Chapter 614: How To Get Rid Of Sand [Bonus - ]

Chapter 614: How To Get Rid Of Sand [Bonus Chapter]

Ititius noticed the microscopic hesitation, and his grin widened until the corners of Harper’s lips practically tore.

"Oho~?" Ititius purred, stepping forward with sickening confident ease. "What’s the matter, Graves? Why aren’t you drawing that shiny little sword? Why aren’t you summoning those noisy ocean waves you loved so much in the deep tomb?"

He raised Harper’s left hand and pressed the palm flat against her own sternum.

"Because you know, don’t you? I have her right here... The soul of the woman you love, sealed inside my fist."

SQUEEZE!

Deep within the soul-space, the tiny violet wisp convulsed in his golden grip, flickering like a candle caught in a gale.

’SILAS! IT HURTS! SILAS, PLEASE—’

"Lay a single finger on this body," Ititius smiled, leaning Harper’s face closer, his green eyes burning with pure evil, "and I crush her and if you’re clever enough to keep your hands to yourself, it makes no difference... In a few minutes, once I’ve finished dismantling that heap of iron, I’ll crush her anyway."

He waited, eager and hungry, for the familiar delicious sight of a mortal hero collapsing into weeping paralyzed despair.

He waited for Silas to fall to his knees, to beg, to offer his own life for the woman he loved but there was no despair.

There were no tears either.

Kara White stood completely still, and the silence that settled over her frame was so heavy that the shrieking short-circuit of the Suppression Engine seemed to fade into the background.

Her lips parted.

"Go to hell."

Ititius blinked with his grin freezing for a single second then his golden veins flared with fury.

"DIE, YOU INSIGNIFICANT CUR!" Ititius shrieked.

BZZZZZZZZZT-CRACK!

The machine sparked with a blinding deafening arc of blue lightning, and in that exact second both figures charged.

BOOM!

The stone floor between them violently ruptured as Kara closed the thirty-yard gap with terrifying acceleration with her right fist driving straight toward Harper’s jaw.

’I’ll kill you...’

At the last possible second, Silas hesitated, pulling his force back by thirty percent to avoid shattering Harper’s neck and Ititius saw it.

"WEAK!" Ititius screamed.

SWOOSH!

He dipped Harper’s head beneath the pulled punch and stepped inside Kara’s guard...

Harper’s right elbow, coated in diamond-hard black sand, snapped upward in a vicious rising strike aimed straight at Kara’s throat.

THWACK!

Kara caught the elbow in her fresh left palm and the shockwave tore through the back of her coat, but she didn’t yield an inch.

She pivoted her hips and drove her knee into Harper’s ribs, and once again Silas pulled the force, aiming only to pin the body.

’DAMN IT!’ Silas cursed. ’Every time I pull a strike, he uses the recovery frame!’

Inside the soul-space, Harper’s tiny violet wisp flared with desperate agonizing resolve.

’Silas...’ Harper’s thoughts screamed, thrashing against the crushing golden fingers of the god. ’Don’t hold back! HIT ME! HIT HIM!’

She poured every scrap of her soul-force into disrupting Ititius’s command over her motor nerves as Harper’s left arm spasmed with her fingers twitching uncontrollably, and Ititius’s follow-up strike veered three inches off target.

"Insolent little insect!" Ititius snarled within their shared consciousness, clamping down on her soul with a burst of blinding golden pressure.

CRUNCH!

Silas took the opening, swept Harper’s lead foot, and drove his shoulder forward to send the body crashing to the floor.

THUD-CRACK!

Harper hit the flagstones, but Ititius didn’t skip a beat as he didn’t need balance.

WHOOSH!

Six massive tendrils of black sand erupted from Harper’s back like the legs of a monstrous arachnid, launching her upward while lashing toward Kara’s chest.

SHRIT-SHRIT-SHRIT!

Kara twisted through the air with her boots kicking off the ceiling ribbing, dodging four of the tendrils, but the fifth grazed her cheek and carved a deep bloody gouge along her jawline.

CRACKLE!

The black sand on the wound tried to vitrify her flesh into glass.

"Disperse," She grunted.

FWOOSH!

A pulse of Gold Core mana flushed through Kara’s facial capillaries, incinerating the black mineral before the calcification could take hold and the wound sealed with a hiss of rapid regeneration.

Kara landed thirty paces away, panting slightly and across the chamber, Ititius rose laughing.

"Is that all you have, Graves?!" he mocked. "Even with your other arm in place?!"

CRRRRRR-SNAP!

He didn’t even bother targeting her.

With a sweep of Harper’s arms he drove three massive barbed lances into the short-circuiting hull of the Suppression Engine behind him.

KABOOM!

The plates tore open further as boiling coolant flooded the floor into thick choking clouds, and the machine’s rings began to grind against their tracks with gravity dipping by fractions of a percent as the barrier weakened.

"Every second you waste hesitating," Ititius sneered, "the machine dies and when it dies, my brothers from the Sovereign Realm will pour through the sky like locusts!"

’Physical attacks won’t work,’ Silas thought, his pulse hammering. ’Even if I beat this body unconscious, he’ll burn Harper’s life-force to keep the meat moving until her organs fail...’

He couldn’t hurt the body, and he couldn’t reach the god so Silas did the only thing he had left that he was good at.

He stopped fighting the body and then...

He read it.

The film of moisture across his eyes shivered as he pushed a thin pulse of water mana through it anchored in the tears themselves so the boiling coolant clouds couldn’t smear the image...

The chamber dissolved into glowing blue current lines as every tendon, every twitch of Harper’s frame, every shift of weight, traced in light a heartbeat before it happened.

It should have made this easy but it didn’t... The lines lagged as Harper’s left knee bent, and then its blue line lit...

’What the hell...?’

Her shoulder rolled, and then its line lit and Silas frowned.

He had it backwards, no the body wasn’t moving first.

Something was moving before the body, and the body was only answering.

...There.

Threaded through the blue, so thin he’d taken it for a reflection, ran a second current, gold.

It didn’t follow the muscle at all, instead it poured down from a single knotted point behind Harper’s sternum and out along every limb a hair before the limb obeyed.

When Ititius decided to strike, the gold flowed, and the flesh followed like a puppet on a string.

’He isn’t hitting me with her arms,’ Silas realized, and a cold clean clarity settled over his mind. ’He’s hitting me with that... The body is just where the string ends.’

Mana was the ink and the body was the paper so all this time he’d been punching the paper.

"Stop staring at me!" Ititius shrieked, and lunged.

WHOOM!

Harper’s arm came in cocked for a killing elbow with the gold current flaring down it like a lit fuse, and Silas didn’t dodge.

He watched the gold and the room went quiet.

It was like sinking underwater, every sound dulled and stretched, the roar of the dying Engine draining into a distant hum.

The golden river in Harper’s chest slowed until Silas could see each strand braiding into the knot behind her sternum and his heartbeat fell into step with it.

Thump! Thump!

’The goal is to save Harper and to ensure that he suffers...’

He didn’t push his mana against the current the way he’d pushed against everything his whole life but he let it flow with the current like the way a tide answers the moon.

’There.’

His right fist moved, and it wasn’t aimed at the body at all but it was aimed at the knot beneath it.

WHOOSH!

There was no sound as a hairline tear of black light bloomed at his knuckles, ringed with gold sparks, and then sound returned.

BANG!

"GAAAAAAAHHH!"

Ititius’s scream tore out of Harper’s throat in his own raw tone as Harper’s body didn’t move an inch... She had broken no bones, no thread of her blouse was torn either, but the golden shape inside her chest convulsed and a mouthful of glittering spiritual bile sprayed from her lips.

Ititius’s grip on the violet wisp slipped a full inch and the quiet snapped as the roar of the Engine crashed back in.

"Ugh..."

Silas staggered a step, staring at his own knuckles and they tingled a bit, as though he’d struck a bell.

’What... was that?’

He had no name for it, what he did just now didn’t feel real at all but he was sure that he did it.

"WHAT DID YOU DO?!" Ititius shrieked with golden veins flaring along Harper’s neck.

Fear turned to blind rage in a heartbeat, and he slammed both hands into the floor.

"DIE!"

Black sand exploded outward in a lashing storm, and Silas threw himself back into the feeling and reached for it.

...Nothing.

He forced it, and it wasn’t there as he swung at a chest that was only a chest, and a sand-hardened elbow crushed into his ribs.

CRUNCH-THUD!

Kara hurtled backward and hit an iron pillar hard enough to dent it and blood filled her mouth.

’Not force,’ Silas thought while pushing himself up. ’It came when I stopped trying to force it... When I listened in a way.’

Ititius was already laughing, gathering himself for a killing blow however Silas closed his eyes for a single breath.

He needed the blue lines and the gold currents as well as the slow patient pulse beneath both...

He opened them, and the world dipped underwater again.

Ititius came at him, and the gold flared down Harper’s right arm a heartbeat before the arm moved; however Silas was already gone from its path.

WHOOSH!

He slid inside the elbow, turned his hip, and his left fist met the current at its source.

The black tear bloomed again.

BANG!

"GAH!"

Ititius spun away, gagging with one hand clawing at a chest that wasn’t hurt, and hurled everything he had.

"DAMN YOU..."

He shot out six lashing legs of sand, a spinning buzzsaw of violet lightning and a lance of black glass punching up through the floor as well... Everything was to ensure that this man in front of him died.

’It won’t be that easy...’

Every attack lit gold before it lit blue.

Silas read each one the way you read a word before it’s finished.

WHOOSH!

He slipped under the disk.

WHOOSH!

He stepped through the gap between two tendrils like a man crossing a busy street.

FWOOSH!

He hopped the glass lance and came down beside it, and the third strike drove into the knot from below like a rising tide.

"IMPOSSIBLE!" Ititius shrieked, and something in his voice cracked. "I AM A GOD! HOW ARE YOU—"

He tried to retreat however he never even started.

The gold flowed toward Harper’s legs, toward the coolant pool behind him, and Silas was already there before the legs finished the thought.

WHOOSH! BANG!

The fourth strike hammered into the knot, and a hairline fracture of silver light split through the golden shape inside Harper’s chest.

"AGHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Ititius roared and gave up on dignity.

"DIE, YOU FILTH!"

Harper’s right hand, sheathed in black sand and screaming purple lightning, tore across the air in a blind desperate swipe.

CRUNCH!

It caught Kara across the left side of the face as her cheek, brow, and eye, tore away down to the bone in a spray of vaporized blood...

"Hahaha! I TOOK YOUR EYE, YOU DOG!" Ititius howled but Silas didn’t blink his remaining eye.

He had already stepped in...

His strike had left a half-second before Ititius’s, and it was already traveling.

’I think I need two more strikes.’

The Gold Core roared in his chest with fresh muscle braiding across exposed bone as the fifth strike went home.

BOOM!

"AGGHHHHHHHHHH! STOPPPPPP! W-What kind of monster ARE you?!" Ititius choked with light bleeding through the widening cracks in his soul.

Deep in the soul-space, the crushing grip on Harper’s wisp had gone slack, and she didn’t waste it.

’GET OUT OF MY BODY, YOU SICK BITCH!’

With everything she had, Harper seized her own motor nerves as her knees locked which kept her feet rooted to the flagstones.

Ititius found the body he had stolen, refusing to move...

"NO! MOVE! MOVE, YOU INSIGNIFICANT SLAG!" Ititius shrieked with his soul clawing at a body that was no longer his.

Silas drew back his fist, and the underwater quiet closed over the world one last time.

The blue lines... Gold river... The single violet thread waiting in the middle, and all of it converging on the knot he had struck five times.

’Thank you, Harper.’

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The sixth strike went in like a spear through the center of the tide.

SHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK!

Harper’s body didn’t move an inch.

AND YET... An explosion of golden light erupted from Harper’s back.

TEAR!

Like an oil slick scraped from clean glass, Ititius’s towering translucent soul was knocked clean out of Harper’s flesh.

"AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

An ear-splitting wail of soul-tearing agony ripped through the cavern as the god’s spiritual avatar tumbled backward through the air and crashed against the basalt wall forty paces away.

Harper’s body swayed on locked knees with her eyes flickering from green back toward violet.

Ititius on the other hand hovered there with his golden robes shredded, his divine diadem cracked in two and his handsome face twisted into disbelieving horror as he looked down at his own translucent hands.

’I... I was expelled...?’ Ititius thought, his mind struggling to comprehend the reality. ’A mortal expelled a god from a vessel?!’

CRACK!

A hairline sound came from his spiritual chest and Ititius looked down as a glowing silver fracture had torn straight through his primary soul-seat.

’No...’

CRACK! CRACK-CRACK!

The fracture spread... It raced up his neck, across his cheekbones, down both arms!

’Think! I am Ititius! I am a deity!’ the god screamed in the frantic panic of his fading mind. ’I have contingencies! The anchor in the northern pantheon! The soul-shard hidden within the Sovereign Realm’s eighth tier! The dormant relic I pawned to the sea-lords! I will simply transfer my consciousness! I will sleep for three hundred years and return—’

SNAP!

Deep within the cosmic strata, across the infinite expanse of the Sovereign Realm, a series of muted distant pops echoed through reality.

The anchor in the northern pantheon shattered... The soul-shard in the eighth tier was vaporized and the dormant relic in the sea got pulverized in the same instant.

Silas’s strikes hadn’t merely hit the remnant... They had traced the power of the parasite’s unique spiritual frequency and sent a lethal traveling shockwave down every thread that tied him to existence!

Ititius’s golden eyes widened.

"No..." he whimpered, his voice shrinking into a small reedy squeak. "My anchors... all of them... every one..."

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

The cracks swallowed his jaw and crept toward his eyes, and his voice spilled out in a broken flood.

"You don’t understand! I was going to fix it! No more hungry children! No more stolen thrones! No more sisters with knives! A god doesn’t get carried to a portal! A god doesn’t get pushed! Nobody would ever... ever... carry me anywhere I didn’t choose to go again!"

The voice cracked and something in it slid, note by note, into a higher softer older tone, until the voice drifting from the crumbling golden figure wasn’t a god’s at all...

"It was so dark, after," the voice said. "I used to sing to them, the little ones, before they were gone... I didn’t know any other songs..."

Silas whose fists were still half-raised went very still.

The dying figure turned its head toward Harper’s swaying body, toward the violet slowly returning to her eyes, and for a moment there was no vanity in the golden face at all.

"Violet," it whispered. "She has my little girl’s eyes."

The cracks reached the lashes.

"I liked the ice cream," the voice said, almost shy. "Pistachio... It was so cold. I never told her..."

A breath like sand pouring through fingers. "Sister... you said we were going home."

A tear of light slid down the cracked golden cheek.

"I only wanted to go home."

SHATTER!

Ititius’s soul imploded into drifting lightless ash.

The ash hung in the cold air for half a second, then evaporated into nothing, leaving not so much as a whisper of him behind on either plane of reality.

[Author’s Note]

First of all, I do want to thank everyone for the support and castles that I received! I’m glad to know that you all like this book that much... I was originally planning to do 10 Chapters per day for 3 days since I owe you all 30+ Bonus Chapters however that one busted and I feel really sick right now.

However if I don’t mass release this month, all your Bonus Chapters will come with a New Month’s Mass release! Ty for all the gifts and everything as well. I’ll be going to the Clinic today.