The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) Page 8
“Icsain!” Jav cried through his Artifact. “Get out here. Now!”
“I am here, Mr. Holson. There is no need to shout.”
Jav glanced back towards the bay doors, and indeed, Gran Lej was just stepping past them.
“Scanlan! Vays! Are you all right?” Jav said through his Artifact.
“We are, but Brin’s been injured,” Vays replied. There was no immediate response from Jav. “She should be all right,” Vays added.
There was another pause from Jav.
This time Scanlan spoke. “As you can likely see, Gran Mal is inoperable. With fifteen minutes, I can restore power.”
“Do it,” Jav said. “Nils, you find our friend, the Light Smith and keep those beams from the Palace. Hilene, you scout ahead and see what else we’re up against—and stay hollow. Generals, bring your Grans forward, you especially, Icsain. I want to see your fabulous Relic Cords at work. Vays, when you’re able, we could use you out here.”
“Understood.”
Hilene didn’t have to go far before the full threat was visible. The six masses had been reduced to five. She recognized Gim Peshil and was not surprised to see others, similar in appearance, accompanying him. All but Peshil had great membrane wings which gave them aerial mobility. She found it quaint that they seemed to come in different colors. Raus’s new recruit was a deep red. Two, though differing somewhat in their finer features, were white. Another was cobalt blue and could have been a twin of one of the white ones. The largest was a lustrous black and Hilene couldn’t help thinking that he was made of solid iron, which made his agility in the air seem all the more fantastic.
“General Holson—” she started to report.
“I see them. Hilene, you’re in no danger from me, but I don’t relish the idea of sending attacks your way. Fall back. I’m going to paint the sky.”
“Understood.”
Jav crouched down on one knee to steady himself as Gran Mid raised its giant skull. “Gran Mid! Fire!” he cried, and Gran Mid obeyed, sending an unbroken stream of blazing orange fire into the red sky. The tongue of flame waved to and fro and did as Jav described, painting the sky, until, after scattering the others, it fell upon the black dragon. Once Gran Mid’s fire found a target, the Gran could lock on to that target, directing the two-minute burst unerringly upon it until the flame was exhausted and the recharge phase began. The black dragon took all that Gran Mid had to give and yet proceeded. Jav saw that this dragon would be trouble, but just as he was making up his mind to engage it himself, the cobalt blue dragon and one of the white ones came straight for him in tandem and did something for which he was unprepared. Somehow they merged, with the slightly smaller white dragon forming the arms, chest, and head and the blue dragon forming the remainder of the body. The size of this new dragon dwarfed all of its fellows and the thing threatened to pounce upon Jav and Gran Mid within seconds. Jav leapt straight for the onrushing beast as he cried out, “Gran Mid! Dive!”
Gran Mid vomited its powerful fire upon the ground, turning it molten, and proceeded to burrow through the otherwise impenetrable rock skin of the planet.
Jav started the calculations for the Kaiser Kick, but on initiation of the technique, the blue and white dragon turned, effectively avoiding the vector of the kick. Jav was astounded by its timing and its flawless escape. Using AI to keep himself in the air, he pursued the monster.
• • •
Down below, Raus was taking a moment to understand his new charge, which, he found had some facility besides its shear size. It had ruined Gran Mal by means of a power very similar to his own Gran’s, but the dragon was not earthbound. Raus ordered the dragon’s animated corpse up into the air, aimed it at the massive black dragon, and initiated the Red Lance. The remaining white dragon partially blocked the way, but perhaps he would get lucky and down two of their foes with a single shot.
To Raus’s astonishment, the white dragon burst apart like a cloud of mist as the Red Lance passed. It would have broken the left half its body, but total destruction was perhaps too good to be true and visually too reminiscent of Jav’s Ghost Kaiser for Raus’s liking. He glanced away to see the Red Lance crash into the intended target, and though the black dragon was knocked backwards, it did not appear to be the least bit hurt. The projectile dragon had been pulped on impact and bright red gore rained down in great chunks, leaving the black dragon’s iron scales awash with blood. The black dragon resumed its course, which seemed to be straight for the Root Palace.
When Raus looked again to confirm his fears regarding the white dragon, he was not surprised to see the white mist still maintaining some cohesion. What did surprise him was the speed with which it was now approaching him.
The volume of mist made the cloud shape many times larger than Gran Pham. A white head undulated, coming into and out of shape, but was clearly glowering at Raus, hovering just above him, and then it spoke.
“You are indeed of an enviable stature. It is unfortunate that you come here to conquer. For one such as you, I would have shared much, not the least of which, my bed.”
As she spoke, Raus’s stomach dropped. It had been many years since he’d heard that voice and this was the first time ever off of his home planet of Sarsa. Though she always wore a different face, and always came in a different generation, something intrinsic and inexplicable remained the same. Regardless of what her name might be here, there was no doubt in his mind that this was an echo of Milla Marz and that one of them would die by the other’s hand on this barren basalt world.
His preoccupation cost him. She’d been speaking all along, but he hadn’t heard. When he next focused his gaze upon the cloud of mist before him, it was changing shape. A narrow jet was coming at him and already crashing into his face. Through his clenched teeth, past the soft jelly of his eyes, up his nose, and into his ears the mist poured without cease, filling him. The cavities of his lungs and stomach were largest and given to the most expansion. She forced the entirety of her volume inside him, which nearly caused him to burst. Returning to her solid form did cause him to burst.
The white dragon shook her great frame once to rid herself of the gray-green blood and gobs of like-colored flesh that yet clung to it. With a beat of the great wings at her back, the dragon rose into the sky, leaving what was left of Raus Kapler below. His legs yet stood upon Gran Pham’s head, but everything above his waist was gone, littering the ground for several tens of meters in every direction. With its master unable to command it, Gran Pham simply stood inert.
• • •
Jav, hearing the sound of Raus exploding, paused a moment in his efforts against the blue and white dragon to scrutinize his friend’s remains. By incorporating Approaching Infinity techniques, he’d learned to substantially enhance his vision when necessary, bringing into focus objects impossibly far away, or infinitesimally small, or both. In this manner he saw that Raus was not dead, at least not yet. The cells of the meat at his waist were dividing at a fantastic rate and slowly rebuilding the lost mass. Jav also noted the wires of the Resurrection Bolts, issuing from the waist and still connected to the Bolts themselves, which were even now being reeled in back towards their roots from either side of Gran Pham. Jav swallowed hard. This was by far the worst punishment Raus had ever experienced, but his regenerative abilities seemed to be nearly on par with Lor Kalkin’s. Though he might not be able to help them further today, it appeared that Raus would live.
Through his Artifact, Jav cried out, “Hilene! See to the white dragon. Icsain! Demonstrate the power of your Relic Cords on the black one.”
Only Hilene replied in the affirmative.
• • •
Nils Porta harassed Gim Peshil endlessly, but could not overtake him. He was certain that if he could catch up to Peshil, he could shred him. Jav had explained how Peshil had been solid enough to kick and it seemed that the dragon only took on the properties of light when he was flitting about, moving from place to place, which was all he was doing right
now. Peshil’s progress through the sky looked like a latticework of light, like the secret framework of creation revealed. In order to stay in the vicinity, Peshil was forced to take very short jaunts, making acute-angle trajectory changes nearly every second.
Nils was growing weary of the stalemate. Every minute or half minute, Peshil would direct a part of himself towards the Shade, but the Alloyed Splitter made his skin impenetrable to the laser light. Eventually, Nils broke apart and spread his one-centimeter “gnats” to cover as much of the local sky to which Peshil seemed to be limiting himself as possible. All he could do was wait for Peshil to pause long enough to take on substance and become food for the gnats.
• • •
Hilene flew straight into the white dragon, but just before she would have phased through its solid mass, it became a billowing cloud of mist once again, proceeding towards the Root Palace as if Hilene weren’t present. Hilene was surprised. This was the first time in thirty-five years that her power had been stymied. She hovered in the air, momentarily dumbstruck, watching the cloud mass leave her behind.
She gathered herself and pursued. She saw that the black dragon had drawn close to the Root Palace and that Icsain, within Gran Lej, would meet it presently.
The humanoid Gran, not as tall as its opponent, leapt up for the black dragon and succeeded in tackling it, bringing it crashing to the ground. Gran Lej was far more graceful than the other in recovering its feet, moving liquidly as the thousands of two-meter tall puppets that composed it moved and shifted to reform the towering figure.
What the black dragon lacked in grace, however, it made up for in power. It gained its feet and received the oncoming Gran Lej, which attempted to grapple with it. For a moment they were locked, each striving against the other, but Gran Lej could not match the strength of the black dragon.
Hilene saw this, rushed forward, overtaking the white mist cloud, and as she drew near, she employed the Ten Deaths technique made possible by the Attenuated Splitter. Upon her faceplate ten points lit up, each corresponding to a target upon the black dragon’s body, and then she exploded into ten perfect copies, each intangible but deadly. Each iteration of Hilene found its target unerringly. She passed through the iron hide severally, but found to her dismay that the dragon’s insides were also of iron. Had she encountered flesh and bone, she could have crippled it even with the disparity of scale, but as it was, she could do little against ten targets of solid iron. The ten Hilenes retreated, each drawn back to the origin point to reintegrate. For the second time that day, she was struck dumb by her inability to kill—or even affect—an opponent.
• • •
In spite of his use of AI, Jav found himself unable to lay a hand upon the blue and white dragon, not significantly anyway. He’d nicked it here and there, but that was all he could manage, and it was maddening. The dragon was always moving away at the perfect moment, no matter what tack Jav took. It wasn’t that its speed was greater than his—it had been unable to touch Jav at all, though its attempts were many—nor was its skill greater than his. It moved with strength and grace, like an animal with instincts supplemented with intelligence, but Jav had trained enough to recognize that it possessed no true martial talents, learned or innate. It was, however, very, very good at getting away.
Summoning Gran Mid back to the surface to catch the dragon in an ambush proved fruitless, but also illustrative. An explanation—the only explanation—occurred to Jav, poking tentatively through his mounting frustration. He was starting to realize that the only way the dragon could be anticipating his movements was by knowing them. Somehow, his opponent was extracting the necessary information from his own brain.
That he was vexed by the conditions of the “fight” was already obvious, and with this final realization, hopelessness stole in. How could he fight an opponent who could read his thoughts? The dragon had size, power, and that particular cunning which made it unassailable. Certainly he was outmatched. Defeated, he paused in the air, giving up his pursuit and giving in to the inevitable. The blue and white dragon seized upon this in elation, swooping in and clapping Jav between its two giant fore claws.
Smoke squeezed out in jetting wisps from between the dragon’s claws, but something was wrong. Before it could look between its claws to see what had become of its prey, Jav, by way of the Ghost Kaiser, was upon its head, the fingers of his right hand gripping the boney edge of the beast’s right eye socket while his left hand pressed down upon the middle of its brow. Bracing himself, he strove with the strength conditioned by thirty standard gravities and the added might of the Kaiser Bones to pry the top of the dragon’s head off. First, there was a succession of sounds like glass being crushed which gave way to a sharp crack. The bone broke far enough along the top of the skull to leave a gaping wound. Blood sprayed, and thick vessels, blue and red, snapped like elastic bands. With a final jerk, he tore free a rough triangle of the dragon’s skull top. He tore the ragged and scaly scalp free, flipped the bone shard around in his hands so that the sharpest end pointed down then drove this into the exposed brain.
Once the skull piece was lodged nearly flush within the gray matter, Jav placed his right palm upon the protruding edge and, using AI, gave it an impossibly hard and sudden shove, sending it down through the rest of the brain, the beast’s throat, and into the chest cavity. As the projectile ripped downwards, the lower, blue half of the dragon undulated strangely and separated from the upper white portion just in time to escape the triangle of bone, which shot out through the white abdomen. The bone missile continued down in a streak to shatter on the stony plates of the ground below. The pierced corpse of the white dragon followed, but Jav remained in the air, as if he could not be bothered by gravity.
He and the blue dragon glared at one another, but Jav was faster to move. This time the Kaiser Kick was not thwarted. The great blue head exploded as Jav impacted into it with the combined power of two separate sets of AI calculations backed by his own prodigious physical strength. The shock to the head was catastrophic, but the beast’s body was rocked only slightly by the attack and presently dropped to the ground, where it hit, not far from where the white one had, with a suite of nauseating sounds.
Jav took a moment to regard the other skirmishes. He could see that Nils was moving through strategies with Peshil and was not overly concerned—Nils would come through. What did concern him, though, was the unchecked progress made by the black dragon, which was on the verge of bypassing the courtyard wall. The other white dragon, too, had somehow passed Hilene and was close behind the black one, coming up on Gran Mal. He watched Gran Lej attempting unsuccessfully to wrestle the black dragon to the ground, the contest ending in moments when the black dragon struck with a fore claw, driving Gran Lej skidding and splintering upon the ground.
“Icsain! Where are your Relic Cords?” Jav cried through his Artifact.
“The brute appears to be immune.” Icsain replied.
“It’s true, General Holson,” Hilene added. “The black one is solid iron, through and through. Flesh, organs, bone: everything is iron.”
“And the white one?”
There was the slightest pause before Hilene responded. “The white one is the exact opposite, sir: no substance.”
“Suggestions? Anyone?”
“Maybe we can add to the mix,” Vays replied.
Jav glanced to the smoking hulk of Gran Mal. Having emerged from a port upon the great turtle-shell back, near Gran Mal’s hind quarters, Vays stood, all angular and silver, supporting Brin Karvasti. Brin’s eyes shone a brilliant yellow and the Dharma Engine appeared at her back, petals of what looked like fine filigreed black steel blossoming from between her shoulder blades.
“Stop!” Brin cried out after the white cloud of mist. The mist dragon stopped and took on the semblance of solidity, though it continued to waver. The dragon struggled against unseen bonds for a moment before its limbs spread out with sudden force to form a giant X as it were crucified upon Brin’
s Dharma Clock.
Vays stepped away from Brin and looked towards Jav. “Should I try the black one?”
“If Brin’s got the white one, let me try the black one,” Jav said. “You go see if you can help Nils finish off Peshil.”
Vays nodded and leapt from Gran Mal, gripping with his right hand the horn of his helmet—the hilt of his Titan Saber—which he pulled free. He darted towards the ground beneath the sky occupied by Nils and Peshil.
Jav began calculations for another Kaiser Kick, executing them in seconds to strike the back of the black dragon’s head. The strike pealed with a deafening note, staggering the iron monstrosity for the first time and sending it face first to the ground.
“He is solid,” Jav said, marveling, “but I’ve got just the thing.” He moved through the air towards the fallen dragon, holding his hands low, to his right, palms facing each other, fingers bent into stiff claws.
• • •
In the midst of his flitting, Gim Peshil noted that something had happened to Sera Fontessa. Pausing only for an instant to take in her predicament—that she was somehow pinned to the air upon the spokes of a giant wheel—was all the time that Nils Porta needed to act. For in that instant, Peshil became solid and Nils’s cloud of gnats stripped him bare of his skin, exposing the bright red flesh beneath. Though his eyes bugged from their sockets and his blood splashed to the ground, Peshil hardly seemed to notice, so quickly did he take on the aspect of light, flashing to Sera Fontessa’s aid.