School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)

by Gage Lee

  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 ancient 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.

  “I am sorry, Jace.” He looked at the wound my blade had opened in his arm as if surprised he felt anything at all. “If you had accepted your role, this would not have to happen.”

  The Lost glided toward me. His hand descended, pointed fingers glowing like white stars of annihilation headed straight for my heart. The man’s dark eyes were narrowed, and I sensed an abiding sorrow deep within him.

  He didn’t want to kill me.

  But his nature wouldn’t allow anything, anyone, to stand in his way.

  A sound like a ripping sheet of paper roared through the air between us. The Lost’s arm plunged into nothingness, just before his fingers would’ve pierced my heart. His momentum carried him forward, and half his body vanished into the narrow portal that had opened between us. He glared at me from above its edge and tried to recoil his arm.

  The gateway snapped shut with an electric hiss.

  The Lost screamed and fell away from me. His right arm and half his chest were gone, the flesh scooped away to reveal the gleaming white loops and whorls of his innards. The man sagged to his knees, blood spurting from open arteries and drooling from dissected veins.

  Abi, Clem, Eric, and Rachel stared at me through a portal just beyond where my foe had fallen. The hole in space showed me the pilot’s station Abi was supposed to be guarding. He carefully lifted his hands away from the control panel, then rushed through the portal with the rest of my friends right behind him.

  “I’m really glad that worked,” Abi said, his eyes wide with shock.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I said. “None of you should be.”

  “You’re welcome,” Eric said. “Next time we’ll wait for the bad guy to kill you before we take him out.”

  “Are you okay?” Clem and Rachel asked at the same time.

  “I will be.” I was angry at my friends for putting their lives in danger, but I was grateful for what they’d done. As soon as I finished this, I’d figure out some way to show them that.

  But, first, I had to deal with the Lost.

  I summoned my fusion blade again.

  “Why?” he gasped through the blood that bubbled from his lips. “You were meant for so much more. You could have led the next generation, Jace. Why would you throw all that away?”

  “You can’t fix anything by burning it to the ground,” I said with a shake of my head. “I couldn’t step aside and let that happen.”

  “Killing me hasn’t stopped anything,” the Lost gasped. Pale, almost colorless, blood oozed from his terrible wound. “The hungry spirit horde is coming. It will pour across this world in a flood of death. If we are not here to control it, there won’t be anything left when the waters recede.”

  “I’ll stop it.” My blade plunged through the center of the man’s forehead.

  Satisfied he was dead, I put my foot on his chest and pushed his body off my weapon.

  The Eclipse Warrior collapsed to the floor, his mutilated body curling into itself.

  I turned my back on my fallen enemy and strode toward the portal he’d created. Blackness boiled beyond its orange ring, the dark cold of the Far Horizon just inches away.

  This is where I should’ve had something heroic to say. Some last words to bolster my friends’ spirits and let everyone know I’d be back right after I saved the day.

  But
there weren’t any words, and no guarantee any of us would ever see each other again. I had to stop the Locust Court, but I didn’t know how. Stepping into the Far Horizon might very well be a hopeless battle.

  But it was my battle.

  I’d summoned the Lost back to Earth. This was my mess to clean up.

  I rolled my neck on my shoulders, and it crackled like a string of firecrackers. Then I hefted my blade and followed in the footsteps of mankind’s greatest creation and most horrible enemy.

  The Host

  THE FAR HORIZON WAS a buffer between Earth and everything else that was out there in the universe. Some said it was created by the Empyrean Flame by burning away the worlds that ventured too close to its territory. Others believed the dead space around Earth was proof that humans were the only non-spirit culture in all the universe. I didn’t know who was right, and it didn’t matter at the moment. The dead black plane of glossy stone and gray ash was just another obstacle in my way.

  “What can we do?” Clem asked from the other side of the portal, her voice frantic. “I won’t leave you alone.”

  I took in as much of the scene as I could stand. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of portals hung in the darkness, their orange frames lit by the cityscapes within. I recognized Dallas, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, and I glimpsed what might have been New York. Every one of those portals was an attack point for the Locust Court. If I didn’t stop the attack, the hungry spirits would pour across the Far Horizon and strip those cities to their metal bones by morning.

  Far across the black emptiness, an arch of violet fire faced the smaller portals. I saw a strange and twisting landscape on its far side, a place of chaos and constant change. Hills crumbled into valleys and were washed away by turbulent rivers of lava, which spread into wide, deep lakes before vanishing into whirlpools rimed with frost.

  In the distance, an army of crystalline figures swarmed through the nightmare landscape. They glittered like sharpened blades under a shifting sun, drawing closer to the portal every moment.

  Closer, but they hadn’t arrived.

  There was still a chance to stop them.

  “Abi, you have to to tell your commander we need to close a portal,” I called back to my friends. “A big one. I’ll try to hold them off, but I don’t know how long I can last.”

  “I’ll tell them,” he said, his eyes searching my face. “How will we find it?”

  “How did you know where to open the portal that cut the Lost in half?” I asked.

  “Rachel and Clem,” he admitted. “They thought of you, and we used that as an anchor to find you. Once we’d opened the portal to your location, I opened a second portal to deal with the Lost. The offset was tricky, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Thank the Flame that it did.”

  “Thank you for taking the chance. I don’t think I’d be here if you hadn’t. If Rachel and Clem can find me, they can find the gate,” I said. “Because I’ll be standing in it.”

  “We can’t close it with you inside,” he said. “It will kill you.”

  “Just do it,” I said. “It’s the only way. There’s an army of hungry spirits from the Locust Court headed this way. If they get through that portal, they’ll kill us all, anyway.”

  “We can close this portal,” he protested. “That will keep them on the other side of the Far Horizon.”

  “No,” I said. “There are hundreds of portals already opened. Trust me, Abi. This is the only way. Get your people and seal the gate as fast as you can. You have to do this.”

  My friend’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. He reached out, one hand coming through the portal. I clasped it in mine, and he pulled me close to throw an arm around my shoulders.

  “I do not want things to end like this,” he whispered. “But I will tell you, Jace, that I finally sense the peace within your grasp. Whatever tormented you before, today is the day you can reconcile with it.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure Abi was right. I certainly didn’t feel at peace with the monster still raging in my head and a terrible hunger squeezing my stomach in a black fist. Even if I pulled this off, I was a monster. The sages had seen that, and they would make me pay. Dying a hero seemed far preferable to facing that punishment and disgrace again.

  I left my friends behind and sped across the Far Horizon at the speed of thought. Distance there was an illusion, a conceptual space that I found I could discard. One moment I was far from the enemy gate. The next I stood before it.

  The world of the hungry spirits was a horrifying place. It broke itself down and built itself up following rules I didn’t understand. How the spirits could survive there was a mystery to me. I wasn’t sure I could do the same.

  Let’s find out, I thought. Other Eclipse Warriors had done it.

  My fusion blade hummed in my hand, a comforting presence, and my aura throbbed with power. My Eclipse nature was ready to devour everything in sight.

  It was time to give it that chance.

  I took a deep breath, cycled the strange alien air of the Far Horizon through my core, and stepped through the gate into the world of the Locust Court.

  The shift was disorienting and yanked my stomach up into my throat. There was solid ground beneath my feet, but everything else changed faster than I could comprehend. Forests bloomed and then collapsed into ash. Thickets of blackberries burst from the ground in coiled, thorny brambles, only to fade away when I got close to them.

  There was something familiar about this place. Not the chaos or instability, but the way it seemed to respect the edges of my presence.

  “It’s like the School,” I muttered.

  I concentrated on the horde and willed the shifting terrain to take me to them. It wasn’t easy, but the place slowly, painfully, bent to my will. The ground remained solid beneath my soles, and a stretch of ground ten feet ahead of me remained stable and clear of obstructions. That was the most I could do. If my core had still been at the initiate level, I likely wouldn’t have been able to even manage that.

  I pushed ahead on a collision course with the invading army. The path ahead of me was straight and true, but what burst from the ground on either side and behind me was another matter entirely. Ravens the size of grown men erupted from patches of moldy ground. Droplets of rain fell from a black sky and cried like children when they splashed into the dirt.

  “No,” I said. “None of this is real.”

  I was an Eclipse Warrior. I’d been built to defeat this madness, and that is what I was going to do. There was nothing to be gained by chasing after the invaders, when I could make them come to me.

  I stopped moving and sculpted my surroundings into a steep-walled ravine that funneled from its wide mouth to a narrow exit behind me. I stood in that gap, blade ready, determined to stop the horde from passing through to reach the portal. It took me what seemed like an hour to complete the task, and I finished not a moment too soon.

  The Locust Court poured into the ravine’s mouth in a boiling tide. Unlike the animalistic creatures I’d battled in the courtroom, these seemed more advanced. They wore crystalline armor covered in hooked spines and wielded jagged weapons that danced with sparks of jinsei. Aspects of violence and destruction, chaos and death, churned in the spirits’ auras as they bore down on me in a crazed flood.

  This was it.

  My last stand.

  My mind hung in a cold, dark space far removed from the fear that coursed through my veins or the hunger that poured from my Eclipse nature in an endless torrent. The grim calculus was obvious. There were too many enemies coming for me, and eventually they would wear me down and rip me limb from limb.

  If I couldn’t win, then I’d make the monsters pay for killing me. I’d hold them until Abi and the Portal Defense Force could seal the gate between worlds.

  I could do that.

  That was enough.

  I sank into my Eclipse Warrior nature. I felt the hunger bubble up within me like poison gas. I didn’t fight
it or try to control it. This was what I was meant to do. It was the reason I’d been born, and I finally understood that. My core, aura, and blade were all in perfect unison. I was as ready as I’d ever be.

  The first wave of hungry spirits slammed into me, and the Thief’s Shield technique devoured them. The shattered armor tumbled away from the wisps of their bodies and crashed into their allies. The next rank stepped up and I sheared through their chitinous blades with my fusion blade.

  My Eclipse nature transformed me into a tornado of destruction. My weapon carved through spirit bodies, while my Shield technique consumed their sacred energy and twisted their aspects to harden my aura. In this strange and alien world, I’d become more than I’d ever thought possible.

  It was a terrible thing to behold.

  My blade killed spirits on contact. It devoured their jinsei and stole their aspects. No sooner did an enemy come near me than it was consumed and its remains cast aside.

  I was an untouchable god of death.

  That power, though, had a price. The unrestrained dark urge consumed any spirit who touched my aura or was touched by my blade. It fed a constant stream of jinsei into my core, pushing it to its limits. The pain from an overfull core threatened to overwhelm me, and I pushed as much of it as I could into my body’s channels. I became stronger and faster than ever before.

  Much stronger and faster than my body could stand. My channels were overloading, and the jinsei they couldn’t contain burned through my flesh like acid. That damage couldn’t be healed by jinsei, and as the battle wore on, it would only become more serious.

  But I couldn’t stop. While I was up and fighting, the spirits wouldn’t get past me. They couldn’t reach Earth.

  That was all that mattered.

  I felt a gentle touch across the throbbing ache of my core and recognized the tingling sensation from the moments before Abi and the others had arrived. It must have been Clem and Rachel helping anchor the portal to my core. That meant Abi had gotten through to his people. They knew where I was. They’d find the gate. If I kept fighting and held the gap for just a bit longer, they could close the gateway forever.