Chapter 516: Way Forward [Bonus - ]
Silas’s hair stood on end but he didn’t parry.
"Fuu..."
His instincts told him that crossing blades with that black ice edge would result in his guard being cleanly diverted and his throat opened so he ducked, bending backward at a ninety-degree angle as the translucent blade whistled through the empty air an inch above his nose.
SWISH!
The construct didn’t reset.
With terrifying fluidity, it allowed the momentum of the missed horizontal slash to carry its torso through a complete rotation, reversing its grip mid-spin to drive a downward reverse-grip stab toward Silas’s exposed sternum.
’Too clean!’ Silas thought with his teeth gritting.
He couldn’t dodge backward since the stone behind him was slick with freezing rime so he brought the flat of his golden longsword across his chest, locking his left palm against the spine of the blade in a reinforced cross-guard.
CLANG-KRA-BOOM!
The black ice blade struck the golden steel dead-center and the impact was so strong that the bedrock beneath Silas’s boots shattered into a spiderweb of cracks.
The shockwave blew the surrounding fog away in a concussive ring, and Silas felt the bone-jarring vibration travel through his forearms, into his collarbone, and down his spine.
The construct didn’t recoil.
Using the pressure of the locked blades, it shifted its lead foot behind Silas’s heel, executing an instantaneous sweep while simultaneously driving its left elbow toward his temple.
’This thing fights like a professional too!’
Silas flared his Gold Core.
BOOM!
He didn’t play the technique game as he flooded the contact point with raw water mana.
"[Tidal Impact]!"
A concussive hydraulic shockwave exploded outward from the flat of his blade.
The point-blank explosion blew the construct three paces backward, forcing its feet to slide across the permafrost.
Yet the entity didn’t lose its balance for a fraction of a second. The moment its soles regained traction, it dropped into a low coiled stance, the black ice blade blurring into eight simultaneous thrusts that screamed through the dark like striking vipers.
TICK-TICK-CLANG-TICK-SHING-CLANG!
Silas was forced onto the defensive.
His golden longsword moved in desperate arcs, deflecting the thrusts by millimeters.
Every time his blade met the black ice, the construct altered the angle of attack mid-stroke, exploiting the microscopic gaps in Silas’s guard with chilling computer-like precision.
RIP!
A shallow cut opened along Silas’s right bicep, tearing the wool coat and slicing through the top layer of skin.
TICK!
Another thrust grazed his jawline, drawing a thin bead of scarlet blood that froze instantly in the bitter air.
Up on Silas’s shoulder, the obsidian bird had been clinging to his collar for dear life with its talons digging into his leather mantle.
It saw the construct’s blade cock back for a third thrust aimed directly at Silas’s throat.
"SQUAWWWWWWWK!"
’The hell does it want to do? Run?’ Silas really didn’t care at this point, this strike was exactly what he needed for an opening to slaughter this thing.
The bird didn’t flee.
Driven by some spark of loyalty or perhaps the realization that if the human died, it was going to be digested next... the obsidian familiar threw its wings wide!
It launched itself from Silas’s shoulder directly into the construct’s face.
FLAP-FLAP-FLAP!
Its dark crystalline wings battered against the featureless obsidian mask, and with a vicious metallic snap, its curved scythe-beak struck the construct’s right eye-ridge with a sharp clack.
The strike didn’t deal damage as the construct’s hide was harder than iron.
But it did something infinitely more valuable.
It disrupted the entity’s sightline for a tenth of a second and the lethal thrust aimed at Silas’s throat hitched, drifting three inches to the left.
’Not exactly what I planned but...’
"Good bird!" Silas roared, a tenth of a second was all a Gold Core Lord needed.
Silas didn’t try to out-fence the swordsman and he didn’t try to mimic its refined footwork.
’All of those are important but for a fight to the death?’
He abandoned finesse completely.
Silas dropped his center of gravity, stepped straight into the construct’s guard, and drove his left shoulder hard into its chest with the concussive force of a battering ram.
KRA-CRUNCH!
The collision shattered the construct’s lead clavicle.
As the entity staggered backward, Silas’s left hand shot out like an iron clamp, locking around the construct’s sword-wrist with a grip that cracked the chitin beneath his fingers.
"You’re a better swordsman than me," Silas grunted, his golden ringed blue eyes burning with savage fire. "Too bad this isn’t a tournament..."
VUUUM!
Golden lightning exploded from Silas’s palm, surging directly into the construct’s arm.
"Once more..." Silas breathed out. "Fulgur Annihilation!"
He really liked the name of this spell...
KRA-FLASH-BOOOOOOM!
Tens of thousands of volts of destructive lightning surged through the construct’s body as the entity arched backward.
Its featureless mask vibrated violently as the lightning cooked its internal mana circuits from the inside out.
Cracks of blinding golden light spiderwebbed across its obsidian hide, shattering its chitin plates into smoldering shards.
Before the paralyzed construct could collapse, Silas drew his golden longsword back with both hands.
He cycled the full rotational torque of his core, pulling moisture from the air and coating the mythril edge in five layers of pressurized heavy water!
"Tidal-Blade Arts: First Style... Severing Horizon!"
SHING-BOOOOOOOM!
The horizontal crescent wave cleaved through the construct’s waist at point-blank range.
The black ice blade shattered into dust, the construct was sliced cleanly in two, and the concussive heavy-water wave detonated outward, blasting the severed halves thirty yards across the floor to dissolve into inert puddles of gray slush.
Silas didn’t even watch it dissolve.
The instant the construct fell, he redirected his entire momentum toward the far wall.
The obsidian bird fluttered frantically, barely managing to latch back onto his left collar as Silas tore across the stone like a falling meteor.
The weeping eye was thirty paces away, floating low near the permafrost and its leathery lids were trembling violently.
"Fuuu..."
Silas knew its pattern now.
He knew it was going to slide. It was going to shift to the left, dart up the ice wall, or drop into the permafrost crevices to escape the kill-stroke so he prepared for the dodge.
He coiled his legs, priming a burst of Cyclone Slipstream to alter his trajectory mid-air the microsecond the organ made its evasive twitch.
’Don’t worry, you’re not escaping this time...’
He closed the distance.
...Twenty paces.
...Ten paces.
...Five paces.
Silas raised his golden blade high above his head with both hands locked around the hilt and his Mythic Gold Core screaming at maximum output!
’Dodge, damn you!’ Silas braced himself. ’Which way are you going?!’
The eye didn’t move.
It had room to slide as the wall to its right was completely open and the permafrost below was slick and frictionless.
It could have easily detached its leathery anchor and skittered up into the ceiling shadows just as it had done three times before.
Yet... it simply sat there.
The leathery gray skin relaxed and the thick blackened veins stopped pulsing.
And in that final second, the wide stone-gray pupil rolled slightly upward, meeting Silas’s gaze with an expression that carried no malice and no resistance.
It looked... tired.
It seemed to have simply given up.
Silas’s breath caught in his throat.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, genuine shock rippled through his mind as he was fully expecting his blade to hit empty ice again but he didn’t stop the swing.
SHING-CRACK!
The golden mythril blade cleaved straight into the center of the twenty-foot eyeball!
KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The impact didn’t sound like cutting meat, instead it sounded like a massive, pressurized dam shattering under millions of tons of water.
SPLAT-SQUELCH-GUSH!
The giant organ violently ruptured and a geyser of thick oily pitch-black blood detonated outward in every direction.
The volume of visceral fluid hit Silas and the bird like a tidal wave.
The black gore washed over his hair, his face, his silver-threaded coat, and soaked through his trousers, completely drowning them in a foul, coppery deluge.
The obsidian bird was battered flat against Silas’s chest, its crystalline feathers thoroughly coated in thick sticky black slime until it looked like a drowned rat.
The entire chamber was painted in dripping smoking black gore.
THUD!
Silas landed on his feet, spitting a mouthful of bitter black fluid onto the permafrost, wiping his eyes with a drenched stained forearm.
"Disgusting..." Silas coughed, shaking his head. "Utterly repulsive."
Beside his ear, the bird let out a pathetic muffled cough. "Krrr... glug... caw..."
Then, the world began to tear apart.
CRACK! KRA-CRACK-RUMBLE!
With the death of the core Tier 5 entity, the power anchoring the cavern collapsed.
The ceiling vault hundreds of feet above began to fracture as massive house-sized fissures ripped through the solid basalt and ancient permafrost, and colossal slabs of rock began to detach, plummeting toward the floor in a catastrophic deafening cave-in.
BOOM! CRASH!
He looked at the eye.
’There’s nothing left of it...?’
"Time to go!" Silas shouted.
He didn’t look for an exit tunnel since there was no tunnel.
Silas bent his knees, his Gold Core flaring as he targeted a falling, carriage-sized slab of granite.
BOOM!
He leaped straight upward and he landed on the falling boulder, used its downward momentum to springboard higher, and vaulted onto a second falling stalactite.
KRA-BOOM!
He climbed the falling debris like a staircase, leaping from shattered rock to falling ice with wind mana roaring beneath his boots as he rocketed toward the fracturing ceiling vault.
High above, a jagged fissure exposed a sliver of pale gray light.
Silas reached the apex of his leap, pulled his golden longsword back with both hands, and unleashed a massive upward strike—
"Cyclone Slipstream!"
SHING-BOOOOOOM!
The emerald vacuum edge shattered the remaining six feet of surface permafrost into fine powder.
Silas broke through the crust, bursting into the open freezing air like an artillery shell, landing in a low sliding crouch on the pristine snowfields of the northern surface.
THUD!
Behind him, the ground violently collapsed inward, sinking into a massive gouge nearly a hundred yards wide as the subterranean cavern below imploded.
Silas stood up, brushing the dirt and drying black blood from his coat.
Cold mountain wind whipped his stained black hair across his forehead as he turned around, staring down into the enormous smoking crater in the earth with a bewildered dry squint.
’It was underground the entire time, eh?’ Silas thought, letting out a long frosty sigh.
The bitter northern wind whistled across the lip of the collapsed crater, whipping loose flakes of pulverized black shale and crystalline ice dust into the gray sky.
Silas stood on the edge of the yawning chasm with his boots planted firmly in the crust.
Beneath the dark leather soles, the earth groaned with the muffled aftershock settle of thousands of tons of collapsed basalt.
The fog had not simply transported him far away from the detachment; it had dragged him deep into the bedrock, depositing him directly at the threshold of that weeping monstrosity.
’Why specifically did it summon me there?’ Silas thought, raising a heavy leather-clad forearm to rub the nape of his neck.
The thick crust of black ichor coating his skin and hair was already hardening in the sub-zero air, snapping into brittle greasy scales under his fingers. ’Did it sense the furnace of the Gold Core and mistake it for a fuel source? Did it assume an isolated human was an easy meal? Or did the pull of this wretched basin naturally draw the anomaly toward the strongest foreign mana signature in the valley?’
He looked down at the state of his traveling coat.
The reinforced silver-thread embroidery along the lapels was completely ruined, drenched in tar-like coppery sludge that emitted a faint, alkaline vapor as it froze.
The hem of his trousers was stiff with the dead beast’s fluids.
He exhaled a long, cloudy breath that scattered across the wind, giving a dry, dismissive shrug.
’Doesn’t matter. It’s dead now.’
"SQUAWK! SQUAWK! KRRR-CLACK! CAW!"
On his shoulder, the obsidian bird launched into a violent convulsive fit of grooming.
It beat its crystalline wings against its flanks, sending sprays of sticky, half-frozen black slime clattering across the clean white snow like flecks of wet coal.
It hopped down Silas’s bicep, its razor-sharp talons clicking nervously against the polished metal plates of his vambrace.
The creature’s beady black eyes darted frantically toward the northwest.
It craned its neck, pointing its scythe-curved beak toward the jagged horizon, fluffing its matted plumage and squawking with an urgent desperate sort of excitement that made its entire hollow-boned frame vibrate.
It recognized this sector.
The biting draft here did not eddy or churn like the unnatural currents of the outer parts as it scoured down from the high glaciers in razor-sharp sheets.
The organic rotten-wood stench of petrified mountain pine had vanished too.
In its place was the dead bite of cold.
"You know where you’re going from here?" Silas asked, rolling his neck until the cervical vertebrae snapped with a series of sharp satisfying cracks.
The bird nodded with comical intensity, bobbing its crested head up and down so fast it nearly lost its footing on his arm.
It let out a rapid barrage of metallic clicks and rattling trills.
"Krrr-caw! Caw! Clack-clack!"
"Lead on, then," Silas muttered, adjusting the sword belt at his waist so the golden mythril scabbard sat comfortably against his hip. "And try to pick a path that doesn’t route through any more digestive tracts... My coat is out of clean patches, and I have no desire to skin another worm today."