Chapter 28- Override

Chapter 28: 28- Override

The moment the limiter slammed back down on his core, Sol dropped to both knees in the scalding water.

[OVERRIDE TERMINATED.]

[STATUS: Level 1 (Flesh and Bone) - Mid-Stage (51% Progression).]

[WARNING: SEVERE MUSCULAR ATROPHY AND INTERNAL BURNS DETECTED.]

He had eaten four pure inner-city crystals, enough to push him past eighty percent .. and yet he burned every single drop of them, plus thirteen percent of his own existing core, in less than forty seconds.

His hands were trembling so badly he could barely see them. The skin on his palms and forearms was blistered and split from channeling heat past his vessel’s limit, and every breath he took tasted like smoke.

"Val," Sol croaked.

He couldn’t stand up. His left calf was cut to the bone, and his thighs felt like wet paper.

So he crawled on his hands and knees through the warm, steaming water back down the incline toward the crumpled shape leaning against the brick wall.

When he reached her, his heart nearly stopped.

In his flickering thermal sight, Valera’s core was reduced to a tiny, dying pinprick of blue light. The wire Lyra had wrapped around her torso was still buried in her skin, slowly dissolving into nothing now that Lyra was dead, but the damage was done. Valera’s skin was covered in a thick rime of white frost. Her lips were blue, and her chest wasn’t moving.

"No, you don’t," Sol snarled, his voice breaking as he dragged himself up against the wall beside her. "You told me we don’t die in a hole. You don’t get to quit first."

With shaking, blistered hands, he tore the wet canvas cloak and the shredded remnants of her shirt away from her chest, then pulled her limp, freezing body directly onto his lap, pressing her bare stomach and ribs flush against his own burning, blistered chest.

She felt like a block of solid marble dragged out of a river in mid-winter.

The shock of her absolute zero skin hitting his raw burns made Sol bite clean through his bottom lip, a fresh line of blood running down his chin.

He ignored it. He wrapped both arms around her back, locking his hands behind her shoulder blades, and pressed his forehead against the side of her icy neck.

He didn’t have enough energy left in his core to do a safe, controlled transfer.

He reached into his pocket with two numb fingers, pulled out Lyra Vane’s massive Peak-Stage crystal, and pressed it flat between his chest and Valera’s sternum, trapping the stone right between their hearts.

"Breathe, damn you," Sol whispered against her cold ear, calling up the last, scraping dregs of his furnace to crack the outer shell of the Peak crystal between them.

The crystal fractured.

A thick, warm flood of purified mist filtered through the furnace of Sol’s bleeding chest pushed straight across the skin barrier into Valera’s frozen ribs.

For ten seconds, nothing happened. The sewer was completely silent except for the dripping of cooling condensation from the ceiling and the rapid, ragged wheezing of Sol’s lungs.

Fifteen seconds.

In Sol’s thermal sight, the tiny pinprick of blue light in her chest twitched.

A single, hairline thread of gold crept out from Sol’s sternum, crossed into her skin, and wrapped around her stalled heart.

Thump.

Valera’s back arched violently in his arms. She sucked in a massive, ragged lungful of warm air, immediately coughing up a mouthful of half-frozen blood and purple sludge onto Sol’s shoulder as her lungs cleared the Vane taint.

"Sol-!" she gasped, her hands flying up to clutch blindly at his forearms, her nails digging straight into the raw blisters on his skin. "The wires--behind--"

"She’s dead," Sol wheezed, letting his head drop back against the wet brick wall behind them, his eyes closing as the last of his continuous thermal vision gave out, dropping him back into pitch blackness. "They’re all dead. Stop moving. You’re going to open your ribs again."

Valera froze in his lap, her chest heaving against his.

As her vision cleared in the dark tunnel, she looked down. She saw the four dead Pale Hounds dissolving into gray mist down the incline.

She saw the two broken halves of Lyra Vane’s masterwork rapiers lying in the drying mud ten feet away.

And then she looked at Sol.

Even in the dark, she could feel the wrongness of his body. His skin wasn’t the steady, comforting warm of a fireplace anymore, it felt dry, brittle, and feverish, covered in weeping blisters and dried black blood from his nose and ears.

And wedged between their chests, already half-dissolved, was a crystal so dense and pure it could only have come from a Peak-Stage noble at the edge of the Silver Blood realm.

"How..." Valera’s voice was a tiny, horrified whisper as she carefully lifted her hands off his burned forearms, terrified of hurting him worse. "Sol, she was a peak cultivator. How did you kill her?"

"I think my powers got unleashed" Sol murmured in the dark, his breathing shallow. "Bad idea. Don’t let me do that again. Everything hurts."

"You burned your own core," Valera said, her fingers trembling as she lightly touched the side of his jaw, feeling the cracked molars through his cheek and the crusted blood under his nose. "Where are the four crystals from the bag?"

"Ate ’em."

"All four?!"

"You weren’t breathing, Val," Sol said simply, his head lolling slightly to rest against the top of her shoulder. "If I waited to chew them slow, you’d be silver dust right now. Don’t yell at me. My ears are ringing."

Valera opened her mouth to shout at him, to tell him he was a reckless, suicidal idiot who had just shaved years off his life..and then her voice died in her throat.

She looked down at the deep, bleeding wire-trench across her own shoulder and waist, already numbed and stabilized by the heat pouring off his ruined chest, and the Peak crystal slowly dissolving between their ribs.

For ten years, every noble in Hearth City had looked at her like a piece of dangerous livestock, something to be locked in a kennel, studied for its bloodline, and thrown into the meat grinder the moment the politics shifted. Even her own cousins had run for the carriages when the nobles came over the walls ten years ago.

And this blind slum butcher had just swallowed four live grenades and walked bare-handed through a web of Peak-Stage razors just because her heart had stopped beating for ten seconds.

Valera didn’t yell.

She shifted carefully on his lap so she wouldn’t press on his cut calf, wrapped her arms gently around his neck making sure her cold Night-iron gauntlets didn’t touch his blistered back and pulled his head tightly against her shoulder.

"I’m not yelling," she whispered into his dirty hair, closing her eyes as she began pulling the excess fever out of his burned veins and cycling the Peak crystal between them at a slow, safe pace. "Just shut up and let me take the heat, Sol. I’ve got you."

"We can’t stay here," Sol muttered against her neck, already half-delirious from exhaustion as the crystal’s vitality began the long, slow work of rebuilding his scorched muscles. "When she doesn’t come back... her uncle..."

"I know," Valera said, looking down the dark tunnel toward the deep sinkholes that led out of Purgatory toward the industrial sector. "Give us twenty minutes to finish this crystal so you can walk. Then we leave this place behind."