Chapter 45- The Slit Serpent(2)

Chapter 45: 45- The Slit Serpent(2)

And the serpent was already right behind the blast, jaws wide to swallow Sol’s upper body whole while he was off-balance.

Sol had half a second.

His feet were tangled in the torn edge of his fur coat, and the serpent’s three-foot jaws were closing around his head and right shoulder.

If those fangs closed, he was dead. Level 2 frost-venom would freeze his heart before his furnace could even recognize the poison.

Sol didn’t try to pull his arm out of the mouth.

As the huge, freezing jaws snapped down over his head and right shoulder, Sol pivoted his hips and jammed the six-pound old-world hatchet vertically, down on the beast’s lower jaw, hammer-head wedged up against the roof of its mouth right behind the two front fangs propping the eighteen-inch solid steel tang between its upper and lower teeth like a steel pillar holding up a collapsing mine roof.

CRUNCH-SHRIEK!

The serpent’s jaws slammed down onto the vertical hatchet shaft with two tons of biting force.

The solid, three-quarter-inch pre-collapse tool steel bowed half an inch under the monstrous pressure, groaning horribly.

As the beast’s two four-inch fangs missed Sol’s collarbone by a hair and scraped down the front of his leather-patched coat, spilling freezing blue venom across his chest.

Sol was pinned on his back in the mud, looking straight up into the freezing, black gullet of a twenty-five-foot Level 2 monster, holding its mouth propped open by gripping the middle of the vertical steel handle with both hands.

"Sol!" Valera screamed from twenty feet away.

The serpent began to thrash its head violently from side to side, trying to snap the steel handle or break Sol’s wrists so it could chew his head off.

Sol’s shoulders were wrenched out of their sockets by a fraction of an inch with every jerk, his spine slamming repeatedly against the frozen ground while the spilled venom on his chest ate through his coat and turned the skin over his sternum pitch-black with frostbite.

"Don’t... let go... of the tail!" Sol choked out from inside the shadow of the beast’s jaws, his boots kicking for purchase in the mud. "If it coils around me... I’m done!"

"You can’t hold its jaw open!" Valera yelled back, blood running from her nose from the strain of holding a Level 2 beast’s tail frozen to the rock.

"The steel’s bending!"

She was right.

In Sol’s thermal sight, a hairline fracture was forming right in the center of the hatchet’s tang where the serpent’s back teeth were grinding against the steel.

Two more seconds and Marrow’s old-world hatchet was going to snap in half.

And he was looking straight down the wet, unarmored pink tunnel of the serpent’s throat.

Scale armor on the outside. Soft meat on the inside.

"Hey, snake," Sol growled, black blood bubbling over his lips as the frost-venom on his chest fought a war against the furnace behind his ribs.

"You want to eat something hot?"

Sol let go of the hatchet handle with his left hand, leaving only his right arm bracing the bowing steel shaft between the teeth.

He didn’t turn on a full-body Override, he didn’t want to burn himself back down to one percent out here in the middle of the Wastes.

Instead, he did what he had spent six months practicing every night on the flat cooking-stones in their camps: he took eighty percent of the fire in his Peak-Stage core, bypassed his right arm entirely, and packed all of it every blistering, roaring ounce of it straight into the palm and five fingers of his bare left hand until his left fist looked like a ball of molten brass.

It was a different application of the skill Valera had teached him earlier.

Then Sol shoved his bare left arm, all the way up to the elbow, straight down the open throat of the Level 2 Silt-Serpent.

Swoosh!

The serpent’s slit-pupil eyes bulged in sudden horror as a human arm burning at twelve hundred degrees slid past its tongue and down its esophagus.

Sol’s fingers didn’t stop until they hit the slick, pulsing wall of muscle right above the beast’s heart and the walnut-sized Level 2 crystal sitting beside it.

Sol hooked his burning fingers into the meat of the serpent’s inner throat and let the fire go.

FOOOOM!

There was no explosion on the outside.

Inside the closed chamber of the serpent’s neck, the water and blood instantly flash-boiled into high-pressure steam that had nowhere to go.

The massive slate scales along the front three feet of the beast’s neck bulged outward like an over-inflated skin, popping and cracking as boiling blood and white steam blasted out of its nostrils, its eye sockets, and around Sol’s shoulder through its propped-open mouth.

The serpent’s body went completely rigid, convulsing so hard it ripped the chunk of limestone Valera had frozen its tail to clean out of the riverbank.

On the bank, Valera saw the beast’s throat smoking from the inside.

She didn’t waste a fraction of a second.

Letting go of the tail, she sprinted ten feet across the mud, leaped onto the back of the serpent’s thrashing neck right behind the three ice-horns, and drove both of her Night-iron gauntlets down into the gap where the scales had popped loose from Sol’s internal steam-blast.

"Die, you ugly bastard!" Valera snarled, and dumped her Ice Sculpture straight into the cooked, boiling meat of the serpent’s upper spine.

One thousand degrees of fire met -80°C frost right across the beast’s brain-stem.

CRACK.

The thermal shock didn’t just kill the nerve cord, it snapped the serpent’s cervical vertebrae cleanly in half like a hot glass mug dropped into ice water.

The twenty-five-foot body went limp all at once, collapsing sideways into the frozen peat with a heavy, wet thud.

Inside the slack jaws, Sol pulled his smoking, blood-covered left arm out of the beast’s throat.

He yanked his bent hatchet out from between its teeth with his right hand, and rolled clear onto the snow, coughing up a lungful of steam and frost-bitten phlegm.

For ten seconds, neither of them said a word.

Valera slid off the dead serpent’s neck, landing on her rear in the mud beside Sol’s boots, her chest heaving so hard she couldn’t even hold her hands up.

Sol lay flat on his back, staring up at the gray sky with his glowing orange eyes, his left arm steaming in the snow and his chest black and numb where the blue venom had soaked through his shirt.

"You..." Valera wheezed between ragged breaths, reaching over to smack his shin weakly with the back of her gauntlet.

"You stuck your hand... in its mouth."

"Down its throat," Sol corrected in a thick rasp, wincing as he rolled his dislocated left shoulder against the frozen dirt until it popped back into the socket with a wet clunk.

"You said don’t let it kill me. Didn’t say anything about feeding it a knuckle."

"Look at your hatchet," she panted.

Sol lifted his right hand and looked at the old-world hatchet through his thermal sight.

The eighteen-inch solid steel tang had a permanent fifteen-degree bend in the middle where the Level 2 jaws had nearly bitten through it, and a deep crack ran two-thirds of the way through the metal behind the head.

One more fight and the head would fly right off the handle.

"Yeah," Sol sighed, letting his arm drop back into the snow.

"Marrow’s scrap isn’t made for Crowned teeth. Give me two minutes to burn this blue crap off my chest, and let’s skin this thing faster before the sky eats the best parts."