Chapter 18-Mid Level!

Chapter 18: 18-Mid Level!

Sol couldn’t feel his legs.

All he knew was the five-inch wide piece of broken steel wedged in his belly and the smell of his own cooked meat.

Every time he tried to draw a breath, his lungs hit the charred, stiff ring of flesh around the blade and spasmed, bringing up warm, black clots into his mouth.

Something cold and jagged pressed hard against his teeth.

"Open your mouth, Sol," Valera’s voice was right in his ear, high and ragged. Her left hand was tangled in his sweat-soaked hair, holding his head off the tiles.

She was using her left because her right arm was hanging uselessly at her side, the flesh from her fingertips to her elbow turned dull, dead black from the backlash of killing Kael. "Open it, damn you. Don’t make me break your jaw."

Sol parted his cracked lips.

Valera shoved the Captain’s Late-Stage crystal past his teeth. It was huge, the size of a child’s fist, pulsing with a freezing, heavy density that made his remaining teeth ache on contact.

"Chew," she ordered, dropping down beside him on the blood-slick floor and wrapping her good arm around his shoulders, pressing her freezing chest flush against his smoking ribs. "Burn it. Right now."

Sol didn’t have the strength to bite through a Late-Stage shard. His jaw was trembling too hard. Instead, he stopped fighting the furnace in his sternum and let the fire climb straight up his throat.

Thump-THUMP.

The crystal didn’t shatter. It melted.

A torrent of raw, violent lunar energy poured down his gullet like liquid nitrogen, colliding head-on with the starving fire in his chest.

His Sun’s Believer core latched onto the massive influx of fuel with the ferocity of a rabid dog.

Sol arched his back off the floor, a muffled, wet roar tearing through his clenched teeth.

Above them, the ceiling shook as another explosion rocked the courtyard. Their twenty minutes were nearly up. Voss’s men wouldn’t hold the front gates forever..

"Pull it out," Sol choked through a mouthful of boiling steam.

"What?" Valera gasped, her teeth chattering as she drank in the sudden, violent wave of heat radiating from his skin.

The black frostbite on her right arm was already starting to hiss and weep as his furnace fought back against her curse.

"The sword," Sol ground out, his blind eyes flaring a terrifying, continuous white-orange in the dark. "If my gut heals around the steel... I’m dead. Pull it out!"

Valera looked down at the broken stub of Kael’s broadsword jutting out of his stomach. The charred flesh was fused to the metal. If she pulled it, she was going to tear the cauterized seal wide open.

She didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t a sheltered girl in an inner-city manor anymore.

Valera braced her boot against Sol’s hip, wrapped her good left hand around the jagged break of the broadsword, and yanked upward with everything she had.

The sound of tearing, cooked flesh echoed horribly in the quiet sub-basement.

Sol didn’t scream as he couldn’t. The pain locked his vocal cords completely shut. His hands clawed at the tiles, his fingernails splitting as the six-inch slab of steel slid out of his intestines and clattered across the floor.

Dark, smoking blood immediately gushed from the gaping hole in his abdomen.

Before a second wave of blood could spill, the Late-Stage crystal in his core fully ignited.

[HIGH-DENSITY LUNAR CORE CONSUMED.]

[TAINT INCINERATED. MASSIVE VITALITY INFLUX.] [THRESHOLD REACHED. RECONSTRUCTING VESSEL...]

The heat inside Sol didn’t explode outward this time. Driven by the system’s forced evolution, the fire turned entirely inward, attacking the lethal wound in his gut.

It was horrific to watch. In the dim light of the basement, the muscles and torn fascia of Sol’s stomach began to writhe and knit together like living cords of glowing orange wire.

The violent energy of the Late-Stage Captain was being burned down into raw, physical mass.

His broken left collarbone snapped back into place with an audible pop, the bone calcifying into something denser, heavier, and harder than iron.

The overflowing heat bled straight into Valera. She buried her face into his neck, groaning in agony and relief as the blistering radiation forced the black frostbite out of her right arm, restoring the pale, healthy color to her skin and pushing her own Godblessed core upward alongside his.

For three minutes, they lay tangled in a puddle of melted ice and steaming blood, breathing the same superheated air, until the violent thrumming in Sol’s chest finally settled into a deep, heavy, rhythmic beat.

Thump.

Thump.

[BREAKTHROUGH SUCCESSFUL.]

[STATUS: Level 1 (Flesh and Bone) - Mid-Stage (8% Progression).]

[GIFT: Sun’s Believer - Core Capacity Increased.Mental fortitude increased..]

Sol opened his eyes.

He didn’t need to pulse the Strobe. He didn’t even feel the familiar, dull ache behind his retinas.

The sub-basement was crystal clear. His thermal vision had evolved.

He didn’t just see blobs of orange and blue anymore; he saw the fine, intricate grain of the silver-wood pillars based on how they conducted the room’s temperature. He looked at Valera. He could see the exact, rhythmic pulse of the veins under her pale skin, glowing a soft, warm gold over the brilliant white-blue star of her chest.

He looked down at his stomach. His shirt was burned away, revealing a thick, jagged star of pale, raised scar tissue right below his navel. It was ugly, tight, and completely sealed.

"You’re disgusting," Valera breathed, rolling off him onto her back, her chest heaving. She lifted her right arm, flexing her fingers.

The frostbite was gone, leaving only faint, silvery lines across her knuckles. "Do you have any idea how bad burning intestines smell?"

"Better than rotting beast," Sol rasped, sitting up.

His voice was deeper, the raspy rattle in his lungs cleared out by the breakthrough.

He felt heavy, like his bones had been filled with lead, yet when he stood up, he moved with an effortless, terrifying grace.

He reached down, grabbed her left hand, and hauled her to her feet.

"How much time?" Sol asked, picking up his wrapped silver sword from the tiles.

"Five minutes, maybe less," Valera said, her eyes locking onto the massive vault door behind the shattered remains of Captain Kael. "The fighting upstairs is getting quieter. Voss is pulling back."

"Then let’s get paid."