The Primordial Record - Chapter 1899: Warm As A Blessing
Chapter 1899: Warm As A Blessing
Primordial Memory suddenly charged towards Rowan, emitting faint ripples of golden light that were so sharp they sliced apart space and time, effectively eliminating the distance between him and his target. With time shattered, the Primordial attack landed even before he began his actions.
Rowan was facing the distance alongside Primordial Life, and his focus was on Reality with no care for the danger he had beside him. The golden ripples of light emanating from Primordial Memory solidified into blades, twenty-seven in total.
These blades were forged from the remnants of dead Realities, and the memory of them remained with him. These weapons were those of a particularly deadly Breaker that had fallen in the past, who had killed many Primordials but believed he could challenge the greatest Primordials in existence. So he had fought the main body of the Primordial Demon to a standstill, but was soon overwhelmed by the infinite power of the ancient demon.
One trait of these blades was that they were soundless and traceless, and even though they gleamed with gold, what could be observed by the senses was always wrong… Primordial Memory may have pretended that he was calm, but that was only to gather power. He had learned his lessons when he faced Rowan’s pet previously and knew that any power that he summoned that was within Rowan’s knowledge would not work against this abomination.
The blades were positioned in a manner that would cover any of Rowan’s possible movements. If he were pierced by even one of them, he would be unable to move, and then other, more sinister powers of the blade could come into effect.
These blades performed as they were created to do; they were traceless and formless, but who was Rowan Kuranes? He was still young, and his story had not been told, but what was undoubtedly the truth was that he was a warrior like none the world had ever seen.
His eyes, which were focused on Reality, did not waver; he did not even turn around, but drew in a deep breath and held it in his chest for a moment before he exhaled. It was slow and measured as if he were alone in a garden watching petals fall. Beside him, the eyes of Primordial Life were beginning to widen; his perception was fast enough to follow what was happening, but his body was still too slow to follow what happened next.
Rowan’s hand flashed to the hilt of his Destroyer, and the blade slid out of the head of Primordial Light with no sound, as if it were emerging from a sheath, no rasp of steel against bone.
It rose in a motion too lazy to be called a draw, more like Rowan was lifting a teacup, the lights falling from countless worlds and stars inside Reality fell on the edge of his blade, and they stayed there, like a quiet lake.
In the same motion that he took to draw the blade, he aligned the edge of his Destroyer to cut through seven of the golden blades, straight through their middle, disregarding all the mystical cloaking covering the blades and finding their original position. The blades that had been cleanly cut through their spine rotated like flowers before they embedded themselves into the ground.
Rowan took one step back, his hair blowing past him and covering his face like a cloud of black lightning, and with that single move, he dodged the rest of the blade that zoomed past him like a wasp. Primordial Memory had been closely following the blades, and he could not hold back his momentum as the wall that was Rowan’s back covered his vision a moment before this back slammed against his face and chest, blasting him to the ground.
The blades that had zoomed past Rowan returned, moving much faster than before. Nine blades were at the fore, and they arrived in a tight cone with a bit of a rotation. They were aimed to punch through the spine, kidneys, and lungs, before spinning and shredding him apart,
The Destroyer moved once, Rowan making a single, languid circle, his wrist barely turning. The storm of blades folded into itself when they met the Destroyer’s edge at angles no mathematics could explain, and they were refracted around Rowan’s body, flying across his skin with less than a nanometer separating them from touching him, and their speeds were even faster than before.
Primordial Memory’s skull had not even bounced off the floor from being slammed by Rowan’s back when he saw nine blades flashing towards him. His Will shook as he tried to abort the powers imbued in these blades, but he was not quick enough… the powers already inside them could not be easily dissipated, as they were nearly perfect weapons. Without these traits, it would have been a pipe dream to think of hurting Rowan, but now his perfect work was filling him with regret.
Too late for regrets, his own blades found his body mid-bounce, three in the chest, two in the throat, four buried to the hilt in joints and organs. He hit the ground with a wet slap, still trying to scream through a mouth suddenly full of steel, and his body was firmly pinned to the ground of his own labyrinth.
Rowan had still not looked back.
He took another step back now, calm and unhurried, as though strolling through morning mist, watching the last eleven blades. His eyes filled with appreciation as he analyzed the properties of the blades. Truly, the Primordials were gifts that just kept giving.
The blades came low, a scything wave meant to hamstring and finish. Rowan’s response was simple; his Destroyer dipped, tip tracing a single horizontal line no wider than a hair. The blades met that line, and they fell apart into perfect halves, clattering to the stones like metallic rain.
Only then did Rowan turn.
Primordial Memory lay twitching in a spreading lake of his own blood, eyes wide with the realization that he had just tried to murder a warrior who faced Primordial Demon in combat without trickery and beat him to death using his fists alone.
Rowan regarded him the way one might regard a moth that had beaten itself to death against a lantern.
He flicked the Destroyer once. A single drop of blood, Primordial Memory’s own, traced a lazy arc through the air and landed on the dying Primordial’s forehead, warm as a blessing.
“You’d better pull back your powers before you kill yourself using your power, that would be a shame that would make you roll over in death.”
Primordial Memory gasped, choking in his blood, but he refused to pull back his power; it was better to die in humiliation, he decided, than live another second under the disappointed eyes of this abomination.
“Such skill,” he thought he heard Life whisper, but he could be wrong; everything was beginning to fade to black, and then there was pain as Rowan bent down and started pulling out all the blades from his body, one by one.
“Why do you think in my presence, you can die without my permission?”
With the last blades pulled from his body, Rowan turned around and looked up into the skies as massive beings made from marble and shadow descended with widespread wings, holding great chains that stretched across Reality,
“The fate of Primordial Time inspired me,” Rowan said as these beings descended and bowed towards him, “ready yourself, your work begins now.”
