Chapter 37: The Darkness Answers His Blade
Three more snakes closed in behind him. And it landed on him all at once, the size of what he’d walked into, the slick of sweat on his palms, the burn already building in his shoulders, the plain fact that he did not know how to do this.
He had been holding his own so far, but it had barely been a minute. And this was his first time fighting a monster at all. They’d run crash courses on monsters back in university, how to read them, how to cut them, but those had only ever been simulations.
’Fuck, it’s difficult!’
Even in those courses, none of them had told him to end up alone. Once you found yourself boxed in with more than one monster, the advice was simple. Run. But Theo... couldn’t run.
He had people to protect.
He made a sharp turn and swung his blade across the jaw of one. The steel sang a hard metallic note and caught, the edge skidding off scale as the shock jarred back up his arms.
By now he had deduced that the creature had incredibly tough scale almost everywhere, except its back. Not all of the back, though. Theo was sure of that much.
Since he was cornered, he backed away, shooting out of the gap, and just as his intuition warned, all four snakes pursued. At least the one nearest the door had turned off it and fixed on him now.
’I need a way to get around...’
He frowned, glancing around, hunting for anything he could use. His eyes caught on the cloth. He locked on and shot leftward, closer to the Gate, where more serpents were still crawling out of it.
But Theo curved off before he reached the Gate. He ran back to the center of the rooftop before the snakes could close, leaped the bench, and caught up a large thin blanket, flinging it through the air. It dropped over two of the serpents. Theo lunged after them with brutal speed.
His senses had gone sharp, like he’d grown a sword sense somewhere along the way, his body already moving before his mind caught up. Both hands closed tight on the hilt, and he called on Shadow Sword. The shadows around him answered.
They flooded into him, and his strength rose with them, his blade sharpening tenfold. Theo spun like a hurricane of darkness and slashed across both serpents at once. But the edge met that same metallic resistance and skated off.
He gritted his teeth at the wasted opening, but he didn’t spend a breath mourning it. His body pivoted hard. He threw the sword up spinning by its handle, caught it clean, and drove it down through the serpent.
The obsidian gleamed a ghostly blue as it punched through the snake from behind. The shadows turned more violent, and Theo felt the change in them.
[Your Mastery of the Shadow Sword has increased]
’It reacts to my improvisation?’
The first time, he had only followed his intuition, and the intuition had pushed him to try something new, and doing it had cemented the move as his own. The second time was intuition too, nothing but antics to add force to the strike.
’God, I’m moving like someone that’s been fighting for so long... Is this the advantage of the Limitless Body, or the sword skill?’
Theo pulled back fast. The win had almost blinded him to how far he was outnumbered, with no clean way out of this.
The second serpent was thrashing to tear free of the sheet, and it had already ripped a gash in it. Theo lunged, ducking under another snake that struck at where he’d just been. He clenched both hands together and used the same form of the sub-skill he’d made, this time with both feet planted to the ground.
He slammed the sword down and stabbed clean through the snake’s neck, the white sheet blooming purple beneath it. He wrenched the blade free and leaped back, once, twice, until his heels found the edge of the rooftop.
The snakes were pooling together now around the larger one, the serpent whose eye Theo had taken, lost somewhere in the coil of them.
Theo glanced at the door.
’They still don’t seem to mind the door... that’s a relief.’
The sky had gone fully dark now, night settled over the rooftop, but the city lights still blazed below.
Theo ran through his options, and none of them bought him time. He needed to hold out until the Gate forecast went off and the government dispatched its Heroes.
He set both hands on the sword again, dropped his stance a little, and breathed in slow, out slow.
His body loosened, and the racing in his head went quiet. Something like calm settled through his senses, and the darkness seemed to lean toward it, toward the new stillness in him.
New senses opened past his eyes. He could feel the dark corners of the yard, the cold pooling in them, the shapes shifting at the edges. At first he couldn’t place the feeling, but his body took to it fast, and even in those few breaths he felt the difference in himself.
[Your Mastery of the Limitless Body has increased]
Even so, Theo still couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t giving this everything he had. The snakes lunged as one, and he answered, flashing forward to meet them.
’Huh?’
His body was lighter than before, far lighter, and the snakes had slowed. The shadow sheathing his blade thickened and gave off a faint glow, and when it swept past the first snake, the edge went through it like searing metal through butter. The serpent fell apart in two halves before it could so much as writhe.
Theo moved sharp. As he cut down the first, he stepped sideways, changed the direction of the blade, and sent it upward, cleaving the next one open through the underbelly. The sword cut through with ease.
Theo frowned, all focus, feeling something surge through him. He let it come. It rose from his chest and ran the length of his body, and each time he moved to strike it poured out through the blow, every strike more terrifying than the last.
In among the Horned Serpents, Theo blurred into a dark shape, a moving piece of the night itself.