Chapter 729: Exceed Monsters (2/2)
Chapter 729: Exceed Monsters (2/2)
"So they’re everywhere," Rudra said to the empty water, and there was something almost like grim satisfaction in it. He had wanted to know the shape of this fight. Now he knew.
He fought it the way an Admiral fights a superior fleet, which is to say he did not fight it at all until he understood it. Nine days in the drowned dark he studied the thing, and every weapon he owned came back the same. Immune to his strength, which was considerable. Immune to the pressure he could turn against it, the cold, the sheer force of a man who had put down monsters that ended coastlines. There was one thing, and Rudra hunted it with the methodical patience that had kept his forces alive across a hundred engagements, and he found it in the last place he thought to look, which was the pressure itself.
There was a trench, at the very bottom of that region, where the water lay so heavy and so still that even the great glowing thing would not descend into it. Rudra went down into the trench, because a creature’s fear was always a map, and at the bottom he found a bed of dark salt, salt so concentrated by the crushing deep that it had gone hard and crystalline, and when he broke off a shard the water around it went utterly still. The salt did not spread. It gathered. It pulled the very current out of the water and locked it into stillness, and Rudra held the shard in the deep and felt his own heartbeat steady against it, and knew he had it.
He could not fabricate and he could not enchant, but he could carry, and he could strike, and that had always been enough. He wrapped the shard in a working of his own making, ground it against itself until it took an edge, and on the tenth day he swam back up to the glowing thing and let the veils reach for him.
They found him and could not seize him. The still salt drank the current before it touched his heart. Rudra drove into the heart of the drifting mass with the shard held before him and the whole living tide around him going hard and quiet and dead, and he pushed until he reached the pulsing core of it and stilled that too.
The creature guttered out like a lamp running dry, its light going gray, its veils drifting apart into nothing, and the drowned world darkened around Rudra one region at a time.
The green light of the far sky spelled it out.
[1/100]
Rudra hung in the dark water, salt-shard in hand, and allowed himself one slow breath of the drowned air. Then he turned toward the next distant glow, and began the long swim down.
Ainen’s world had the decency, at least, to smell like something cooking.
He stepped through the door onto warm red sand under three small suns, and the air over it shimmered with a heat that would have killed most men in an hour, and somewhere on the wind there was the unmistakable scent of roasting spice, rich and dark and entirely out of place in a wasteland. Ainen stood there and breathed it in and felt, against all reason, a flicker of professional interest.
"All right," he said. "That is a good smell. I will give the murder-world that much."
The spirit rose out of the sand as a column of shifting heat that never quite became a body. When it spoke, the words came out of the shimmer itself.
"You feed people," it said. "You have made your art out of taking dead things and making them worth wanting. Here nothing will feed you. Everything will try to make a meal of you instead." The heat rippled, amused. "Your trial. Salt the Earth. Empty the Table."
Ainen exhaled through his nose. "You people love your little phrases."
"You will love them less by the end," the spirit said, and the sand opened, and dropped him into the country beneath.
He came up in a canyon of red rock riddled with caves, and the first thing that came for him came out of one of those caves on too many legs, a fast pale creature all chitin and hunger, and it crossed the ground toward him faster than anything that size had a right to move. Ainen was not helpless. A man did not survive to cook at the Regalons’ table without being able to fight, and he met it with a strength and a speed that had surprised many people who mistook the cook for soft. He hit it hard enough to stagger a bull.
It did not stagger. It ate the blow, and it kept coming, and it opened his shoulder to the bone before he got clear.
[Exceed Monster.]
"Naturally," Ainen said, clamping a hand over the wound and retreating up the rocks. "Naturally the appetizer bites back."
He was, for all his complaining, a patient man, and patience was the whole of this test. Nine days he spent learning the pale thing, and nine days it shrugged off everything he had, immune to strength, to heat, to the sharp fast strikes that had ended tougher-looking monsters. There was one thing. Ainen went looking for it the way he went looking for the one ingredient that would make a difficult dish finally come together, tasting the world, testing it, refusing to give up on the notion that somewhere in this wasteland there was the exact thing this creature could not stomach.
He found it, fittingly, by following the good smell.
The roasting-spice scent that had greeted him at the door was real, and it came from a single gnarled bush growing in the deepest, hottest part of the canyon, hung with small black seed-pods that gave off that rich dark aroma as they baked in the triple sun. Ainen crushed one out of pure habit, to smell it properly, and where the oil of it touched the red rock the stone hissed and pitted and dissolved. He stood very still and looked at the ruined patch of stone and then at the pale creature’s tracks, which he now realized never once came within a hundred paces of this bush, and something in him that had spent a lifetime reading flavors clicked satisfyingly into place.
"There you are," he said softly. "You have been avoiding the seasoning."
He could not fabricate and he could not enchant, but he could prepare, and that was a craft all its own. He gathered the black pods and he worked their oil with the care of a man reducing a sauce, cooking it down over three days until it was thick and terrible and would eat through anything it touched but the pod’s own charred husk, and he coated a blade of husk-hard rock in it, and on the tenth day he stood in the open and let the pale thing come.
It came fast, the way it always came, all chitin and appetite, and Ainen did not run. He let it reach him, let it open its jaws to take him whole, and he put the seasoned blade straight down its throat into the soft dark heart of it, and the creature that had been immune to everything the world could do to it discovered, in its final moment, the one flavor it could not survive.
It came apart in the red sand, hissing, dissolving, and Ainen sat down heavily on a warm rock and pressed a hand to his ruined shoulder and watched it go.
The three suns spelled it across the sky between them.
[1/100]
Ainen read it, and sighed, and let his head drop back against the rock.
"One hundred," he said, to nobody, to the heat, to the good dark smell still hanging on the wind. "The sane version of me picked an Epic."
Then he got up, because the seasoning would not gather itself, and went looking for the next one.