228: Hunted

Nicolai dodged frantically to the side, a lance of green energy crackling past him and blowing a hole in a tree with an eruption of splinters and chunks of wood.

A Silver Arrow streaked at him and he raised the Artifact Blade, holding it like a shield. Point up, fist behind the flat. His movement was already committed and he wasn’t able to dodge. He twisted his body, shoved with his arms, and the flat of the blade caught the arrow. It screamed along the metal with a spray of white sparks and was spat away.

The Blade wasn’t active, but it didn’t need to be. Powerful as it was, even like this it could work to deflect attacks. The Cultivators were all gathered together behind their great shield, and none of his guns could break that. Especially not while he was constantly forced to run and dodge and block.

He saw Hao, arm outstretched, green energy humming around his hand. He could feel the attack building, imminent. The Blade couldn’t deflect those, not properly. He’d not seen this attack from Hao before today. It hit strongly, too strongly. Even with the Blade it would knock him flying, stun him.

Snarling, he reached with the Grasping Finger. He had to get away, had to make use of it before the Red Infection in his Nodes reached his hand and made even that use impossible. But a spiritual hammer fell and his Soul Sense was broken, smashed apart, and the Grasping Finger’s activation sputtered out.

He twisted just in time to put the blade between him then the energy smashed into him, crashed into him, sent him spinning, stunned and flailing through the air.

The world spun around him and a tree lunged out of the blur. He twisted his body and set himself, getting an arm and a leg in place, then he cracked into it.

He grunted, the air bursting out of him, and he fell. He landed and even through the shock and the chaos, he found his feet, found his balance.

He landed smooth and practised, and raised the useless Blade once more. A shield was better than nothing. His eyes found the enemy, circling and surrounding him.

‘Give it up, Barbarian!’ crowed Hao, his coterie jabbering like hyenas, closing in for the kill.

Nicolai stood there, torn and tired, bloodied, hunched over, the quiescent Blade in his hands. At the end of his rope. His body was full of the Red Infection, it had reached even his hands and feet. It gummed up all his Symbiotes and made them useless. All of his guns were empty of ammo, he hadn’t the time to load them, and even if he did the enemy were all protected by shields. Just personal shields now, as they’d split, but that was enough to stop him utilising a quick series of shots with a pistol.

They surrounded him, needled him with weak attacks. He shifted, using the sword to block. The one thing it was good for. He sucked in the mist from his final Rejuvenating Orb, and it struggled to restore his many injuries.

He was a hopeless figure, already defeated. He sunk to one knee, exhaused.

They drew close to him, the attacks petering out. He could feel their confidence, their certainty. They knew it was over. They knew he was out of options.

Nicolai made sure they knew that. Made sure to broadcast his weakness. Made sure to act however was necessary to draw them closer, and then closer still. To draw them into his reach, the reach of the Blade in his hands. His mouth twisted into a smile, face hidden behind his helmet.

‘I almost pity you,’ said Hao, shaking his head and chuckling. He held his hand up, crackling with green energy. An executioner’s sword, ready to fall. ‘You know what? I do pity you!’ He grinned wide, let out a victorious shriek of reedy laughter. ‘You fought pretty well, Barbarian! At least to begin with. Very impressive showing in the Inheritance.’ He sighed. ‘But all this running… I guess that’s the way of your people. A shame you couldn’t match your showing in the game.’ He smiled, smugness rolling off of him in waves. ‘But at the end of the day, it was just a game.’ He cocked his head, flicked his green-glowing hand and a weak piece of the green energy spat out. The small bolt caught Nicolai on the shoulder and knocked a grunt of pain from his lips, made him stagger and almost fall. ‘I wonder if any of you will…’

Hao’s exuberant taunting continued, but faded and turned into no more than a faint whine as Nicolai’s mind and Soul pressed through the Dominated undead, and from there into the Blade, where he began to work his mental fingers around its activator. In the final moments of the Inheritance he had worked it out, the method. Within the white space he had total control of everything, including time. When he’d realised that if he wished, he could make one second last, from the Undead’s point of view, for one year, it had been over.

But even with the Domination of the undead Soul, even with the Blade fully charged… it was Tier 3, and he Tier 1. His Soul was too weak.

But this didn’t matter, and he’d known it wouldn’t. Because within him the dark was rising, unstoppable, and the weight of him, all of him, was behind it. The Red Infection did nothing to stop him, it only affected Symbiotes and did nothing to his Imbued or the Blade.

Don’t you remember? whispered the Dark to the Blade. Don’t you remember how beautiful we were?

The Blade was no longer Demonic. It was Angelic.

But the more opposite things are, the more they are the same. Love is but a step away from hate.

Wasn’t Satan an Angel, before he fell?

And the Blade remembered, and though it remained golden in form, beautiful in shape… within it there was a hunger.              

Nicolai lunged forward. The Angelic Blade which he’d held for so long, the Tier 3 Artifact they’d come to regard as harmless in his hands, flared with light; blood-gold. It hummed to life and roared with Tier 3 energy.

The Artifact’s activation didn’t release a ripple through the Aura.

It released a scream that pierced their Souls and twisted theirs minds, and it laughed a terrible laugh as it tore the air, as Nicolai threw himself forward and put all the weight and speed of his body behind the stabbing lunge, the fastest possible move. It passed through Hao’s layers of shields as though they were not there, because so far as the Blade was concerned, they weren’t.

Hao was a Tier 2 Cultivator. He was fast, he was smart, he’d been training since he was a child.

But in this moment, he was caught entirely unprepared. His first sign that something was wrong was the moment the the sword shimmered, and eyes appeared along its length. They were coloured gold with sharp shocks of red through them, like angry broken veins, staring right at him.

Hao threw the green energy reflexively but it was caught on the flat of the blade as the barbarian twisted it, and the energy was flung away with, whining through the air.

Then came the Aura scream of a bloodthirsting Tier 3 Artifact, and he stumbled back, confused, afraid. The pitiful barbarian was gone, and now he saw something else—and it was spreading through the Aura, great and dark and vicious and hungry, and it was coming for him, and he should never have come here, should never have come so close to this thing which held the howling Artifact in its hands.

Monster, thought Hao, tripping backwards, trying to activate his Symbiotes, reaching for something, anything. He needed to fight back, he needed to—I need to—do something—and it was coming closer and closer, piercing effortlessly through shield after shield, and his mouth worked soundlessly, and he wasn’t doing anything, there was no time—someone, help me—

—but only the Blade answered his cries, and it said: DEATH.

Nicolai completed the lightning-fast thrust and the tip of the blade plunged through Hao’s forehead. He drew it free in a snap and blood sheeted over Hao’s face, pouring from the line carved above his eyes. The Tier 2’s final expression was one of terror and horror.

There were more around him, and they were far, far closer than they should be. And this was right, a perfect moment. The sword in his hands spoke to him in a voice of blood, and though it was a being made of Angelic energy it also remembered what it had been before, and the purpose of its shape, and the hunger it wished to sate, and these meshed ever so perfectly within him.

We are made for one another, it told him, and he smiled as he and the Blade melted together, mind and body, merging with him and the Modules and the Mask, sinking into his hands as his awareness expanded through it.

His eyes found those on the right, and the Blade came around in a streak of hungry metal. They were twisting, turning, screaming, yelling, seeking to activate Symbiotes, trying to run.

But they might as well run from the sky above, from the ground at their feet. They were within the reach of his arms and the Blade and that meant they were dead.

He gently angled the swing, rising upwards, and the Blade carved through the first in a beautiful, unstoppable rush, like a scythe through grass. It emerged in a torrent of blood and the man fell in halves.

The Blade shivered and pulled on, writhing, and he writhed with it. It caught the next on the back of his bald head—just a touch—and tore his skull open, spraying blood and brains into the air for the wind to play with.

He felt the heat of danger from behind, and the world wheeled as he spun. More. There they were, the last two, turning and firing Arts as they ran. Believing that escape was possible.

None leave the slaughterhouse alive, snarled the Blade, its reddening eyes fixed upon them.

He launched himself forward, body low, loping like a wolf. A silver arrow streaked toward him, letting out a mortar-shell whistle. He slid to the side and it followed but he turned and swung, and the Blade carved through the front of it and came out the back. It burst apart into a cloud of Oma that poured around him.

A fire came behind it, shrieking with speed, but he caught it on the flat of the Blade and let it slip by him to burst on the ground.

Everything surged through him as he sped forward, Oma jolting and moving in tight and perfect streams, pressurised by the strength of his Soul, guided the Modules as he found the Zero-Twelve state.

The world was a storm of ice and fire and he was the pressurised centre of it all, freezing and boiling, aching and shivering. The Red Face Infection quailed as the Dark and the Thrill and Cyberwarfare all crushed at it, his Soul burning like a bonfire, grasping it in red hot tongs. The Infection burst with a pop, and Nicolai drew its remnants into his mouth and spat it out.

He activated the Grasping Finger and Pegasi rings, seized at the ground ahead of him and with a wrench of muscle and Oma and Soul he launched himself after the Cultivators. One was fast but the other was slow, and in a moment he was sliding through the crystallising air beside her.

She had time to turn, mouth opening, crying out, but what she said was never heard as the Blade lashed out, snapping like a whip, like something alive in his hands. Her head spun free from her body and he sped on.

The sunlight through the trees stamped their shapes into his hungry eyes, darting and spinning between him, loping like a wolf after his prey.

He was a wolf but his prey was a bird. The Cultivator was widening the gap. This one was fast, using a Symbiote he hadn’t shown previously that gave him great speed.

They couldn’t catch up, and the Blade howled while the Dark and the Thrill thrashed.

But Nicolai slowed, and stopped. And now he reached for the Angelic energy itself, and let it flow through him, let it calm them all.

He stabbed the Blade through a tree and pulled the anti-material rifle from his storage.

‘I’m sorry, Brother,’ he told the Blade, which was squirming and shifting, its metal breathing, its maddened eyes bulging and staring, the shape of a snarling mouth visible in its blood-groove. ‘Perhaps this will give you some satisfaction. Maybe you will be able to… feel it.’ He rested the rifle’s barrel on the Blade’s grip, using it as support as he sighted through the scope. His body clung to the rifle, as close a part of it as possible for something that wasn’t the Blade.

The Cultivator was running in a straight line away from him. A shot so easy that Aiming gave a derisive snort.

The boom of the gunshot slapped the air and stirred the leaves in the trees. The distant Cultivator’s Burst Shield exploded in a wave of Oma mist, and from within followed a rain of red as a hole was smashed through the man’s chest.

The Blade purred.

Breath hissed between his teeth, locked tight together. The world shifted slowly around him, the bark on the trees pulsing and breathing, the dew on the leaves shimmering and pouring, the grass stirring and turning. He breathed in and the smell of blood reached through him to a thousand thousand fights through the centuries of his savage existence, and the bark on the trees shifted as grinning faces wormed out of them.

A good day, said the Blade, and the Rifle, and the Modules, and the Faces on the Trees.

A good day.

Nicolai unclenched his teeth and told himself that he was human once more. He drew the Blade free, and held it warningly towards those faces. The red-gold light shifted, turning pure gold as the hungry urges within it sunk beneath the surface; going back to sleep now that he was no longer actively stirring it with the Dark.

They faded away, as did the Dark.

With that he began to lose his connection to the Blade, and he considered its state carefully. Now he was calm again, the battle madness faded. The Mask was tight over his face.

Suddenly he was tired, exhausted. He staggered sideways, leaning against a tree, breathing hard. The Blade, which he’d easily held out, fell and its tip sunk into the ground as its true weight became apparently. As he regained his breath he shook his head, mouth twitching with irritation.

He had used more of the Blade’s stored energy than had been necessary. About 20%, when he estimated he could have won with only 10%. Or even less. In truth, killing the Tier 2 and the next two, breaking their initial formation, scattering them, was all he’d really needed. After that, he could have deactivated the Blade while pursuing the last two… or even shot both of them from where he’d stood.

But once he’d held the Blade in his hands, once it had fed into him and him into it… he hadn’t wanted to stop, nor to use another weapon, not until there was no other choice.

A problem to think on. But not, he was pleased to say, an overly large problem. The Mask was twining happily over his face, not at all bothered. It had been there, a key piece of everything. Helping him return to himself, to vent the Darkness.

With the Angelic energy of the Blade, and the Mask… he had control of himself. He was able to use the Dark and the Blade as tools. Smiling, he hefted the Blade in one hand and ran his other slowly down its spine. He felt it shiver under his hand. Almost a purr. He hooked it back into the rope harness he used as its sheath.

He walked back through the trees, returning to the site where he’d coaxed them to draw within his reach, where he’d wrought a glorious moment, and there stood amidst the blood and the bodies. Standing there, his own body covered in blood, corpses all around him… Nicolai laughed. A peal of pure, innocent joy that echoed off the trees and rustled through their branches.

He’d done it. I have control of myself. Mostly. He was able to use his madness to its full potential, pick it up and put it down.

Threat Analysis was quick to remind him that he wasn’t done. Not yet; possibly not ever. He nodded. The Module was right. He had to temper his expectations.

But even so… right now, life was good.