Knives & Levels - Chapter 74

The next hour was dominated by the logistics of how best to effectively pull a pissed-off Minotaur torso and head through the dark streets of New Nashville—when they tried to tie ropes around the chest to drag it, it would try to gore your hands and bit the ropes until they broke.

With all the black blood spilling out on the street, Colt would’ve thought the thing should be weakened, but no, that Savage Edict burned bright, a supply of raw power that should’ve felt frightening to witness. Everyone else around him was taken aback by it; they got squeamish around the Minotaur and felt the fear when it roared.

Colt didn’t. He simply observed it with a cold calculation, where fear should’ve been he felt a pang of hollowness that he was starting to piece together what had happened.

In the quest for nobility, Cut had severed the part of him it deemed useless. That limiting fear.

And now, consequentially, when his body reached out for it, the sensation was gone. When he looked at the bleeding, the raging impossibility of a monster-man beneath him, the same squeamish sensation of disgust and lack of understanding of how it could keep going, even missing legs that he saw in the groups milling about.

Even his own wasn’t immune. Nate couldn’t spend too long looking at the creature. Julia was growing frustrated, and Sarah was a ghost on the scene, opting instead to scout the street ahead as they dragged it difficult meter by meter.

The bull raged, dragging the process it, breaking any attempt to bind it. As Colt trudged along, hours dragged by, and he collected more pieces of himself.

There was a simple, logical conclusion. Day wasn’t far away. Dragging this monster was getting dangerous; everyone around him was tired and afraid. Something had to be done.

So Colt would do it.

Colt stood in front of it and let a golden light erupt on his knife. The Edict now had a tangible color and weight to it as it condensed over his knife. In his hand, he felt the heavy-handed nature of Cut. It would divide. Wherever he wished to unleash it, it would do its work and leave there a cleave in the nature of reality itself.

With the weight of his law in hand, he crouched in front of the Bull—for the first time, it stopped. Its eyes locked on his knife.

“You know this now, don’t you?” Colt said, his voice cold.

Within those dark-brown beast eyes, he saw it now. That little bit of humanity lingered there, trapped by the outer shell of his monster.

Colt grabbed it by its second horn before it could protest—and despite the gathering Edict there, despite it trying to rage back and stop him, he slashed through its remaining horn with a single Cut, wrecking its last weapon and forcing it to let out a pained cry as he drew yet more blood.

In those dark monsters eyes, deep where the last bit of its humanity lay he saw fear. A fear of the monster he could be if forced into it.

Colt held his knife up; letting the glow radiate as his Cut remained thick on the weapon, holding the weight of a universal law to it.

“You are only alive because you’re worth more to us alive than dead. If you choose to make that more difficult or impossible to bring you to our safehouse for our plans, that will change. You will make your life worth more dead than alive, and I will not hesitate to put you down for good and use that experience of yours to take out Denny,” Colt made the promise.

With light coming up, the danger of being spotted or Denny discovering what happened before they could prepare was increasing.

He saw the fear there radiate again, saw its darting eyes. It was interesting since he was now keenly aware of the void left behind how he could now so easily see it in others. Even this monster, by all their metrics, wasn’t absent that emotion.

But now he was.

The Bull stopped squirming. Colt stood up and let Cut fade away, his knife giving one last heartbeat before returning to the way it was.

Colt ran a hand through his hair and signaled Nate to continue.

The man came in with chains—scavenged from a nearby greasy garage after the Bull broke the latest set of ropes. With the way it shook on the ground now, almost as if it were trying to cry, Colt felt that this would be the last time it gave them any trouble.

Nate looked him up and down as he wrapped the chains around his hand, psyching himself up to get close and personal with the over level seventy monster in front of him.

“You’re different.” He observed. Not that he could inspect Colt and get much information from it, given he was still wearing the black cloak 

“I am. Cut advanced.” Even now, when he said the word, it had a weight to it that wasn’t there before. To his soul, he felt a slight stir in the air. It was as if it were always there, always giving him a part of its attention as one of its wielders. “What comes after Greater is Superior. But to get there, your Edict will want something in return,” Colt said, probing that sensation in himself once more. That pit where fear should be.

What came after they had this Bull locked up was the inevitable fight. There was danger there. For him, for his friends, for the new allies, they’d be dragging into this battle—he should feel fear for that; it was healthy to care about those who he liked.

Now, though, try as he might, he didn’t feel it. Not that he was overconfident in his ability to pull it off, but he still worried over some of their plans and still wondered how much stronger Denny would be. What surprises the man would inevitably try to bring to the conflict; even with Cut at the highest level of Edict he’d ever seen, there were tricks that could damage and hurt those around him.

Denny still had Jimmy, too, and that alone should’ve been enough reason.

“What did it take in return?” Nate asked, his grip tightened on the chair as he looked at the Bull laid out on the ground, no longer fussing.

“It took my fear, for some reason. It’s gone now; there’d just be a void there,” Colt shook his head and sighed, “That isn’t terrible. I don’t know if it’s forever, like everything here, I suppose to get power it takes risks and sacrifices, and we have no promise of whether or not those things will pay out in the future.”

Nate gave him a concerned look, but then went to do his job. It seemed the soldier had been stunned into a silence. Somewhere inside, Colt was sure those same questions about what his Edict would take as payment were brewing.

None of them had the answers.

So Nate went over and did his job, wrapping chains around the Bull. This time, it didn’t contest, obeying and giving into what Colt demanded. That, at least, would be easier now.

Julia came up to him as their trip resumed. They walked together with the mist underfoot, hanging there without anywhere to go; she tried to talk his ear off, saying how Harry and the Cops were blown away by what they saw—but Colt didn’t feel much for talking. He felt tired. And as they made quicker progress to the warehouse, he felt lighter and lighter.

Soon, he would get his rest, and then they could plan out the next part of this plan. Leveraging their new asset to get Denny to agree to a trade, they would then ambush him and take out the danger to New Nashville once and for all.

As the sun began to rise in the east, he wondered how Denny would react when he found out his prized tool had been stolen.

###

The beast wasn't there. Denny's boots echoed against stone as he descended into his private labyrinth beneath the city, each step carrying him deeper into his domain. The tunnels here were his creation, carved out at the behest of his Icon and with his faction points., a physical manifestation of his growing power. 

The chamber where his prized monster should have been waiting lay empty. Denny's hand tightened on the doorframe as he surveyed the abandoned room—the scattered straw, the untouched water trough, the absurd exercise equipment the meathead had insisted on even after losing his humanity. Even the air felt wrong, absent the usual thick musk of beast and blood.

But it wasn’t there.

People could be stronger, but they had to answer to the King. That was the natural order of things. The strong ruled, and the weak served. His monster had understood that, and had embraced that truth. So where was it now?

People could be stronger, but they had to answer to the King.

An interesting quest had enabled such a transformation, turning man into a monster. Icon quests could be quite interesting indeed, especially since that one was a natural extension of his 'Crown-Marked Skill.' 

The memory brought a thin smile to his face. His mark had a startling effect—it allowed him to infuse his Edict into a willing recipient, watching as they transformed into something greater, something that answered only to him. A win-win situation, though he always gained more than they did. As it should be.

Denny folded his arms as he looked at the disused room; his monster was still alive. If their bond was broken through death, he would’ve felt it. He was sure of this, having tested it using a soldier.

“You damn fool.” Denny seethed into the room, letting his anger roil outward. His new Edict reacted to the sensation. He fed into it, letting it bleed into reality.

The room felt heavier and shook. As he commanded his beast to return through his link to it, he felt it stir and react, and oddly, a cold shock of fear flooded through the link. But it wasn’t fear of him.

Fear of something else?

“What in the name of hell?”

He felt his alarm trigger above, one of his chains of light reacting to the sensation of someone knocking on his door, and Denny sighed. Just a damn hour, that’s all he wanted. With all these useless people and their useless problems, he just wanted a damn hour to himself to sort out a mess.

Their trash keeper had gone missing, and some were probably knocking on his door asking about a business permit in the middle of an apocalypse.

Denny yearned to open the walls wide, to conscript every last one of those useless people and turn them into something more.

A fighting force of soldiers loyal to the crown and able to reclaim this great nation once more—but if he did it too quickly, there would be pushback. He’d been making efforts, going to great and annoying lengths to bargain and replace people who had taken natural leadership positions with his own leaders.

The thing was, to boil a frog and keep it from jumping out, you had to heat the water slowly.

So it was that Denny rolled his shoulders and looked at the empty room. Peeved at his missing monster. Curious as to what could make that over-leveled beast feel fear other than him—a mystery to explore as soon as possible.

First, to deal with the annoying administrative work.