Chapter 53- The cultists(4)

Chapter 53: 53- The cultists(4)

"His weapon broke!" Julian howled with joy, dropping his own twisted knife and driving all ten of his bare, crystal-crusted fingers straight toward Sol’s exposed throat to rip his windpipe out by hand.

"On him! Pile on him!"

Four more pullers leaped over the ice wall behind the priest, ready to bury Sol under half a ton of biting, clawing flesh.

Beside the concrete pier, Valera had just finished snapping Sister Mara’s neck after a brutal grapple in the gravel that had left three deep claw-marks bleeding across Valera’s cheek.

She saw Sol’s hatchet head fly into the snow as Julian’s hands closed within three inches of Sol’s throat.

She was ten feet away, too far to reach him before the priest’s thumbs went through his trachea.

"Sol, the sled!" Valera screamed, kicking the pine drag-sled beside her with all her strength, sending the loaded sled skidding across the icy gravel straight into the backs of Sol’s calves.

Sol didn’t look down.

As Father Julian’s crystal-studded fingers grazed the skin of his neck, burning with necrotic purple frost, Sol dropped the useless broken handle of his hatchet, threw his left arm up inside Julian’s elbows to wedge the priest’s forearms two inches apart, and reached blindly down behind his own hip with his right hand into the elk-hide lashings of the sled.

His fingers didn’t close on iron.

They closed around the thick, curved base of one of the four-inch Level 2 Silt-Serpent fangs they had hacked out of the Crowned monster’s skull two days ago.

Sol ripped the hollow bone fang out of the sled ropes.

earlier, after the centipede fight, Sol had told Valera that he couldn’t use Level 1 bone or chitin as a weapon because his solar fire turned it into brittle ash in ten seconds.

This wasn’t a level 1 bone.

This was the crown-fang of a Level 2 monster, grown in the deep mud from compressed Foundation-grade sapphire..

As Father Julian lunged forward with his body weight to bite Sol’s nose off with his own teeth while their arms were locked together, Sol held the curved, four-inch serpent fang like a punch-dagger between his index and middle fingers, and dumped a full, roaring blast of his Peak-Stage Sun’s Believer furnace straight into the hollow venom-canal at the base of the tooth.

Instead of turning to ash, the residual Level 2 frost-ichor trapped inside the hollow fang reacted violently with the two-thousand-degree solar fire, turning the curved ivory tooth into a pressurized, incandescent orange plasma-torch that screamed like a whistle.

Sol drove his right fist straight up under Father Julian’s chin.

SHK-FOOM!

The four-inch glowing fang punched effortlessly through the soft meat beneath the priest’s jaw, straight through his tongue, and out the crown of his bald skull.

The violent clash of solar heat and residual Level 2 serpent frost inside the hollow tooth vented straight out the tip of the fang inside Julian’s brain case.

The Peak-Stage Confessor didn’t even get to close his teeth.

The top of his skull blew open in a cloud of boiling purple steam and scorched bone fragments, and his body went slack against Sol’s chest.

As Julian collapsed into the snow at Sol’s boots and the Silver Eye immediately tried to pull the priest’s powerful Peak-Stage corpse into the sky, Sol didn’t let a single thread of silver mist rise.

He planted his left boot squarely on the dead priest’s chest and let a five-foot wave of open orange fire roll down his leg across the corpse, burning every last scrap of Father Julian’s rising soul into a thick, greasy black cloud of soot that blew straight into the faces of the charging cultists behind him.

"Who’s next?!" Sol roared, standing over the blackened smear of their shepherd with blood pouring down his bare, glowing orange eyes from his split forehead, holding the smoking, four-inch Level 2 monster fang in his fist as Valera stepped up beside him, both of her Night-iron gauntlets encased up to the elbows in blood-stained blue ice.

"Come on! Who else wants to go to the sky?!"

For the first time since the fight started, the remaining twenty-two Low- and Medium-Stage pullers stopped charging.

They weren’t afraid of dying, they actually wanted to die.

They were terrified of not dying properly.

Looking at the greasy black smudge in the snow where Father Julian and their High-Stage acolyte had been reduced to nothing, denied the Moon’s embrace forever by the blind demon with the glowing orange eyes, the fanaticism in the pullers’ chests cracked into pure, superstitious terror.

"Don’t let his ash touch your robes!" one of the pullers screamed, stumbling backward up the gravel slope on his broken, bleeding feet and abandoning the mirror-wagon entirely.

"If his soot gets on your skin, the Mother won’t recognize you! Run! Run back to the Quarry!"

Like a flock of startled crows, the twenty-two surviving cultists turned and scrambled frantically back up the collapsed concrete ramp, dragging themselves over the broken railing on their hands and knees and sprinting south down the highway into the freezing salt-fog without even looking back for their dead.

Sol stood at the bottom of the slope for ten seconds, his chest heaving, waiting to make sure none of them doubled back through the fog.

When the last of their crooked, purple heat signatures disappeared two hundred yards down the southern ramp, Sol slowly let his right arm drop to his side and cut the heat to his hand.

He looked down at the four-inch Silt-Serpent fang wedged between his bloody knuckles.

The ivory tooth was blackened around the base and smoking faintly, with a tiny crack near the tip from the internal steam explosion, but it hadn’t turned to ash.

It had held his Peak-Stage heat without melting or snapping.

Behind him, Valera let out a long, ragged breath, shaking the frozen purple blood off her Night-iron gauntlets before reaching up with the clean inside of her sleeve to wipe the blood out of Sol’s eyes where the priest’s arm-crystals had cut his brow.