Jake lingered awkwardly as Ferryn and Conrad and the red haired fellow rushed to speak with Fae at the barrier. The half elf hadn't really wanted to speak with them; he barely knew Ferryn, had never been properly introduced to Conrad and felt certain the older youth hated him. But the combination of bloodshed and greasy chicken had tied his stomach in knots. Hoping no one would notice, Jake turned and strode for the exit, thinking he might find Stacia on her walk. The blue eyed beauty surprised him, entering the hall as he reached the door.
"Stash!" He exclaimed, a seldom-used nickname. He rubbed his chest through his green sifan shirt. "I was coming to join you." She pushed past him, seized his hand and drew him along the aisle that stood between the last row of spectators and the impassive stone wall.
"You should have!" She exclaimed as she dragged him toward the far end of the arena. The place by the emptying buffet table, where Cronen had carved out his den. "This may be the last beautiful day we have," she said with sad determination, "come along Jake, pick up your feet!"
Jake sighed and jogged along with her, resisting the urge to wince with each bouncing step. The crowd was on its feet, and the noise had changed. Escalated. Cries for Breaker and Genocide Giant and even Abomination still rang out, but the roar of the masses had taken on a shrill edge. The sound was somewhere between cheers of glory and screams of horror.
Stacia heard it as well. Her pale face, so pretty it could be porcelain, drew tight around lips that pursed and blew nervously.
"How fares the fighting?" She panted as they ran in rough rhythm behind swathes of screaming, waving spectators.
"I don't... Josh is winning." Jake took the easy lie. He hadn't truly been paying attention for some time, focusing instead on keeping his lunch in his belly. The pack of spectators pressed all the way to the wall as they reached the corner, and Jake found himself separated from Stacia as he squeezed between bodies. Lost in a throng of sweaty faces and shouting mouths, it was all he could do not to spill his guts. It took some minutes of struggling but he made it out the other side and found Stacia waiting for him, hand outstretched. Of course she could walk right through a mob.
They rounded a wall of people hand in hand and stopped short when they saw Master Bodorson. Stacia gasped, and not from the sudden force with which Jake gripped her palm.
A crumpled tankard lay behind Terech's heavy feet. He leaned into the Mystic Barrier nose first, pounding with both hands like he was back in the forge ruining hammer and anvil. The back of the dwarf's neck was redder than the arena floor, but what horrified the youths were the words tearing from his throat.
"Breaker you bastard, cease this madness! What are you doing you fool? You FOOL!"
Jake and Stacia rushed to his sides, pupils dilating in terror as they joined his frenzied cries.
"Put it away!" Jake pleaded, no strength in his voice. Stacia struck straight to the point.
"Jooosh! Noooooooooo!"
~ * ~
The Genocide Giant's shadow shrouded him, and Breaker's instincts took over. He abandoned the ice poultice half-formed and snaked an arm behind his back, plunging a palm into the first of the sheath's cargo pockets. He gripped a delyn ball and created something worse than the still burning bomb.
But Tinerad had vanished.
Cronen blinked. Could have sworn something blocked out the sun there. His forehead burned. Blood dribbled down the outside of his right boot like the brim of an overfilled glass. There was no feeling below the ankle. Cronen coughed and pulled water from the air, pouring it over and around and into his boot. The liquid stabilized and exhaled mist as it froze into a clunky cast, encasing the broken limb from knee to boot sole.
A familiar voice called his name.
"Fae?" He shouted, turning his head so fast his neck popped like a gunshot. "Am'aleh's eyes, get down! There's a--"
The explosion suspended her like a tormented marionette, and for an instant Cronen's heart soared. She had cleared the blast radius. The thunderous report rocked his equilibrium but he held the seated position firmly, marveling at the girl's endurance. She had come back from a difficult defeat to challenge in the second round. She had survived the worst the Abomination and the drowess could deliver. She had... a small redwood growing from her breast. A tree that wept crimson tears.
Josh rolled to his front and retched. There was nothing in his stomach to come up, but the disease inside wanted out, and he couldn't watch her die again. He slammed a fist into the floor in frustration, and then again and again until the writhing in his stomach stopped and the din of the crowd faded to a buzz and the linoleum took a permanent impression of his knuckles.
He pushed off the ground and stood. Wobbling on his slick peg leg, he looked around blearily at the wreckage of the Felicity Chamber and saw the screaming spectators beyond. They sounded like insects, buzzing against the window. Why wouldn't they leave him alone? Why hadn't the mana shield faded? It still glowed and sparkled between him and freedom. Or was he intended to leave?
Stumping over the linoleum felt like wading through the Ella Chamber, where flood waters had swallowed Fae whole before he drove merciful spikes of ice through her heart. As before Josh found himself encircled by fallen warriors, and yet the barrier remained. Perhaps not all have fallen... He had passed the divet in the floor left by Rythadine's pommel and the section of tile torn up by Tinerad's fall.
The construct still leaned against the last unbroken table in the final column. Its strange stony skin flickered with energy, its head shook from side to side, and indistinguishable whispered word-sounds flowed from its mouth. Something in its core kept it alive, something powerful that glowed to Cronen's eyes like a torch to a moth. The battle does not end until all but one have fallen. Those were the rules... it seemed foolish. The construct was finished. Why wouldn't Sei bring down the shield? What reason could there be to...
The truth of it gripped Josh like a brazed gauntlet. Sweat trickled from his hairline, blazing a trail through the crevasses of concern that opened on his brow. He couldn't be certain. He wanted there to be a reason for all this pain. He needed something to redeem the failure of letting Fae down again. But he could still be right. That must be it. Orlouge, you crafty bastard... As tournament Grandmaster, the customs of the Cell bound Silence Sei to protect the lives of the competitors and the crowd.
Breaker was bound by nothing but ice.
He hooked the construct beneath its sturdy shoulder-joint and hauled the mumbling paperweight across his shoulders, hearing it knock against Rythadine's hilt and grind over the looped dehlar cable. He knocked the table over with his hip and then turned and limped, burdened and slipping, to where the Immortal lay with the Abomination's upper half.
The ice on his leg and the slide of his cast on the red-white-and-black floor transported him... years in the past and across an ocean, to a mountaintop south of Sulgoran's Axe.
Kristina had vanished in the midst of a riot staged outside the palace walls in Knife's Edge. Kidnapped by her brother Geoffrey and the King of the Tiered Mountain, taken as leverage to force her father to make weapons of war. The Mountain King had been the most feared fighter in the shadows of Salvar. A myth more than a legend. Cronen had pursued them like a Haidian hound through wormwork tunnels beneath the city, and caught them after miles of underground paths ramped to an open-air plateau. At least, he thought he had caught them. The King of the Tiered Mountain merely wanted to test his prized pupil against the Breaker. Josh had felled Geoff with the same leaping front kick that cost him his ankle against Tinerad. In the mad flurry that followed the self-proclaimed king had snapped Kristina's spine like a winter-dried twig.
The sickening feeling returned as Josh dumped the construct between Draug and Jensen. He kept his eyes away from Fae's broken body, but he could not escape his memories.
With Kristina gasping and dying in the snow, desperation had driven Cronen to act. He'd thrown the still-woozy Geoffrey from the cliffs, knowing the man's enchanted gloves would carry him to safety. But the distraction had opened a crack in the Mountain King's steely defenses, and Breaker did what he did best. Two threats to the Salvic Royal family had fallen through frigid air that day. Cronen could not forgive himself for letting Geoff escape, but he would have yielded them both go if it meant bringing her back. Kristina had died in his arms, choking on her own blood and wishing him well in his life to come.
Breaker roared. Air he didn't know he'd inhaled burst from both lungs in a long, single-syllable note of loss. He raised a bloody hand and then plunged it deep into the construct's gaping chest.
Callused fingers closed around the Power Orb as it seared a layer of flesh to its surface. Cronen cackled like a mad crow, for there was no pain that could find him. He was alone with Kristina atop the palace walls where they'd shared their first kiss. He was standing in the Underwood smithy chatting with Master Thiadore while Fae flashed eyes at him from the bellows. He was home atop the Peaceful Promenade, smoking his pipe and hearing a knock on the wooden door that heralded Jake or Stacia or Terech.
He drew the Power Orb out in a cage of curled fingers, feeling as much as seeing the crackle and hiss of unstable energy. Endless energy. The orb shuddered and smoked like fire and lightning battled within.
Cronen almost toppled over as he reached back with his free hand and carefully removed the weapon he'd created from its pocket on Rythadine's sheath. The plain delyn ball contained a portion of his own energy. Explosive energy, compressed to the bursting point. He half-crouched and bent forward and crammed the ball into the Abomination's maw as gently as he could. His lips peeled back from his teeth as he crafted a razor of pure ice and shaved the orb from his palm like coarse stubble. Fresh blood spattered the floor but he focused on placing the radiating item to rest between the Abomination's opened jaws.
The corpses had stayed 'till the shield dropped in the Ella Chamber. Nothing got out without the Mystics' permission. Souls had to spend the interim somewhere.
Cronen had not touched the orb for nothing. He had charged it with the same energy as the delyn ball, building on the tumultuous storm inside. Two impact grenades shone from the homunculus' lifeless maw, the glowing one balanced atop the delyn. Stable, for the moment. A haze blurred Joshua's vision and the buzzing in his ears crescendoed as he forced himself to stoop further, lifting Jensen over his left shoulder like a sack of baked potatoes. He'd never met the man before, but the Immortal fought well, and was one of Sei's Generals besides. Breaker did not know how he found his way to Fae's blood-soaked form, but she was weightless as he slung her over his right shoulder. He tottered through tiny step after tiny step for an eternity, and finally fell behind the table he had tipped on its side. The last table at the end of the hall. It lay like a pitiful barricade, solid redwood surface flat toward the sea of blood that surrounded the Abomination.
One wide palm grasped the top of the redwood barrier, followed by the other. Cronen pulled himself to a kneeling position with his right leg stretched awkwardly behind, the ice cast weeping frigid tears between Jensen and Fae. Josh leaned against the varnished wood, letting the weight of his chest and shoulders settle on the edge. He reached back, stretching as far as he could as the cast melted away. He drew a revolver from a holster on the numb ankle and dipped his other hand into the seemingly empty pocket on Rythadine's sheath. Fingers sticky with gore collected another metal item, smaller and streamlined and perfectly smooth.
With his last ounce of energy Cronen drew a gust of air across the Colt Anaconda. The big handgun would fire wet, but he wanted no room for error. Jake had searched furiously through the Bazaar in his short allotment of time that afternoon, and found a single bullet for purchase. A steel forty-four caliber slug with a conical nose.
He slapped the Anaconda's cylinder open lazily, like slapping palms with an old friend, and dropped the projectile into place. The gun clicked and clicked as he pulled the trigger five times, feeling the draw and checking the mechanism and rotating the bullet to the barrel. His forearms rested on the table edge as it absorbed his weight once more, gun gripped in his right hand, left cradling the weight.
Sei didn't want an investigator. He needed a killer. He wanted the Breaker.
Josh lined the steel sights up with the still-sparking Power Orb balanced atop the Abomination. He inhaled to his diaphragm, testing the table's give and the strength in his arms. He exhaled and surrendered to oblivion.
Breaker squeezed the trigger.
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