Chapter 7- The silver blade

Chapter 7: 7- The silver blade

"Then we go hunting," Valera said, her eyes turning a dangerous, icy white. "If we need weapons, we’re going to have to take them off their corpses."

They moved up from the cistern, slipping into the smog-choked labyrinth of the slum’s surface.

In the pitch-black ruins of a collapsed tenement, they found their first targets.

Two slum guards, Level 1 (Low) Cultivators, sweeping the perimeter. Valera struck from the shadows, her Godblessed core freezing the air in their lungs before they could even shout.

Sol followed up, his rusted cleaver flashing white-hot in the dark.

He executed them both, but the cost was absolute. The rusted iron of his cleaver finally gave out, melting into a useless, warped stump of slag.

He threw it into the mud. He quickly snatched the two glowing low-level crystals from their dissolving bodies and shoved them into his pockets.

Before they could move, the heavy, rhythmic thud of plated boots echoed through the ruins.

Flash.

Sol pulsed his vision.

Walking through the archway of the tenement was a thermal signature twice as dense as the guards. He felt that the cultivator was mid-stage or higher.

It was a young inner-city Enforcer, clad in polished silver armor. In his hand, he held a long, elegant straight-blade forged from pale silver, radiating a deadly, freezing aura.

Darkness.

The Enforcer saw the dead guards and instantly dropped into a combat stance. "Bastards, show yourselves," the young noble spat, his eyes scanning the gloom.

Valera didn’t wait for him to call for backup. She lunged out of the shadows, swinging her iron pipe. But the Enforcer was mid-stage and he was faster. He batted her pipe aside with the flat of his silver blade and thrust forward, aiming to impale her.

As the strike came, Valera screamed , her core activating, frost spewing from her body.

The ambient temperature plunged to absolute zero. A shockwave of pure white frost erupted from her boots, creeping up the Enforcer’s legs and instantly locking his armor in solid ice, slowing him down.

The Enforcer panicked, his thrust halting inches from Valera’s chest as his joints started to freeze.

It was a window of barely a second, but for a butcher, a second was a lifetime.

Sol stepped out of the dark. Unarmed, he didn’t try to punch through the armor. He bypassed it entirely. Sol grabbed the young Enforcer by the exposed throat.

Thump-THUMP.

Sol pushed the full, violently burning output of his Sun’s Believer core straight into his palm. The Enforcer’s scream never made it out of his mouth. The sheer, blistering heat instantly boiled the blood in his carotid artery and snapped his neck.

The cold blue thermal signature snuffed out. The Enforcer dropped dead.

Sol didn’t let the body hit the floor. He ripped the pristine silver blade from the dead man’s grip. The weapon was ice-cold, but as Sol’s burning blood pumped through his hands, the silver rapidly acclimated, humming with a suppressed, violent heat.

Flash.

Sol turned to look at Valera.

Darkness.

A horrific, cracking sound echoed in the ruined tenement. It sounded like a frozen lake violently splitting open.

Flash.

Valera was on her knees near the precipice of the ruined floor, looking out over the smog-choked drop to the streets below.

Her brilliant, white-blue thermal signature wasn’t just flickering, it was violently expanding. Pushing her blessed core to instantly freeze a Mid-Stage Cultivator had broken her fragile equilibrium.

Darkness.

"Valera!" Sol rasped, lunging toward the edge of the drop.

He reached her just as she collapsed onto her side. The Permafrost curse had triggered.

Thick, jagged ice was literally blooming out of her pores, sealing her lips, freezing her eyelashes, and locking her joints in a tomb of absolute zero.

Sol dropped to his knees on the freezing concrete. He grabbed her shoulders, but his hands instantly stuck to her skin, the frost biting so deep it felt like burning.

His heat wasn’t enough. The cold radiating from her core was suffocating his furnacelike core.

If he didn’t counter it right now, her heart would freeze solid in seconds.

Sol didn’t hesitate. He let go of her shoulder with one hand, reached into the dissolving mist of the young Enforcer’s corpse, and ripped out the Level 1 (Mid) lunar crystal shard.

He pulled the two low-level shards he had just looted from his pocket.

He shoved all three glowing crystals into his mouth and bit down hard.

The crystals shattered like glass. The violent lunar energy trying to mutate him, but his gift activated instantly, mercilessly grinding the massive influx of shards into pure, explosive fuel.

A shockwave of blistering thermal energy detonated inside his sternum. His skin turned a blinding, molten orange.

Sol threw his body completely over Valera’s, trapping her against the edge of the rooftop.

He wrapped his arms around her frozen torso, burying his blazing, smoking face into her ice-locked neck.

He pushed every single ounce of the stolen energy directly into her.

The clash between his overloading furnace and her absolute zero permafrost was deafening.

A massive column of superheated steam violently erupted from the edge of the tenement.

Valera gasped, her back arching as the agonizing, blistering heat tore through her frozen veins, forcefully melting the ice that had locked her heart.

Her hands violently spasmed and locked around Sol’s burning back, her fingernails digging into his scorching skin.

They hovered directly on the razor’s edge of the drop. He was bleeding heat into her to stop himself from burning out; she was draining his fire to stop herself from freezing.

Slowly, the violent hissing died down.

The steam cleared.

Sol collapsed sideways onto the concrete, his skin returning from molten orange to a pale, bruised white.

He was completely drained, gasping for the cold slum air, his hand still locked around the hilt of his newly claimed silver blade.

Beside him, Valera rolled onto her back. The ice was completely gone.

A new frosted panel materialized in Sol’s pitch-black vision.

[LUNAR SHARDS ABSORBED. CULTIVATION SUCCESSFUL.]

[STATUS: Level 1 (Flesh and Bone) - 46% Progression to Mid-Stage.]

Valera slowly turned her head to look at him, her icy blue eyes locking onto his blind face.

"You ate an unpurified Mid-Stage crystal and two Low-Stage shards at the exact same time," she whispered, her voice hoarse but completely steady.

"Everyone has their secrets," Sol rasped, coughing up a small plume of gray ash.

He pushed himself up, resting the silver blade over his shoulder. "And now we have a sword."