Chapter 13 - Tackling apex predators (Patreon)

The strike was clean and quick, the sort of perfect swing that would stun a courtyard into silence.

To’Aacar took a casual step back, letting the blade flash a hairbreadth away from his throat. The spear in his left hand spun, already putting itself in position to tackle the followup hits. The shock on his face faded to a grin, almost as if he'd been playing it up for dramatic effect.

That scrapshit had something else coming for him if he thought that’s all we had. Occult pulsed, and both Cathida and I struck as one from opposite ends. One side was her blade, and the other was my spectral copy. 

The spear flicked out, expertly stopping her strike, while he crouched and twisted under my attack, turning the move into a kick that sent us flying backwards, as if we’d run into a wall.

Cathida landed like a cat, back on two feet. To’Aacar remained where he’d stood as if nothing had happened. “I see Atius found a way to teach you some tricks. A novel use of a relic armor. Very novel. I’m impressed.” He smiled. “Not often I see something new these days. But this won't work either. Do you know why you won’t win?”

“You talk to much.” Cathida said and leaped forward. Occult blue licked the sides of my armor as I readied the fractal of mirrors one more time. The winterscar blade whistled through the air, a near blur. Three ghostly blades struck at the same time, from alternate directions.

To’Aacar matched out speed, and then exceeded it. I think the spear struck back at Cathida’s attack, bouncing her off but I can’t be sure. Things were going too fast for me to keep up, even with the Occult sight feeding concepts directly into my mind. Whatever happened in those fragments of seconds, To’Aacar dodged or destroyed all my own occult strikes, and slammed us down into the ground. Then kicked us away, casually, like scrap metal.

 Cathida landed hard against the ground, rolling for a moment before her hand struck out and lifted the entire armor off the ground and back on solid footing.

“I can overclock my systems. Make time fly by as if it was trapped in amber.” He said, taking another relaxed step to follow us. “A second to you can be an eternity to me. Your armor can do the same of course, which would even out our speeds. For a moment. Where your trouble lies is that my body was made to funnel and dissipate heat. Made for war and battle, optimized for it, perfected. Your armor has to deal with that squishy human inside. It was built to protect you first, and fight second. They were never created to have such strain put on them, and so they don't have the means to handle that strain for long.”

“He’s right.” Cathida said in my ear. “I know I’m better than him, the little scraphead only has one hand and a spear bigger than his ego. But skill’s worth nothing if he can just move faster to counter anything I do. If I try to keep up, Journey’s saying I’d risk cooking you alive deary. The armor’s worse than an overprotective parent, but having you burn to death is something I can grudgingly set my differences aside for.”

“How long can you match his speed?”

“Journey’s saying it doesn’t want to even try.” Cathida said. “Goddess, it’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t want to take risks. You’re going to have to do that administration mubo jumbo to make it listen.”

To’Aacar leisurely walked forward. Cathida took steps backwards, keeping out of range. We were going deeper into the cave with each step.

I spoke the authorization, Cathida walking me through whichever it was that Journey needed, and only then did my relic armor reluctantly supply the specs it had to work with. 

The answer wasn’t good. “The real problem is that heat stays trapped inside the armor for a good few minutes due to the seal against the environment. That means even with the overclocks turned off, you’ll still be roasting in here with whatever’s slowly going away. Journey says twenty seconds is the cut off point where you’ll live through the cool down. Thirty seven if you take off your helmet right after to make an opening for air to pass through.”

“Twenty seconds is enough.” I said. “If he doesn’t have a shield, all we need is a few good cuts to put him out of commission. It only takes a second to cut his head off with an Occult blade. This isn’t aerogel engineering.”

"And how exactly are you planning on deleting his shield from the equation? Because that seems to be the hard part."

“You know I can hear you muttering under your helmet?” To’Aacar said as he continued to force us to backtrack. "I have no helmet but somehow I get the impression you didn’t hear me the first time, despite that. Let me help you with that short attention span, you poor miserable little thing: I was created to hunt down and kill deities. I’ve crossed blades with the likes of Talen and held the line. Even weakened from madness, he’s a few hundred leagues above a human cowering behind his pet armor.”

“Cathida,” I said, whispering. “Time for plan B.”

She instantly sheathed a blade and drew the knightbreaker out from its holster by the small of my back, and aimed it down sights with her left hand. The Feather paused, head tilting. “You think a grenade is going to do anything to me?” He smiled, “Fire away. I’m right here, you can’t possibly miss.” 

Looks like he thought this was just a regular grenade launcher. I gave a prayer to any god that would hear me, hoping that this scraphead’s ego was just wide enough he’d think to tank the shell directly. He seemed like the type to do that.

"Eat shit and die, scraphead." Cathida hissed, and fired without hesitation. The occult shell launched with little recoil, the payload zipping through the air directly at the Feather’s center mass.

To’Aacar’s left hand moved. The spear blurred. One moment it had been at his side, the next, it was pointing up, held high in the air.

He’d cut the shell in half. Right as it was on the way to intercept. There was even a whip-like crack as the spear clearly passed the speed of sound to do that. 

Almost at the same exact moment, physics gave his dramatic counter the middle finger.

The shell continued moving forward by inertia, no longer connected as a single unit, but split in half, and still going the same general direction with the rotational energy pushing them apart - but not quite fast enough. Parts of the carefully crafted occult chains inside were no doubt cut, but not all of them, and not all completely. The split shell fragments collided against his chest, and the chains flew out as designed. One didn’t light up at all, the power source likely being in the way of the occult spear. 

But the other three did light up. Two had been greatly shortened, and the third was undamaged. They sliced and diced wildly in all directions for a fraction of a second, before the two shell fragments flew off in different directions, dragging the chains behind them.

The chains hadn’t wrapped around their target as intended. But the damage had still gone through in those milliseconds of contact.

His shield flared out within that millisecond, and instantly collapsed. The chains dug and cut into the mechanical body, causing havoc, ripping apart bits. His limp right arm was shredded in three parts, with only the chunk up to his elbow remaining. Dangling from a bit of artificial skin where the occult chain hadn’t happened to pass through.

His chest had major cuts, right through whatever served as the rib cage. A few chains had both cut into him, and then flailed around before being sucked away by the shell pieces, and they’d done untold damage within him. A shorter chain had whipped right into his eye, and passed through out his cheek, just before the ear. Nothing survived wherever the Occult edge passed.

The left arm was mostly intact, but his spear wasn't. Only the spear blade itself had an Occult edge. The handle and shaft were the traditional weakpoint of a spear, the reason combat spears weren't used. Those chains flew right at the shaft, and wrapped around the hilt, where an occult shield, of all things, flared up for a heartbeat. It collapsed just as fast as the Feather's own shields had. 

There was no stopping the chains. The spear was cut into chunks, as if it hadn't been shielded at all, leaving him holding onto a short metal rod with no blade attached.

The chains zipped around further into the air, like two scribbles of blue fading out, before the shells hit the walls and bounced off, clinking onto the ground, the currents stopped and the attack completely spent. But damn did this little beauty pay off. Worth every bit of stress and money to make. The moment I'm back home, I'm ordering ten more.   

To’Aacar stumbled, falling down onto one knee, now looking more like a ripped up puppet. He lifted his head to stare. Disfigured, with only his left eye working while the right side of his face looked like it had been held down against a blender. A few emotions passed through whatever parts of his face remained working. Shock. Disbelief. Anger. And hate. A lot of hate. And then surprise again, at the sight of an occult blade zipping right for that last eye.

Cathida, being an imperial crusader and having long learned never to pass on any opportunity, had already committed to attacking regardless of the outcomes. The moment she’d fired the weapon, the grenade launcher had been tossed out of her hands while she sprinted forward, Winterscar blades tip first, one reaching to impale, while the other sweeped to catch any dodge attempt. 

His head shifted to the side and the blade passed an inch off target. Without delay, occult pulsed across his body, and flashed out. Cathida’s follow-up attempt to cleave down with her off hand went directly through nothing, with the rest of my own occult mirrors also striking through thin air. He'd vanished, but not far. Whatever that occult spell was, it had repositioned him a few feet to our right. 

Cathida and I instantly pivoted, and we both struck out.

I don’t know how he did it, but one of his feet kicked the speartip off the ground, and tossed it straight up, directly through one of my occult mirror strikes at the same time that he narrowly avoided Cathida's hit. The ghost apparition faded the moment the occult edge cut through. That didn’t matter, I’d thrown out another in that span of time. This second swing he took head on, letting it cut through parts of his chest, and carve out a new cut across his limp right arm.

In exchange he threw out an open handed punch. Occult pulsed around his arm, and when he struck, it was like a massive anvil had clobbered us. Once more I found my limp body being thrown back violently.

“You godless heathen,” Cathida snarled, standing us back up a distance away. “Just die already. It’s embarrassing.”

“This isn’t happening.” To’Aacar said, voice bewildered. “This can’t be happening. How? Zero Twelve’s dead. How did you recover his chain? I saw him cast it into the mite sea, seven entire levels below, right before we killed him! Nothing comes back from that. Nothing.”

He took a step forward and collapsed on another leg. The damage to his chest was really something, a human would have been dead twenty times over by now. It was like watching a corpse move around, the body occasionally refusing to function, twitching even. “No. No, no, no, he can’t be alive. He’s dead. I saw him die!”

“I don’t know what you’re babbling about.” I said, taking back control. “But it looks to me like you’re finished. If you don’t want that head of yours to fly off whatever’s left of your shoulders, you’re going to do the smart thing and surrender now. I’ve got a lot of questions to ask.”

He stared back, that one eye seemed as if it wasn’t looking at me, but somewhere far off in the past. “Of course.” He nearly whispered. “The mites finally spat his body and chain back out. They must have pushed it to the surface of all places. But how did you duplicate it into so many parts?”

"Don't know who else had the idea to use chains, but I made those myself. I'm pretty good at making weapons these days." I said, taking a few steps forward. “Not so high and mighty now, eh?”

This time his eye focused on me. It looks like he responded well to taunts. “This isn’t over.” He said. “I haven’t lost.”

“Spoken like every sore loser at the gambling table. It’s over. You’re on one knee if you haven’t noticed, and the other doesn't seem to be working well either. Give up.”

There was rumbling behind me. The rocks he’d collapsed at the entrance shook, and began to tumble down. “Scans show the fighting’s died down on the other side.” Cathida said, answering my unworded question. “They’re breaking the rocks down. Time to wrap him up and take him back home. Part of me really hates to say this, but those Knightbreaker shells of yours are on a different level. Instantly ended that fight. I’d hate to be on the other end of one of those.”

That violet eye seemed to twitch. “I do not surrender to anyone or anything. I am To’Aacar, the one above all challenge and reach. Know this, human. Today, I acknowledge you. Even the Deathless I hunt don't cause me this much damage.” He stood up, slowly, and collapsed back on his knees.

“I don’t think you’re following the script here, buddy.” I said. “I’ve got the sword and shields. You’re down an arm, a shield, a spear and…” I waved a sword tip in his general direction. “Well, an everything. This fight’s over. You’re coming with me, or I’ll cut you up some more. And then you’re coming with me.” Man, now I’m starting to sound like the villain here. But there was something visceral satisfying lording over a broken enemy. Or maybe it's the Winterscar in me that simply can't pass up on an opportunity to taunt and kick a downed opponent. 

“The fight is never over. Not until you, or I, die.” He said, oddly calm. 

"Fine. Don't say I didn't give you a chance. Cathida, serve up another limb. And bring out the fancy silverware please."

She complied, one blade swiping down on that last working hand of his. The crippled machine corpse once more moved with that scrapshit alacrity, twisting his whole torso to avoid the blow, grabbing the wrist of our hand, and yanking up.

Quite literally, throwing us straight up over his shoulder, in a full unbroken arc, and tossing us away. Like we were a shopping bag. And relic armors weigh quite a lot. In the hundreds of pounds. 

We hit the ground with a thud, rolling back into ground. No real damage, other than my pride of course, not even the shields were triggered. But how strong was this scraphead exactly?! Even with all that damage piled up and no leverage on his knees, he still tossed us like laundry.   

The machine corpse tried to rise and take a step after us, but stumbled and crashed down again on his knees. He looked up, agast. Then his eye widened. “That’s… your full name is… Keith Winterscar? You?”

“Yes, me. What, you never even checked my first name?" I said, taking some control back and brushing off the dust on the armor. "I’d say I’m hurt, but somehow that seems in character for what I’ve seen of you. I’ll be honest, you’re not the most polite person I’ve met.”

The feather laughed. “All humans are the same to me. Or were the same until this moment. I know who you are now. I've just read everything that exists with your name attatched to it. Perhaps I was too... harsh on my little sister. You are an anomaly among humans. I see now how she could have been killed by you.”

“I don’t remember killing your sister? I think that would have been a memorable occasion for me.” I shrugged, “Cathida, do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

She gave the verbal version of a shrug.

“Her name is To’Wrathh. And it was a… memorable occasion to her when you killed her. She’s very interested in you. Obsessed even. I should have read the full report long ago, there’s so much more I could have tormented her with. How I've wasted the opportunities.”

The rocks continued to rumble, breaking apart. Bits of light shafts began to open up.

“Still doesn’t jog any memory. Sorry. Don’t remember stabbing a machine lady to death recently. I know I have poor memory, but it can’t be that bad.”

He grinned. A wide wicked thing, like a child that had found a new toy to torment. “She wasn’t a Feather when you met her. No, she came back solely to hunt you down and finish what she started.”

“Oh! Now I get it. Is this some kind of stalling tactic? You’re making up a story on the spot to keep me entertained? It's not going to work, but keep going. I'll admit it's entertaining. So what did this lady start exactly?”

Well, I was stalling too on my end. He had nothing he could do to do damage to me anymore, not with Journey's shields still being active. He could try to punch me a few times and that might just work. But we had the occult weapons. So I decided I was going to wait for the rest of my knights to show up, and we'll dogpile the Feather until someone managed to cut his legs and arms off. Why get tossed around again when I had friends on the way?

“She killed that other knight you were with." To'Aacar said, with unmistakable glee. "Right before you killed her. How ironic. How delightfully ironic. Your final words to her was to remember the moment. And you’ve forgotten it. You don't even know who she is. I can’t wait to show her.”

My blood froze as he spoke. Memory flashed through my muddled mind. I took a step back, almost in shock. No. No way.  

“You should feel honored, Keith. This is the first time I’ve ever taken an interest in one of your kind.” He said. Occult pulsed around him. “The next time I see you, I’ll be ready. It’s a shame you can only die once.”

Cathida took command, drawing a blade up and directly at him. “Don’t.” She said.

The Feather simply leered. Madness in that eye. Occult flashed, wrapping around his body in a heartbeat - and faded away.

Where he stood, there was nothing left.

The fucker had run.

• Next chapter - Alone (T)

AN: While doing research on how fast things can move before air friction becomes an issue, I found out that the tips of whips actually break the speed of sound right at the endpoint. That's where the crack comes from. No dramatic shockwaves though, and things need to be moving a lot faster than the speed of sound before friction starts to be dangerous.