Eclipse Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 2)

by Gage Lee

  I stepped across the threshold of the hole in space, and my stomach churned as the world turned itself inside out. For the briefest moment, I had one foot back in the School and the other on the cool white tiles of a spartan, efficient building in the Kyoto overcity.

  Surprised shouts erupted at my sudden appearance, and the portal closed behind me with a sharp, electric snap. Abi had been wrong about his accuracy. He hadn’t put me down near the courthouse, he’d put me inside it. Given the high-profile case taking place there that day, there were plenty of security guards and media nearby to be alarmed at my abrupt entrance.

  The more quickwitted reporters amongst the crowd snapped pictures of me with cameras they produced as if by magic. Their slower peers jumped and shouted in alarm.

  The guards on duty had an altogether different reaction.

  One of them drew his sidearm and shouted at me in a language I assumed was Japanese. The weapon was centered on my chest. A little more pressure on the trigger, and I was a dead man.

  And so was everyone else in this building. I was the only hope any of them had of surviving what was on its way.

  “English!” I shouted. “I only speak English.”

  The reporters and civilians moved away from me at top speed, leaving me alone on the ground floor just past a security checkpoint. A set of stairs led up to the next floor ahead of me, and elevators flanked either side of the lobby. There were two guards on the steps, five guards at the security checkpoint, and one guard near each bank of elevators. All of them had their weapons trained on me.

  “Adjudicator Hark.” I said the only important name that might be the least bit friendly to me and raised my hands over my head. Getting punched full of bullet holes seemed like a bad idea. An idea occurred to me. “I need to talk to Adjudicator Hark.”

  Even if they didn’t speak English, I hoped that name would get their attention. Clem’s mom was the ruling authority who’d sentenced Grayson Bishop. She wasn’t overseeing his trial here, that fell to the five sacred sages, but she would definitely be on hand.

  The guards on the stairs ahead of me glanced at one another. One of them tilted his head to the side and said something into the boxy microphone attached to his shoulder. His eyes and gun stayed focused on me as he spoke. A few moments later, his radio crackled a response that I didn’t understand. I hoped that meant someone I could talk to was on their way.

  All of those guns aimed at my chest made it hard to concentrate. My Eclipse nature did not approve of the many, many threats surrounding us. It wanted me to lash out and end them, immediately. After all the craziness in my cottage, it was very, very difficult to bring the dark urge to heel.

  A tall man in the white and red robes of the Resplendent Suns clan appeared at the head of the stairs. He held his fusion blade, a slender scimitar of golden flame, in his right hand. His serpents twined around him in spirals of blazing light, ready to strike or defend at a thought. He passed between the guards and stopped at the bottom of the staircase. The weight of his attention pressed against my aura, an insistent force that demanded my attention.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he barked at me, surprised that my veil rebuffed his attempts to read me.

  “I need to speak to Adjudicator Hark,” I said. My supernatural sight showed me the man’s core was only slightly more powerful than mine. That would’ve put him at the Disciple rank, one level above me. He would probably beat me in a fair fight. I wouldn’t let it come to that. “There’s an attack coming on this building.”

  The weight of the Empyreal’s attention bore down on me, oozing through my aura to wrap around my core. He tried again, and failed, to penetrate my veil.

  My Eclipse nature didn’t like being poked and prodded. The familiar pressure built behind my eyes. I was seconds from losing control and lashing out.

  “Get on the ground,” the man growled as my eyes shifted to black. He shouted something in Japanese, and the guards around me tensed. “If you move, they’ll kill you.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “There are Eclipse Warriors coming here, right now. I’m the only one who can stop them.”

  “On the ground!” The Empyreal advanced on me, his blade raised and ready to strike. The guards on the stairs adjusted their positions to keep their firing lanes wide open.

  I had no way to know how much time remained before the Lost attacked. It could be minutes. Or hours. Or seconds. The only way I could be sure I’d be ready to fight them was if I was in the hearing room. Easier said than done.

  Deciding that survival was better than instant death, I followed the man’s orders. I lowered myself to my knees, then lay prone, facedown, hands stretched out above my head, palms flat on the stone floor.

  “These men will restrain you now,” the man said. “If you resist, I will kill you.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Just listen. Warn the sages in the Bishop case. An attack—”

  “The most powerful members of Empyreal society are in that room,” my captor said. “You’re what, an adept? There’s nothing that you can do that they can’t do better. If a threat appears, they will dispatch it.”

  A strange chill washed over my skin. A low, throbbing hum intruded on my thoughts. I’d felt this before, at the cottage.

  “They don’t know what they’re dealing with,” I said. “The Eclipse Warriors are too strong. Without me, they’re all dead.”

  “I fought in the Utter War,” the man said. “But you’re no Eclipse Warrior.”

  Two guards grabbed my arms and dragged them behind me. One of them fastened a handcuff around my right wrist. The cold metal’s grip infuriated my Eclipse nature. Dark memories of a past I’d never experienced flashed like lightning through my mind. A cold, clear rage sliced through me like a knife. First, they’d manacle me.

  Then they’d drag me to the pit.

  And burn me.

  The humming intensified, and pulses of cold wind ruffled my robes. My ears popped as the air pressure changed. The guards jumped back from me, and the Resplendent Sun shouted something I didn’t understand.

  “Whatever you’re doing, stop it!” The heat of his fusion blade warmed the back of my neck.

  “I’m not doing this,” I said. “It’s them! You have to let me up. I have to stop them.”

  The Sun said nothing, and in that moment I knew he’d decided to kill me.

  My aura was still packed with aspects I’d stolen from the School. If I didn’t use them, my life was over. It was now or never.

  My Eclipse nature tried to break free of my control, but I held it in check even as I used its unique power. These guards didn’t deserve to die. I only needed to get past them.

  My serpents whipped out of my core and wound tightly around the Sun’s burning fusion blade. There was a moment of searing pain as the fiery weapon burned into the tendrils of jinsei connected to my core. My instinct was to pull the serpents away from the pain, but I rejected that and maintained my steely grip on the Sun’s blade.

  The Resplendent Sun reacted with shocking speed despite his surprise. He yanked back hard on his fusion blade to tear it free of my serpents’ grip. It was a smart move on his part, because he’d rightly guessed most of the pressure for my serpents would be pushing up against the weapon to keep it from slicing my head off.

  What he hadn’t anticipated was that I didn’t need to pry the blade out of his grip to make it useless.

  My serpents stripped the fire aspects from the weapon and reduced it to a pale shadow of itself in the space between heartbeats. They took its jinsei next, and the blade vanished entirely.

  With the threat of immediate extermination out of the way, I rolled hard to the left and bounced up to my feet. The guards were trained Empyreals, but they were only initiates. To them, this fight had been nothing more than a blur of motion. Their weak cores weren’t strong enough to keep up with what was happening.

  I used that to my advantage and lashed out at the two men
who’d tried to manacle me. My serpents whipped through their auras and instantly drained most of their aspects and jinsei. I stepped past the stunned Resplendent Sun and drained the two guards behind him on the stairs in the same motion.

  With their auras empty, the guards slumped to the floor. I’d held the dark urge at bay just enough to spare their lives. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could fight it. My willpower was running low.

  “Stop or they’ll shoot!” the Resplendent Sun shouted from behind me.

  Naturally, I didn’t stop. I pushed jinsei out of my core and into my channels to climb the stairs at top speed. I wove a serpentine pattern to the second floor, and the guards’ shots missed me and chipped stone from the steps.

  The humming had grown to an almost deafening droning by the time I’d climbed the stairs. Dust devils tore through the building’s hallways, and spirals of tortured air pulled at my robes and hair. Whatever the Lost were up to was extraordinarily powerful.

  I ignored the elevators because I knew the guards would kill them as soon as they recovered. Instead, I charged through the nearest exit door and into the stairwell. I raced up the narrow concrete steps, around and around the square silo at the heart of the courthouse. I passed each floor in the space of a heartbeat and made it to the sixth level before a door above me burst open.

  Guards spilled into the stairwell with their weapons raised. They wore plated body armor and carried much bigger, much scarier sidearms than the lobby crew. They completely blocked my path with a barrier of bodies and guns. Their eyes were hard and cold under the brims of their riot helmets.

  The guys downstairs had been grunts. These were the elites, ready and willing to kill me.

  There was no way to pass them on the stairs without catching enough lead to sink a ship, even with my enhanced speed. Instead, I leaped into the open space at the heart of the stairwell. Guns roared behind me, sending a storm of bullets after me.

  My jinsei-enhanced leap carried me to the next landing, and I kicked off the railing there to propel myself up and onto the floor above.

  Bullets slammed into the concrete steps instead of me. The guards shouted in surprise and alarm when they realize I’d escaped without so much as a scrape.

  I didn’t stop to gloat. These guys were pros, and I doubted my trick would work a second time. If I wanted to live, I needed to stay ahead of them.

  I made it to the tenth floor without another attack, the guards chasing after me. They might close the gap by the time I reached my target, but by then they’d have other things to worry about.

  The droning had become an endless groan that raked icy fingers across my nerves. There was something terribly wrong about that sound. Madness echoed in its eerie harmonies. Death lurked in the melodies that wound higher and higher.

  My stomach churned as the noise built. More frighteningly, my Eclipse nature seemed to like the cacophony.

  I wondered if that meant the Lost were close.

  I crashed through a door and burst onto the eleventh floor. The power was there, nearby. It pulled at my core like a lodestone to iron filings. I followed it, activating the Borrowed Core technique as I ran. I lashed connections to any living creature I could find. Rats, cockroaches, tiny snakes coiled around warm pipes.

  Other cores flickered at the edges of my awareness, and my Borrowed Core flinched away from them before they could make a connection. I recognized those hideous targets and my mouth went dry.

  The Locust Court was here.

  The Lost hadn’t just attacked the leaders of Imperial society. They’d betrayed them in the most devastating way possible. They’d allied themselves with humanity’s deadliest enemies and unleashed the Hungry Spirits on the world.

  I crashed through a pair of double doors and into the courtroom where Bishop was on trial. The chamber was in utter disarray. Hot, red blood stained the walls in streaks that glistened in the reflected light from burning orange circles in the ceiling. Darkness oozed through those portals and filled the room with shadows that made it difficult to understand what was happening.

  The dead, dying, and wounded were scattered around the courtroom like broken dolls. Most of those who’d come as officials or witnesses to the trial were down and motionless. I spotted guard uniforms among the fallen and caught a glimpse of Grayson Bishop’s ashen face in the witness stand. He was slumped in a chair behind a wooden rail, and I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Elder Hirani was on the floor a few feet in front of where Grayson sat, her hair splayed out around her head, a puddle of blood oozing from a wound in her belly. Her core still glowed, though her eyes were closed and the jinsei channels in her body were nearly empty.

  The chairs in the jury box were filled with broken bodies that my mind refused to catalog. The audience seating was even worse. The majority of the portals had opened above that section of the courtroom, and those sitting there had been caught completely unaware. Their bodies had been torn to shreds, the pieces tossed around like hurricane debris.

  The only survivors had gathered in the courtroom’s far corner, to the right of the wide, empty judges’ bench. Tycho Reyes and the three sacred sages still on their feet had triggered defensive techniques to shelter themselves and a handful of other Empyreals who’d managed to survive the first wave of madness. Sanrin was with them, slumped in the corner, eyes fluttering as he tried to hang onto consciousness. A ragged gash across his face and a puncture wound on the left side of his chest leaked far too much blood. He wouldn’t last long.

  A swarm of Locust Court spirits surrounded the survivors and hammered at their defenses with glowing fists of pure jinsei. Already, the shields raised by the sages were flickering. It wouldn’t be long before they collapsed and the spirits had their way with the Empyrean Flame’s most powerful servants.

  I despised Tycho for the way he’d used me, but I wouldn’t let anyone, not even him, die by the Locusts.

  My Eclipse nature surged within me, and I embraced it. These were the enemies I’d been born to fight.

  And I would destroy them.

  The Assault

  I’D EXPECTED MY ECLIPSE nature to rage at the sight of dozens of Locust Court spirits. Instead, it became a still, icy presence that surrounded my core like a protective mother bear sheltering a cub. It was strangely comforting in the way it numbed me to the horrors and let me focus on the killing that needed to be done.

  The hungry spirits were too intent on reaching the prey right under their noses to notice my arrival. Their single-minded lust to devour the living gave me a few moments to assess the situation and prepare myself for battle, and I took advantage of every second.

  I threw bonds from the Borrowed Core technique far and wide, harnessing the courthouse’s many unseen inhabitants. We cycled our breaths together, filling my core with jinsei and my aura with aspects.

  I summoned my fusion blade, called forth my serpents, and let out a long, slow breath.

  It was time.

  I crammed jinsei into my channels and hurled myself at the back of the Locust Court horde. My weapon rose and fell in brutal butchery. Its blade carved through screaming spirits, ripping their corrupted jinsei bodies to shreds and casting them aside in swathes of gore. My serpents speared the creatures’ cores with deadly accuracy and drained their jinsei in one greedy gulp after another.

  For the first time since that fateful day in Singapore, I unleashed my Eclipse nature. My foes were not humans. They weren’t even beasts. They were evil incarnate, hungry spirits who plotted and schemed beyond the Far Horizon, their leaders bent on devouring all of humanity to fuel their wanton lust for conquest.

  I was an Eclipse Warrior, and these fearsome beasts would know fear this day.

  My onslaught annihilated a dozen of the Locust Court before they recognized they were under attack. The creatures withered and burst apart in blooms of gray threads as I drained their jinsei. Without sacred energy, the spirits were truly nothing.

  “Mr. Warin.” Tycho called out t
o me in a surprisingly calm voice. “How good of you to join us. I hope you brought more reinforcements.”

  “No such luck,” I shouted over the yowling of the furious spirits, slicing a cluster of them into jinsei-spurting chunks with my fusion blade. My serpents speared another pair who’d charged from my side and drained them away into gray threads. “I’m all you’re getting.”

  “That’s a pity.” Despite his calm demeanor, Tycho’s face bore signs of stress. Deep shadows under his eyes showed the strain of this encounter clearly. As strong as the sages were, the surprise attack by the Court had pushed them to their limits. “We tried to summon aid when the assault began, but our attackers were clever enough to block any communications in or out of the area. We will have to make the best of it.”

  The powerful Empyreals redoubled their efforts and pushed the shield they’d raised back onto their attackers. The defensive technique’s surface flared with sparks of jinsei that lashed out to gouge chunks of crystallized jinsei from the creatures’ twisted forms. The stink of ozone flooded the courtroom, and the foul creatures shrieked and recoiled from their prey.

  Trapped between my wailing fusion blade and the aggressive defense mounted by the sages, the monsters split into two groups. The smaller part of the horde kept up the pressure on Tycho’s team. The others fanned out around me, searching for a blind spot. Those behind me darted in to swipe at my back with claws and stingers, then fell back out of sword’s reach when I spun to face them. It was a classic wolf pack attack that would wear me down if I didn’t end this fight in a big hurry.

  Pure offense had worked while I had the element of surprise and the spirits had their attention split. Now that most of them had focused on me, I switched to a defensive stance and activated the Thief’s Shield technique. That irritated my Eclipse nature, which wanted me to keep slashing and draining my enemies to feed it, and I struggled to control its dark urge. The Shield would still steal aspects and jinsei from anything that touched me, though much slower than I could manage with my serpents, and it would weaken their attacks against me. That was my best chance of survival, and I took it.