Chapter 15- Light, camera, action

Chapter 15: 15- Light, camera, action

The heavy iron door of the chamber slid shut, cutting off the chaotic noise of Purgatory.

Sol dropped his wrapped sword onto a scavenged cot and sat down against the concrete wall, letting out a long, exhausted breath.

He pushed a pulse of heat to his eyes, illuminating the small room. Valera was standing by the door, her arms wrapped around her waist, her breath misting in the cold air she constantly generated.

"You can sit down, you know," Sol said quietly. "We have twelve hours."

Valera hesitated, then walked over, sitting on the floor beside him. She pulled her knees to her chest. Her shoulder pressed against his, the familiar, agonizingly perfect equilibrium of fire and ice washing over them both.

Sol let his core bleed heat into her side, thawing the frost that always threatened to lock her joints.

"You were reckless in the alley," Valera said softly, staring at the opposite wall.

"With Voss? I was securing our cut."

"You provoked a Level 1 Peak Cultivator who had a hammer the size of a carriage," she corrected, her voice tight. "If he had decided his pride was worth more than his vault, he would have crushed your skull before you could even draw your blade."

"He’s a Slum King," Sol replied, leaning his head back against the concrete. "Slum Kings don’t have pride. They have ledgers. As long as we are profitable, we are safe."

Valera turned her head. In the absolute dark, she reached out, her cool fingers lightly tracing the heavy, dense scars on Sol’s left arm, right where the Enforcer’s twin blades had nearly severed his limb days ago.

The touch sent a jolt through Sol’s chest that had absolutely nothing to do with lunar energy or his Sun’s Believer gift.

"I don’t want you to die, Sol," Valera whispered, the aristocratic mask completely gone.

"It’s a transaction," Sol murmured, repeating the words she had used like a shield during their long descent into the sewers. "You need a furnace. I need a heat-sink."

"Stop it," she said, her fingers digging slightly into his scarred arm.

The ambient temperature in the room plummeted for a second as her emotions flared, the Permafrost reacting to her heart rate. "You know it’s more than that now. If I just needed a heat-sink, I would have abandoned you in the drains and found some other heat with my current powers."

Sol turned his head. He didn’t pulse his vision.

He just existed in the dark, feeling the cold, shivering weight of the girl leaning against him.

He moved his hand, his burning, calloused fingers finding her pale, icy hand in the pitch black. He intertwined their fingers. The clash of absolute zero and molten heat created a localized pocket of warm, hissing steam between their palms.

"I’m not going to die," Sol promised, his voice a low, grating rumble in the quiet room. "And I’m not going to let you freeze. Tomorrow night, we take their crystals. We hit Mid-Stage. And then we start looking for the nobles who burned House Fyrn."

Valera squeezed his hand, leaning her head against his shoulder. For the first time since she was thrown into the Colosseum, the freezing, isolated void of the Permafrost felt miles away.

Twenty-four hours later

Sol pulled himself up the massive, rusted iron drainage pipe, his boots slipping on the slick, coagulated sludge of thousands of slaughtered beasts.

The pipe was completely dark, incredibly cramped, and suffocatingly hot from the decomposing matter.

Behind him, Valera crawled in silence, her pure white-blue frost suppressing the worst of the putrid smell around her face.

Above them, the thick iron ceiling of the pipe violently vibrated.

The muffled, thunderous roar of an explosion shook the rust loose, raining flakes of iron into the blood. Voss had kept his word. The Slum King’s army had just breached the main courtyard of the Harvest House. The raid had begun.

"We’re almost at the grate!" Sol shouted back, his voice swallowed by the wet echo of the pipe.

He pushed a massive surge of heat to his optic nerves, abandoning the Strobe for continuous vision.

Flash.

The world illuminated in deep, violent red. Twenty feet ahead, the pipe ended in a massive, heavy iron grate, bolted directly into the ceiling of the sub-basement.

Sol crawled faster, ignoring the burning ache in his shoulders. He reached the grate, wiping a thick layer of congealed blood from his face, and pressed his back against the iron bars.

He didn’t try to unbolt it. He gripped the bars with both hands, summoned the violent, churning furnace of his core, and dumped pure, unrefined heat directly into his palms.

The rusted iron instantly glowed cherry-red, hissing violently as the beast blood boiled against it. The metal softened, warped, and with a brutal pull Sol ripped the massive grate entirely out of its housing.

He pulled himself out of the pipe, rolling onto the pristine, polished wood floor of the Harvest House sub-basement. He dripped rotting blood onto the immaculate tiles.

Valera followed a second later, pulling herself up with elegant, practiced grace despite being covered in gore.

The moment her boots hit the floor, a wave of pure, absolute zero frost blasted outward, instantly freezing the blood dripping from their clothes and neutralizing the stench.

Sol drew his wrapped silver sword. The blade hummed as he forced his energy inside the steel, the edge glowing a brilliant, lethal orange.

"Clear?" Valera asked, drawing her iron pipe, her breath misting heavily in the cold air.

Sol scanned the room. It was a massive, subterranean antechamber lined with silver-wood pillars. And standing directly in front of a massive, heavily reinforced vault door were four towering thermal signatures.

Inner-guard Enforcers. Level 1 Mid-stage. They wore heavier armor than the surface patrols, thick plates of interlocking silver that radiated a suffocating, coordinated chill.

They hadn’t gone to the courtyard and instead were the retainers of the House of Vane, sworn to protect the stockpile above all else.

"Four hostiles," Sol rasped, adjusting his grip on the wrapped hilt. "Mid-Stage. Heavy armor."

The Enforcers drew their weapons in unison, four identical, massive silver halberds. They didn’t shout. They didn’t panic. They simply locked their visors onto the blind butcher and the frost-covered noble who had just crawled out of their waste disposal.

"Your path ends here!" the lead Enforcer hissed, his voice cold and mechanical through his helmet. "Formation, gather."

"I think you better give up now." Sol said, stepping fully into the center of the chamber. He lowered his stance, turning his body sideways, weight on the balls of his feet. "I didn’t care for it."

Valera stepped to his right, her blessed core fully activating. The polished floor beneath her boots instantly shattered into jagged spikes of solid ice, creeping rapidly toward the Enforcers.

"Sol," Valera whispered, her eyes glowing a terrifying, pure white. "You have twenty minutes."

Sol lunged forward, his glowing orange sword trailing steam in the freezing air, and the fight began.