Chapter 746: Ten Circle Titans

The crystalline halberd screamed downward like a falling guillotine, aimed to split his skull clean in two.

His left shin was already wrist-deep in a jagged fissure of broken cathedral stone, the razor edges chewing into muscle and bone like living teeth.

He could not pull free in time.

So, he did not move the leg, he moved his spine.

A backward arch from the kneeling position so violent it ripped three distinct ropes of muscle along his lower back in wet, audible tears — each one a white-hot whipcrack of agony that punched the air from his lungs and flooded his mouth with the iron taste of blood.

The halberd carved four inches above his nose and exploded the broken stone where his face had been.

KKKRAKK.

His vision blackened along the edges as if stars had burst behind his eyes.

Phei’s world tilted sickeningly. For one heartbeat he was certain the spine-tears had paralyzed him from the waist down.

He used the bounce, wrenching his shin free in the half-second of structural collapse, his skin and meat scraping a long rust-coloured streak up the inside of the fissure as fresh agony lanced up his leg like molten wire.

He rolled sideways across the cracked floor in a long bleeding tumble, every impact grinding shards of stone deeper into the open wounds along his back.

Came up on one knee, with both daggers in his fists, lungs heaving, blood in his mouth, heart hammering so hard it felt like it would burst through his ribs.

A second Titan was already on him with a saber, in a long horizontal arc at neck height for pure decapitation, the blade sand with hunger.

Phei dropped his entire bodyweight backward, spine snapping into a dirty improvised bridge, both palms hitting cracked stone behind his head as the saber passed over his throat with two inches of clearance and a whisper of compressed air.

The wind of its passage sliced a shallow line across his Adam’s apple; warm blood trickled down his collarbone.

He kicked off the bridge—both feet driving up into the construct’s pelvic seam at full 340-Strength, the impact producing a low cracking note—and flipped backward over his own hands, landing on his feet behind the saber-Titan’s flank with both daggers reversed.

He drove them into the lower-back kidney-line.

Frost-iced edges

sank

to the hilt with a wet crunch of shattering crystal and meat. Two long radial fractures climbed the construct’s spine to its shoulder blades like lightning frozen in glass.

The Titan turned with both daggers still buried where its kidneys would’ve been and caught Phei’s left wrist in one massive crystalline fist.

And threw him.

WHHRRRRRMMMM

He covered forty yards in one long arc and saw the spears coming before he hit the apex.

Six Titans had compiled six javelins in the half-second of his throw. At the apex of his trajectory—the moment he stopped rising and had not yet begun to fall—the six released in a synchronised volley, six lines of pale crystalline blue converging on his airborne body from six different angles in the precise mathematical tessellation of a trap that had been designed to require Void-Ice to escape it.

His

perception

slowed.

He had time to see the patient mineral veining along the shafts, to think fuck, fuck, fuck, to reach inward, to feel the bureaucratic dismissal, and to curse it in three languages.

He did not have time to deflect six.

The first javelin

punched

through his left deltoid like a freight train of ice and fire, the crystalline shaft scraping bone as it pinned him in mid-air, shredding rotator cuff and artery in one catastrophic instant. A

rterial spray painted the air behind him.

The second pinned his right thigh to nothing, the tip exploding out the back of his leg in a geyser of dark blood that pattered across the cathedral floor forty feet below.

The third

pinned

his left forearm, the impact snapping the radius and ulna like dry twigs; white-hot shards of his own bone grated inside the wound.

The fourth punched through his right pectoral four inches below the collarbone, the tip emerging from his back in a slow flowering of pale crystalline tip and his own dark blood, collapsing his lung with a wet sucking sound that filled his chest with liquid fire.

The fifth and sixth would have finished him.

They did not arrive.

A massive crystalline foot intercepted them mid-air—a Titan-leg swung in a wide sweeping arc—and the same kick caught Phei in the temple with the force of a

wrecking

ball.

His pinned body ripped off the four embedded javelins in a long wet tearing that sent four ribbons of his own blood arcing across the cathedral hollow’s afternoon light. The temple impact detonated white lightning across his skull; he felt something critical shift inside his brain.

Concussion. Maybe worse.

He was airborne again.

Forty yards toward a Titan that was waiting.

The waiting Titan caught him. Both crystalline fists

closing

around his upper arms.

His body slammed hard into the construct’s chest and was held there—feet dangling, blood pouring from six fresh punctures and one head wound, his shoulder loose in its socket, the cathedral hollow swimming around him in concussive smear.

Every breath was a drowning rasp. His vision kept flickering black. The pain was no longer separate events—it was a single roaring ocean trying to drag him under.

Two more Titans rushed in.

Mace from the left. Halberd from the right. Both weapons trailing after-images of killing light.

He had perhaps a half-second.

He used it.

He

twisted

in the held position—both his trapped arms going up rather than out, the holding Titan’s grip preventing lateral but not vertical—and as the two rushing Titans arrived at the peak of their swings, his legs whipped out in a synchronised double kick at full strength.

WHUMP. WHUMP.

The mace-Titan’s faceless skull cracked—a long fissure racing diagonally down across its chest. The halberd-Titan’s neck

snapped

sideways, the twelve-foot frame jerking back, stumbling three steps before catching on its weapon.

But the damage was already healing; Eira was already knitting the crystal back together with lazy, mocking patience.

Phei was now horizontal in the holding Titan’s grip.

He used the grip as a fulcrum.

He hauled his entire body weight upward in a single furious abdominal pull and flipped. Legs vertical. Past vertical. Full inverted handstand with both his held arms still pinned in the construct’s fists.

For one dilated heartbeat he hung

upside-down

with his feet directly above the holding Titan’s faceless skull with blood pouring from his mouth and nose in thick ropes, painting the Titan’s chest like war-paint.

—and came all down.

Both knees, descended in a single discrete vector into the construct’s chin from above.

KKKRRRAAAKKKK.

The faceless skull cracked from the chin upward. A long jagged fissure opened from where his knees connected, racing up through the jaw architecture into the forehead in a single wet splintering line.

The impact jolted up through his own shattered thigh and punctured lung like a second set of spears.

Its grip released.

He landed on the Titan’s shoulders and couched there.

He reached inward again.

Pushed the frost-edge of his daggers further—extended the enhancement from edge into blade, the frost crystallising outward into

twelve-inch

ice-swords that held—the cold so intense it burned his own palms raw.

He drove them down.

Both swords into the cracked fissure of the construct’s skull.

The blades sank to their hilts. The fissure widened into a vertical canyon. The Titan’s center began to come apart along the line he had just driven into.

The Titan threw him before it died.

A last reflex — both fists giving him one violent shove as its body fell apart — the throw arcing him forty feet east into the chest of another waiting Titan.

He hit it square with hisown back first.

The Titan’s chest received his ribcage with the soft accepting whump of a body that had been waiting for him. Three ribs snapped like green wood; the sound was sickeningly loud inside his own head.

It caught his arms.

Held him in place.

And as Phei looked up—bleeding from eight punctures now, skull-cracked, the long screaming muscle tears along his lower back, lungs full of his own copper, vision swimming in red and black, one eye already swelling shut, every breath a wet death-rattle—the dying Titan behind him still coming apart in slow motion—

He saw the construct holding him now —

—bore not a single mark.

Three of the constructs Phei had put through

"fatal"

damage in this engagement — chest cracked, skull fissured — were standing, at their peak, around the perimeter of the engagement.

Eira was keeping them whole the same way it was keeping him whole.

"You bitch!" She just laughed.

The damage Phei had inflicted was not damage.

It was rehearsal.

The construct holding him now drew its arm back. The fist was the size of a tombstone.

Phei spat blood across his own chin and grinned, because the dark dry gallows part of him had decided, somewhere around the fourth javelin, that he was simply going to keep being kicked by these things until something interesting happened—or until the bond finally failed and the darkness took him for good.

The fist began its descent toward his face —

And hell

whispered,

closer than it had ever been: This time it might not miss.