Chapter 33-The Escape(3)

Chapter 33: 33-The Escape(3)

"So," Cassian said. His voice was calm, almost conversational, cutting cleanly across the open stone as thirty retainers poured out of the alleyways behind Sol and Valera, sealing off the slaughterhouse doors with a wall of pikes. "You are the defect who ate my niece."

Sol stopped walking. He lowered the thirty-pound butcher’s axe from his shoulder, holding the greasy leather haft in both hands across his thighs.

"She tried to put a wire through my girl’s neck," Sol said, his voice flat and deep. "So I broke her ribs and took her rock. Who are you? The uncle?"

Behind them, several of the Second-Ring retainers gasped at the way the half-naked slum boy spoke to a High Lord.

Cassian didn’t loook angry. His pale, bloodless face remained completely smooth as he looked past Sol at Valera, taking in the Night-iron gauntlets on her wrists and the pure, clear white frost curling off her spear tip.

"Valera Fyrn," Cassian murmured, stopping twenty-five feet away from them, just five feet short of letting his thirty-foot ring of floating snow touch Sol’s boots.

"Ten years in the third-ring kennels, fed on dregs and beast-scraps, and you still managed to wake the Pure Moon in a sewer. Your father would have wept to see you crawling through pig blood with a blind mutant."

"My father died with a sword in his hand fighting four of your brothers in our courtyard, Cassian," Valera said, her voice shaking with a hatred so cold it made her Night-iron spear hum.

"At least I didn’t have to poison someone’s wine at a Council banquet to take their Harvest rights."

"History is written by the Houses that still have roofs over their heads, child," Cassian replied softly.

He looked back at Sol, his eyes dropping to the massive, rusted pig-iron cleaver-axe in Sol’s hands.

"Wait there for a moment, boy. Do not force me to ruin your chest. My scholars are very eager to see how your heart burns the taint out of our crystals without killing you. If you drop the cleaver and kneel on the stone, I will allow the girl to die cleanly before we open you up."

Sol shifted his left thumb half an inch up the leather haft of the axe.

"Val," Sol said without taking his eyes off the slow, ten-second heartbeat inside Cassian’s chest. Six... seven... eight... "How fast can you run sixty meters?"

"Not faster than a Level 2," Valera whispered back through her teeth. "Sol, that snow around him, that’s Rime Dominion. It’s his Gift. The second you step inside ten meters, he doesn’t have to touch you. He snaps his fingers and the air freezes onto your skin like five hundred pounds of iron. You won’t even reach him."

"Watch his chest," Sol murmured.

Nine... ten... Ba-dump.

"His heart only beats once every ten seconds. Right before it beats, the silver stuff in his knees and elbows goes dark for a second. His blood’s too thick to pump fast."

Valera’s eyes widened slightly. "You can see his circulation through his robes?!"

"I can see everything," Sol said.

"Enough whispering," Cassian said, taking two slow steps forward.

The shimmering ten meter boundary of his Rime Dominion swept across the limestone and washed right over Sol and Valera’s boots.

Cassian raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.

CRACK.

It didn’t come from the ground like a normal frost attack. The air directly touching their skin and clothes instantly condensed into two-inch-thick plates of heavy, black-blue ice.

Valera cried out as her legs were encased from the hips down, the sheer, crushing weight of the Level 2 mana slamming her down onto one knee, cracking the limestone beneath her shin.

Even with her Pure Moon bloodline resisting the freeze, the physical mass of Cassian’s Dominion pinned her like a lead statue.

Next to her, the black ice formed over Sol’s shoulders, chest, and legs, and immediately began to shriek as it hit his Late-Stage skin.

"Kneel," Cassian commanded, raising two fingers to add another five hundred pounds of black ice to Sol’s spine.

Sol’s knees bent an inch as the limestone beneath his boots spider-webbed and sank under the weight.

He looked at Valera pinned on one knee beside him. He looked at the thirty pikes closing in from the slaughterhouse doors behind them.

And he looked at the forty meters of open stone between him and the cliff railing behind Cassian Vane.

If he fought at Late-Stage, they were dead in ten seconds. You didn’t beat a Silver Blood Cultivator with Flesh and Bone.

Unless you stopped caring what happened to the flesh and bone.

"Hey, Val," Sol grunted through the steam pouring off his shoulders as the black ice fought to crush his collarbone. "Remember in the sewer when you told me not to turn the damper off again?"

Valera looked up from the stone, her eyes wide with sudden panic as she felt the temperature in the Bone-Yard spike.

"Sol, no! You don’t have any crystals left in your stomach! If you use Override on an empty belly, it’ll burn your own core!"

"We’ve still got twelve percent of Lyra left in the tank," Sol said, a terrifying, blood-stained grin splitting his face as he looked straight at the High Lord of House Vane. "Hang onto my belt."

Sol didn’t wait for her to argue.

He reached inside his chest and kicked the furnace door off its hinges for the second time in six hours.

[GIFT EVOLUTION ACTIVE: SUN’S BELIEVER -"OVERRIDE".]

[WARNING: NO EXTERNAL FUEL DETECTED. CONSUMING CORE PROGRESSION AND MUSCULAR TISSUE.]

[OUTPUT: 200% LATE-STAGE CAPACITY.]

BOOM.

The five hundred pounds of Level 2 black ice encasing Sol’s body didn’t melt into water, it sublimated straight into a blinding, concussive white cloud of superheated steam that blew outward like a mortar shell.

The shockwave of pure, unfiltered solar heat washed over Valera beside him, shattering the black ice around her thighs in half a second and knocking the front rank of retainers behind them flat on their backs.

Twelve meters ahead, Lord Cassian Vane’s smooth, aristocratic face twitched in genuine shock as a two meter hole was burned straight through the front of his ten meters Rime Dominion.