Chapter 123 – Hunting Old Gods (3)
(Erynd)
"Let's talk about love," I said.
Her heads—plural, because the wall behind her had grown extra mouths and half-faces that echoed her movements—tilted.
Amusement rippled through the chamber.
It wasn't on her ruined lips.
It was in the way the flesh around us shivered, like the whole place was holding back a giggle.
Then she moved.
No chant.
No complicated sigils.
Just raw, obscene biology.
Her left arm—too long, bone jutting through the wrist—whipped out like a striking rope. The flesh that tied her into the ceiling and floor and walls tensed, and the entire chamber reacted.
Spikes pushed out of the meat-walls all around me. Not graceful icicles of ice or stone. Wet, white shards of bone, snapping forward on cords of tendon.
"Of course," I muttered. "She's a porcupine."
Melody left my back without needing a word.
One moment, weight against my spine; the next, a sword in my hand, her body flowing into steel mid-air like it was the most natural transition in the world.
I dropped Gungnir into my left hand, brought Melody up in my right, and moved.
Bone spikes hammered in from three angles.
Melody laughed—bright, high, pleased—and her blade blurred.
She wasn't just cutting.
She was making space.
Any time something came close enough to turn me into a kebab, she was already there, edge passing through tendon, splitting bone, knocking lethal angles a few degrees off.
One of the spikes still grazed my arm; hot pain, wet warmth.
Good.
Pain meant I was still alive.
"Child," the chorus said.
It wasn't a question.
"What," I grunted, twisting under the sweep of that too-long arm, feeling the air pressure shift as claws tore a furrow through the meat behind me.
"Why do you have the Authority with you?" she asked.
It wasn't just sound.
The word Authority hit like a pressure change.
The walls inhaled.
Little mouths on the tendrils gasped.
Cold crept along my spine.
"Interesting," Melody murmured in my head. "She can see it."
"I keep getting told I have things I didn't order," I said aloud.
Her eyes—uneven, broken—fixed on me.
The big one dilated further.
The smaller one twitched.
"That is not yours," she hissed. "That belongs to—"
"I don't know what it is," I cut in. "I just know I've got it."
I shifted my feet, feeling the slick, yielding surface under my boots.
"And I'll use it," I finished.
I threw Gungnir.
Not a mundane throw.
I poured everything I had into the vector.
Force.
Direction.
Purpose.
Gungnir left my hand with a shriek of mana and metal, the projection at its tip blooming into full, lethal reality.
It crossed the chamber between heartbeats.
Nazyen jerked.
Her arm snapped up, tendrils convulsing, trying to drag flesh in front of the spear.
Too slow.
Gungnir punched into her side, just below where her ribs turned into wall. For a split-second, nothing happened.
Then the Authority bit.
It wasn't my magic.
It wasn't the spear, not entirely.
There was a note in the impact that was not mine at all.
Like a third hand reached in and twisted.
The flesh at the point of impact charred. Not fire-black, but absence-black. Color drained from it like someone had pulled the saturation slider down. The rot there wasn't slow and rich; it was brittle, crystalline.
Nazyen screamed.
Every mouth in the chamber screamed with her.
The sound made my teeth ache.
"You—" she choked. "You thief—"
"Melody!" I snapped.
She knew what I meant.
She always does.
Her blade shifted in my hand.
What had been steel a moment ago suddenly felt… sharper.
Not just in the ordinary sense.
The air around the edge went very, very quiet.
She pulled herself in, metaphysically speaking, reinforcing her structure until I could feel the density in my bones. Atoms, mana, whatever you want to call the pieces of reality—she was shoving them closer together, making herself a single intention, a single line.
To human eyes, the blade looked the same.
My senses told a different story.
The edge was thin enough now that it barely existed.
Melody hummed, delighted.
"Finally," she whispered. "You let me bring the good knives."
Arcs of energy crawled along the flat of the blade.
Lightning, upgraded and refined since the last time we'd danced like this.
Before, it had been sloppy. Raw discharge. Lots of flash, not enough teeth.
Now the charge was tight. Focused. Bound to the immediate area around the edge instead of wasting itself on lighting up the room.
A caged storm, eating its own tail.
"Don't miss," I said.
"I never miss," she said.
We moved.
Nazyen's arm came at me again, claws big enough to pulp a horse.
I went into it.
Duck under the first swipe, let the second pass over my back, feel the wind of it tear a few hairs free.
Then I was at her base.
Right where flesh turned into the horrifically extended fusion with the wall.
"Now," I said.
Melody sang.
We struck.
Edge and electricity together.
Steel—if you could still call it that—met godflesh, and for a moment there was resistance. Like pressing into stale bread.
Then the edge took.
The blade slid through her like someone had drawn a line through butter left in the sun.
The lightning didn't spread.
It burrowed.
It crawled along the wound, into it, riding nerve paths, racing through meat.
Nazyen convulsed.
The entire chamber bucked, like a heartbeat trying to eject a foreign object.
Her upper torso peeled away from the wall.
Not fully.
Just enough that for one hideous second she was hanging there, half-pulled out of her own anchor, organs sloshing, tendrils stretching.
The cut was deep.
Wide.
Beautiful, in a way that would probably make a therapist very nervous.
"Good girl," I panted at Melody.
The praise made her preen.
Nazyen's scream this time wasn't rage.
It was fear.
And then—
she regenerated.
Flesh rushed to fill the gap.
Not orderly.
Not healthy.
It came in a surge—fat, muscle, skin all at once, like someone spilling meat out of a bucket into the wound.
The lightning burned some of it.
The Authority-tainted wreckage from Gungnir's hit resisted a little.
It didn't matter.
She had too much to work with.
The gap closed in seconds.
Leftovers dripped off her, sizzling when they hit the ground, writhing for a moment before going still.
Her form was worse now.
More asymmetrical.
One breast had slumped lower than the other, flesh hanging like melted wax. Her neck was too thick on one side. The arm we'd cut near now had extra joints, too many bends in the wrong places.
She laughed.
It came out wet and broken and infinitely smug.
"Oh, little child," she crooned. "Did you think you could cut love? Did you think one wound would be enough to end me?"
She flexed.
The chamber flexed with her.
Spines punched out of the floor this time.
I jumped.
One grazed my calf, tearing through cloth and skin, hot pain lancing up my leg.
Blood ran.
The floor drank.
I landed on a patch of ground that was less actively trying to murder me and took stock.
Vera Flamma?
No.
Any significant fire in here, and the oxygen would vanish. Best case, we all suffocate. Worst case, the flesh walls cook, contract, and crush everything like a clenched fist.
Promethean Inferno?
Absolutely not.
Even if I could call the sun here—which I can't, not underground—the focus beam would punch through half the city. The collateral damage would be… unattractive.
"I see you thinking," Melody said. "Don't."
"Don't what?" I asked.
"Don't martyr yourself," she said. "You're still tier three. You throw a tier seven tantrum in here and you'll black out before you even see if it worked."
She wasn't wrong.
My mana reserves are generous for my tier.
They are not infinite.
And every big spell here wouldn't just hit her.
It would hit the framework keeping this tunnel from becoming a mass grave.
"Look at you," Nazyen giggled, voice echoing from a dozen mouths. "Look at your little tricks. Your little toys. You scratch me, I reshape. You burn me, I bloom. You can't even see my core, can you?"
She was right about that, too.
My mage-sight was useless on her.
Normally, I can see where a spell is anchored. A core of mana, a knot, a pattern. A locus. Something.
With her, there's… nothing.
Or too much of everything.
The whole chamber is her.
Every tendon, every lump, every twitching fingertip in the wall is part of the same system.
No central weak point.
Distributed failure.
She laughed harder.
"Now you realize you're doomed, child?" she taunted.
"Doomed" is a big word for a thing that can't stop rotting.
"What is with that grotesque attitude," I muttered. "You died, got dragged back wrong, and now you're heckling teenagers."
"You are wrong," she hissed. "You wear something that isn't yours. You carry authority you don't understand. They let you have it? Or did you steal it? Little thief. Little—"
Her arm lashed again.
I parried with Melody, felt the impact jolt up my arm.
She wasn't trying to hit me with that last swipe.
She was testing my timing.
Melody felt it too.
"She's not dumb," Melody said. "Broken, but not dumb. She's learning you."
"I hate when they learn," I said.
If Gungnir's Authority-infused hits and Melody's mono-edge, arc-wrapped strikes can't put her down before she knits… then I can't win this with damage.
Not fast enough.
Not in this room.
Not without trading my consciousness for a maybe.
"So," I thought, "don't kill. Control."
My elemental tricks are flashy.
Fire, light, a few bits of storm.
Useful.
Limited.
My real talent is vectors.
Not the fire itself.
The direction of the heat.
The force behind the sword.
The way motion flows through a room.
I've been leaning on that without really… leaning in.
If I can't overpower her body, I have to start playing with the space she occupies.
The problem is that kind of finesse isn't just about raw willpower.
It's about something deeper.
Derivation.
***
Derivation is the point where technique stops being something you do and starts being something you are.
Sword knights have good basics.
Footwork.
Guard.
Cut.
Thrust.
They can win fights by being more trained, more disciplined, more ruthless.
Sword masters… bend reality.
They move in ways that make no sense until you're already bleeding.
They're not throwing spells.
They've reached derivations—personal laws—that reshape how their strikes interact with the world.
You can't brute-force that.
You don't get it by shouting "I believe in myself" and swinging harder.
It's something you accrue.
Bad fights.
Close calls.
Ten thousand tiny adjustments until your body and mind internalize a pattern so completely that the System has to admit, "Fine, you get a cheat now."
In the hazy, not-quite-memories that sit behind my eyes, I remember being a decent knight.
Never a master.
Never past the threshold.
In this body, in this life, with the Martial Realm backing my training, something's different.
There's been a tug at the edge of my awareness for a while.
A thread.
A whisper.
A sense that if I just turned my head the right way, I'd see… everything.
Not in the prophetic sense.
In the geometric sense.
Where everything sits.
Where everything moves.
Spatial awareness.
Not basic "I know where the chair is so I don't kick it."
Deeper.
The sense that every object in a room is a vector waiting to be drawn.
That every line between things has weight.
That if I can hold those lines in my mind, I can nudge them.
Even now, in this disgusting chamber, I can feel it.
The way her tendrils hang.
The arc of her arm when she swings.
The distance between each bone spike and my skin.
The rhythm of the room's pulse.
It calls me.
Like a slow, insistent heartbeat.
Like a map unfolding in my head, asking if I'm ready to read it.
[ System ]
[Derivation progress: Spatial Awareness]
[ 1% ]
There it is.
A tiny, almost insulting number.
One percent.
But it's real.
Recognition.
"A beginner's step," Melody said. "In the middle of a god's stomach. You do pick your moments."
"Could be worse," I said.
"Not really," she said. "This is pretty bad."
Nazyen's laughter rolled over us again.
"Little thief," she crooned. "Little child. Little nothing. Come closer. Let me love you until your bones forget how to hold you up."
Spikes rose.
Tendrils tensed.
The whole room inhaled.
I exhaled.
And for the first time in a long time, I stopped thinking about spells.
Stopped thinking about tiers.
Stopped thinking about gods and Authorities and whether or not I was doomed.
I thought about lines.
Angles.
Distances.
The space between her claws and my throat.
Where her weight sat in the wall.
Where the ceiling would fall if I took out the right support.
The world narrowed down to that map.
[ Derivation progress: Spatial Awareness ]
[ 2% ]
"Okay," I thought.
"Let's see if I can make you miss."