by Gage Lee
She squawked in surprise when the horn-helmed warrior slammed into her back.
With a grunt, the dragon stepped forward onto the platform that had once held the Jinsei Institute’s fighter. The pillar wobbled beneath her weight, but didn’t fall.
The Bright Lodge warrior landed where Trulissinangoth had stood a moment before, off-balance, and let his fusion blade dissipate.
Before he could right himself and raise another defense, Trulissinangoth lashed out with a spinning backhand that cracked across his jaw like thunder. The helmet spun off and his head whipped to the side. Dazed and badly wounded, the Bright Lodge team member started to fall.
My heart lurched in my chest. None of these people would have raised a finger to help me, but competing to the death for the Empyrean Flame’s benefit made me sick. There was no need for any of us to die.
My serpent lashed out and caught the horned warrior around the shoulders and stopped his fall. He regained his feet, wobbly, but stable enough for me to let him go.
“Let’s just get across,” I shouted to Trulissinangoth. “We gain nothing by killing other students. It’s over. You won.”
“Agreed,” the dragon said.
The Bright Lodge warrior I’d just saved turned his face away. Tochi and Aesgir glared at us, but knew they had no hope of winning.
Trulissinangoth and I activated the last set of pillars within our reach and drifted toward the far side of the ledge.
Or, at least I did.
Trulissinangoth squawked in surprise when she realized the trick I’d pulled. The platform that she had previously stood on drifted forward, along with mine. The pillar she was currently standing on, though, had belonged to a different team.
I’d done it.
I’d tricked Trulissinangoth, and now all I had to do was run up to the doorway and claim my prize.
“You’ll pay for this!” the dragon shouted.
“Not today.” I sprinted for victory.
I couldn’t believe it. The challenge was over.
And then, ten feet from the door that led to the Empyrean Flame and my ultimate victory, an explosion blasted me off my feet.
The Attack
SCREAMS AND ROARS DRAGGED me back from the edge of unconsciousness. I tried to rise, but a weight on my back and shoulders had me pinned to the stone floor. I wriggled my hand down to my belt and found Christina’s jinsei vials. This close to the end of the challenge, there was no point in playing it safe. I needed to get free before Trulissinangoth reached me or another explosion finished me off. I grabbed the last of the small bottles, bit off their waxed seals, and gulped them all down.
A ripping sensation speared through my core, and strength flooded my limbs. I’d hurt myself, sure, but that was all right. All I had to do was get up and stumble to the Flame. I’d ask for it to reward me by healing my core. When that was done, I’d come back and finish off the dragons. No one would stand a chance against me when I was at full strength.
I pushed up against whatever held me down, and it pushed back. I was flattened against the stone again.
Well, that wasn’t fun.
I gathered my strength, then thrust both arms down against the floor. Whatever was on top of me toppled away and landed beside me with a deafening crash. I sprang to my feet and stared down at the biggest construct I’d ever encountered.
It was twelve feet of armor that had to weigh a couple thousand pounds. It had a barrel-shaped torso, with four stocky legs and a pair of long, simian arms tipped with a blade and a heavy mace. Its head was a globe of glowing jinsei, and its rage flashed across my core like a searchlight.
In that same instant, a flash of recognition burned through my thoughts. This thing had come from the heretics. They’d threatened to destroy the Gauntlet, and, somehow, they’d found a way to do it.
More of the constructs had landed, or tried to land, in the cavern. Fortunately for the rest of the students, the attack had gone catastrophically wrong. Most of the mechanical giants had fallen into the chasms between the pillars, and those that hadn’t clung to their stone platforms.
The remaining competitors were all still alive and unharmed. They stared at me, unsure what to do next.
I didn’t have any idea what they should do, either.
The construct that had landed on me hauled itself back up to its feet. The power within its artificial core hummed with deadly life. A quick glance told me that core was at least as strong as mine, though there were all kinds of things wrong with it. It was a mockery of life, something that was never meant to be.
It was a Machina.
“This ends here,” a voice blasted from the construct. It lashed out with one long arm, and its blade whistled toward my head. Fortunately, the strength and speed I’d gained from the jinsei in my channels let me dodge back from it with ease. I flipped to the side, and the blade shot past me with inches to spare. The creature stepped forward and brought its mace down at my head. I sidestepped that, too, and the spiked ball shattered the stone to my right. Chips of marble flew in every direction, pinging off the construct’s armor and slicing jagged tears in my robes.
As fast as the construct was, it lacked finesse. The only mode of attack it possessed was a full-on assault. With a grinding of gears and a clatter of armor, the thing hurled itself at me with its weapons raised and ready to strike.
I held my ground. Timing was everything.
The construct’s sword flashed toward me, and my eyes locked on its aura. I activated the Thief’s Shield vessel at the precise moment when the construct was too far into the attack to deflect its momentum and braced myself for the rush of power that would flood into the vessel and my channels. I would use the jinsei I stole from the construct to activate my other techniques, and the fight would be over very quickly.
Except that didn’t happen.
The Machina’s core wasn’t like any other I’d encountered. It passed through my technique like a bar of soap slipping through wet fingers.
At the last possible second, I dodged to the side. The enormous blade swept through the air where I’d been standing and shattered the stone floor. I was so stunned by my technique’s failure that I didn’t have a chance to protect myself from the construct’s next attack.
The thing slammed its knee up into my chest so hard it flung me toward the edge of the abyss. I rolled once and slapped my palm against the ground to stop myself. That kept me from going over the edge but left me turned away from my opponent.
The construct leaped through the air with surprising agility and landed with a foot on either side of my chest. It bent at the waist and cocked its sword arm back and struck like a falling meteor. The blade whistled toward me, a streaking shaft of gleaming steel that would punch right through my skull and spill my brains across the floor.
Even with the jinsei in my channels, I wasn’t fast enough to entirely avoid the attack. I turned my body and gave the weapon my left shoulder rather than my head. The sword plowed through flesh and bone into the stone beneath me.
The pain shattered my thoughts. Every millisecond was an agonizing torment. I took a breath, and the bones in my shoulder grated against the blade that was still lodged in my body. The agony nearly knocked me senseless. I lay on the cold stone, blood gushing from my wound.
“Do something!” Clem shouted. “You can’t let him die!”
But no one did anything.
No help was coming.
I had to save myself.
The pain nearly put me out of the fight, but the furious attack had also damaged the construct. Its weapon was stuck in the stone, and its limited intellect was entirely focused on solving that problem. It could’ve crushed my head with a simple swing from the mace or a stomp from its foot, but it was too focused on retrieving its sword to do anything else.
I had a precious few seconds to gather my thoughts and make a counterattack.
My serpents were still active, and I sent them slithering across the construct’s body like
snakes looking for a warm burrow. The seams of the monstrosity’s armor were tight, but there had to be some space at the joints or it couldn’t move.
My serpents found an opening near the thing’s ankle and slipped through the gap. Gears and scrivened circuits hummed under my serpents’ touch, and I urged them deeper into the creature. I needed to find its center.
I had to kill it, before it could kill me.
The construct slammed its mace down on the stone next to my head, braced itself, and yanked on the sword. Its tremendous strength wrenched half an inch of the blade’s length free of the floor and dragged it through my tortured flesh and bone.
I roared in pain and clung to consciousness. If I blacked out, I’d be dead before I came to.
“No,” I groaned. “I didn’t come this far to lose.”
My serpents finally found what they’d been seeking: the Machina. They slithered across its smooth, blocky surface and found the points where thick copper cables connected to its jinsei circuits. I coiled the serpents around the Machina within the construct and pulled as hard as I could. The cables creaked, but they didn’t come loose. With a frustrated shout, I abandoned that avenue of attack. There had to be another way.
The construct gave another convulsive jerk, and more of the blade slid out of the stone. Blood sprayed from my wound, and a freezing wind poured into the ugly puncture. I blinked hard, willing the jinsei out of my channels and into my skull. I needed to stay alert, to keep myself awake.
Spots of light glowed like complex constellations near the ceiling. Their pattern seemed familiar, and yet utterly alien.
What were those lights?
The construct’s gears groaned, and jets of steam whistled from the cracks in its armor. With a final jerk, it ripped its blade free of the floor’s grasp. The weapon’s dull edges snagged on my bones, dragging me into the air. Blood poured from the hem of my robes and splattered across the creature’s armor.
The stars shone down on us.
No, they weren’t stars.
They were scrivenings.
On the gargoyles’ feet.
A desperate, horrible thought occurred to me. There might be a way out of this.
But it also might kill me.
I activated the Borrowed Core technique and forged a connection to the nearest gargoyle. I pulled at its unguarded jinsei stores and the aspects of elemental damage snared in its aura. I cycled my breathing and drew more and more of its elements into me. My aura blazed with fire and ice.
It had only taken a second, the blink of an eye during which I hung suspended from the construct’s blade and my life leaked out of the horrifying wound in my shoulder.
Before the creature could hurl me away, I rolled the dice.
A swarm of serpents exploded from my aura. They lashed out toward the soles of every gargoyle in the arena. I put everything I had into that one moment and stretched my serpents farther than ever before. I forced myself to channel jinsei, all that I could muster, to strengthen and elongate the tentacles.
They slammed into the gargoyles with perfect timing. The trap the statues had been set to guard was sprung. Their heads swiveled in the same direction at the exact same time. Beams of elemental force burst from their eyes and streaked toward me.
Time slowed to a deadly crawl. The beams were headed on a perfect trajectory to annihilate me. My core gave me gifts of speed and precision that few others could hope to attain. And in the split second before I was torn apart by that elemental force, I grabbed hold of the construct’s blade with my good hand.
And tore the sword out of my body.
I fell away from the construct in a shower of my own blood.
A dozen ruby blasts from the gargoyles streaked through the space where I’d hung from the sword a moment before. They slammed into the construct with devastating force. Its torso was broken wide open to reveal its complex workings. The Machina, a cube of unbelievable power and complexity, glowed from within the metal cavern with a strange and unwholesome light.
The pain was too much for me. I lay on the stone, and my head fell back. The construct was beaten. I’d destroyed it.
But Trulissinangoth was still out there. If she reached me, I was done for.
I willed myself to stand up off the floor.
But I’d injured myself too grievously.
My flesh was wounded beyond repair. My core’s delamination had reached a critical stage. Even with no new jinsei flowing through it, the damage I’d done was irreversible. It peeled away, layer after layer, a hot spike of agony through my center.
I lay back on the stone, dying.
I’d come so far, done so much.
And still, I’d lost.
The Stitch
THE FRIGID AIR BLOWING through the wound on my shoulder wasn’t quite enough to drag me back to the land of the living. Something sharp poking into the tip of my nose, however, did the trick.
“Leave me alone,” I slurred. I’d lost a lot of blood. And, more importantly, a lot of jinsei. I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but it was long enough. The last threads that had held my core together were snapped. I was empty.
Hollow.
Again.
“Get up,” a familiar voice muttered in my ear. “They haven’t figured out how to cross the gap yet, but they will. You must finish this before that happens.”
Hahen?
“I’m dead,” I told the rat spirit. “Like, really dead.”
That was the only thing that made sense. The construct had nearly ripped my arm off. I’d been bleeding on the stones for who knew how long. And now my friend, who couldn’t possibly be anywhere near me, was talking to me.
I was dead. I had to be.
“Nowhere near dead,” Hahen said. “You have a disciple-level core. If half losing most of an arm were enough to kill a warrior with your strength, your ancestors never would’ve been able to slay the dragons. Get up. You must reach the Flame before anyone else. It’s your only chance.”
I tried to raise myself up on my left arm, before I remembered I didn’t really have much of a left arm anymore. I sat up, pulled my mutilated limb onto my lap, and bound it to my chest with a scrap of cloth I tore from the hem of my robe. It was ugly work, but it was the best I could manage in my current condition. Satisfied it wouldn’t jostle around too much, and gritting my teeth against the pain, I stood.
“Thank you, Ha—” The rat spirit was nowhere to be seen.
Had I imagined him? He’d seemed so real.
The construct was still down. The Machina lay in its fractured chest, a dull square of hammered copper that looked wholly unremarkable. How could something like that have caused so much trouble?
Behind me, the rest of the competitors were shouting at one another. Trulissinangoth wanted my team to help her across. Of course, Clem, Abi, Eric, and Hagar were having none of that. Hagar unleashed a stream of profanity that left the rest of us agape. I’d never heard her talk like that, but clearly her time on the front lines had taught her a few things we’d never learned at school.
Tochi and Aesgir were arguing, too. Aesgir saw this as his chance to take out a dragon and wanted the Jinsei Institute’s members to help him reach one of them. With one of his number already lost to a dragon’s superior strength and skill, Tochi refused to commit any of his people to what he believed was a suicide mission.
Good. As long as the other teams were squabbling amongst themselves, I still had at least a few minutes.
I forced myself to walk to the construct. If I’d had more time, I’d have taken the Machina with me. My clan would want to see it.
Maybe we could use it to track down my mother.
But, there wasn’t time to pry it out of the construct’s chest. I doubted I’d have the strength to do it, anyway. There wasn’t even enough jinsei left in my body to heal my wounds, and blood ran from the ugly hole through my shoulder in a steady flow.
It was okay. One more short walk, and I’d reach the Flame. It
would heal my core, and then...
And then what?
I wouldn’t be any better off than I was now. Sure, my core would be fixed, but the world would still be in chaos. The Inquisition, the very people who’d tried to sell the rest of humanity out to the dragons for their own benefit, would remain in power. The Grand Design was still just as damaged as ever.
This didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like I was letting the bad guys keep the status quo.
I didn’t want to do that.
And, I realized, I didn’t have to. There was a way I could change everything.
While the others argued about what they should do, I reached inside the battered construct. Jinsei throbbed within the Machina’s artificial core. Now that it was inert, I didn’t see any defenses that would stop me from taking the sacred energy.
Except, I was a hollow core again. I couldn’t hold the jinsei I’d drain. It would all be wasted.
While I chewed on that problem, I found the latches that held the copper restraints in place. I opened them with my good hand, and the cables popped free of the metal cube. I pulled it out and sat on the floor with the Machina in my lap. It felt totally alien and completely familiar at the same time. My mother’s creation was far more advanced than the equipment I’d stolen from her lab last year.
This Machina was something different, something purer, and something far more dangerous than anything the heretics had used before.
It was perfect.
And if I’d had enough jinsei, I’d even have been able to use it.
It took me long seconds to remember the vial in my belt. With shaking fingers, I pulled Christina’s gift from where I’d hidden it and popped off its cap. I downed the contents in a single gulp and offered up a silent prayer my plan would work.