Chapter 143: The Blade That Cuts Skills

Static Step tore out of Jace like a nerve pulled through a keyhole.

The stolen skill rose above Alexander's sword as a blue human shape, twisted once in silent pain, and shattered into a thousand sparks. The sparks did not fade. They gathered, hardened, and hung over the arena as a single red blade the length of a bus.

[SEALED SKILLS BECOME VERDICT BLADES]

[VERDICT BLADES: 1 OF 6]

[THE ROOK WARSHIP IS COUNTING]

Alexander looked up at the blade and did not look pleased. "My sword was never meant to feed the ship."

"Then help me starve it," Jace said.

The warship answered by pulling its fourteen red cables tight.

The entire colosseum tore free of the ground. Ten thousand stone seats shrieked upward on chains of crimson light, the sand floor tilted past vertical, and the arena began to spin like a ring saw the size of a stadium. Wind roared through it. Three hundred feet below, Manhattan's southern skyline waited with its windows lit.

[ROOK COLOSSEUM: PHASE TWO, THE MILLSTONE]

[GRIND PATH: THE SAFE ZONE]

[CONTACT IN 60 SECONDS]

The four hidden weapon-beasts burst out of the spinning sand and fused in midair, axes into spears, spears into chains, chains into a hundred-blade wyrm that wrapped the inside of the Millstone like a steel river.

[HUNDRED-BLADE WYRM: LEVEL 455]

[ROOK ART: FALLING VERDICT, FIRST EDICT]

Alexander moved.

He crossed forty feet of tilted sand in one stride and cut the first edict across the air. Breach Sight showed Jace the line a heartbeat early, a pale thread through Alexander's shoulder, and Jace twisted between two slashes and felt the third scrape his arm. The Seal of Rook flashed.

[HEALTH: 31 -> 27]

[SKILL SEALED: BREACH SIGHT]

[SEAL BACKLASH: CHARGE 6 -> 5]

The world went flat. Every fault line vanished, and Alexander became a red storm with no center.

"Four more," Alexander said quietly. "Then you are only a man."

"Everybody keeps telling me that."

The Wyrm struck from below. Jace dropped through its coils, caught the edge of a passing halberd, and drove Rule Fracture into the law holding its hundred bodies together. Every segment unclipped at once, and a river of loose steel poured across the Millstone. Alexander ran through it without slowing and opened Jace's thigh.

[HEALTH: 27 -> 23]

[SKILL SEALED: RULE FRACTURE]

[SEAL BACKLASH: CHARGE 5 -> 4]

Three Verdict Blades hung above them now. The shattered Wyrm rose from the sand in pieces, and the pieces joined the red constellation.

"Two hundred and four chains broke on the boar!" Liam's voice crackled in Jace's ear. "One hundred and eight civilians left! Scarlett is cutting them loose, but every seat just grew teeth!"

The Millstone heard him.

Every empty seat in the arena opened a mouth full of swords. Down in the stands, Scarlett vaulted a row of snapping jaws, her red blade a streak of light, and slammed it through three chains at once. A hundred meters away, Theodore Voss crouched over two retired bus drivers with a medical bag and the calm face of a man treating a barbecue accident.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Collateral is mine," Theodore said, to nobody and everybody. "Concentrate on your own idiot."

Something sweet and heavy pressed against the inside of Jace's skull. It was a voice with no owner, soft and insistent, telling him that skills were gone, that fighting was for people with systems, that the sensible thing was to kneel.

"Archive is holding," Zoey said flatly in his ear. "The arena is pushing a control signal through every wall. I have kept it out of the Archive. I have not kept it out of you."

"Noted."

"Do not kneel."

"I wasn't going to."

He planted an Error Mark on the vertical floor. It spread through the nearest thousand seats and turned their hunger inward, and stone jaws bit down on the red chains holding the last prisoners. Alexander hit him from behind before the mark stopped glowing, and the sword crossed his chest.

[HEALTH: 23 -> 19]

[SKILL SEALED: ERROR MARK]

[SEAL BACKLASH: CHARGE 4 -> 3]

"All three hundred and twelve are clear!" Liam shouted. "Jace, get off that thing!"

Four Verdict Blades hung over the arena as the warship's mouth opened wider, and all four turned to point at him.

Alexander raised his sword for the fourth cut, and Jace did the only thing left in the kit. He triggered Reality Anchor and bound himself to the cracked center pillar of the Millstone, the one piece of the arena that mattered. Alexander struck anyway. The blade passed through the anchor like a knife through wet paper and opened Jace's side.

[HEALTH: 19 -> 15]

[SKILL SEALED: REALITY ANCHOR]

[SEAL BACKLASH: CHARGE 3 -> 2]

The pillar cracked. The Millstone lurched. Forty seconds had become twenty, and the Safe Zone was growing in the spinning gap below them like a ripe plum.

Jace had one skill left. Alexander lifted his sword and aimed it at the last quiet corner of Jace's mind, and Older Law Perception, the faint gold sense that told him what a thing had been before the System named it, flickered like a candle in a draft.

"Rook Art," Alexander said, "Falling Verdict, Fifth Edict."

The fifth cut took it.

[HEALTH: 15 -> 12]

[SKILL SEALED: OLDER LAW PERCEPTION]

[SEAL BACKLASH: CHARGE 2 -> 1]

[VERDICT BLADES: 6 OF 6]

[VERDICT CROWN: COMPLETE]

Six red swords locked into a ring above the warship, spun once, and began to fall.

Jace had one Charge, twelve Health, no skill left to spend, and a body that had finally learned the shape of the man trying to kill it. Alexander attacked three times before turning, and he always paused to breathe after the sixth strike. The seventh stroke always came from the right, because the burning mark over his heart pulled the blade home like a magnet.

"Seventh from the right!" Scarlett yelled from the stands. "He always finishes right!"

"I know!" Jace shouted. "I am the one it keeps hitting!"

Mutual Shelter flared in his chest as fourteen blue doors, and Alexander's sixth cut skidded off them like rain off a tin roof.

[SEAL OF ROOK: TARGET HAS NO SINGLE OWNER]

[MUTUAL SHELTER: NOT SEALABLE]

Alexander stopped to breathe. The Verdict Crown screamed down.

The seventh stroke came from the right.

Jace stepped inside it.

Jace used no skill, produced no glow, and received no help from any system in the sky. He caught Alexander's wrist in his left hand, planted one boot on a falling slab of the Millstone, and used the whole collapsing arena as his windup. A ten-thousand-ton ring of broken stone, a rotating wall of blades, and a man in free fall, all of it compressed behind one ordinary fist.

He punched the burning mark over Alexander's heart.

The rain turned to steam. A white ring burst across the clouds from horizon to horizon, and the sound that followed rattled windows as far away as New Jersey.

Alexander Rook crossed the entire colosseum backward. He hit the warship's lower jaw, drove a canyon through its black iron hull, and forced the entire nine-kilometer vessel three hundred feet higher. The Millstone split down its center like a snapped dinner plate. Its two halves peeled apart and fell, spinning, into the empty harbor, where they raised twin waves that broke against the empty piers and drowned nothing but a hot dog stand.

[UNRANKED PHYSICAL COUNTER: SUCCESS]

[HIT REGISTERED AS: THE AUDACITY]

[ROOK HEART MARK: BROKEN]

[ROOK BLADE SEAL: ACQUIRED]

A thin red cut opened across Jace's palm and sank in. It felt like a lock being picked from the inside.

[ROOK BLADE SEAL LV. 1]

[FUNCTION: CUT ONE SEAL FROM A PERSON, OBJECT, OR BOUNDARY]

[COST: STAMINA. LIMIT: CANNOT CUT A SEAL OF EQUAL OR HIGHER POWER]

The six sealed skills glowed inside him again, dim and blanketed, but located. He fell to one knee. The blood he was losing was no longer a figure of speech.

Alexander tore himself out of the dent in the warship. His breastplate fell into the city. Blood ran from his mouth, and he was laughing.

"A thousand duels," he said. "Nobody ever punched the arena into my ship."

"You brought it too close."

The warship screamed.

The broken colosseum did not declare a winner. Its two halves folded back together around Jace and Alexander, becoming an upper jaw and a lower jaw, and a river of red glass began to pour upward into the vessel's mouth.

[ARENA HEART: REFUSING THE RESULT]

[THE DUEL WILL CONTINUE INSIDE THE WARSHIP]

[BOARDING DESCENT: INITIATED]

Alexander caught Jace by the collar before he could fall. Scarlett leapt from the stands and caught the lip of the lower jaw with both hands, and Theodore seized her belt as the world tipped toward the sky. Manhattan shrank beneath a closing cathedral of iron teeth.

The last thing Jace heard from the ground was Liam shouting that every civilian was safe.

The first thing he heard inside the ship was a thousand cages opening.

Health: 12/420.

Charge: 1/140.