The rushing sound was nearly upon him when the very ground seemed to rise up to towering heights, fueled by an inexhaustible torrent of water, to form Un Azameio, melted by the heat of Braams’s explosion. The great beast was eighty meters high and broad before it came crashing down upon Braams with all its weight and its master’s outrage.
Dolma Set, arms folded, stood at Un Azameio’s back. Despite the churning of the water, Set could see perfectly well through his creation. Braams had been driven to the ground where he stayed long enough for Un Azameio to rise again and begin a savage pummeling. Its massive fists, weighing nearly a hundred tons each, came down with ape-like fury, again and again, driving Braams further and further into the so recently fused ground.
This was a small victory for the Viscain, and short-lived. Set dropped his arms, concerned by the change he sensed in Un Azameio. Its temperature had risen suddenly and drastically. It was boiling already, giving off inordinate amounts of steam that weren’t dense enough for Set to reign in and control. In just over a minute, Un Azameio was gone, this time irretrievably.
Set wasted no time bemoaning the loss. He moved with slick speed across the ground to Braams who was already standing. Just as Set came within range and was about to strike, he stopped, becoming stock still. He couldn’t move. He felt as though his blood had stopped flowing, had turned to rubber cement, holding him fast.
Braams brushed himself off. “I’m not going to fight you. I don’t have to fight him,” he said, nodding towards Jav who was some ways away panting and trying to fight off exhaustion, “but doing so serves as an object lesson—for me and all those of the Three Worlds—that there are no bogeymen.”
From over Set’s right shoulder, Forbis Vays shot like a giant silver bullet, leading with the Titan Saber, straight for Braams. Braams faded slightly to his right, his right palm crossing before him, striking the flat of the blade a third of the way from the hilt. The blade snapped off cleanly and pinwheeled away to stab the ground several meters away. Still moving fluidly, Braams snaked his left hand forward under his right arm, gripped the approaching Vays with crushing fingers, crumpling the Titan Star’s armor, and swept his left arm back behind him, so that Vays was sent hurtling past him, his momentum increased many, many times. Vays turned over as he shot through the air and impacted upside down and back first into the base of the Root Palace, not far from where Jav had before.
Braams turned his attention back towards Jav, walked past Set, who was still immobile, pushing the skeletons that sought to assault him out his way like fragile things made of glass. A giant stepped from among the walking corpses, barring further approach.
Braams cocked his head and regarded Raus. “Your blood is different. I can’t sense your heartbeat. I can’t see into you.”
Raus shrugged. “I’m not sure if you should blame my father or the Viscain Emperor. In my experience so far, the former is the better bet.
“I think I’ve got the majority of your friends here,” Raus said indicating the dead throng at his command. “Can you sense their heartbeats? Or see into them?”
Braams surveyed those arrayed before him. Some were long-dead and half-rotted away, but there were others that he recognized. Too many that he recognized. Kars Kromma, Aareks, Faiz, Pallsiver, Fennin, Kraaskau. Poor, poor Lissa, riddled with bite marks.
Raus moved casually forward, his host advancing a pace behind with him. He lurched forward jabbing his massive left arm under Braams’s right, only to curl back around to grip Braams’s bony white chin. At the same time, he wrapped his right arm around Braams’s waist, transfixing him where he stood.
Raus chuckled then jerked his right hand which should have broken Braams’s neck, but there was no spine holding his head up. What bones there were were on the outside of his semi-solid body of blood and those were not rigid, but segments like vertebrae housing no spine and accommodated any flexure Raus could manage.
“That I cannot stop your blood,” Braams said calmly, “means little. I have already summoned all who yet live within your plant to fight for me and turned what human troops you employ against each other and your genetic trash.”
Raus glanced from the Palace to the Viscain forces he’d left behind, seeing even at this distance with his enhanced senses, that indeed Barson’s remaining troops were butchering gene soldiers and that people in various states of health were pouring out of the base of the Root Palace, coming this way.
“You can set your dead upon them and then keep them as pets when they too are dead,” Braams said. “You could, if I were to let you live.” He reached his right arm past Raus’s face and hooked his fingers under Raus’s heavy jaw. He sank the fingers of his left hand into Raus’s right shoulder and pulled his hands in opposite directions.
Raus’s neck, thick as it was, was structurally weaker than his shoulder, so the skin began to pull beyond its elasticity, taut against the straining muscles, and tear as Braams pulled him apart. Raus quivered with effort, trying to maintain his grip on Braams and ignore the pain, but finally, gray-green fluid spewed from a gash that followed a course leading from beneath his jaw, down along the inner line of his trapezius muscle, the Resurrection Bolt jutting forth from the torn flesh, but showing no sign of being dislodged or otherwise disturbed. He released Braams, seeking escape, but Braams raked his left hand down with strength Raus had never dreamed possible. Raus’s shoulder was pulped in an instant and his arm, sheared away almost as an afterthought, hit the ground, twitching. Raus stumbled back three steps, pressing his left hand first to the gaping wound at his neck, then to the mess of his shoulder, unable to staunch the dark fluid in either case that pumped in waves and spurts from between his fingers. His eyes fluttered and he nearly fainted from pain and blood loss, but he maintained his feet and cried out to the heavens.
A jagged column of lightning struck him then, and seemed to pour into him indefinitely, filling him with its energy. Raus lowered his head and made eye contact with Braams. The giant Shade dropped his left hand from his shoulder, and Braams watched as the other wound began to close, sealing from neck to shoulder top. But more disturbing was the activity at the raw stump. A nub of bone poked tentatively from the ragged mess, lengthened and grew thicker. The torn meat of his shoulder stretched and took on mass, traveling down the length of the bone.
Braams saw thin metal wires, which he could not know were the nerves of the Resurrection Bolts, shoot through the new, raw muscle, promoting growth and aiding in design as the arm built to what he knew was its inevitable completion. Smaller iterations of the Resurrection Bolts rose up down the length of the arm as it finished.
In moments Raus held brand new fingers before his face. He flexed them, marveling at the wonder his own body and the Resurrection Bolts produced. His right arm was identical to the left, and to the other right arm on the ground, except that it was a darker greenish-gray than the rest of him—a permanent scar to remind him of his temporary loss and of the boon received from the Viscain Emperor.
The lightning ceased, but the air suddenly filled with current, this time issuing from Raus’s body as he became a living resonant transformer.
Braams was startled as the sparks danced over him, but he walked through the field of arcing lights and struck Raus, piston hard and straight, square in the chest with his palm. Fire bloomed a blossom big enough to obscure Raus entirely for a moment, but he was gone, his chest caved in, though perhaps healing already, surging through the air, away from the Root Palace. As he drew further and further away, Braams heard his laughter swallowed only partially by the wind, but more words were lost entirely.
When he resumed his hunt for Jav, he saw that Jav had indeed benefited from his respite.
Jav had been preparing the Kaiser Claw for a full minute and forty-eight seconds. He cried out and made one last, desperate lunge towards Braams, leading with the Kaiser Claw. Braams’s right arm shot through Jav’s seeking hands, his fingers finding Jav’s throat, but Jav’s hands, too, found their targ
et, seizing Braams’s head once again in their vice grip. The two were locked together like that, inseparable. Holding Jav suspended at the end of his right arm, Braams drove a left cross into Jav’s head, a deft palm strike that sent three thick fracture lines from the impact point. Two large triangles of bone fell to the ground, and Braams tore the rest of the helmet from Jav’s head, flinging it behind him.
“You’re just a man, Jav Holson. The King of Spades is nothing!”
Still Jav did not let go.
Braams drove his left claw hand into Jav’s midsection so hard that his fingers pushed out through the wound in the small of Jav’s back. Blood jetted, ran down Jav’s broken body, and Braams’s arm, which was still lodged in Jav’s guts. Braams yanked his hand free and shook the blood from it.
“There,” Braams said with some satisfaction. “There. I can feel your heart slowing, pumping blood out of you rather than through you, but less and less with every weakening beat. You’ve lost so much already. It won’t be long now before the Three Worlds is rid of the King of Spades.”
Jav’s grip still did not falter, though what was left of the Kaiser Bones wavered for a moment, like a failing holographic image, and disappeared altogether. Pain coursed through him, pounded in his skull like some primitive language that was somehow familiar to him. He probed with his failing Artifact. He knew that Abanastar was nearby, wounded and exhausted himself, but perhaps all that lay between victory and defeat.
All of his strength was flowing out of him, if not through the hole in his stomach, then the from the one in his back, or the one in his striving right arm. He maintained the placement of his hands, but his ability to calculate was diminishing. Blackness was encroaching.
20. MII KAISER
10,691.151
(Year of the Church 1084)
Voices echoed, competed for dominance. Not outside, but in.
“Submit-submit-submit. You must submit-submit-submit.”
“We cannot. It is wrong-wrong-wrong.”
“Then all is lost-lost-lost. Even now you fade-fade-fade. You can be forced-forced-forced. You will be. You will be made whole-whole-whole.”
There was silence for a moment, like a smothering blanket.
“Submit-submit-submit!”
Jav started, consciousness rising from the heavy press of oblivion. There was only blackness and the beating of the voice like a drum, like a heart, shaking his very being.
“To what?” Jav responded weakly.
“Submit your conscience. Submit to power-power-power. If you do not, you, your friends that remain will die-die-die.”
“Mao. . .”
“Dead-dead-dead.”
Anger stirred in Jav like. . . like a flame. Fire. But fire alone wasn’t what made Braams so strong. No, it was—
“Blood-blood-blood. I too need blood-blood-blood. But you must submit-submit-submit.”
“The choice is mine?”
“The choice has always been yours-yours-yours.”
“Not always,” Jav said petulantly. Once again, silence descended like numbness. “What must I do?”
“Submit-submit-submit or die-die-die.”
Jav did not speak, but speaking here, in this place, was suspect. Though he didn’t voice it, he had made his decision.
Laughter boomed. “The choice has always been yours-yours-yours.”
• • •
Skeletons, corpses, and one Dolma Set, all of them standing immobile, like some morbid, post-apocalyptic still-life diorama, surrounded Braams and his prey. Braams was growing frustrated with Jav’s clinging hands. Jav was dead or close enough to it that he should have no such strength. When he looked into Jav’s eyes, he was shocked to see a bone plate covering Jav’s face and the eyes he looked into were living shadows, filled with contempt and a terrible knowing. Braams could not fight a drowning wave of horror—the stories of the King of Spades were too much a part of him, and he feared for a moment that Kessel’s prophecy had doomed them psychologically just as much as it had prepared them physically. Commingling with this undeniable dread was an awareness in the back of his mind that he could no longer sense Jav’s blood inside or outside of his body.
A strange power pulsed through Braams, sickening him, threatening to turn out the contents of his stomach, despite not having a stomach anymore.
A fine red haze had risen. The pulse, alien and intrinsically wrong, came again, and the haze was drawn into the Mask that covered Jav’s face.
Braams felt strength surge back into Jav’s arms, saw his right arm regain some of its bulk.
“Abanastar!” Jav cried through his Artifact. “If you’re here, it must be now or you, Set, and Vays die!”
Hidden amongst the crowd of corpses, Abanastar floated in and out of consciousness. He’d lost a lot of blood and taxed himself with his lenses, using them in ways that were beyond their design to bring them all closer to the Palace. Jav’s words roused him slightly, and he used his lenses to see what was going on. He saw that Jav had Braams held firmly within the Kaiser Claw, but that he could not finish the technique. This was something Abanastar could help with.
He lurched suddenly, as blood was yanked from the existing wounds across his body. He nearly blacked out from the additional loss, but Jav cried out a final time in his mind, snapping him to attention. Abanastar focused and envisioned a series of lenses about Jav’s outstretched arms. The lenses weren’t physical and Jav had no sense of them rotating about his arms, but he did feel them focusing his strength, increasing it, enabling him to concentrate on his calculations.
Abanastar pumped everything he had left into those lenses, and Jav’s physical strength surged. This allowed his calculations to go unperturbed, even as Braams raked his fingers down through his right side, obliterating ribs and spilling freshly reclaimed blood in a wet splash. Damaged as Jav was, the strength from Abanastar was localized and unaffected by any structural requirements to maintain it. The pain was excruciating, and brought Jav closer to death than he’d ever been or ever would be again, but still he pushed the Kaiser Claw. If he could just get the cascading effect to begin on Braams, all would be worth it.
The shadow eyes of the Ritual Mask narrowed and Jav howled, driving his calculations until Abanastar slid the lenses down the lengths of Jav’s arms to encompass the AI effect taking place between his hands. At this, Jav felt something like literal infinity pour through him.
• • •
Braams had been aware of Jav’s strange facility to somehow bend space to his will, greatly adding to the velocity of his strikes, to his impact power, and making this strange wrestling hold nearly impossible to escape. He’d been aware, too, of the vast amounts of pressure Jav could bring to bear. The affect was highly focused and contained so he didn’t feel that it warranted as much concern as the horse-headed one’s artificial singularity had. Though Jav refused to let go, Braams could withstand the pressure. The blood of millions had given him the power of God and he felt that power in evidence now, resisting the press of infinity with an equal or greater infinity. Braams was sure that he could outlast Jav’s efforts. Jav had gotten a second wind somehow, but he would tire again, and Braams would kill him—again.
Or so he thought.
Someone somewhere had suddenly added to Jav’s strength. Braams felt the grip upon his head tighten, generating physical pressure greater than any the Entitled had ever been able to effect. While the strength was unprecedented, the aid was not. The Entitled themselves had learned to combine their Haloes, to chain their power, channeling it through one another to accomplish a result many times greater than that possible by a lone individual, but their methods were less subtle than the one being employed now. Obviously, in this case, close physical proximity was unnecessary. Braams could not see who was responsible. He could sense the person’s blood, could even seize control of that blood, but he could not stop the aid that was being provided and there was a danger. If that effect was somehow transferred to the assault upon the spa
ce between Jav’s hands, Braams could very likely lose the stamina battle.
Braams composed himself and split his focus equally between resisting the forces attempting to crush his head and preparing for the Red Beam. But time was running out; what he’d feared might happen had started to happen. He could feel the gentle shift in power from physical to spatial, and the strain upon his head abruptly went from tolerable to sanity crippling.
• • •
It was a simple adjustment for Abanastar, but the effect was incalculable, precipitating three separate processes, which quickly built to a nearly simultaneous crescendo. Abanastar pushed the last of his consciousness into his power, causing it to spike; Jav reached deeper into himself, exerting his muscles and his mind, pushing both to limits new to him; and Braams finished preparing the Red Beam.
As Abanastar passed out, but before the Red Beam fired, a thin line, like a single strand of hair, surfaced upon Braams’s helmet from chin to crown, right between the eye slits, and was punctuated by a sharp chinking sound.
The red speck flared, flashing out in that half-centimeter beam that had proven so destructive before, and Jav disappeared, leaving nothing but a smokey outline that quickly dissipated. The battlefield, too, was cleared of all in the beam’s path. Braams began to laugh a nervous and strained laugh that died when the red glare lit the far off horizon. The city of Halaam, the staging area for repelling the invasion, was gone. The blood of nearly a million people was gone, vaporized in a moment of carelessness.
“No. No. No!” Braams cried.
But his anger gave way to confusion. His vision was obscured. He put a hand to his face and briefly interrupted a fine sheet of blood spraying out the length of the crack in the Blood Frame’s helmet.
“I suppose it’s not really fair,” Jav said from behind him.
The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) Page 34
