I launch myself from the disintegrating stone platform, my boots kicking off solid rock a fraction of a second before it is pulverized by a falling boulder the size of a tavern. Gravity seizes me immediately pulling me down.
The city of Baelin is dying.
Above me, the jagged ribbon of the sky is entirely eclipsed by millions of tons of descending bedrock. Lopez and what I assume is the rest of Helix have succeeded in compromising the foundational fault lines of the mountain, turning the city's defensive geography into its own tomb. The mountain is collapsing, and I am deep in the lower part of the city. Trying to climb up against an avalanche of terminal-velocity granite would be suicide. The only viable chance of survival is down. I have to reach the plains at the bottom of the valley floor where we first spotted the Federation encampment and then I have to haul ass before the mountain crushes the canyon shut entirely.
I drop fifty feet in a single bound, landing with bone-jarring force on a swaying wooden suspension bridge. The ancient timber groans and cracks in agony under my augmented impact. I don't stop moving. I sprint across the span as it begins to snap behind me, the kinetic shockwaves from the collapsing mountain above rippling down the canyon walls and shattering the anchor points.
Every step is a precisely measured application of violence. Through the hyper focused greyscale lens of my Fearmonger mark, the apocalypse is reduced to pure geometry. I see the vectors of falling debris. I track the structural integrity of the stone terraces jutting from the canyon walls. The world is a monochromatic nightmare of angles. I do not spare a single thought for the rest of Helix. If they are crushed by Lopez's kinetic shear, that is their own failure. May the being I believe to be God grant mercy on their souls. I do not care about the civilians either; they were dead the moment we breached the city limits.
But I do care about the weight currently throwing off my center of gravity.
Imara hangs over my left shoulder, a limp, unconscious sack of bleeding flesh. Her broken arm flops with every desperate leap I make, her armored weight dragging against the physical augmentation of my muscles. She is a massive disadvantage.
Drop her, the voices hiss. She is already dead, just a useless sack of meat.
I grit my teeth, narrowing my eyes against against the suffocating clouds of dust being kicked up by pulverized stone. I leap from the splintering bridge just as a jagged stalactite of bedrock spears through its center, vaporizing the wood. I fall another sixty feet, angling my trajectory toward a wide, stone commercial plaza.
A part of me, however, agrees. Carrying over a hundred extra pounds of dead weight reduces how fast I can move.
I hit the stone plaza. The impact forces the breath from my lungs in a sharp hiss. The Regenerator mark flares instantly, a brief, blinding flash of gold beneath my skin that knits the micro-tears in my quadriceps before they can fully rupture.
I don't drop her....
I refuse to. It isn't out of loyalty. It certainly isn't out of some pathetic, lingering sentimentality for my academy squadmate. It is pure, unadulterated arrogance. I decided she is a useful pawn. I claimed her from the platform. Nothing else gets to dictate what I keep and what I discard. It is my will after all, and who dares stop me?
A deafening, concussive boom rattles my teeth in my skull.
I look up. A section of the canyon wall roughly half the size of the Imperial Palace has completely detached. It is sliding downward, peeling away from the mountain in a horrific slow-motion cascade of dust and sparks, grinding against the bedrock. It is falling directly toward the plaza I am running across.
There is nowhere to jump. The gap between this wall and the opposite side of the canyon is too wide, even for my augmented legs.
I shift Imara's weight higher onto my shoulder, tightening my left arm around her waist, and I draw Teleb's living sword with my right hand.
The moment the dark steel clears the leather scabbard, the psychic resonance floods my nervous system. The trapped soul of the woman forged into the blade screams in absolute, existential terror. Her bottomless anguish, her desperate, weeping panic and hate, flows up the hilt and directly into me.
It is intoxicating.
I drink her terror like a dying man finding water in the desert. The fear converts into raw, kinetic adrenaline, supercharging my bloodlust.
"Hold on," I snarl to the unconscious woman on my shoulder.
I don't run from the falling mountain. I run toward the edge of the plaza, directly into the shadow of the descending leviathan of stone.
At the exact moment the bottom edge of the falling wall is about to crush the plaza into dust, I leap. I throw myself off the edge of the terrace, not outward into the canyon, but straight down, parallel to the falling slab.
The air pressure between the falling rock and the canyon wall is immense. It buffets me, tearing at my shredded clothes, threatening to spin me out of control. I fall alongside the massive chunk of the city. I reach out with the living sword and drive the blade directly into the sheer face of the descending rock.
The dark steel screams in my mind in pain as it bites into the granite, sparking violently.
I use the sword as an anchor, hanging off the side of the falling rock face while holding Imara tightly against my chest. I am riding the collapsing mountain down into the valley.
The descent is a chaotic, blinding hellscape.
The slab I am attached to crashes into lower platforms, obliterating them in explosions of stone shrapnel and splintered timber. Boulders the size of wagons rain down around my head. I have to actively yank the sword free, kick off the rock, and reposition myself lower down the slab to avoid being crushed by secondary debris.
My right arm screams in agony. The reconstructed bones ache under the massive, sustained fatigue of holding two bodies against the force of gravity and friction. The golden light of the Regenerator pulses continuously, an endless cycle of tearing muscle and divine healing. I laugh.
Imara slips.
The jolt of a particularly brutal impact against the canyon wall tears her waist from my grip. She slides down my body, her dead weight pulling her toward the abyss.
I sigh in resentment. I should let her fall. She is already gone. Catching her in time would require me to let go of the sword.
I sneer. I drop the living sword.
I let the blade tear free from the rock. As I begin to free-fall again, the wind roaring in my ears, I snap my right hand out and catch Imara by the leather straps of her combat harness.
I dangle in the open air, thousands of feet above the valley floor, holding her with one hand. We are plummeting.
I twist my body in mid-air, using the Fearmonger's hyper-perception to map the falling debris around me. Just below us, a massive chunk of a stone archway is falling parallel to our trajectory.
I tuck my knees to my chest, pulling Imara close, and angle my fall. I slam feet-first into the surface of the falling archway, the impact sending a shockwave of pain up my spine while cracking the stone and sending chunks flying. But I keep my balance. I ride the plummeting stone like a twisted, apocalyptic surfboard, surfing the debris down through the narrowing throat of the canyon.
The heat is blistering. The fires from the upper levels have been sucked down into the gorge by the vacuum of the collapse, turning the air into a superheated furnace. It burns my lungs with every ragged breath.
Below, the greyscale vision pieces together the final landscape.
The canyon opens up. The jagged, sheer walls pull back, revealing the sprawling, flat expanse of the plains. The valley floor is rushing up to meet us at terrifying speed. The Federation encampment is already buried under the initial landslides, a graveyard of crushed tents and broken bodies.
The massive stone archway I am riding is going to hit the valley floor and shatter into a million pieces. If I am on it when it lands, the sheer violence of the collusion will liquify my internal organs. Maybe my regenerator mark will bring me back from becoming a puddle, but I am not really in any mood to find out.
"Wake up damn you!" I roar at Imara, though I know she can't hear me.
I wait until the very last possible microsecond.
The ground is fifty feet away. Then thirty. Then twenty.
"Fuck me sideways!" I curse
I funnel every last drop of augmented energy into my quadriceps. I crouch low on the falling stone, and just before the archway impacts the earth, I launch myself horizontally off the debris.
The jump breaks my legs.
I feel the femurs snap and the knee joints pop out of their sockets as I propel us laterally away from the epicenter of the crash. We fly through the dusty air like a fired cannonball.
Behind us, the archway slams into the valley floor with a deafening, earth-shattering detonation. The shockwave catches us in mid-air, throwing us forward with explosive force.
We crash into the soft earth of the farmlands.
I hit the ground back-first, wrapping my body around Imara to shield her from the worst of the impact. We roll violently through the dirt, tearing up the soil, bouncing and skidding until the friction finally bleeds away our momentum.
I come to a halt flat on my back, staring up at the sky.
My legs are a twisted ruin. My ribs are broken. My lung has been pierced. One of my arms has been practically ripped from my body. The golden light of the Regenerator is already flashing across my vision, violently snapping the bones back into place, forcing a scream through my gritted teeth. The pain of healing such wounds causing such intense agony that my mind simply ceases working for a second.
After what feels like an eternity I roll over, spitting blood and dirt from my mouth. A deep residual pain still permeates my body.
I look back at the mountain.
The canyon of Baelin is gone. The jagged peak has completely collapsed inward, sealing the gorge under billions of tons of impenetrable rock. A massive, towering cloud of grey dust and pulverized stone rises miles into the sky, a monument to the absolute, ruthless efficiency of Helix.
I look down at the dirt beside me. Imara is still breathing. Shallow and ragged, but breathing.
I drag myself to my feet, my newly healed legs trembling, and turn my back on the ruins of the city and I look to the sky and I call out to the being that resurrected me.
"Is this what you wanted? All of this death and destruction in your name? I am to be your sword is that it? BEHOLD ME NOW!"