Chapter 538 | A Knife into a Peach

Chapter 538: 538 | A Knife into a Peach

The flesh along her cut was already knitting back together, pink tissue crawling across the gap like time-lapse footage. The alpha healed faster than anything I had ever fought, and my death mark was eating the eye socket, but the rest of its face had apparently read a different memo.

I did the math in the time it takes to blink. Reaper’s Edge at Copper could cut, but it couldn’t reach the core before the meat sealed it off. The discounted Divine Overflow sat in my chest like a suicide vest on clearance, forty percent off, and every girl on that shelf would murder me in my sleep if I touched it. Misato had told me twice not to burn essence to be a hero.

I decided that burning one cup to stay alive didn’t count as heroics, and I felt very good about that legal reasoning.

I pulled a bottle out of the vault with my free hand, bit the cap off, spat it into the sea, and drank. Belle’s butterscotch flooded my mouth, warm and rich and tasting faintly of her temper. The Overclock prompt flashed across my vision in angry red, and I slammed my mental thumb on it before anyone could talk me out of it.

Reaper’s Edge jumped two ranks in one heartbeat.

The kama in my fist grew. The handle stretched out to a meter and a half, the blade swept out into a long black crescent, and the air around it went cold enough to frost the seawater on my knuckles. Death mana poured up my arm like ice water through my veins, and the graft behind my ribs roared in approval so loud that I nearly let go of the handle.

Four minutes of Silver started counting down in the corner of my eye.

"Jace!" Belle’s voice ripped across the water. "Did you just drink my milk on a monster’s head?"

"It was an emergency, Belle, and you can bill me later!"

"I’m billing you with interest, you walking liability!"

I ripped the scythe out of the eye socket, and the whole left side of the alpha’s face sloughed off in a sheet of black rot. The head lurched. I rode the lurch forward, planted both boots on the edge of Hikaru’s closing cut, and swung.

The scythe went through the flesh like it wasn’t there. The black crescent sheared a trench down to the core in one stroke, and everywhere the blade passed, the meat died and stayed dead. No knitting, no pink tissue crawling back. The healing just stopped, and the alpha’s scream changed pitch into something that sounded a lot like fear.

I dropped into the trench up to my waist in gore.

It was hot in there. The smell hit me in a wave of low tide and rotten fruit, and I gagged hard enough to see stars. The core pulsed half a meter from my face, gold and black, and the heat coming off it made my eyebrows feel crispy. Every pulse shoved into the graft, and the graft shoved back, and for one ugly second I felt the core look at me.

It didn’t have eyes, but it looked at me anyway, and I felt it recognize the thing in my chest.

"Oh, hell no," I said to the ball of evil light. "You don’t get to be sentient right now."

The trench walls started closing. Not healing, closing, the dead flesh collapsing inward as the living meat around it squeezed. The weight hit me from both sides like two mattresses full of wet sand. My ribs creaked again. The scythe’s handle jammed against the side of the trench, and I couldn’t get the angle to swing.

"Monroe, the walls!" Misato’s clone had made it to the edge of the crater, hands braced on the rim, face white. "You’re getting buried in there!"

"I’m aware of the burying, Captain, and I don’t recommend it!"

Something slammed into the alpha’s jaw from below so hard that the whole head rang. The trench walls jerked apart by half a meter. I heard Naomi screaming wordless and furious somewhere under the water, and I felt the next spiral hit before I heard it, and the head jumped again.

Blue-white fire poured in over the lip of the crater and washed across the living flesh of the walls, and the meat recoiled from it with a hiss of steam. Blair’s voice came down after the fire, cracking at the top.

"Do it now, Monroe! I can’t hold this humidity for long!"

The scythe came free.

I didn’t swing it this time. I pulled the blade down in front of me, blade point toward the core, and I shoved both hands forward with everything the Overclock gave me. The black crescent sank into the gold light like a knife into a peach.

The core didn’t crack. It screamed.

The sound came up through the scythe, through my wrists, into my teeth and my spine and the backs of my eyes. Black veins raced out of the blade into the gold and started eating it from the inside. The light flickered. It flared white so hot that my suit smoked at the cuffs, and then it collapsed inward on itself with a wet crunch like a rotten melon under a boot.

The alpha went still under me.

For one second, everything stopped. No shriek, no tentacles, no roar of water. I stood waist-deep in a dead monster’s skull with a scythe in my hands and gold ash floating up around me, and all I could hear was my own heart slamming. ℯℯ𝘭.

Then the head started to fall.

It went sideways first, rolling off the column of water Naomi had shoved it up on, and the dead flesh around me turned to grey slush that poured off the bone. I dropped through it. The scythe dissolved back into black smoke in my fists as the Overclock cut off, two minutes early, and my arms went heavy as lead.

I hit the ocean flat on my back.