Chapter 137: Sera’s POV — 1

[Sera’s POV]

Golden titans, it turned out, were boring.

I did not mind fighting. I enjoyed it, actually, when the other side had a brain, a plan, or at least the decency to look nervous.

These things had none of those. They had fists the size of wagon wheels and a single thought, repeated endlessly: crush.

Fighting them felt like arguing with a wall.

I kept my swordsmanship clean and sparing, with only a trace of my affinity running through the steel, enough to make the blade hot.

Heat was all I bothered with. The purifying flames I had tried at the start had done nothing, and I mean nothing. Not a scorch, not a flinch. The titan had looked at my fire like it was embarrassing to even see it.

Can you believe that? Purifying flames. Wasted.

Still, we were making progress. One of them already lay in a heap near the staircase, courtesy of Arthur’s vines and my blade working together. Arthur had wrapped its ankles and I had taken the rest.

It was almost teamwork. I would never say so out loud.

Across the hall, Theodore was dancing.

That is the only word for it.

He slid under a swinging arm, rolled off a stomping foot, and spun away from a grab that would have turned his ribs into powder, all with the bored grace of a man avoiding a puddle.

He was not trying to hurt it yet. He was hunting for an angle, a clean line to the titan’s back.

Yes, you have guessed it right. Its back was the weak point. We had worked that out early, mostly by noticing that every time something struck it there, the titan screamed differently. Hit it hard enough in that spot and it would die.

Everywhere else, it only got angrier.

I glanced past Theodore, to where Charolette stood with starlight gathering around her fingers, and an old thought slid back into my head, unwelcome as a splinter.

’Whose side are you really on?’

I had never been fully sure of her.

Perceptive, smiling, too convenient. But the starlight that had just tore across the hall had not hit us, and that was a point in her favor.

Suspicion could wait. The titan in front of me could not.

It came at me with a heavy, hateful stomp. I stepped aside and swept Cataclysm low across its leg.

My sword was an Awakened rank blade, and it was seventy-five times sharper than anything a blacksmith could forge. It did not cut the way a normal sword cuts.

It simply disagreed with the leg being in one piece. Skin parted, muscle parted, and the bone went like a thin slice of ripe fruit. The titan roared and dropped to one knee, golden blood spattering across the stone.

It raised its fist anyway. Of course it did. Stubborn, stupid things always do.

The fist came down to flatten me into the floor.

Unfortunately for him, I had seen this trick from low-level fighters since I was twelve.

I did not dodge back. I dodged forward, planted my boot on the titan’s knee, and used the shoulder as a stair. Its own arm became my ramp.

I rose into the air above its head, flipped, and turned the point of Cataclysm toward the broad golden back.

’Gotcha.’

Gsk!

The blade slid in, but not the way flesh should feel.

There was something under the skin, something cold and false, like pressing a needle into an illusion of metal. It resisted for half a heartbeat. Then Cataclysm decided it did not care.

I pulled the sword free and landed. Behind me, the titan swayed, made a sound and toppled forward with a crash that shook dust from the high windows.

I straightened and flicked the gold from my blade.

That was when I looked up and saw my brother.

He was standing in front of the throne room gates, sword lowered, lightning fading along the steel.

The captain who had waited for us, the one who had floated above our heads like some smug little god, lay slumped against the door with his chin on his chest.

Edmund had won.

My geniusly idiotic brother had actually won.

Something warm and unreasonable fluttered in my chest.

I stamped it flat. He looked over, found my eyes across the hall, and I gave him a small nod.

Just one. Nothing more.

I know what you are thinking: You could at least smile, Sera~

Nah, If i smiled, he would get that look, the pleased, thoughtful look he got whenever one of his plans landed, and then he would spend the next three days believing he was a genius.

He was a genius. That was exactly the problem.

Besides, that is what caring sisters do. They keep their brothers humble.

I turned back to the fight. Another titan had gone down while I was busy, Theodore’s work, with Charolette’s starlight pinning its arms at just the right moment for his knuckle-spikes to find its spine.

That left two.

’Two titans.’ I rolled my shoulder. ’Easy.’

Then the backhand caught me.

I never saw it coming. The titan I had not been watching swung without warning and its forearm clipped my shoulder, and pain lit up my arm like a struck match. I stumbled and hissed through my teeth.

"Arthur!"

I did not have to shout twice. I pointed at my shoulder and then at him, and he understood at once. He came sprinting across the wreckage with the book already open in his hands.

Poet’s Dream. A small, battered thing, bound in leather, as soft as an old coat.

He knelt beside me and began to recite, low and earnest, as though the words were something he was handing over rather than saying.

I will not repeat the poem. It was awful. It rhymed wound with moon, and Arthur recited it with absolute sincerity, and I would sooner be hit by a titan again than tell him how bad it was.

But the pages began to glow, and a soft green mist rose from them and curled around my shoulder like warm water. The ache dulled. The heat in my shoulder cooled.

It was not a full healing, nothing close to it, but I could stand. I could run.

"Thank you," I said, which was as close to praise as I would get.

Arthur grinned up at me. "You are welcome. Please do not get hit again."

’No promises.’

I rose, rolled my ankle once, and looked at the last two golden titans, snarling in the smoke and starlight with their ruined, blind faces.

’Two titans. Pfft.’

I began to run.

___

Author’s Note: Sera is basically calling the men who had drinked the golden potion Titans.