by Gage Lee
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 to 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.
Minutes passed in a delicate dance that required me to constantly adjust my stance and position in the circle of spirits. I hardened my aura with aspects I stole from the creatures and relied on the Thief’s Shield to ward off the worst of the attacks my enemies launched from my blind side. That tactic allowed me to push my attack against the spirits, killing several of them and weakening their circle. It also cost me a dozen minor injuries to my back and legs.
In the midst of the battle, something grazed my core. It was a gentle touch, gone almost before I registered it. My brow furrowed at the distraction. I didn’t have time to worry about something so minor when I was surrounded by hungry spirits.
The spirits became cannier as the fight wore on. They faded away from my assaults and surged in to claw and bite in concentrated attacks that penetrated the Thief’s Shield. The painful injuries they inflicted slowed my reactions and forced me to spend precious jinsei to stop the bleeding and restore my flagging strength. A trio of the foul creatures slammed into my left leg, howling with glee when their concerted effort staggered me.
“You need to fight,” I shouted to Tycho. That last attack had nearly brought me to my knees. “I can’t kill them all on my own!”
“We’re trying,” the sage called back. “We were ambushed, and they drained the jinsei from several of us. The hungry spirits are consuming the sacred energy from the area faster than we can cycle it into our cores.”
Oh. That sucked.
I hadn’t noticed the drain because I’d stolen power back from the Locust Court killers through my serpents and with my Thief’s Shield. While the monsters’ attacks had physically weakened me, they’d bolstered my stores of aspects and jinsei.
I’d have to carry the weight of the fight.
That called for a new strategy. The Thief’s Shield was a powerful defense that stole from the spirits when they attacked. The sacred energy and aspects I gained from it let me fill my jinsei channels to harden my body against damage and accelerate my reflexes, and the aspects further reinforced my aura to strengthen the technique. Unfortunately, my enemies had figured out they could overwhelm the Shield with brute force.
I changed tactics, dropping back into a defensive posture, my fusion blade held before me. A series of wide sweeps cleared a gap in the circle of spirits, and I darted through it to put my back against a wall. My new position traded mobility for a narrower battle front. The spirits had to come at me head-on, now, and that meant they’d have to get past my weapon to do any damage.
The Locust Court proved too smart to fall for that. They pulled back into a cordon of teeth and claws, then raised their heads and howled a repetitive series of alien syllables. The sound tore at my ears and nerves, and even my Eclipse nature recoiled at the horrifying cry.
At first, I thought it was some sort of assault. Then the orange borders around the portal grew brighter and widened.
They weren’t attacking. They’d called for reinforcements.
Locust Court monsters poured through the portals into the courtroom. Their chitinous forms crashed into dead bodies and splintered furniture in a cacophonous hailstorm. They howled eagerly, ready to rip and rend.
“Jace,” Tycho called, his voice weak and ragged, barely audible over the battle cries of our enemies, “there are too many. They’re draining our jinsei faster than we can replenish it. Get out of here.”
“Too late,” I shouted back.
The wall of spirits around me had doubled, then tripled in strength. There was nowhere for me to run even if I wanted to. This was my last stand.
Last stand...
I remembered one of the stories I’d read about the Utter War. How a single Eclipse Warrior had held off unit after unit of Locust Court killers to save a retreating force of Resplendent Sun shock troopers. How had they done it?
A spirit leaped at my head, jaws wide and claws stretched out to flay my skull open, and I slashed its head off its shoulders. A cloud of jinsei blinded me for a moment, and two more of the creatures took advantage, rushing my flanks. The one on my right screamed when I cut its arm off, and it staggered away with sacred energy spurting from the wound. The one on my left, though, got past my blade and punched through the Thief’s Shield to open a shallow gash across my ribs.
The pain drove me back to the wall behind me, my hand clutched over the injury. It burned like fire. My Eclipse nature urged me to tear and shred. Nothing would have made me happier, but all I could think of was healing the pain with a flow of jinsei through my channels.
The spirits smelled weakness and moved in. Their mere presence drained the jinsei from the air and pulled threads of it loose from my core. There were too many. I needed more sacred energy to fight them. I activated my Borrowed Core technique to connect to more creatures, and a cascade of thoughts clicked into place.
That technique bound itself to cores, not creatures.
If I wasn’t careful, I could drain the cores I connected to.
I understood how that Eclipse Warrior had held off the Locust Court.
The technique didn’t want to do what I needed, and it took me precious seconds to force it to make the first connection.
The monsters had evolved to become the most efficient and ruthless devourers of jinsei in the many worlds. Their cores were perfect at taking jinsei into themselves, wasting not a drop of the precious energy.
They had no defense as a thread of sacred energy from my core slid into the closest Locust Court spirit. The Borrowed Core connection snapped into place.
The spirit was mine.
The monsters screeched when my sacred energy touched them, furious at the unaccustomed violation. Ten of the creatures were mine, then twenty, thirty. My breath became a whirling blur of power through our united cores. Jinsei filled me to bursting, and aspects of hunger and horror clotted in my aura. And when I thought I’d reached my limit, my advanced adept core proved me wrong.
I bound forty, then fifty of the spirits to my core.
Every breath I took drained more of my foes. The first batch vanished in puffs of gray dust, and I lashed fifty more to my technique. My core swelled and stretched to accommodate the sacred energy I’d stolen.
The spirits panicked and howled for more of their brothers and sisters to come aid them. There was no answer.
Realizing what they faced, the monsters screamed and scrambled away from me. I consumed more and more of them, until my aura couldn’t hold any more aspects, and the power I stole leaked away and evaporated into nothingness. My Eclipse nature gloated over the destruction, encouraging me to kill more, to take them all. For once, I didn’t fight it.
The sages let their barrier fall and greedily cycled the jinsei that had returned to the room as I mopped up the battle’s remnants. The weight of the powerful Empyreals’ attention crashed against my aura, then slipped away like a wave pounding against a beach. Their curiosity slowly turned to fear and confusion, and I wondered if any of them really understood what, exactly, I was.
And what they’d do about it once they did.
The last of the spirits screeched and came apart. I’d done it. I’d destroyed the spirits and saved the survivors of the initial assault.
The dark urge I’d unleashed, though, was still inside me. It wanted more. The death and hunger aspects and jinsei I’d stolen didn’t satisfy it. Those had only whetted its appetite. It needed to consume the bubbling vibrancy of life.
This was what the Empyreals feared. A hunger that couldn’t be stopped. A threat that made the Locust Court look like nothing more than a passing annoyance. The dark urge told me I could kill everyone in the room. I could devour the elders and the sages. All I had to do was let it go. It would do the rest.
“Mr. Warin,” Tycho said, his voice tinged with the faintest threads of concern, “thank you for what you did here. Are you quite all right?”
My teeth ached with the need to bite and tear. The Empyreals before me would fill me with power. Maybe enough to advance my core to the disciple level. Or further. It would be so easy...
“No,” I whispered. “That isn’t happening.”
It took a monumental effort of will to shut down the feral greed for life that flowed from the dark urge in a heady stream. I clenched my fists, gritted my teeth, and begged the Empyrean Flame for the self-control to beat this thing inside me. Finally, I trusted myself to speak.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just need a few minutes.”
I turned away from the sages, my eyes locked on the far wall of the courtroom. The patterns of blood there seemed to shift and writhe, though I knew that was impossible. It was just my supernatural senses showing me the churning currents of jinsei that teemed within the red splatters. They were merely echoes of life, the remnants of the people they’d spilled from.
Emergency personnel and guards burst into the courtroom behind me. They went to work with quiet efficiency, searching the fallen to separate those who could be helped from those who were far beyond the reach of technological or mystical medicine. Guards shouted over the clatter of their beeping and flashing equipment, and the confusing flood of Japanese made it hard for me to concentrate on keeping my Eclipse nature at bay.
“Leave him be. He saved us,” Tycho said, and then let fly a string of syllables in a language the guards could understand. For once, I was grateful to have him speak for me.
Despite the tragedy that had occurred, a sense of relief flooded the room. There’d been an attack, but now it was over. The bad guys had been driven back, and the good guys could start putting the pieces of their worlds back together. It wouldn’t be easy, and the survivors would remember what had happened here for a very long time. For the moment, though, we were safe.
So why couldn’t I relax?
I pushed back against my Eclipse nature. Its hungry demands had distracted me from the real danger.
The droning hum I’d heard during my mad rush to the courtroom hadn’t stopped.
It was growing stronger.
“Do you hear that?” I asked no one in particular.
I turned to face the disaster. Emergency medical technicians and jinsei artists loaded the fallen onto gurneys or into body bags. The courthouse guards stood around, looking ineffectual now that there was no immediate danger to deal with.
“Hear what?” Tycho asked from his position near the witness stand. It looked like Grayson wasn’t dead, which was a relief. I wanted to see him punished for what he’d done.
“That humming noise,” I said, distracted by the sensation of someone peering at my core. It was a soft touch, but annoying. “You can’t hear it?”
“No,” Tycho said warily.
Orange light poured into the courtroom accompanied by an earsplitting shriek. A blast of freezing wind poured over my back and whipped my hair around my head. My Eclipse nature howled, a joyous sound of recognition.
Oh, no.
Something heavy whipped past me and smashed into the wood next to me. Splinters of wood flew in every direction, and I threw an arm up to protect my eyes from the shrapnel.
“You fool,” a voice snarled behind me. “How could you betray us?”
The room erupted in confusion. The civilians screamed in panic and horror. The sages shouted to one another in a cacophony of languages I didn’t understand. I wasn’t sure if they’d gathered their strength enough after the spirit ambush to be of
any use against this new threat.
How could we have been so stupid?
The Lost
MY SERPENTS BURST FROM my core to deflect an attack my Eclipse nature detected, and I spun to face my attacker, fusion blade still in my hand.
He was tall and thin, completely naked save for wisps of sacred energy that encircled his body in hazy clouds. His eyes were the same black voids as mine. Like the woman who’d killed the Death Weaver and Henry in my cottage, he was completely bald, and his white scalp gleamed in the orange light from the portal he’d opened in the courtroom. The air cracked and hissed around him as he pulled streams of jinsei into his aura.
“I didn’t betray you,” I said. “But I can’t let you destroy those who did.”
“Let me?” The man laughed, a sound as sharp and jagged as breaking glass. “We’ve planned this since before the Empyreals turned on us. You can no more stop what is coming than you could halt a tidal wave approaching a distant shore.”
Even if he was right, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.
My aura was still filled with the aspects I’d stolen from the Locust Court. I fed them into my serpents, amplifying them again and again as I surged across the courtroom. I leaped into the air, clearing the fallen seats, and raised my long-hilted blade above my head to split my foe in half. The jinsei I’d shoved into my channels moved me faster than humanly possible. The world blurred around me as I sped toward my target like a bladed missile.
The Lost slipped out of my path with surprising ease, and his aura flared out toward me as I landed next to him.
My Eclipse core yowled and drove jinsei into my legs. Its raw survival instinct sent me hurtling away from the aura before it could drain me dry. The dark urge made it clear that any contact with the Lost’s aura would leave me an empty husk. As powerful as I was, this man was far stronger.
