“I’m...not sure,” I answered, propping myself up on my elbows and wincing as the burning under my skin increased in intensity. “How long has it been? What happened to me?”
“It’s only been a few minutes,” Lia explained, leaning in close to inspect my eyes. She grabbed my chin and turned my head side to side, continuing the check-up as she spoke. “The Strategist is leaving the city tonight. He said that ‘his part to play is over for now, but your work has now truly begun.’ Before he left, he told all the men that anybody who wanted to ‘take the next step towards a brighter future’ should stay here, and their ‘improvements’ would come soon.”
I scanned out over the plaza again and found that at least fifty men had stayed behind after the rally had ended, waiting for their promised “improvements.” My jaw clenched as I pictured them all transforming into mindless Thralls, with their grotesque purple eyes all staring directly at me. Somewhere in the back of my head, I heard my own voice whisper to me. They all deserve to suffer.
There was a tangible snap at the base of my neck, and the world around me flickered and changed. My surroundings faded to black and white, but the entire room sharpened into unbelievable focus; Lia and Val were both outlined with a vibrant red, and their weapons burned brightly against the drab backdrop around them. The pain that had been consuming my body vanished all at once and left me feeling in near perfect condition, apart from a tingling sensation in my right hand.
“We cannot let the Strategist escape,” Val stated. “Though it might mean a mad dash through their defenses, it is the only way to ensure that—” Her thought was cut off by a round of gasps from all of us as I held my hand out before me.
Jagged black lines scarred my skin, slowly crawling from my fingertips up to the palm and back of my hand. Faint wisps of dark smoke seeped out from the marks, and licks of familiar black flame danced across the surface of my skin. Val sat transfixed as her eyes widened, while Lia reached out towards my burning hand with terrible recognition in her eyes. I threw myself backwards, spinning the right side of my body away from my companions.
My voice echoed in the back of my head again, louder than before. Kill them for what they did to you. The burning in my hand surged at the thought, and I felt the black energy crackle up past my wrist. “Stay back,” I whispered desperately. Whatever part of me had caused the dark fire was growing in strength, and it began to take a more conscious effort to hold the flames at bay. “Please, stay back.”
Lia’s hands trembled, still outstretched towards me but no longer moving forward. “Lux, I don’t understand...what’s happening?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that we’re running out of time.” With my good hand, I reached down into the pouch on my belt and retrieved the blue and silver orbs. “If we go out and fight our way through to the statehouse, they’ll have the building locked down by the time we make it there, and the Strategist will escape. You two need to make it inside before that happens.”
There was sadness in Val’s eyes as she nodded to me. Lia looked between the two of us, her brow furrowed. “What do you mean, the two of us? You’re staying here?” The desperation grew in her eyes as she stared me down. “You can’t go out there alone! That’s suicide!”
“No,” I countered, “it’s our best chance to succeed. It’ll be easier for you to find the Strategist if their attention is focused on me.” I looked back to my right arm and found my bracer wreathed in black flame up to my elbow. “I can’t come with you. Not like this.”
“Whatever’s happening to you, we can get through it together! You don’t have to give in to the darkness!” Lia’s voice rose from a furtive whisper to a weakly suppressed cry. “I won’t let you leave us!”
I smiled at her, one last time, then crushed the silver orb against the ground in front of me. A violent hiss filled the room as thick grey smoke billowed up from beneath my hand, quickly obscuring our surroundings and rushing out the window. “You promised me, remember? You have to finish this, no matter the cost.” Her body was completely hidden by the cloud of smoke, but I saw her mana burning in anguish before me. “You have to go, now. Both of you.”
Val stood, taking her own silver orb in hand. “We will not fail you, Lux.”
“You’d better not,” I chuckled grimly back to her. There was a commotion outside as the nearby guards noticed the plume of smoke escaping the window. I reached out and grabbed Lia’s hand with my own. “This isn’t the end, Lia. You are the most important thing in this world to me. No matter what happens to me here, I swear I’ll find you again.”
I heard a muffled cry through the smoke. “You aren’t a monster, Lux. Don’t let them convince you that you are.”
My conscious mind was fading fast against the dark presence, but I found a momentary reprieve in her words. “You’ll always bring me back.” With a final squeeze, I dropped her hand and stood as energy pulsed through me like lightning. “Now go, before they find you.”
Val led Lia to the window closest to the statehouse and weighed the small silver globe in her hand. As she prepared to toss it, I took the last remaining orb I had left for myself and threw it against the back wall of our building. The resulting explosion and flash of blue light masked the sudden expansion of the cloud of smoke as Val threw her own orb out into the plaza. After a final moment of hesitation, the pair mantled out through the open window and crept through the swirling smoke, successfully crossing the distance from our hiding place to the corner of the statehouse.
BRING. DEATH.
The thought crashed through my head so loudly that I staggered sideways, catching myself at the windowsill. Flames rushed up the length of my arm to my shoulder, where I was barely able to contain its spread. Three guards approached the building while the rest of the large group watched with interest from the center of the plaza. “Just a few more seconds,” I encouraged myself with a strained whisper as I watched Val and Lia run along the length of the statehouse.
When their mana finally vanished from the edge of my Detection, I breathed a sigh of relief and slid out through the window into the plaza. My sword flashed into existence in my right hand, and the pent-up energy in my arm rushed through it hungrily. The scars on my fingers wound their way out along the length of the blade, staining the sky-blue metal with a malicious black web that burned with stark black flames against the cloud of smoke around me.
“The building’s on fire!” one of the guards shouted from the edge of the smoke.
“The building can’t be on fire, you idiot, it’s made of stone,” a second voice mocked.
“Well, how do you explain the smoke?”
“I don’t know, go find out!”
After a brief hesitation, the first guard took a cautious step into the cloud. We were less than ten feet apart, but the thick smoke completely blocked his line of sight. Mine, on the other hand, was entirely unimpeded; I saw the trepidation on his face clearly through the neon red outline of my enhanced vision. He held a shortsword out before him with both hands, waving it back and forth like a divining rod as he shuffled closer to the building.
The energy driving up my arm grew too powerful to resist, and I took one last moment to think clearly before it overwhelmed me. I’ll come back. I promised. The flames rippled across my shoulders and moved down my torso, growing in intensity as they spread. My chest began to heave as my vision narrowed, and I was consumed with the burning rage of the presence that had grown to take over my consciousness. I felt my foot take a step forward unbidden, and my sword arm raised to point at the approaching guard as the world finally went black.
Not so fast, Elden. You promised, remember? Amaya’s voice echoed through the darkness, cold and cruel. Eyes open.
I felt every cell in my body burst into overdrive as the foreign energy fully activated. The black fire amplified in intensity, burning so fiercely across the surface of my skin and armor that my physical form disappeared somewhere within its shimmering d
epths. It was as if I was a passenger inside my own body as it lunged forward, closing the distance to the investigating guard with a single, impossibly effortless step. The flaming bastard sword in my hand impaled the man, driving up through his gut to pierce his spine and emerge from between his shoulder blades, steaming with fresh blood.
The presence filling my body roared in bloody triumph, so loud it seemed to shake the world around me. No sound came from the guard as I lifted him up into the air on the end of my sword and marveled at his lifeless, bleeding body. I felt a deep, primal fear at the sight, but another feeling grew quickly and overwhelmed my terror: relief. It was relief to a pain I didn’t know I had; a pain buried so deep within my psyche that I hadn’t truly felt it for decades. It was relief, but it was something else as well, I realized as the guard’s corpse burst into black flame: it was retribution.
There was an immense infusion of power into my body from my sword as the man burned. The feeling fascinated me; where I normally would have recoiled from the all too familiar pain of the void between worlds, it was now a welcome rush of fuel for my flames. I lowered my sword when his flames burned out, leaving nothing behind but a quickly dispersing cloud of black ash. Without delay, my attention turned to the remaining two guards at the edge of the smokescreen.
I stalked towards my new prey, whipping my sword in a quick circle to remove the last bits of ash and blood staining the edge of the blade. Based on the expression of the two men as I exited the cloud, I must have been a nightmarish sight; a demon wreathed in shadow-black flames, carrying a burning sword and emerging from the exact spot their friend had entered mere seconds before. They stood in terrified awe, mouths open but voiceless as their hands fumbled frantically at their weapon belts.
A single step and a flick of my wrist was all it took to dispatch them. Wounds opened across their chests, boiling with a mixture of blood and dark smoke as they fell to the ground screaming in agony. Their cries grew quiet after a few moments, and the black flames quickly consumed their bodies. More. The thought came from the dark presence, but I knew that I wanted it too. More.
The commotion caught the attention of the collection of guards across the plaza, and a chorus of shouts rang out as they readied weapons and began a reckless charge towards me. A gout of flames burst from my feet as I sprinted out to meet them, barely touching the stone below me. I broke through their front line and dove into the center of the group, spinning my sword in a wide circle to create distance between us. “Come. Meet your end,” I growled, my voice reverberating with a deep distortion.
My perception of time stopped as the fighting began. Every moment existed alone, disconnected from the next like a slideshow, and I watched them go by with a growing sense of unbridled glee. Every stroke of my sword, each weapon deflected, every spin, slash, dodge, stab, and kill; they were all woven together into my joyous dance of death. As the bodies fell and burned around me, the dance quickened as my own flames grew brighter. I lusted after every drop of dying energy the guards could give to me, and hunted them down relentlessly.
A flash of crimson at the edge of the courtyard drew my attention, and I froze in place to turn and inspect it. Eight men stood at one of the plaza entrances, their purple irises gleaming at me through the darkness. One of them held a heavy chain attached to the collar of a hulking dog that snapped its jaws angrily at me, its eyes matching those of its master. YES. LET’S MAKE THEM SUFFER. TOGETHER, the presence screamed to me. I agreed.
Before I could move towards them, a sharp pain shot up from my right leg. One of the guards had capitalized on my lack of focus and stabbed his sword through the skin and muscle of my thigh, cracking it against my femur. I threw back my head and let out a guttural scream. Instead of turning to fight, I continued bending backwards, folding over with a series of sickening cracks until I faced the man upside down. I turned my head to observe the blade that stuck out of the obscuring flames of my leg. A bolt of black energy cracked along the surface of the metal and into the guard’s hand, and both exploded a moment later in a bright gout of flames.
The vicious wound in my leg was already healed by the time I straightened out again. While my focus was entirely consumed on my new targets across the plaza, I had a vague awareness of the four remaining guards around me scattering like frightened children. Two ran towards the lingering cloud of smoke at the edge of the plaza, while the other pair moved in a straight line towards their reinforcements, dropping their weapons in a headlong sprint to escape the punishment I sought to inflict upon them. Unfortunately for them, it also meant they stood between me and my true targets.
I hurled my sword towards the closest one and watched the flaming weapon scream across the distance between us before it embedded itself in the man’s back. His anguished cries as the flames engulfed him only served to fuel the second guard’s fear, and his frantic sprint intensified as he left his comrade to die. Even though he was nearly fifty feet away, I could feel his essence like it was beside me; his pounding heartbeat, his shaking legs, and his burning lungs were just an arm’s length away.
I reached my now-empty sword hand out before me, and a cloud of sickly purple energy formed around it. My fingers stretched into the ominous void and probed the space meticulously, feeling around for what I knew existed until I finally found purchase. Immediately, I clenched my fist and yanked hard, and my whole body lurched forward. The world blinked away, then back again, and I was suddenly in a different space. My hand was wrapped around the throat of the running guard, whose eyes looked into mine with surprised terror. He let out a single, sharp scream before my flames filled his mouth and eyes, silencing him forever.
With my path now clear, I turned to face the men who would soon be the Dominion. An ancient, unstoppable rage blurred the line between my consciousness and the dark presence in my head, and my chest vibrated with a bestial roar as I launched myself towards the group in a headlong assault. The man holding the dog dropped the chain and let the beast loose towards me, and the rest of the group raised their weapons in anticipation. “SUFFER,” I screamed with a hundred echoed voices.
The sword I had left behind appeared in my hand just in time to lop the head from the charging beast. Dark, tainted blood burst from the stump of its neck as it toppled sideways to the ground at the feet of its master; his utter shock at the ease with which it died gave me ample time to spin and drive my sword into his chest. An odd sensation passed through me as the effortless fighting continued: while I knew the men had yet to fully transform into Thralls, the presence I felt from them was different from what I had experienced in Hedaat. I had lacked the precise Detection then that I used now, but my memory of the Dominion’s soldiers was unmistakably different from the soldiers before me.
The thought lingered for a moment, then faded behind my rising fury; I was far too enthralled with the one-sided slaughter I inflicted upon the men to care. Every kill sent my spirit soaring, driving me inexorably forward into more reckless attacks. YES, I thought in tandem with the presence. YES, MORE, MORE! Before I knew it, the plaza had grown still, and I scanned hungrily for more targets to kill.
My burning aura rose and fell in sync with my heaving chest as I turned to the statehouse. THE LEADERS NOW, the presence insisted, and I began to move towards the steps eagerly.
Yes, I thought back, the leaders. We have to move quickly, before—My legs locked in place as a small pinpoint of light pierced the darkness suffusing my mind. Lia. Lia’s in there. We can’t.
The presence growled at me. The leaders. The Conduit. The Dominion. They all need to DIE. My body shook as I struggled to hold myself back from my planned path of destruction. WE WILL HAVE RETRIBUTION.
No. Not while Lia is there. I won’t put her in danger like that. I managed to take a single step and turn away from the statehouse. I can’t let her see me like this. The blazing fire enveloping my body began to dim, and saturation began to return to my grayscale vision.
YOU WILL NOT DENY US. THERE WILL BE MO
RE DEATH TONIGHT: THE LEADERS, THE CONDUIT, THE PRIESTESS, ALL OF THEM. The presence was screaming with a hungry desperation, now suddenly pushed onto the defensive as I regained more and more control over my body. WE WILL KILL EVERY LAST PERSON IN THIS CITY TO—
“Enough!” I shouted at myself. With strengthened resolve, I threw my sword to the ground at my feet. The flames surrounding the blade snuffed out immediately, and the blackened metal slowly began to shift back to its natural blue. “This goes no further! I’m not your puppet anymore.”
WE ARE ONE. YOU CANNOT DENY WHO WE ARE.
“I still have a promise to keep.” All at once, the black fire smoked and disappeared. I could feel the malicious energy drain out of my body, receding back to the hand from which it had originally spread. Initially, it was the greatest relief I had ever felt as the dissolving pain of the void dissipated, but alarms quickly began to blare in my head as I transitioned from one pain to another.
Every sensation my body had been suppressing during my rage returned at once, and I fell to my knees and retched bile onto the painted plaza stones. Each movement I made felt like I was trapped in a pool of molasses, and my head swam in a thick fog. As I knelt on all fours spitting up the remnants of Marin’s sandwich, I attempted to take stock of myself. Pain...tired...dizzy...so, so tired. When the realization finally came, I fell onto my side and took a shaky, unsteady breath. My mana...it’s all gone.
The implication of the idea was astounding. I hadn’t tapped out my mana since my encounter with Jack in the dungeon, and my reserves had increased exponentially through all of the constant training with Lia. If I’m already bordering on empty after just a few minutes of fighting, I’m definitely going into withdrawals. Worse than my episode this afternoon. I was still puzzled by where the energy had gone; the fuel for the dark flames had been distinctly different from mana.
You never fail to entertain, Elden. That was quite a show. Amaya’s voice returned to me, speaking softly inside my head. I found a momentary comfort in it, until I remembered that Amaya wasn’t the source. A heavy wave of fatigue swept through my body, and I helplessly tipped over onto my back. I guess you didn’t need my help after all.
Restart Again: Volume 2 Page 26