The Eighth Excalibur

by Luke Mitchell

  He tried to scramble back and reset, but the Knight stayed with him, raining strikes down like a vengeful god. He didn’t bother getting fancy. Didn’t even appear to be putting his back into it. He just threw one overhand strike after another, hammering Nate to the stone like a carpenter casually nailing down shingles.

  Playing with him, Nate realized through ragged breaths, beginning to lose his grip on the fear. Knocking him around like a toy soldier. He’d known he was outmatched, but this...

  SLAM.

  Do not give up, Nathaniel.

  SLAM.

  Do not give in.

  SLAM.

  Remember who you fight for.

  Gritting his teeth, Nate gathered what little juice he had and threw himself into a tumbling backward roll. He popped to his feet, preparing to strike, but the Black Knight was already there, raising his greatsword with fearless certainty. The dark blade burst into hellish flames, and Nate’s insides went cold. He threw up sword and shield, bracing himself with everything he had left. The flaming sword crashed into his defenses, knocking him to the ground hard enough to crack the stone. Head spinning, he raised his sword to defend against the next blow… and gaped at the glowing red edge of the dagger in front of him.

  The Black Knight had cleaved his sword clean through.

  Something closed around his throat. The Black Knight’s hand, he registered, still staring in helpless shock at the severed blade. Then the world spun and exploded with bone shaking impact and cresting waves of pain.

  He was pinned to a stone column, his dwindling spots of vision informed him. Held aloft by the throat crushing grip of the Black Knight, the debris of his impact raining down upon them. The dark titan didn’t seem to notice the fist-sized hunk of rock that struck his helmet. He just calmly slung his greatsword across his back with a magnetic thrum, then reached down and plucked what remained of Nate’s useless sword from his hand.

  Only what remained wasn’t quite useless, Nate realized with a sickened twinge, as the Black Knight placed the glowing tip of the severed blade almost gently to the point just below his heart.

  He grabbed onto the Knight’s thick wrist with both hands, knowing deep in his racing heart he didn’t have the strength to stop this monster.

  “Do not be afraid,” the Black Knight said quietly, almost gently.

  But Nate was afraid, looking into the terrible darkness of those bottomless eye slots. More afraid than he’d ever been in his life.

  He kicked and cried, vision waning, dimly aware of Ex shouting him on as he clawed desperately at the Black Knight’s sword hand. He wasn’t ready to die. He wasn’t. He wanted to cry. Wanted to scream.

  Then the Knight’s crushing hand tensed on his throat, and something cold and brilliantly sharp pierced straight into his heart.

  43

  Fire and Rain

  For one merciful moment, it almost seemed as if getting stabbed in the heart wasn’t going to be nearly as agonizing as it should’ve been. Then that cold, foreign length of invading steel ripped through some inner barrier, and the pain ignited through every inch of his being.

  Nate rocked his head back and screamed. He tried to fight back, tried one last time to kick the Black Knight away from him, but his limbs had already gone weak, lifeless. The blade twisted in his chest, the movement surprisingly painless and oddly… wriggling?

  N-N-Nathaniel… What… What is…

  With a supreme effort, Nate looked down through his spotted vision and saw two things that didn’t make any sense: the broken tip of his sword, still pressed to the exterior of his armor and decidedly not buried in his chest, and the armor itself, wriggling around the tip of the blade in spasmodic jitters. Just like Iveera’s had been doing back on the ship.

  You must… stop him… Nathan—Agh!

  Whatever hit Ex hit Nate just as hard. The pain spiked, and he screamed again, bucking against the agony, worse than powerless to stop it. He couldn’t even twitch. It was like his armor had gone on full lockdown. He tried anyway, fighting hopelessly on even as the blinding pain wrapped around him, demanding that he stop.

  It was too much.

  He couldn’t have said how long he struggled, or even whether he was fully conscious for the duration. He was adrift on a red sea of agony behind his closed eyelids, lost in the depths so thoroughly that he couldn’t remember his own name.

  Then an explosive cracking sound split through his awareness, and he jerked back to the cathedral just as something detonated between him and the Black Knight. An indistinguishable blur of movement and pain later, Nate hit the stone floor with a crash, gasping for breath, completely disoriented. He tried to raise his head, blindly slapping around in a shallow pool of something wet and…

  He blinked around the cathedral, half-expecting to find himself lying in a pool of his own blood, panicked senses trying to catch up with the relevant facts. The wetness was cold. Ice cold. Inches of ice cold water sloshing across the sanctuary floor.

  Ocean water.

  He looked up just in time to see the metal leaflets extending to seal off the hemorrhaging section of the distant dome, then he traced the falling water down, rattled brain working for answers. Down, right to the Merlin.

  He’d never been so relieved to see anyone in his entire damn life.

  The wizard stood over the Black Knight, a gnarled staff in one hand, the other extended toward the dark titan, spindly fingers flexed. The Knight was on his knees, bound in a series of thick chains still actively lengthening from thin air, constricting about him like a nest of angry snakes.

  “You,” the Merlin said, so quietly Nate almost missed it.

  “Bastard,” the Black Knight growled in reply, straining against the chains.

  “Take the Beacon, lad,” the Merlin called toward Nate, his eyes not leaving the dark titan before him. “Take it and go now.”

  It was only then that he noticed the strained look on the old wizard’s face. The Merlin looked like hell, ratty robes even dirtier and more tattered than the last time Nate had seen, face gaunt, eyes sunken.

  “Go!” the wizard cried, snapping him back to attention.

  He turned for the wrought iron shrine at the head of the hall, not knowing where it was he was supposed to go, not especially caring. The Beacon’s song intensified as he laid eyes on it, calling to him, and he scrambled to shaky feet, coaxing his battered body to move.

  “BASTARD!”

  The roar struck like a sonic bomb, shaking the walls and whipping Nate around just in time to see the Black Knight’s greatsword burst into flames, superheating the chains across his back like a plasma torch. With a wordless scream and a small explosion of red hot shrapnel, the dark titan burst free from the chains and leapt to his feet, dark eye slots blazing to life with crimson fire.

  Faster than Nate could track, the Knight had closed on the Merlin, flaming greatsword already in hand. He brought the weapon down in a mighty two-handed blow leagues above anything he’d thrown at Nate. The Merlin caught the strike on his raised staff, and an explosion of flame ripped out across half the cathedral, blackening the stone around them and gushing over Nate’s armor for one terrifyingly hot second.

  “The Beacon, Nathaniel!” the Merlin shouted as the rush of flames cleared, blasting the Knight down the aisle with a thrumming open palm strike, then following up with an honest-to-god bolt of lightning from his staff.

  The lightning caught the Black Knight square in the chest and sent him rocketing into the rear wall so hard that Nate expected he might’ve punched clean through in the resultant explosion of dust and debris. When the dust cleared, though, the Knight was already back on his feet, so to speak—hovering calmly over the main aisle as if getting struck by wizard’s lightning was an everyday sort of thing.

  It was terrifying.

  Heeding the Merlin’s words, Nate turned for the Beacon and took off as fast as his legs would move. Ahead, the Beacon’s light intensified, its call quickening, the air itself seeming to
part before him, urging him on almost as if the thing wanted him to—

  “Get down!” the Merlin cried somewhere behind him.

  Nate jerked to a halt mid-step, too startled to immediately comprehend. Then the fiery-eyed Black Knight slammed down in front of him, hard enough to crater the dais steps underfoot, and Nate heeded the Merlin’s words for a second time.

  No sooner had he dropped than a bolt of lightning seared through the space his head had just occupied, raking tingling claws across his armored back and warping his helmet display with enough dancing discoloration and jitters that he must’ve mistaken what he saw next.

  Standing firm in the crater of his impact, the Black Knight caught the lightning blast right on the flat of his greatsword, barely even budging but to sweep one foot back and brace himself. Then he pointed the dark, crackling blade back at the Merlin, as if to return the favor.

  Nate stumbled to his feet without thinking, throwing both arms up and willing his shield into full deployment. The barrier sprang to life with the speed of a detonating bomb, rippling out from both forearms. And not a moment too soon.

  Lightning exploded from the Black Knight’s sword, punching into Nate’s shield and… dissipating?

  He stared at his hasty barrier, arms numb, the reek of ozone and burnt something almost as thick in the air as Nate’s own disbelief.

  Had he just caught lightning?

  I have you, little hobbit.

  For a second, Nate was too relieved to think straight. Then Ex gave a cry of warning, and the Black Knight flashed forward and drove a devastating kick into his shield.

  Nate wasn’t sure how the Merlin avoided getting bowled over by his resultant flight, but by the time he stopped skidding, bouncing, and splashing across the ocean-soaked floor enough to make sense of things again, the crashes of impact and crumbling stone told him the two were already locked in combat up by the Beacon shrine.

  He coughed, tasted blood, and tried to stand. His arms failed him. He tried again. The pain was distant—disembodied—but he could feel it there at the edges, shutting down control, demanding he lie still and stop this madness before he fell to literal pieces.

  It occurred to him he might be dying.

  Don’t be dramatic. I am mending what I can.

  Nate took a breath and tried again, this time managing to push up to his knees. The kicks. The falls. The super-powered body slams. How many times over would he have already been dead if it weren’t for Ex?

  You probably don’t want to know that right now.

  Ex was almost certainly right about that. He was thinking about making another try for his feet anyway when a pair of black boots winked into existence ahead. He looked up through the deepening dread in his gut. Up to those burning red eyes, and to the sight of the Black Knight raising his flaming sword to deliver the blow that even the Excalibur wouldn’t be able to put back together.

  He sagged down on his aching knees, no longer able to fight it.

  Then the Merlin appeared between them in a booming flash of light, and the Black Knight sucker punched him without a moment’s hesitation. Punched him so hard, so quickly, neither Nate nor the Merlin could seem to comprehend it. On the second punch, the Merlin staggered back into Nate. On the third blow, the Black Knight brought the pommel of his greatsword down on the Merlin’s bushy-haired head with skull-shattering force, and the wizard hit the wet stone floor like a limp sack of meat.

  A trap, Nate realized with a sickened feeling, as the Knight promptly waved a hand and dark chains sprang into existence, snaking the Merlin into a tight hog-tie. A trap baited and set by his own helpless, beaten body.

  The Black Knight knelt to add a gag and dark hood to the Merlin’s restraints, his movements brimming with a newfound energy—not excited, exactly, but satisfied. Reinvigorated. Like his plan was coming to perfect fruition.

  Nate glanced at the Beacon, still patiently hovering there in its shrine, then back to the Knight, and decided it didn’t matter what the titan’s plan had been. The bastard was distracted, which meant this was probably the only shot he had left. So, he focused everything he had on his blaster, and raised his wrist to take it.

  The Black Knight turned with eerily perfect timing and grace to palm the crackling blue blaster bolt Nate fired at the back of his head. Nate watched with a sinking heart, utterly defeated, as the blackened bastard’s gauntlet visibly channeled the crackling energy to one pointing fingertip, preparing to spit it right back.

  Then a copper blur streaked past and crashed into the Black Knight too hard for even his unstoppable ass to ignore.

  Iveera, Nate thought with a faint flicker of hope, just before they crashed clean through a stone column and slammed into the far wall long enough for him to get a good look. It didn’t last long before the Black Knight retaliated, and they fell into it properly.

  The fighting was breathtakingly fast. Too fast for Nate to follow. The pair blurred through the cathedral like a swift wind that shattered everything it touched, kicking up a steady spray of icy ocean water from the floor, sparking a gout of flame here, a rapid-fire crash of thundering impacts there. For a few seconds, he was kneeling helplessly at the eye of a raging storm. Then the hyperspeed fight yanked to a halt with a wet thunk, and he felt the first flicker of hope at the sight of Iveera’s spear buried deep in the Black Knight’s shoulder.

  She was actually doing it, he thought.

  Then the Black Knight threw himself further onto Iveera’s spear, caught her by the throat, and slammed her halfway through the adjacent stone column before Nate could so much as blink. The dark titan held the gorgon Knight aloft, pummeling her with a barrage of bone-crushing body shots. Nate clenched his teeth and clawed his way to his feet, desperate to help.

  Ahead, Iveera’s serpentine jin lashed out and caught the Black Knight’s wrist as he reached to dislodge the spear from his shoulder. She kneed him in the groin, and he pulled her close by the throat and jin and slammed her into the stone again, hard enough that the entire column shattered with a deep, resonant crack, and buried them both in a rain of rock and dust.

  Nate lurched forward on shaky feet, not really sure how anyone could’ve survived the downpour, yet unsurprised when his helmet vision showed movement in the resultant dust cloud. The two Knights emerged still struggling, the Black Knight’s helm now snared tight by Iveera’s jin right along with his hand. He released her throat, thrusting his unbound hand backward. Across the cathedral, his greatsword burst free from a pile of rubble, rocketing straight for his outstretched hand.

  “NO!” Nate yelled, throwing himself forward and gunning his boot thrusters, not a thought in his head but to tackle the blackened bastard away from Iveera.

  But the Knights both saw him coming, and they were faster.

  Iveera retracted her jin grip and ripped free of the Black Knight as he spun to meet Nate. The dark titan caught him by the throat, effortlessly absorbing his headlong thruster charge with one hand even as he caught his speeding greatsword in the other.

  Nate might’ve been dead then if Iveera hadn’t ripped her spear free from the dark titan’s shoulder and taken another try.

  Her spear stabbed through nothing but thin air. It wasn’t until Nate hit the ground, gasping for breath, that he understood why. The Black Knight was already halfway across the cathedral, scooping the Merlin’s limp form up by the chains and turning for the dais at the head of the hall. Another flash step, and he was at the shrine with the Merlin, reaching a black gauntlet for the whirling Beacon.

  Nate watched in a helpless stupor as Iveera leapt forward, rocketing toward the altar. Then the Black Knight palmed the Beacon, and a tsunami of wind and raw force detonated through the cathedral, hurling Iveera back and slapping Nate several splashing bounces across the stone.

  “Blind fools,” came the Black Knight’s voice, carrying unnaturally on the Beacon’s whipping winds. “Every last one of you.”

  Then the maelstrom died, and the Black Knight was gone,
along with the Merlin and the Beacon.

  Impossible, Ex whispered.

  Nate only stared at the empty shrine, mind blank, barely even aware of Iveera landing softly in the shallow waters beside him. When he finally tore his eyes away to look up at her, she was fixed on the dais too, perfectly still, jin pressed flat to her head and expression safely hidden behind her faceplate.

  He wanted to ask her what had just happened—where the Black Knight had gone, what the hell they were supposed to do now—but something about the way she was standing there told him he wasn’t the only one who was lost right then.

  He was still trying to get the words out anyway when a faint cracking sound trickled down from the dome, horribly crisp on the unnaturally still air.

  “Iveera?” he heard himself croak.

  Another crack rang down as he raised his eyes, and another. More of them. Accelerating. He could see them now, spiderwebbing out through the stone like a fractured window under too much load.

  I think perhaps we should leave.

  He opened his mouth to suggest as much. A deep, reverberating crack split the air before he could, thin streams of water spouting from a dozen different points on the dome.

  “Oh fuck,” Nate whispered.

  Then the lost city of Atlantis began raining down on their heads.

  44

  Collapse

  Iveera didn’t bother with words, just hefted him effortlessly to his feet and dragged him rather violently along toward the cathedral doors until he got himself under control enough to follow her lead. Even then, she didn’t let go. Spurred on by the heavy splashing thud of falling stone somewhere behind, Nate didn’t argue.

  It was only when they reached the open doors that Iveera slowed, drawing to a halt with a frustrated hiss. Outside, water was falling on the city of Atlantis in too many places to count—a streaming trickle here, and fire hydrant jet stream there. Nate listened to the dome’s spreading song of cracking glass in mesmerized horror, recalling what Ex had said about the Beacon potentially being the one thing that’d kept this city standing for the past thousand years.