My Taboo Harem! - Chapter 705 - 705: Not Just Powerless Pride

Kyle’s chest cavity was visibly freezing outward from the point of contact — pale crystalline frost blooming along the inside of the opened ribs, coating the lung tissue, threading through the adjacent vessels.

The arterial red that had been weeping from the X-wound slowed, thickened, began to crystallise at its edges. Kyle’s armoured body shuddered.

But he was still breathing.

A creature such as he did not require the heart his kind had long since rendered decorative. The heart was a relic, an elegance, a courtesy paid to the mortal boody he has not evolved out of yet.

Killing it did not kill him. Freezing it did not end him. It simply hurt so deep that no existing human vocabulary contained the correct noun.

Blood began to pour from his orifices.

Both ears. Both nostrils. The corners of his mouth. The inner corners of his eyes, in slow red tear-lines tracking down through the black-red metal of his crown. The frozen organ in his chest had begun to back pressure up through every vessel connected to it, and the body was venting the surplus through every available opening.

Phei looked up at him. Smiled wider.

And took, finally, a long unhurried look around.

The realm was dying.

The tendrils above had exhausted themselves — the almost endless red-black energy that had threaded the sky at the duel’s beginning was gone, expended, drawn down over the course of the fight into Kyle’s defences and Kyle’s strikes and Kyle’s failed containments.

The sky above them now showed only the bare wound of its dome, pale and empty, no longer feeding him and no longer able to feed him.

The bone-drifts had gone to fine grey powder.

The millions of skulls, the beast skeletons, the horn-lanced things and block-long serpents and the continent-spine on the horizon — all of them, reduced in the course of this contest to dust, the residual energy that had animated the realm having been sucked dry across the span of what had felt, on the outside, like perhaps six minutes.

Six minutes of outside world.

Two days of in the soul realm, all spent while the two fought each other.

The Soul Realm ran that fast.

The realm had given its prince everything it had in the two days time. And Kyle, in his arrogance, had spent it.

“Look at what you’ve done,” Phei said, almost softly.

He turned Kyle slowly in the air on the fulcrum of the fist still buried in his chest — panning Kyle’s one functional eye across the ruined dust-plain that had, minutes ago, been his inner geography.

“All of it. Gone. Every bone. Every skull. Every trophy you laid up across millennias spent on a duel with me. Burned through because you — stretched thin, half-awakened, fundamentally outmatched — decided that the appropriate response to a Cosmic Dragon enslave you, was to fight.”

Kyle’s one eye rolled helplessly.

“Do you know the cost of what you just did, Kyle?”

The question was almost tender.

“It will take you years — decades if you’re lucky — to rebuild what you’ve lost in here these two days. Every drop of stored power. Every anchoring bone. Every accrued memory that kept the realm coherent. Gone. All of it. And for what? To prove to yourself that you couldn’t be leashed? That you were above being enslaved by the charity case you used to beat up in corridors?”

Phei tilted his head.

“If you wanted to prove that, Kyle, you should have made sure you had the strength to pull it off.”

“Not just pride.”

“Not just stupidity.”

Phei’s voice dropped into something quiet, and final, and sovereign.

“Cosmic Dragon Face.”

The realm resisted.

For one last heartbeat — one final convulsion of pride — the ruined dust-plain tried to hold its prince. The residual grey powder of bone rose faintly off the floor in a shivering veil. A thin filament of red-black gasped upward from somewhere beneath the ash.

The dying realm gathered itself one more time, pride older than its own architecture making one last attempt to refuse the summons.

It failed.

The roar that answered was not Phei’s voice.

It was something the realm had never been intended to contain, and could not contain, and did not attempt to contain — a vast low draconic resonance that originated somewhere above Kyle’s dying sky and arrived in every part of the realm simultaneously, a sound with the weight of continents behind it, the roar of a Cosmic Dragon asserting dominion across a soul that had already lost every argument available to it.

The sky tore open.

A face unfolded where the sky had been.

It filled the entire of Kyle’s realm — horizon to horizon, from the empty bone-plain beneath to the empty sky above — an immense draconic countenance rendered in the same violet-white Void of Phei’s dagger, eyes the size of cities, a long scaled muzzle, horns sweeping backward in cosmic arcs, the whole enormous face looking down upon Kyle’s suspended ruined body with a serenity that was not mercy and had never pretended to be.

The Cosmic Dragon’s face observed Kyle.

Kyle’s mouth opened.

“HHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—”

The scream tore out of him unfiltered — the scream Phei’s Void-frost had sealed in his chest through the whole duel, finally permitted, ripping upward out of his throat in a raw unresolving shriek that carried no word and no plea and no dignity.

His soul was being renamed, at a level below awakening and below identity, by a force older than the bloodline currently arguing with it.

His armour began to fade as he screamed.

The carapace dissolved — the fanged pauldrons first, softening into mist, then the cuirass, then the gauntlets, then the crown, the black-red metal losing its purchase on the body it had manifested from, the whole regalia returning into the nothing it had been drawn up from.

His greaves vanished. His boots vanished. The black-red metal dripped from his limbs as though it had been paint and was being washed from him by a slow cold rain.

Kyle hung naked in Phei’s grip.

Naked in the soul sense. Naked in the armour sense. His unclothed body small and pale and pathetic beside the fist still buried in its chest.

Phei spat.

Once.

Then he threw Kyle away.

A simple flick of the wrist — carelessly, as if disposing of a used handkerchief — and Kyle’s body left Phei’s fist in a long ungainly arc, the fist coming out of his chest in a wet sucking release as he sailed backward across the dust-plain.

He hit the ground twenty feet out. Rolled. Came to rest on his back, limbs splayed, the X-wound in his chest still open and still refusing to close, the frozen stone where his heart had been visible through the gap in a pale gleaming lump the colour of new bone.

He writhed in endless screams, bleeding and in pain.

Bleeding from his eyes, his ears, his mouth, his nose. Screaming — continuously now, the scream that the Face had torn out of him having failed to resolve itself, still going, his throat going raw with it.

Phei walked to him.

Did not hurry. Did not bother to speak again. His hair fell long and dark around his shoulders in the waves of the self he would have grown into. His amethyst eyes held the serene inhuman patience of something that had finally arrived where it had always been going.

He crouched beside Kyle.

Reached out with his right hand.

Pressed the pad of his thumb to the centre of Kyle’s forehead — the exact place Eira had guided his finger to at the duel’s opening, the exact place the three blood-beads had briefly marked.

And spoke, quietly, into the ruined silence of a prince’s emptied soul.

“Tiamat Slave Mark.”