Free Web NovelChapter 22: A Dance of Death Against Three Royal Guards
The three royal guards lowered their heads toward us, together.
And they charged.
The Scythe was on me before the other two had taken three steps. It didn’t cross the distance — it erased it. One instant it stood at the back of the cavern, the next its blades were splitting the air toward my throat, a gray streak my Eye could barely hold. I threw my head back; the chitin blade grazed my chin and took a few hairs with it. The second scythe was already coming from below, toward the belly. I twisted my torso, the water surged up into a shield — too slow. It went through the liquid curtain and opened my flank.
Not a graze. A deep gash, hot, that sawed across my ribs and tore a cry out of me. Blood spat out, black under the torchlight, and the pain folded me in two.
"KURO!"
"I’m fine — I’m fine!" I wasn’t. But it was already gone, the Scythe, out of range, circling us in tight loops, hunting for the next angle.
"Garden of Salvation!"
The grass burst up under my feet, the white flowers opened in the charnel field, and the warmth of the Garden began to stitch my flank shut — slowly, too slowly to keep pace with how fast that thing opened flesh. I felt it at once: as long as Alice held the Garden, she couldn’t do much else. And she had to hold it, or I’d bleed out before the end.
The floor exploded under me.
Not a sapper this time. The Weaver. Crouched at the back, motionless, she’d driven her legs into the earth and was playing the whole cavern like an instrument. A spear of stone shot up from the floor straight at my groin; I Dashed aside, and three more erupted where I landed, forcing me to Dash again, without pause, while the Scythe adjusted its line onto my course.
"She’s moving you!" Alice shouted. "The little one, at the back — she decides where you put your feet, she’s feeding you to the fast one!"
She was right. I wasn’t going where I wanted anymore: I was going where the terrain drove me, and the Scythe only had to wait for the spikes to throw me into its blades.
And the Wall was coming.
It didn’t take hits. It charged. Three tons of chitin launched straight at us, and when I Dashed to avoid it, its tree-trunk leg swept back through the air and caught me mid-flight. The impact tore me off the ground — and in the fraction of a second I went flying toward the wall, I did the only thing that mattered: I twisted my body to swing Alice up over my shoulder, against my chest, so it was my back that took the stone. Breath cut clean out of me, something cracking in my already-opened ribs. White stars. The taste of iron. But her, in my arms, untouched.
"Get up, get up, get up—!" Alice’s voice was climbing into the high register, and the Garden followed me, its light crawling across the corpses to reach me and weld back what had just broken.
I got up. Because she told me to. Because the Scythe was already diving at me. I rolled her back onto my back with a heave of my shoulder — "hold on" — and her arms locked around my neck at once, and I knew she was where I could cover her.
"Lightning!"
The bolt cracked from her palm and struck the Scythe mid-lunge, made it skid by a hair — enough. The blade plowed the stone beside my head instead of splitting it. I got my breath. One.
And in that breath, coldly, in that strange calm Apotheosis had melted into me, I did the math.
Three threats. One chasing me across the terrain, one carving me up, one waiting to crush me. As long as the Wall stood, I’d never get to plant myself and deal with the other two; it kept driving me back, again and again, into the scythes and the spikes. It was the pivot. The question was whether I could even scratch that carapace — thick as a siege shield, built to eat battering rams. Not at today’s strength, I was certain just looking at it.
Strike harder. Much harder. Now, or never.
I opened my status with a thought, mid-Dash, and called up my free points. All of them. The ones saved since the dungeon’s entrance, the ones piled up on the swarm without my even counting them. A reserve far bigger than I’d thought.
This was what I was saving you for.
Everything. Into Strength.
[ Free points allocated ]
Strength: 64 -> 92
The weight of the world changed. Power surged into my arms, my shoulders, my back — a brutal inrush, almost painful, like hot lead poured into the muscle. I hated the feeling. That brute strength wasn’t me; me, I was the edge, the dodge, the speed. But that wall wasn’t coming down any other way.
"Alice — the fast one, keep it off me for ten seconds!"
"Count on me! Go, I’ve got it — LIGHTNING!"
She opened fire on the Scythe, bolt after bolt, forcing it to dance, to dodge, to break its line instead of charging me. And I threw myself at the Wall.
My Eye had marked the fault for me: a joint at the shoulder of the foreleg, where the plates gaped by a hair with every step. I drove my first real blow into it, all my new Strength behind the blade, the water gathered into a wedge along the edge.
The sword entered the gap — and snapped clean.
The blade had found the fault, but the ordinary metal Elsa had shoved into my hands wasn’t made to carry a force like that. It cracked at mid-length with a high shriek, and I was left with a stump of blade in my fist, the other half lodged uselessly in the joint.
The Wall pivoted to crush me.
No time to think. I dropped the shard, and I drove my bare hand into the fault the broken blade had opened.
The edges of the plates sheared my forearm to the blood, but I’d gripped it — something in there, a bone, a root of the leg, a hard ridge under the warm fluid. I clenched. And with all that Strength I hated, all that brute power poured into my muscles a minute earlier, I tore.
It came away with a wet crack. A shard of chitin as long as my arm ripped free from inside the joint, and pale fluid erupted from the gaping wound, spraying my face, my mouth, everything.
"VROOOHHHZZZ —" The Wall screamed, a bellow I hadn’t heard yet, pain breaking through under the rage. It staggered on its crippled leg, the mass thrown off balance.
That was the opening. I gathered the water from the whole soaked floor into a thick, compact blade at the end of my fist, and I drove it into the open wound, where no carapace shielded the inside anymore. The water rushed in, forced, tore it apart from within — and burst out the other flank in a spray of fluid.
The mountain of chitin froze. Trembled. Its legs buckled one after another, and the Wall toppled onto its side and crashed down, the whole floor jolting under the mass, shaken by one last spasm.
"Vrooo—" The bellow broke into a gurgle, then went out.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 42 — ... Level 45 — Path of the Spellblade applied
Four levels at once. A single one of these things was worth the entire swarm combined.
No time to savor it. The Scythe let out a shriek — "Fhhzzt-fhhzzt-FHHZZT!" — and whatever patience it had left shattered. It came at me from every side at once, both scythes whirling, and the duel became something I hadn’t known since Elsa: too fast to think, only to react. One scythe opened my forearm. The other drew a line of fire across my thigh. The Garden was stitching behind, but it opened faster than the Garden could close, and the Weaver, at the back, hadn’t let go of me — the spikes kept erupting, driving me straight into the fast one’s passes.
I wasn’t going to last like this. I had to finish it. But it was too fast for me.
Not for Alice.
"Alice — I need its speed! Give me everything!"
A half-second of silence at my back. Then her voice, lower, graver, and her arms tightening around my chest as if to anchor herself to me.
"Don’t die. Nerves of Light."
The spell tore through me like a discharge — and the world nearly stopped.
My Eye and the Nerves of Light fused into a single thing, and the cavern froze into a deep-water silence. The Scythe, that gray streak I couldn’t hold a second earlier, now drifted toward me with a dreamlike slowness. I saw every detail: the first scythe rising toward my throat, the exact angle of its arc, the tremor of muscle under the chitin; the second following from below, toward my belly, half a second behind; the droplets of my own blood suspended in the air between us, motionless, catching the torchlight like red pearls. I saw the single window between the two blades — narrow as a hair, open for the space of one heartbeat.
I slipped into it.
Under the first scythe, over the second, my body gliding through the exact gap, and from my stump of a sword sheathed in water I drove a single line, tail to nape. Time snapped back all at once. And the Scythe collapsed into two pieces that slid slowly apart.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 46 — Path of the Spellblade applied
But something was already heating up behind my eyes. A dull, white pain, pulsing in time with my racing thoughts. The price of the Nerves of Light. My brain was running past its redline, and I could feel it starting to smoke.
No time. The Weaver remained.
Not a single blow struck in the whole battle, and yet the most dangerous of the three — because as long as she lived, the floor lived with her. And she’d understood it: her two guardians dead, she played her last card. The entire floor of the cavern heaved at once. Dozens of holes reopened, vomiting up a fresh tide of workers, and the walls themselves began to close in on us, the vault to descend, as if she meant to bury us alive under her whole colony rather than let us reach her.
"She’s burying us!" Alice cried. "Kuro, if she seals it all, we die down here — you have to reach her NOW!"
"I know. Hold on, I’ll get us out."
Again. I needed its speed again, while my skull was already screaming.
"Alice. One more time."
"Kuro, your head, you’re bleeding, I—"
"One. More. Time."
A sob in her voice. Then: "Nerves of Light."
The world froze a second time, and this time it was like driving a white-hot blade behind my eyes. I screamed, I think, but I didn’t hear myself. I crossed the collapsing cavern in a burst of Dashes, mowing the wave of workers on my line without even watching them die, dodging the stone spears that erupted in slow motion before me, weaving between them like water between fingers. The Weaver raised a last wall of earth. I rounded it before it finished rising. She lifted her legs to reopen a hole beneath me. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
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I sheathed my stump of blade in a compact point of water, extended far past the broken steel, and I split her from skull to abdomen.
She gave one last grating shriek, high, a hiss of steam that died — "Sssfhh..." — and the floor, everywhere, stopped breathing all at once. The walls went still. The vault froze. The tide of workers, robbed of the one who called them up, collapsed where it stood in a final shudder.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 47 — Path of the Spellblade applied
The silence, this time, was absolute.
I’d won.
And that was exactly when my body presented the bill.
All of it, at once. The world that had still been racing a second earlier came back down on me too fast, too hard, and everything the fights had taken from me — the swarm, the Wall, the Scythe, the two gashes, the cracked ribs, and above all that brain pushed twice past what it could bear — all of it hit in the same second.
My skull tore open. A pain I had no word for, as if someone were prying apart the inside of my forehead. Blood ran from my nose, in streams now, and when I coughed it was red I spat onto the white grass. My ears whined. The world doubled, tipped.
Apotheosis had held me up the whole way. Had forced me to keep going when my body should have dropped ten times over, fed me a vigor that didn’t exist, forbidden me to stop — and now that my will finally gave out, there was nothing left to hold me.
My legs folded.
"KURO!"
I didn’t feel the floor. I felt her arms. Alice had leapt from my back before I hit the ground, and she caught me, dropped to her knees with me, my head against her chest, her face above mine drowned in tears.
"No no no — look at me, stay with me, I’ve got you, I’ve got you—" Her hands flew over my face, my forehead, wiping the blood that wouldn’t stop. "Garden of Salvation, stronger, stronger still, I’m begging you—"
The green light swelled around us, rose in a column, denser than I’d ever seen it. The warmth spread through my torn skull, and the pain ebbed, in waves, slowly. The blood slowed. The world pieced itself back together, fragment by fragment, into a single blurred image: her face, her tears, and all around us the immense garden of white flowers spread out in the very middle of the hundreds of ant corpses, the pools of black blood, the gutted stone. An impossible oasis, white and warm, at the heart of the slaughterhouse.
"Am I... done?" I murmured. My voice came from very far away.
"You’re done." She was laughing and crying at once, her forehead against mine. "You killed all of it, Kuro. There’s nothing left. You did well. You did so well."
Her hand stroked my hair, brushed aside a strand glued with blood.
"You can rest now. Everything’s all right. I’m here, I’ve got you, and everything’s all right. Rest."
And cradled by her voice, wrapped in the warmth of her white garden, in the middle of an ocean of death that could do nothing more to me as long as she held me, I let go at last. My eyelids fell. The last thing I felt was the scent of flowers, over the smell of blood — and her arms around me, no longer trembling.
Above us, somewhere deep in the dungeon, the mana went on flowing toward its heart. Toward her. The queen who waited for us, and who had just lost her best pieces without ever showing herself.
We’d go to see her.
But not yet.
