“I am Garlin Braams. Under normal circumstances, I would be impressed with you and your fellows, but as it is, none of you are the King of Spades. Could I convince you to return to your plant, uproot yourselves, and leave the Three Worlds?”
Lowe’s initial fear gave way. He still didn’t know how powerful this man was, to what staggering degree he might outclass him, but it didn’t matter. Speaking had made the man just that, a man, and men Stafros Lowe did not allow himself to fear.
Lowe led with a heavy kick aimed for the head, but which Braams blocked casually with a raised arm. Lowe felt all his force reverberate back through his own body. He’d never felt anything like it.
Wasted seconds might cost him his life, so Lowe immediately invoked the god of his martial art. “Bal Kom Nis Kar Ahn!” he cried, setting his legs to vibrate with power. “Kii Soh Nis Kar Ahn!” He activated the second level of the Lead Cloud Steps but didn’t stop. “Sai Sen! Kar Ahn!”
Lowe dashed forward, leading with a right roundhouse kick, which Braams evaded with what appeared to be effortless grace, but Lowe, at the third level of the Lead Cloud Steps, was fast and deadly. Kicks flashed unceasingly, and Braams continued to dodge, bowing, twisting, turning, stepping back, moving in. Lowe’s speed seemed to increase, though, as the supposed synchronization with the god, Kar Ahn, became complete.
It wasn’t until then that Braams retaliated. He slipped past Lowe’s kicks easily and drove a claw hand straight for Lowe’s chest. Lowe drew his arms in instinctively, forearms together, covering his chest and the lower half of his face. Braams’s palm hit and cracked the electric blue armor, little flecks falling away like chipped paint, but the blow had penetrated more than just Lowe’s armor. Both Lowe’s arms buckled and were driven into his chest, more blue flecks rising like oversized glitter, the bones succumbing to the overwhelming pressure and crunching sickly. The combined pain and sudden shock to his heart and lungs—even though he didn’t need to breathe while Dark—was too much for Lowe. He reared, sucking in air furiously, took three wobbly steps backwards and collapsed, unconscious, his broken arms curled feebly upon his caved-in chest.
“You’d better hope that he still lives.” Bela Fan’s voice was hard and cold.
Braams chuckled at the irony. He deliberately scanned the battlefield, littered with corpses and fallen Entitled, then stared Bela Fan down. “You come here, you kill with abandon, attempt to take what is by no rights yours, and you have the gall and the nerve and the idiocy to threaten me when I defend what is mine, what is ours. I assure you that I will not stop with this one, nor will I stop with you.”
“Gall, maybe. Nerve, certainly. Idiocy? We shall see.” Bela balled her hands into fists and forced her power out in a burst, using the Sinzer Method as few others could. Cold flashed out fiercely in a burst from her eyes, spreading snowy white ice five centimeters thick upon the ground in a widening V. And that was the problem, for where Braams stood, her power stopped, white wings lengthening out on either side of him, but Braams himself was unaffected.
“That’s cold,” he said matter-of-factly. “But, yes, idiocy.”
He approached her, she might have said slowly, but she found that she could not move, neither to attack again nor to retreat. Then he was standing immediately before her. She stared up stupidly and watched his hand come down. His palm slapped the brow of her domed helmet and all went black.
Braams sighed. It was almost too easy. He cursed the situation, that so many had had to die before he could be of use. But where was the King of Spades? Was he still hiding in that monstrous plant, that affront to nature that brought them all here? He rose up into the air and was instantly aware of an imminent catastrophe. One among them had control over forces that could crack the already unstable planet in two. If Shaala were to be destroyed in that manner, Iss and Voskos, by simple virtue of proximity, would also be forfeit.
Braams focused his senses upon the black-clad man atop the giant black horse. The man held his index finger raised to the heavens and just above the tip of that finger, Braams could see, was a particle of mass, unnaturally dense and becoming ever more so. Braams hesitated. He’d been conditioned by the fighting circuit to hold back. The three he’d just put down had been removed from the conflict, but would live; two of them would, anyway. He didn’t have the luxury of mercy with this one. Power of this order had to be eliminated and swiftly—he knew that if he acted now, he could stop what was building.
An intense speck of red light began to shine just before the eye slits of Braams’s bone faceplate . It was, in its way, very much like Barson’s singularity, in that its size was wholly disproportionate to the amount of damage it was capable of producing. The light flared and a beam, a half centimeter in diameter, screamed out, passed through Barson, and through the Vine behind him.
Barson’s body became ripples of ash, radiating out in rapid succession from where the beam had pierced him until he was gone.
The beam seemed to disappear or burn itself out in the Vine, but then the Vine began to shimmer, like it was shaking loose from reality and then there was a tremendous explosion.
• • •
Rocked and sent into the air again for reasons he could not fathom, Jav floated down, as if in slow motion, staring in bewilderment at the black smoke marbled with orange-red fire blossoming between the framework of his upraised feet. The ground came up suddenly and struck him unceremoniously upon his neck and shoulders. His legs teetered for a moment, and then sprawled heavily in the dirt. Still he stared, uncomprehending, but then his Darkened senses penetrated the smoke and flames and he could see that two-thirds of the Vine’s thickness had been obliterated a hundred meters up its length. He cocked his head as understanding bored its way through the haze of his thoughts.
He sat up suddenly and cried at the top of his lungs, calling for Mao. A moment later, alerted by the hoarse sound of his own faltering voice, he realized that it was in fact Mai’s name he’d been shouting. Emotionally defeated by this lapse, he crumpled bonelessly. He struck the ground with both fists, crying out, “No!” He gained his feet, staggered for a step or two, and leapt for the conflagration. Before reaching the peak of his jump, he incorporated AI to propel himself further, through the flames. With his arm guarding his face, he hovered there in the vacancy left by the destruction, held back by raging fire and thick, oily smoke. This time he made no mistake, calling Mao’s name. His head fully clear now, he used AI to approach the nearest open portion of the Vine, pushing through the fire, but much of what he found ran in thick streams of molten resin or was already fused. Bodies and portions of bodies, charred black, jutted from an otherwise indistinguishable mess that might take weeks to adequately assess and address.
Still in the air, Jav emerged from the billowing fire and bleeding smoke. He looked across the battlefield and gawked at what had become of Gran Kwes. It looked like it had been split from the top, down the entirety of its length, with a giant wedge, each half, rolling over like breaking waves of blackened steel. Barson was gone. With the damage done to both Gran Kwes and the Root Palace, Jav understood his absence. Straight down the valley that Gran Kwes had become, Jav saw a figure, also floating in the air, that gave him chill. It was like looking into some strange, faraway mirror that obscured and abstracted. He saw no others that looked like likely candidates for having done this to the Vine, for having taken away Mao, for having sent Kalkin streaking into space, for having disintegrated Barson and destroyed Gran Kwes.
Jav began to quiver with rage. Was there no one he could protect? Was there nothing he could hold onto? So many were dead now. Mai Pardine. Gast Froster. Kimbal Furst. Mont Cranden. Ren Fauer. The retired Shades killed by the Gun Golems. Olander Karza and the rest of the Artifact Competition finalists, some of whom he himself had had to help kill.
He eyed the red mirror image and despite or because of his rage, he blazed through the calculations, bringing himself from a stationary position to the speed of two kilometers per second
, closing the distance between them in that one second and ripping an AI claw hand into the other’s unprotected midsection.
Braams was unprepared for Jav’s sudden assault. He doubled over, feeling Jav’s blow reach deep into his gut. But Braams’s midsection was not unprotected, and Jav’s fingers did not penetrate. Braams’s body, animate blood beneath the bone shapes of the Blood Frame, distributed the explosive force of Jav’s attack. That it made waves at all through the blood medium was a testament to Jav’s power, but in the end it was a mere punch in the stomach, close to Jav’s best, but not of sufficient strength to be of concern to Braams.
Braams grabbed Jav’s outstretched right arm with his left and made as if to claw his arm off at the shoulder with his other hand. Jav stared with big hollow pit eyes of the Kaiser Bones and Braams’s claw tore through a white smoke facsimile.
Braams felt his head struck from behind then seized by something far more powerful than any manmade vice. What he felt was the pressure of infinity between Jav’s hands, but the resilience of the blood sacrificed by millions was greater than the forces Jav could bring to bear.
Jav was confused and frustrated. His calculations were accurate, but there was something about this red doppelgänger that refused the workings of the Kaiser Claw. Jav tried to twist the other’s head from his shoulders, but his hands slipped off of Braams’s helmet clumsily, like magnets with the same polarity. In frustration and desperation, Jav clinched Braams from behind, wrapping his arms around Braams’s neck, his legs around Braams’s torso, just below the arms.
Braams was at first chagrinned by this action, but the strain on his neck as Jav struggled with both arms to liberate his head from his shoulders combined with the sudden eruption from the ground of countless skeletons, whole and moving with some sick semblance of remembered life, cleared his mind of that. Lightning struck three times in under a minute and in close proximity. Braams watched as the fallen—none of them gene soldiers and all of them his fellows—rose from death and reoriented themselves to face him and the remaining forces led by the too few Entitled. He sighed.
“It’s you, then,” he said over his shoulder to Jav. “You’re the King Spades. You are clad in bones, and you do control the dead, at least some of them.”
Jav’s attention, split as it was between trying to remove Braams’s head and raise as many skeletons as possible, left little room for catching or comprehending Braams’s words. He applied AI again and again, but found that, though it seemed to work, its effects were diminished to negligible levels.
Braams drove the heel of his left palm into Jav’s face. This nearly knocked Jav’s head off his shoulders. Dazed more so than before, and knowing instantly that Braams’s strength was of an order far beyond his imagining, Jav somehow managed to maintain his grip, but the lower left jaw of his helmet crumbled away like shattered stoneware. Braams reached back with the same left hand, wrapped his fingers up under the broken upper “lip” of Jav’s helmet, and yanked Jav from his back, bringing his arm straight down, throwing Jav to the ground, hard.
Jav curled into a ball on the ground, but then reached out tentatively to right himself and to stand.
Skeletons and corpses jerked their ungainly way across the front line. The odds, if they’d been based on numbers, would have changed, but numbers were no longer—were perhaps never—a determining factor. But few realized this.
Jav chuckled as he rose, wiping blood from his exposed mouth with the back of his left hand.
“What’s your name,” Jav asked. “Isn’t that the proper way to go about this?”
“I think we’re past that,” Braams said.
Jav shrugged. “My name is Jav Holson. You killed Kalkin, Barson, Mao and who knows how many others. You’ll probably kill me.” His teeth shone out in a smile half visible through his broken faceplate. “But not before I do my damnedest to kill you first.”
“My name is Garlin Braams, Initiate of the Seventh Secret. You are good, Jav Holson, but your damnedest just isn’t good enough.”
Before Jav could react, Braams shot forward. This time he latched onto Jav, clinching him in an all too friendly embrace. The two barreled through the waste of the battlefield flying at breakneck speed mere centimeters above the ground until any fighting that persisted was far behind them.
They stopped abruptly, and Jav noted that they were dangerously close to the smoldering Root Palace now. He stared at Braams for a moment and had the oddest sense that beneath the smooth bone plate Braams was grinning.
Perhaps it was his years of intense Approaching Infinity training, dealing always with tedious minutia, that enabled him to sense the change that was even now taking place, but Jav knew with a certainty that death was an instant away. He swallowed hard and before Braams’s arms could close upon the smoke and emptiness left by the Ghost Kaiser, Braams exploded. A flash as bright as the beam that had reduced Wheeler Barson to ash, Gran Kwes to a cloven mountain of melted slag, and the Root Palace by a quarter or more, nearly cutting it off from its source, filled the space between the fighting and the Palace. The flash grew brighter and brighter still as the explosion spread, racing to claim whatever lay in its path.
The Ghost Kaiser could only bring Jav so far out of harm’s way. As he reappeared he had to focus like never before, invoking the displacement technique several times in succession in an effort to outrun the expanding blast radius, which drove him to the front gates of the Palace before reaching its potential and dissipating. Jav saw that if the explosion had been any larger, had gone any further, it would have wiped the battlefield clean of everyone and everything. He couldn’t deny his admiration for Garlin Braams, but nor could he forgive him, right or wrong.
Jav glanced back, up over his shoulder at the crippled Root Palace and needed no other prodding. Once again, with that incredible speed only possible using AI, he launched himself at Braams, this time leading with the Kaiser Kick. The environment sped by Jav like streams of multicolored paint, and just as his foot was about to impact Braams’s head, Braams reached out and snatched Jav’s ankle. The speed and precision that this action required shocked Jav. Braams turned easily, maintaining Jav’s momentum all the while as he redirected Jav’s course into the ground with a graceful arc.
Braams released his hold on Jav and began to circle him.
Jav struggled to rise. The numbness from the black smoke snake had worn off and his lower back felt hot and wet and pulsed incessantly, like a second, larger and malignant heart. His face hurt. His helmet was lined with cracks across the broad forehead and up over the crown now. He spat dirt, fighting the body-wide ache that threatened to seize and incapacitate him, but paused in his efforts as Braams stopped before him.
“Go on. Get up,” Braams said.
Jav hesitated, but Braams stepped back a pace, raising his hands in a placating gesture.
Jav marshaled himself, scrambled to his feet, and lashed out with an impressive series of strikes that well-represented the Eighteen Heavenly Claws. Despite the punishment he’d received and the pain he was in, Jav was steady, precise, and fast. But so was Braams.
Braams matched Jav blow for blow with blocks that, to Jav, were eerily familiar, reminiscent of the Eighteen Heavenly Claws. Jav pushed, adding AI to his strikes once he’d regained enough of his bearings to do so, moving from tiger to eagle to dragon, and actually looked as though he dominated, but only for a moment. Braams accommodated him at first then went on the offensive himself. His first strikes—those of the tiger, Jav realized with astonishment—were tentative and probing, backed, he knew, only by a fraction of Braams’s real power. But these strikes were enough to jar his eyes in his sockets, his bones in his joints. Successful blocks were wholly dependent on AI and were exhausting as Braams came faster and faster, until he broke Jav’s defense altogether.
Jav turned to roll with an onrushing claw, but could not get out of the way fast enough. Braams’s fingers tore at his right bicep, snagging on the Kaiser Bone there, sinking into
the meat, and continuing on to shear half of it away and send the Bone spinning through the air into the charred dirt. Jav gripped at his ruined arm with his left hand as he cried out and was struck in the chest with a heavy palm, then in the right eye of what remained of his helmet with raking fingers. More of his helmet fell away as Jav staggered backwards, struggling not to fall down, heaving with exhaustion.
Jav took a deep breath and seemed to flex every muscle in his body that would respond. White shapes began to wriggle their way up through the blackened ground. In seconds, skeletons armed with pole swords surrounded Braams.
Braams shook his head. “You have the look of the King of Spades, but you are not my match. Keska Kessel has saved us all. Unless,” he said looking towards the Root Palace, the King of Spades remains yet within.” He stared at Jav for moment, batting away a skeleton who drew too close. “This is not the circuit. Your actions have consequences. I’m sorry that it must be this way.”
Suddenly, the empty plain between the Root Palace and the rest of the fighting was crowded with walking corpses. There was something else as well, a sound, like rushing, like a river. Braams glanced at the roiling sea off to his left, then back towards the advancing line of corpses. The sound was closer now and not coming from the ocean. Braams cocked his head, not understanding, but he didn’t have to wait long for that to change.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 33
