“FUCK!” I screamed in equal parts frustration and pain as my strike was interrupted by the scorching sting of red-hot steel biting into my thigh, buckling me to one knee.

Once more, whilst knights four and five kept me occupied, knight two had attacked from behind, the wretched, emotionless machine I’d already slain beginning to display a worrying degree of cunning.

Grunting, I looked up. The next swipe was poised to take my head. I sighed, and swore again.

Another failed attempt.

Flash Step.

The image before me flickered and tore as tendrils of crimson electricity surged around me, wrenching me to the other side of the room. Safe, for now. Draconic Blood went to work on the wound without delay, its apparent efforts painfully slow thanks to Bullet Time’s perpetual presence.

I grimaced as I watched it work.

“Fuck,” I repeated.

I was panting heavily, greedily drawing in great gulps of air, my limbs trembling from exhaustion. Fang mirrored my motions within my soul, his phantasmal silver tongue lolling, though he looked no less determined for his fatigue.

It was my fault, his current state. Fang’s bone-white pommel was slick with my own sweat, and the resultant lack of grip required me to lean harder and harder upon my faithful hound’s self-articulation to compensate. The knights’ strength, though not as overwhelming as their speed, easily matched my own. I could afford no weakness.

I looked up, and grimaced.

I was tiring, but my enemies were not. Already, they’d turned towards me, eager to begin the brawl anew.

If fighting two at once was difficult, fighting three was altogether impossible.

Knights two, four, and five fought like a single being. There were scarcely any openings to strike, scarcely breaks in their formation. Any attack, any angle, any advantage over one would inevitably leave me vulnerable to another. Their swordplay was childish in complexity, but brutal in efficiency, and their coordination was perfection itself.

Each twisting dodge I executed broke bones, snapped tendons and tore muscles. Each flawless parry led only to another, and another, more and more and more frantic until I was desperately deflecting a barrage of strikes. They rained down upon me, ceaseless and uncaring as a torrential deluge, each just as strong as my own, until I inevitably started taking damage and was forced to Flash Step away.

And each time I did so, my reserves grew smaller and smaller.

There comes a point in battle, my disciple, when everything else falls away, and the only question remaining is this;

Who strikes first? Who strikes fastest?

Ewan’s words, posthumously proving right once more.

I couldn’t kill them. I couldn’t. Even supposing I actually managed to conjure such a devastating electric strike as to take down all three at once, I’d then face off against three fresh knights in addition to the two I’d slain prior. And moreover, Lighting was one of my least efficient abilities; to draw so heavily on it would no doubt wreak havoc on my already dwindling reserves.

No, my only hope lay in crippling the creatures. Resurrect they might, but experience had now proven they didn’t regenerate. Disabling them was the only way to buy time, time to find some other way out of this disaster.

But, therein lay the problem.

Any attempts to disable via Lightning or Fire were flat-out useless. The former was too powerful; I lacked sufficient control over it to maim without killing, especially against mechanical opponents. And the latter suffered from the opposite problem; Lightning worked well because it pierced right through the knights thick alabaster plating to melt their insides, but Fire couldn’t penetrate at all.

Which left my only option to do things the old-fashioned way.

But…but it was just…

“Impossible,” I growled. The three knights were already halfway to me, and I re-settled into a combat stance, wounds healed, barely willing to try another time, just to fail.

It was just impossible. They were too fast. Their reach was too long. I couldn’t even get in range to strike one of them without the others taking me down. I’d already tried throwing Fang, to manipulate him remotely, but in Bullet Time his movement wasn’t accelerated any more than my own, and they’d dodged my efforts with veritable disdain.

How long had we fought, by now?

We’d clashed countless times. By my watch, less than ten minutes had passed, but in the so-thoroughly dilated time, it felt like an eternity. I was pushing my abilities to the very limit, manipulating almost every single one of my Blessings in tight sequence, often simultaneously, and my consciousness was starting to fray.

How much longer could I go on?

It didn’t matter. To let up would mean death. I’d fight on, until I was no longer able. By now, the knights were upon me.

It was time to try again.

I narrowed my eyes, examining their current formation. Knight five ran slightly ahead of its brethren. It would be my target, this round.

It came at me from above, tons of pressure behind its swing, burning steel sizzling through the air.

Doing my best to relax, I flowed through the motions, bringing my sword smoothly up from below, catching its blade on the crossguard of my own. Our weapons groaned against one another, scorching steel meeting Entropic bone in an explosion of force.

Fang roared, and howled, and held.

The full weight of the machine’s frame pressed against me, but I eased backwards, shifting my blade to the left and twisting my body along with it, allowing my back foot to take the pressure.

Now unbalanced by velocity, the knight had nowhere to go but forward, his trajectory controlled entirely by my blade. Rotating my wrist and whipping my sword about, I flicked his steel casually to the side, leaving his alabaster chest wide open.

I didn’t even need to move. The knight’s own momentum would impale whichever part of its body I selected on my sword. A simple maneuver, flawlessly executed.

For nothing.

I narrowed my eyes further, pushing Bullet Time harder. Sixfold dilation became ten, then twenty, then the Thinker Shard maxed out. The machines were frozen in place, allowing me an eternity to confirm my suspicions.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

It was exactly as I’d expected.

The other two knights had reached us, and were attacking from either side. I had the perfect opening, but I’d taken too long. They’d kill me at the same time I crippled their friend, or near enough as to make little difference.

I’d only two choices; Flash Step away, or reposition to avoid their strikes, leading once more to a disastrous cycle of less and less favorable exchanges.

Failure, yet again. One more step closer to exhaustion.

And yet, an odd sense of awkward satisfaction graced my mind.

Its presence surprised me. This was an unwinnable fight. I’d tried again, and again, and again, and failed every time, no matter how well I fought. I couldn’t kill the knights, and I couldn’t cripple them.

I’d struggled so much to get here, suffered through the hell that was the last room, prevailed against near-insurmountable odds, just to be faced with ones that truly were insurmountable. Perhaps Cirque and the World Titan were conspiring together against me.

Or perhaps it was fate, itself. I wasn’t meant for this life. I never had been. I’d just gotten lucky. Now, the universe was putting me back in my place.

I’d passed the seventh room by the grace of the Priest alone, and this one was somehow even more of a fucking joke. Marble stage? An Immortal would have been hard-pressed to defeat it. I was going to die here, within this room, one way or another. I’d never save my companions. I’d never even see them again.

And yet…that last strike. That parry.

The way the forms flowed through me, as natural as breathing. It had swelled something in me, a wellspring of warmth from deep within. A bittersweet nostalgia.

A memory.

A time long past but not forgotten, never forgotten, when a boy and man danced with one another in a dusty, dirty, dilapidated makeshift arena. The recollection of a forever-practiced, finally-flawless stroke, and the incalculably, invaluably rare twitching of the lips that followed it.

The knights I faced now were far from savants, but their speed and strength made them formidable adversaries.

And it had been so long since I’d had someone to dance with.

A sudden stinging in the corners of my eyes made me want to blink them, but I couldn’t. They were frozen in place. Time had scarcely passed. Knight five’s chest was still exposed as he careened forwards, his brothers inching their way towards me on either side.

Mentally, I sighed.

The memory was sweet, but it didn’t change reality. Continuing this engagement would be an exercise in futility, and waste Entropy I didn’t have to spare. Better simply to try again.

Again and again, until I no longer could.

I readied Flash Step, relishing in the accompanying euphoric surge of Lightning through my veins. As always, the Blessing responded immediately, untroubled even by the greatly slowed time.

Untroubled even by the greatly slowed time.

My breath froze in my chest.

The answer had been there, all along, right under my nose, just waiting for me to notice it. Back when I’d fought Flange, I’d almost died because I’d been fighting like a mundy; I wasn’t used to being Blessed. Now, I was making the same mistake.

I was fighting like a Blessed, but I wasn’t one. Not a normal one, anyway.

Not even close.

With a flicker of thought and spike of will, I clamped down hard on the activating Blessing, preventing its activation but allowing the Lightning in my veins to grow and grow. In mere moments it ceased all semblance of servitude, the surging electricity writhing frantically, suddenly forbidden from effecting its sole purpose.

But my grip grew only firmer.

I had a plan.

Flash Step felt like teleportation, but it wasn’t. Not really. It didn’t warp space or time, it physically accelerated my body to a new location through the use of Lightning. Exactly how it did that, I didn’t entirely understand, but I knew that whatever position I was in when I used Flash Step, that was the one I ended up in, too. I also knew that whatever objects I was holding would come with me.

So what if I just used it on a part of me? A part of me holding an object. A part of me that I desperately needed to be capable of striking instantaneously.

Like, say, a sword arm.

My grin broadened. The pure Entropic electricity coursing through my blood was reaching a fever pitch, striking anything and everything around it, singing muscles and cooking organs from within. My capillaries were dissolving. I’d caged a tempest in my veins.

Draconic Blood groaned and buckled under the strain of holding my melting flesh together, but I ignored it all.

My eyes were shut tight, my concentration focused to a razor’s edge. I was guiding the flow, desperately shepherding the galvanic pressure to the correct location, funneling it into my right arm. I was relaying instructions to my Blessing internally, telling it which specific bones and muscles had to move, and in what precise sequence, hammering explanations into its metaphysical form directly via the Shardsong. Just as I’d done before, to create Lesser Levitation and Sensory Projection.

But this was no proto-Blessing.

No mere collection of runes, forged from pure Entropy within the recesses of my soul. This was a genuine Shard. A masterwork of eldritch art and architecture, a magnum opus of some antediluvian entity. The crude creations I’d managed thus far were nothing compared to this multidimensional behemoth. I’d never tried to modify one directly before.

A shiver ran down my spine as, once more, I imagined the consequences should something go wrong. But, what choice did I have?

If my options were between a slow death and a glorious one, I’d choose the latter.

The storm within my soul howled in sanguine fury, fighting me at every turn, launching devastating strikes at the obsidian volcano far below. Flash Step wasn’t designed to do this. It wasn’t capable of this. It was confused, and in pain, shouting out at me to stop. It didn’t understand what I was trying to do.

For once, even the song was unsure.

You are not ready, Hero.

The voice from before, the one deep inside me, called out.

You are unprepared for that which you now attempt. Proceed at your own peril.

Its warning was futile. I couldn’t stop now.

A mammoth amount of Entropy had been converted to Lightning, which now exploded through my arm, circling through faster than the speed of sound, barely contained by the flesh that surrounded it. It needed somewhere to go, something to destroy, or it would destroy me, instead.

My muscles jerked. My nerves fired. My sword arm spasmed.

I opened my eyes and released.

For a fraction of a second immortalized by Bullet Time, my right arm stuttered, and flickered, and phased in and out of existence, and a profound sense of wrongness filled me.

Then Flash Step let out an alien shriek of agony, and my arm exploded.

Countless tendrils of ruby lightning instantly sublimated the gouting blood, arcing out to pulverize half my chest alongside it.

I felt nothing but a slight, numbed discomfort.

Distantly, I sensed wind rush through what remained of my hair, as I was hurled backwards with dizzying speed, brutally splattering against the gilded, marble wall.

My arm was gone. Half my chest was gone. My legs dangled uselessly beneath me, held on by a mere sliver of flesh. My skin was charred cinder and my bones turned to ash. My nerves had disintegrated entirely.

None of this alarmed me, however.

In fact, I felt positively giddy, save for a slight discomfort, a fuzziness, an itching deep inside my brain. I badly wanted to scratch it, to dig my fingers deep into grey matter and worry what disturbed me, but I couldn’t feel my arms.

Or rather, my arm.

I looked out and saw the ruined forms of three knights, crippled beyond recognition but not quite dead. I tried to chuckle, but found that I no longer possessed a lower jaw.

Then the backlash hit.

My Blessings howled in dreadful unison, a funeral dirge borne of anguish and agony. The Entropy fueling them revolted, carving great rents and tears in their eldritch structure as it ruptured violently from their arcane cores. My sea erupted from its continental vessel, swelling up with wild, untamed song, gargantuan waves rising higher and higher until they rocketed into the upper atmosphere, free from my control, and my ocean was completely empty.

Heavily damaged, every single Shard I had shut down. Without Draconic Blood to heal my wounds, I’d be dead in seconds.

But I wasn’t concerned about that.

I didn’t have time to be. My mouth, such as it was, had frozen, my eyes locked open by rictus tremors. Physically, I was paralyzed. In shock. Brain dead.

But I was no longer an entirely physical entity, and my ethereal body was very much alive, indeed.

Trapped within my inner soul, my whole world had been consumed by pain.