Immortal Swordslinger 3

by Dante King

“Not really. Back home, I was good at what I did, and I was proud of that. But here, I’m so much more. I’m growing in power and ability with each passing day, learning skills that don’t even exist where I come from. And there’s this whole world to see, with its wild beasts, its magnificent cities, and, of course, its wonderful women.”

  I pulled her close, and we kissed again. Her hands ran across me, and I stirred at her touch.

  “You’re ready again?” she said with a laugh. “So soon?”

  “Perhaps.” I grinned. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  She rolled onto her back, and I pressed myself against her. We kissed, fierce and wonderful, as I entered her again. This time, we took our pleasure hard and fast, driving against each other with the desperate urgency that came from knowing that we wouldn’t have much longer to ourselves. She squeezed me tight as we writhed against each other. The waters broke around us like a storm. As quickly as we had begun, climax seized us both.

  The waters calmed and we lay, laughing and gasping, thoroughly soaked.

  “Time for another swim, I think,” Kumi said as she eased out from under me.

  By the faint light that had made it from the main cave, I watched her swim out across the pool. My eyes had adjusted by now, and I could see more of her. I took a moment to enjoy the shape of her ass as she turned on her side and beckoned me to follow.

  A voice sounded in my head, low, murmuring, and sensual.

  “It’s good that you’re taking care of Kumi,” Yono said. “She is important to me.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. “Though maybe next time, don’t let me know you’ve been watching.”

  It was weird to have one of the women in my life congratulate me on sleeping with another, but no weirder than having a trident talking in my head. The idea that Yono might have been in my head throughout was a bit more than I was ready to think about, though. Still, it seemed she had far more power than Nydarth. After all, she’d managed to visit me in physical form, whereas Nydarth had only ever been able to meet with me in my dreams.

  I put the thoughts aside and followed Kumi across the pool. We swam past where we’d abandoned our clothes and weapons. My limbs worked against the gentle current flowing through the caves. Aches withdrew from my muscles as the exercise eased them out within the soothing water. I hadn’t felt so good in days.

  “The water stirs,” Kumi said. “I think there are beasts moving in the caves.”

  “We should get back to the Pathless,” I said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We swam swiftly back to where we had undressed and climbed out of the water. Hurriedly, we pulled on our clothes and grabbed our weapons. With the Sundered Heart and the Depthless Dream in my hands, I felt ready to face any monsters the Vigorous Zone could throw at me.

  “Wait.” Kumi grabbed my arm as I made to run toward the camp. “If we go through the water, we might catch the monsters by surprise.”

  I sheathed my weapons and followed her back into the pool. We swam out of our hidden spot and around to the stream that ran up to our encampment.

  “I can get us there quicker,” I said. “Grab your weapons tight and get ready.”

  Kumi clutched her butterfly knives in her hands while I focused on calling on the water within me. Vigor rushed through my body and out into the surrounding pool. I felt connected with the water in a way I hadn’t before, as if we were two bodies joining as one.

  The power of the Crashing Wave ran out through me, but this time, I didn’t try to turn it into a series of steady, rising waves. Instead, it became a single great surge that sank back, then rose up behind us. The wave rushed along the channel up the cave, carrying me and Kumi with it. The force of the water was like a great hand that grabbed hold of me and hauled me along, while its power became a rushing noise in my ears. We hurtled up the stream and into the pool by the cooking fires, then shot out, flung like bullets from a gun.

  I landed in the middle of a group of scarrick beetles, with trident in my hands but my sword sheathed. A beetle snapped at my leg, and I batted it away, but as before, a simple weapon blow wasn’t enough to break through its shell. I let my Vigor flow along the trident, reached with my mind into the water behind me, and summoned another Crashing Wave. It shot out of the pool and slammed into a charging scarrick beetle, then smashed it against the wall. There was a crack of stone on stone, and the impact split the plates on the beetle’s back. It fell to the floor and lay limply twitching amid a heap of damp sand. Rather than give it time to recover, I pounced and struck with the Depthless Dream. The trident plunged into a crack in the creature’s armored plates and sank into the body beneath. The beetle burst apart beneath the impact of the magical blow.

  Scarrick beetles were streaming through the camp, far more of them than I had faced outside. Some menaced the Pathless, but most were going for the heaps of roasted fish. They were trying to steal our supplies. Around the fires, the Pathless moved uncertainly. Most of them weren’t warriors, and even if they had been, their only weapons were thin sticks and flaming torches.

  I strode over and kicked a beetle away from two scared-looking Pathless. The creature landed with a splash in the edge of a pool. Once again, I called on the power of Crashing Waves. The water fountained up around the beetle and hurled it into the air. There was a crunch as it hit the ceiling and then a splat as it landed in the sand at the side of the stream. I brought the Depthless Dream down to finish it off.

  Another beetle was menacing Shadiy with its mandibles. She held out a pair of torches, trying to keep it from the people behind her, but the stone-sheathed creature had no fear of fire. It kept advancing, claws skittering across the ground, while Shadiy and her companions kept retreating.

  I lifted my hand and created a wall of Plank Pillars to separate the monster from the people. Then, I dropped to one knee and slammed my fist into the earth. The ground cracked beneath my blow, and it rippled toward the beetle and threw it onto its back. I charged and slammed the trident down hard in a gap between its armored plating. The power of water surged through me and my weapon, and the beetle spattered across the floor.

  Kumi stood nearby, extricating one of her knives from the underbelly of a beetle. Two more that she had killed lay nearby, but no more were moving.

  “Gather up the fish,” I said to the people around me. “We’re getting out of here.”

  While the Pathless collected the food, Kumi and I collected the cores. She handed her share to me, and I absorbed them. I still didn’t have enough cores to carve the internal pathways for a new technique.

  We moved into the entrance cave. The Pathless loaded the fish into the cart while Shadiy got the horse into the harness.

  “You take the others out of here,” I said.

  “You’re not coming with?”

  “I’ll be nearby, but I can move much faster than if I traveled alongside you all. Besides, if I can pick up a few more beetle cores, I can learn a new technique.”

  “Do your studies never end?” Kumi climbed up onto the cart and took the reins.

  “You know it.”

  I ran out of the cave, ahead of the others.

  In the boneyard, a pack of scarrick beetles milled about. I ensured that Kumi and the others were far from harm and slinked toward the beetles. I gathered my Vigor and sent it running down through my feet into the ground, then back up. Being in a place of earth power and with the waters in the caves right behind me, mud flowed more readily than it would elsewhere. My Mud Geyser burst forth in spectacular fashion amid the main mass of beetles and sent them flying. One landed on its back in front of me, and I sliced it in half with the Sundered Heart Sword, the flaming blade easily cutting through the creature’s soft belly to reveal its innards and glowing magical core.

  The beetles had quickly regrouped and started advancing again. I created a Mud Entrapment beneath some of them, holding back part of the swarm to buy time while I dealt with others.

  Direct elemental attack
s like Untamed Torch wouldn’t do much good against creatures armored in stone, as I’d seen from other fights in this Vigorous Zone. But I had less direct ways of using my Augmenting to affect them. I summoned an Acid Cloud around some of the advancing beetles and watched as they backed off, agitated by the stinging green mist. Two advanced through it, but by the time they reached me, their shells were softening. I stabbed one with the Depthless Dream and punctured its softened shell. Gore oozed out around the wound as I put my foot on its head and tugged the trident free.

  Its companion lashed out at me with its mandibles. I jumped back and brought the Sundered Heart down. The softened stone shell crumpled beneath the blow.

  From afar, hooves clopped and wheels rumbled as the cart rolled down the desert road, Kumi still at the reins and the Pathless running along behind. I trusted that Kumi could deal with any beetles they encountered along the way, so I could spend some more time out here in the Vigorous Zone.

  More beetles emerged from the cairns. They seemed to stream out from the heaps of rocks themselves, their sole purpose to swarm me. I called forth the power of water and thick slabs of Frozen Armor formed across my body.

  Near the central cairn, there was an overwhelming feeling of magical power. It surged around me, invigorating and yet frightening. Not quite the power of the elemental core that had been stolen from this Vigorous Zone but still a potent source of magic.

  I turned and faced the onrushing beetles. With a flick of my mind, a Mud Entrapment appeared beneath the leading creatures, trapping them in its thick goo. More beetles were coming around, so I didn’t have time to pick off the trapped individuals, as I’d done before. Instead, I reached out with Crashing Wave into the water part of the mud. A tidal wave of mud rippled through the ground, lifted up 10 beetles, and smashed them against nearby cairns.

  As the remaining beetles swarmed around the edges of the mud, I clutched the Depthless Dream tight and called on the Crashing Wave again. This time, I sent out two waves of mud, one to the right and the other to the left. They slopped over the advancing beetles, not trapping them as totally as if they had stood in the mud, but still slowing their advance.

  Now, I had a use for my other strongest element: fire. I took hold of the Sundered Heart with one hand and held the other out in front of me. A fireball appeared and quickly expanded in my palm as I channeled the Burning Wheel. It grew into a flaming whirlwind that I flung away from me, right into the mud-coated beetles.

  The Burning Wheel careened wildly back and forth across the boneyard, bouncing off the cairns. As it hit patches of mud, it baked them dry. The sticky mass that had slowed down the beetles turned into a series of individual prisons that pinned each one in place with immovable clay. They strained against it, but none of their legs were individually powerful enough to break through. When the Flaming Wheel finally made its escape between two of the cairns, leaving me and the beetles behind, not one of the creatures remained free.

  I stalked across the sea of hard-baked clay that had been our battleground. I stopped at each individual beetle, found a gap in its clay coating, and thrust in my sword, trident, or knife to finish it off. The ease of dealing with them this way made me appreciate my new mud techniques all the more.

  When I was done collecting their cores, I leaned back against the towering central cairn and caught my breath. I’d just used up a hell of a lot of Vigor. My body was trembling and my nerves sizzling from the power that had run through them.

  It was getting late in the afternoon as I sat at the foot of the great cairn with a heap of scarrick beetle cores in front of me. I pressed the cores against my chest one by one, holding each in place until my body had absorbed it. The power throbbed through me, a suitable reward for a long day of fighting.

  I felt the tipping point at which a new power was available within me and kept the rest of the cores inside my pouch. I wasn’t sure whether there was a market for selling additional cores, but it sounded like a reasonable thing to exist in this world.

  I stood up and held out my arms. It was time to test what I had learned. I opened a channel within me and let Vigor flow.

  Almost immediately, the ground beneath me softened, and I plummeted into it. I yelped in alarm and got a mouthful of dirt before I realized what was happening; this was the Hidden Burrow technique that I’d seen Tahlis use.

  With that in mind, I directed the power. The earth in front of me became as soft as water. I strode through it for half a dozen paces, then directed the power up. The ground beneath me hardened, the ground above me softed, and I shot out beside one of the smaller cairns.

  I tried it again. This time, after sinking into the ground, I used the technique’s power to push me along instead of walking. Suddenly, I was darting around the boneyard, disappearing in one place only to reappear somewhere else entirely. It was like using Crashing Wave to propel me through the water, an extra burst of speed as well as the concealment of moving underground.

  I laughed excitedly as I stood beside the great cairn, panting from exertion.

  “Such good work, my sweet man,” Nydarth spoke in my head. “And now that you’ve got all this lovely earth magic, it’s time to create another core, this time with fire.”

  “I suppose that’s only fair,” Yono said. “You’ve done some wonderful work with water and, of course, with our beloved Kumi. But the Swordslinger needs to have a variety of techniques. Although I don’t like the idea of our beloved man venturing into the spirit realm while enemies could be nearby.”

  My recent powers had all been about earth and mud. Could I use them to build walls around me, or perhaps a sea of mud that would stop attackers in their tracks? I wasn’t sure I trusted that to hold for the time it took me to forge a new core. What about my new technique, Hidden Burrow?

  “I’m going to try something,” I said to the spirit weapons.

  I let the earth power flow through me. The ground softened, and I sank into it. Soon, I was several feet down, close to the central cairn and the magic that flowed around it but completely hidden from view. Thanks to my connection with the earth, I could still breathe, despite the soil pressing in around me. Here, in my own small pocket beneath the ground, I was safe from anything that might happen above, whether passing monsters or scouts from the Unswerving Shadows Cult.

  I drew myself into a cross-legged pose and laid the spirit weapons across my knees. I focused on the Sundered Heart, as it held the power of fire. I also reached out with my mind to the cairn and all the earth Vigor flowing through it—Vigor that matched the flow through my own body. I let the two forces flood my mind and pour through my heart.

  The world around me faded as my consciousness was transported to the spirit realm.

  Other parts of the realm I’d visited had seemed placid and pleasant until the spirits came to fight. This place was made from the melding of fire and earth but was different from the locations of its base elements.

  I stood on the slope of a volcano, beneath a sky that billowed with dark gray clouds and flashes of fire. Lava spewed from the peak of the volcano and ran down its sides like rivers of molten death. More dribbled from holes in the mountainside and created rivulets that ran across the rocks, a spiderweb of glowing liquid. The air shimmered in the heat and carried the stench of sulfur. There were no plants or animals, the only sign of moisture an occasional burst of steam from holes in the rock. Far below, the slope gave way to a cliff edge. At the bottom was broken ground of jagged rocks where a green-tinged pool of water bubbled and steamed.

  As always, I stood unarmed as I prepared to face my foes.

  Two figures emerged from caves on the slope above me. One was made of fire, its body blurring with the air in the heat haze. The other was made of dirt, a flowing figure of sand and soil, like the ones I’d faced twice already in the past few days. The fire and earth spirits looked down at me and waited.

  Fire was an old opponent, and the one I felt most comfortable taking on. I looked around for anything I c
ould use against him. Once we got in close, my own power over fire should keep me from getting too badly burned, but that would only stop me dying, not help me win. I could hardly scoop up handfuls of lava, but there were some substantial rocks lying around. I picked up one that sat well in the palm of my hand, then headed up the mountain toward the fire spirit.

  As I strode up the slope, the two spirits moved down to meet me. I didn’t want to have to fight both at once, so I picked up speed and ran straight toward the fire spirit.

  The creature opened his arms wide and let out a hissing roar. I launched myself off a protruding rock just in front of him and jumped into the air. I crashed into the spirit, bringing us both to the ground.

  We tumbled across a slope of broken and jagged rocks. Protrusions jabbed at my sides, and my elbow jolted with pain as it hit the ground, but I did my best to ignore it.

  The spirit and I grappled with each other. Each of us had one hand at the other’s throat, pushing their head back, trying to get leverage to do some real damage. When I touched his flesh, my skin burned, but it was just the feeling of pain and not genuine damage to my body. I ignored the sting from his heat and flipped him onto the ground. He wrapped both legs around me, the heat of his limbs bearing down on me, before he slammed his head into mine. Stars danced across my vision, and he flipped me over to get on top.

  Before he had a chance to make the most of his advantage, I swung my rock around. It collided with the side of the spirit’s head. He hissed in pain, and his grip on me loosened. I hit him with the rock again and again.

  The spirit slid to one side and raised his hands to protect himself. But he was too slow and now too weak from the damage I’d already done. I brought the rock down repeatedly, battering his arm out of the way and then smashing in his head until, at last, he lay still. The fire faded, and he was gone, leaving only a sooty silhouette where he’d lain.

  I got to my feet and looked around. The earth spirit was only feet away, striding toward me with his four arms swinging.