the sensation of someone peering at my core. It was a soft touch, but annoying. “You can’t hear it?”
“No,” Tycho said warily.
Orange light poured into the courtroom accompanied by an earsplitting shriek. A blast of freezing wind poured over my back and whipped my hair around my head. My Eclipse nature howled, a joyous sound of recognition.
Oh, no.
Something heavy whipped past me and smashed into the wood next to me. Splinters of wood flew in every direction, and I threw an arm up to protect my eyes from the shrapnel.
“You fool,” a voice snarled behind me. “How could you betray us?”
The room erupted in confusion. The civilians screamed in panic and horror. The sages shouted to one another in a cacophony of languages I didn’t understand. I wasn’t sure if they’d gathered their strength enough after the spirit ambush to be of any use against this new threat.
How could we have been so stupid?
The Lost
MY SERPENTS BURST FROM my core to deflect an attack my Eclipse nature detected, and I spun to face my attacker, fusion blade still in my hand.
He was tall and thin, completely naked save for wisps of sacred energy that encircled his body in hazy clouds. His eyes were the same black voids as mine. Like the woman who’d killed the Death Weaver and Henry in my cottage, he was completely bald, and his white scalp gleamed in the orange light from the portal he’d opened in the courtroom. The air cracked and hissed around him as he pulled streams of jinsei into his aura.
“I didn’t betray you,” I said. “But I can’t let you destroy those who did.”
“Let me?” The man laughed, a sound as sharp and jagged as breaking glass. “We’ve planned this since before the Empyreals turned on us. You can no more stop what is coming than you could halt a tidal wave approaching a distant shore.”
Even if he was right, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.
My aura was still filled with the aspects I’d stolen from the Locust Court. I fed them into my serpents, amplifying them again and again as I surged across the courtroom. I leaped into the air, clearing the fallen seats, and raised my long-hilted blade above my head to split my foe in half. The jinsei I’d shoved into my channels moved me faster than humanly possible. The world blurred around me as I sped toward my target like a bladed missile.
The Lost slipped out of my path with surprising ease, and his aura flared out toward me as I landed next to him.
My Eclipse core yowled and drove jinsei into my legs. Its raw survival instinct sent me hurtling away from the aura before it could drain me dry. The dark urge made it clear that any contact with the Lost’s aura would leave me an empty husk. As powerful as I was, this man was far stronger.
The Lost hadn’t expected me to evade his aura, and his moment of surprise gave me time to act. I thrust my blade toward his exposed left side, burning more of my jinsei to speed and strengthen my attack. The weapon’s tip tore through my enemy’s alabaster skin, revealing a strip of striated muscle that glistened like wet ivory.
My foe spun away from the attack at a blinding speed. An arc of straw-colored blood hung in the air behind him for a moment like a string of gemstones from a broken necklace. He lashed out with one hand and caught my blade before I could recoil. A wave of cold rushed up the blade toward me. The Lost smiled a shark’s grin. The instant that cold touched my flesh, I was a dead man. He’d devour my core. He was sure he’d won.
And, if I’d been anyone else, he would have.
I banished the blade, and my enemy’s technique snapped closed around nothing.
The Lost staggered back, stunned by his failed technique.
“The final assault is coming even now.” He stepped to one side, and we circled one another warily. “You showed us the way. Your light is what guided us through the darkness. Don’t stand in our way now. Accept what you are. Stand beside us, and rule over these lesser creatures.”
He swept a hand toward the sages, who had gathered in a defensive ring around Grayson Bishop. The ex-headmaster was conscious, though he looked too weak to do anything but watch in horror as the scene unfolded before him. The other sages weren’t handling this much better. They hadn’t even raised a defense, and their cores flickered within them like dying embers.
The Lost was ripping jinsei out of everything and everyone nearby, except for me. The civilians had collapsed to their knees, their eyes fluttering as they struggled to escape from his dread grasp.
If I didn’t do something soon, they’d all die.
“You know this isn’t right,” I said and summoned my blade once more. The hunger and terror aspects I’d stolen from the Locust Court clung to its surface in a mottled black pattern that writhed like drops of ink on a turbulent stream. “What they did to you was wrong. But destroying everything that you once defended won’t fix that. It will only make us all vulnerable to the next attack.”
“Attack of what?” the Lost asked with a smile. “The Locust Court is no threat to those like us, Jace. Do you think the hungry spirits would have served as our vanguard if we were still enemies?”
Images danced unbidden in my thoughts. I didn’t know where they came from, but I knew they were true. Pale men and women wandering through a night-black wilderness, hungry and empty, desperate, willing to do anything to survive.
The Lost had struck a deal with the Locust Court. In return for safety in the worlds beyond the Far Horizon, the exiled Eclipse Warriors would show humanity’s ancie
nt enemies how to find us again.
When I’d become an Eclipse Warrior, it had been a flare in the darkness. They’d followed the light back to Earth.
“No,” I said. “They’ll betray you. They’ll turn on all of us.”
“We’ve already been betrayed once,” my opponent said. “We were more careful this time. We’ve made arrangements that ensure we will not suffer the same fate again. The Court will serve us here, and we will aid them in their battles beyond the Far Horizon. Time has grown short, Jace. You must choose. Join your people, now, or die in this futile attempt to save a world that has been doomed for longer than any of us have been alive.”
I hung my head. It all seemed so pointless. I’d struggled and stolen and fought and suffered to finally be accepted into Empyreal society. And now that I finally had what I wanted, it was all going to be washed away.
Unless I joined the Lost.
Or beat them.
I whipped my arm forward, burning the last of my jinsei for one last attack. My fusion blade screeched through the air as it traveled toward the Eclipse Warrior. The black patterns on its surface blazed with an unnatural light, and the sharpened blade gleamed like a flash of sunlight in the desert.
The Lost was too slow to avoid this attack. The perfectly thrown weapon was on a direct course with his throat. It would punch through his neck and shatter his spine at the base of his skull. The pale fighter would die, and we could close the portal he’d opened. Whatever horrors were coming, I’d work with the sages to stop them.
I’d won.
Again.
Something brushed my core, twice, in quick succession. It distracted me enough that I missed what happened next.
There was a blur of motion and a metallic clang reverberated through the courtroom. My fusion blade vibrated where it had impaled itself in the wall, deflected by the Eclipse Warrior’s lightning-fast parry.