Chapter 37-Outside(2)

Chapter 37: 37-Outside(2)

"Gomorrah," Sol repeated, testing the word on his tongue as he scanned the frozen marsh with his thermal sight.

"Voss had a fighter from there once. Big bastard with filed teeth. Said if you drop your knife in the street in Gomorrah, three guys will cut your Achilles tendons before you bend over to pick it up."

"It’s a pit," Valera agreed.

"No Great Houses, no Academy, no laws. Just warlords eating each other raw." She glanced sideways at him, the corner of her mouth twitching slightly.

"Honestly, you’d probably fit right in."

"I’m a civilized butcher," Sol protested, patting his empty belt where his cleaver usually hung. "I use a table. Usually."

His stomach let out a loud, hollow rumble that echoed under the concrete bridge.

Burning through four inner-city crystals and twelve percent of his own core during the Override hadn’t just drained his lunar energy.

It had cannibalized twenty pounds of fat and muscle off his frame.

Under his torn coat, his ribs were showing again like they had back when he was a Level 0 uninitiated kid scraping fat off the slaughter-line floors.

"We need meat," Sol said, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the thermal signatures moving out in the marsh grass two hundred yards away from the river.

"Real meat. Not just rocks. If I don’t put some grease back on my bones before we start cultivating, my core’s going to start eating my liver first."

"Don’t go near the deep water," Valera warned, tapping his shoulder and pointing toward the center of the Slag River.

Even from fifty feet away, Sol could see a massive, slow-moving thermal shadow gliding beneath the black surface of the river, a twenty-foot-long eel with a crown of jagged, freezing blue horn-plates growing out of its skull.

Level 2, a Crowned.

Unlike the mindless Blighted beasts in the slums, that thing had eyes that tracked the shoreline with cold, pack-leader intelligence.

"Yeah, I see him," Sol muttered, backing gently away from the water’s edge toward the inland side of the collapsed highway.

"We stay out of the river, and we stay away from the big ruins where the Sovereigns sleep. We stick to the scrub brush, find some Level 1 Blighted strays, and build a camp."

Six Days in the Scrub

They didn’t go far.

Half a mile inland from the bridge, tucked inside the hollowed-out basement of a pre-collapse brick pump-station that had collapsed in on itself decades ago, they found a dry cellar with a broken concrete slab forming a low roof.

For the next six days, the frantic, throat-cutting pace of Hearth City disappeared, replaced by a quiet, brutal routine that felt strangely like peace.

They had no weapons except Valera’s Night-iron gauntlets and rocks they picked up off the ground.

On the first morning, Sol found a pair of Level 1 (Low-Stage) Blighted musk-dogs digging through a snowbank for frozen roots.

Without a blade, Sol didn’t try to be fancy.

Valera waited behind a boulder until Sol chased the two mindless beasts past her, then slapped her gauntleted hands onto the snow, locking their hind legs in solid ice.

Sol came in behind them with a forty-pound chunk of broken highway concrete raised over his head and crushed their skulls in two swings.

He didn’t have a knife to skin them.

"Give me your left hand," Sol told Valera, kneeling over the steaming carcass in the snow before the sky could dissolve the meat.

Valera held out her Night-iron gauntlet.

She channeled a thin, razor-sharp blade of pure frost along the outer edge of her pinky finger, and together they butchered the haunches off the beasts before the rest of the carcasses turned into rising silver mist, leaving two small, tainted Low-Stage shards in the bloody snow.

Back in their concrete cellar, they didn’t need firewood, and smoke would have drawn the Level 2 Crowned packs from the ridge anyway.

Sol was the stove.

He found a flat slab of black slate rock, wedged it over a pit of smaller stones, and pressed both of his scarred palms against the underside of the slate.

Pumping a steady, controlled stream of his heat into the rock, he turned the slate into a scorching griddle.

As the thick slices of Blighted musk-dog fat sizzled on the hot stone, filling the tiny concrete hole with the rich, greasy smell of roasting meat, Valera sat beside the stone with her knees pulled up, watching his hands.

"The nobles in the First Ring eat meat that’s been soaked in three baths of filtered lunar water to wash the taint out,"

Valera said quietly, poking at a strip of sizzling meat with a sharp stick.

"By the time it hits the silver plates in the Crowned Ring, it tastes like wet paper. Cold wet paper."

Sol flipped the meat with his bare fingers, completely immune to the spitting grease, and handed her the thickest piece on a flat chunk of bark.

"Don’t eat the gray veins near the bone," Sol said, tearing into his own piece before he had even finished chewing the first bite.

As the hot, tainted meat hit his stomach, his Ash-Forged furnace immediately roared to life, burning the trace lunar poison into a warm, heavy wave of pure stamina that spread out into his starved muscles.

"I’ll eat the gray parts. You stick to the fat."

"I’m not a delicate flower anymore, Sol," Valera muttered around a mouthful of hot meat, grease shining on her chin as she ate faster than any noble lady would ever admit to.

"Though I still don’t understand how your stomach doesn’t turn inside out when you eat the gristle near the shard."

"Tastes like pepper," Sol said, grinning with his eyes closed as he felt the meat actually filling out his hollow cheeks.

For six days, that was their whole world.

In the mornings, they crept through the gray fog of the scrubland, avoiding the wide tracks of a Level 2 Crowned bear that patrolled the highway overpass a mile north.

They hunted Low- and Medium-Stage Blighted beasts such as snow-boars, mutated crows with iron beaks, and starved wolves that had wandered down from the hills.