chapter 259
The Sacrifice stands on the edge of the stands, at the first row, to the left of the Dark Champions.
Await my commands. You will intervene when I say so.
Maelthra's orders come through the oaths, telepathic.
And so, he waits.
The hooded figure Nimirea summoned steps into the arena while the crowd murmurs in confusion. There's something wrong about the hooded person's aura, something terribly wrong.
The figure reaches up and pulls the hood back.
The crowd recoils.
Students in the lower rows push backward in their seats. A girl in the third row turns her face away. A boy near the rail grabs his neighbor's arm.
The Sacrifice does not recoil.
Female. Infernal. Late adolescence. Height consistent with Drazhal bloodline.
Her face is gone. What was once the smooth red skin of Infernal royalty has stretched and hardened into a mask of obsidian-slick chitin. Her eyes are hollow pits of roiling violet void-fire. A crown of jagged bone shards erupts from her skull where her horns used to be, weaving together like a thorned halo.
Full monsterification. Chitin remodeling across facial structure. Void-fire replacing ocular tissue. Bone crown replacing horn base.
Her skin is no longer flesh. It is a patchwork of bruised, translucent scales and exposed iron-hard muscle. From her spine, four tattered appendages extend, not membrane but woven shadows and splintered ribs. Chunks of something crystalline pulse with violet light where they have fused into her chest and shoulders.
She can't speak.
The proportions of the Drazhal bloodline are still there, buried deep, the way the skeleton of a building survives a fire.
Maelthra's daughter. Iskara.
Then, involuntarily, a second assessment surfaces. He does not call for it.
She reminds me of the ones in the breeding pens. The ones they pushed too far.
Not the same markers, but the architecture of it. The breeding program tested limits. Some subjects were given more than their bodies could contain. The ones who survived past the threshold did not look like themselves anymore. Their bodies remodeled around the power the way a tree grows around an embedded stone. They stopped speaking first. Then they stopped recognizing people. Then they just stopped.
His left hand finds his side. Below the ribs. There's a chilling cold there.
Under four hours.
Maelthra's voice reaches him through the oaths. A single word in the old tongue of the Devils, the language that the breeding program forced into his bones before he could speak Common.
Wait and then retrieve her.
He waits.
***
Jacob sees Iskara and goes still.
He knows who she is. She faced him.
"That's nice company you keep, Nimirea," Jacob says. "If you're still Iskara," Jacob says at the monster. "Know that today I will put you out of your misery."
"She volunteered and other than hood, she was out in the open," Nimirea says. Her smile has an edge now. "Unlike your Champions, who you buried under the sand and riddled with curses."
"They chose to be there."
"And she chose to be here."
Iskara lunges for Jacob.
Jacob blocks. The impact travels through the silver sword, through his arms, through his shoulders, and into the stone beneath his feet. The crater doubles in depth. His boots slide backward a full yard.
Fast. Faster than the last time. She got stronger and she has already applied all her buffs. Perhaps even more.
He parries a second strike, deflects a third, and counters with a horizontal cut aimed at Iskara's midsection. She twists around the blade with a fluidity that looks boneless and strikes at his throat.
Nimirea hits him from the left.
A lance of compressed water punches into his ribs. It would have cored through a normal body. Jacob's Mana absorbs the worst of it but the force still launches him sideways. He catches himself, plants his feet, and Iskara is already there.
She fights without sound. No shouts, no battle cries, no breath that he can hear. The chitin mask where her mouth used to be makes her silent in a way that is worse than silence. A body still fighting, still thinking, still driving forward, with no voice behind it.
Jacob fights back as well as he can.
The power from his Champions' Afflictions roars through his channels, more energy than any single human body should contain, but Nimirea and Iskara together are forcing him to spend it faster than he can accumulate it.
He takes a hit from Nimirea's water, blocks a strike from Iskara, takes another hit. Two opponents of this caliber, now one ranged and one melee...
Jacob plants his feet and activates the Domain.
The arena changes.
It starts at his feet and spreads outward in a wave. The pale stone darkens, cracks, splits. From the fractures, bone rises. Not small bones. Ribs. Massive, bleached-white ribcages erupt from the ground, arching twenty feet into the air, curving inward to form cages of calcium and ancient death. Between them, pillars of obsidian push upward, black and porous, shot through with veins of something that looks like dried blood.
The Domain of Ruin and Bones.
The stench hits the stands. Ancient rot. The dry, mineral smell of a place where living things died so long ago that even the bacteria that consumed them are dead. Students in the lower rows gag. A few cover their faces.
Inside the Domain, Jacob's perception shifts. The bone terrain is his. Every rib, every pillar, every crack in the obsidian feeds information back to him. Nimirea's water currents. Iskara's footwork. The way the air moves between the structures. He can feel all of it.
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He catches Nimirea's next water lance on the flat of the blade and redirects it into an obsidian pillar. The pillar detonates into shrapnel that forces Iskara to dodge. Jacob uses the opening to drive a sequence of five strikes into Nimirea that backs her into a cage of ribs and finally land several Afflictions on her.
he Hellraiser Sword's effects stack with each cut. Bleed opens the wounds wider, blood streaming faster than it should. Hellbane's Mark sinks in next, a debuff that makes every other affliction on her body bite harder. Shadow Plague slows her Mana circulation, and three small will o'wisps from Curse of Fire ignite around her head, orbiting like burning insects. The Domain of Ruin and Bones amplifies all of it, the ribcages around them glowing with a hungry light as they drain her energy.
Nimirea breaks free. But she is bleeding from a new cut across her left arm and the will o'wisps follow her.
Iskara presses him from the other side. Her attacks are faster now. The violet void-fire in her eyes burns deeper, and her strikes carry a weight they did not have thirty seconds ago.
Her aura... the corruption is digging deeper.
Jacob blocks a punch that cracks one of the bone ribs behind him. He spins, cuts low, and the blade scores a line across her forearm. Dark fluid, not quite blood, seeps from the wound.
Nimirea and Iskara regroup. They come at him together, synchronized, the water and the void-fire strikes layering into a pattern that he can't fully follow.
Jacob stretches the power of the Reverse Domain further, feeling his body resonating with the outer Domain.
The effect is immediate. The energy flowing outward through the Domain of Ruin and Bones inverts.
His body changes.
The veins across his forearms and neck darken, turning black beneath the skin. His eyes brighten until the irises are almost white. His movements, already fast, become supersonic.
But there is a cost.
Necrotic damage blooms across his skin, but this time also gets healed. His body fights it. Since he absorbed the Star Metal, he unlocked new levels of power.
Dark patches spread from his hands up his wrists, the tissue dying in real time, killed by the inverted energy that his body is using to fuel the acceleration, and then regenerating. The patches crack and peel. Blood seeps from the cracks.
It's tremendously painful, but he does not slow down.
This is his peak combat form. Only possible after all he went through thanks to Liuthkrav's help.
He hits Nimirea with a combination that she does not fully see. The first strike opens her guard. The second drives the silver sword into the gap between her arm and torso. The third is a rising cut that travels from her hip toward her opposite shoulder with enough force to split the arena floor beneath her.
Nimirea twists. The blade catches her across the stomach instead of bisecting her. The wound is deep. Deep enough that she staggers. Deep enough that the water around her falters for two full seconds.
Jacob turns to Iskara. She is already on him. He blocks three strikes in rapid succession, pivots, and drives a cut at her right shoulder that is aimed not to wound but to remove the arm entirely.
Iskara jerks backward. The blade passes through the space where her arm was and takes a piece of her sleeve and a strip of dark flesh with it. She stumbles. For the first time since she entered the arena, her footing is not perfect.
The power from his Champions' Afflictions is enormous, but the dual Domain consumes it at a rate that even twelve Champions cannot sustain indefinitely.
It is not enough.
Nimirea recovers. The wound across her stomach seals, not heals but seals, the water around her body compressing into the cut like a liquid bandage that holds the flesh together through sheer pressure. Her eyes are hard.
Iskara recovers. And something worse happens.
The chitin across her face cracks and regrows thicker. The bone crown extends, new shards pushing outward from the calcified ridges, curving back over her scalp, spreading down her neck. Her arms lengthen. The joints crack and resettle at new angles. The violet void-fire in her eyes doubles in intensity, flames licking upward past her brow. The shadow appendages on her spine snap wider, splintered ribs fanning out. Then the chitin where her mouth was sealed splits open and from the gap comes a raw, animal shriek.
She is monsterifying further.
Nimirea watches Iskara's transformation, then looks at her own hand. She holds it up. Something ripples across her fingers. The skin splits along lines that are not there before. Beneath it, dark tissue pushes outward, dense, fibrous, wrong. Her right hand swells and reshapes, the fingers fusing into three thicker digits tipped with claws.
One hand. Just one. Enough to increase her striking power by a factor that Jacob can feel in his teeth.
They are desperate.
But desperate and powerful is still powerful.
They hit him together. Nimirea's monsterified hand catches the silver sword mid-swing and wrenches it sideways while Iskara drives a void-fire enhanced fist into his chest. The impact launches him backward through two obsidian pillars. The pillars shatter. Jacob hits the ribcage wall behind them and the bone cracks around his body.
He pushes himself out of the wreckage. The necrotic damage on his arms has reached his elbows. His breathing is ragged. The Devil's Engine still burns, but the hum has changed pitch. Strained. Running hotter than it is designed to.
He raises the silver sword.
They come again.
***
The Sacrifice watches the fight.
His assessment updates in real time. His golden eyes track the exchanges.
Jacob Cloud is going to die.
The calculation is straightforward. Jacob is fighting at a level that should not be possible for a human his age. The dual Domain, the Devil's Engine at True Diamond, the Affliction loop. It is remarkable. In seventeen years of combat, this is among the finest individual performances the Sacrifice has witnessed.
It does not matter.
Two-on-one against opponents of this caliber, with one of them monsterifying in real time and the other carrying the power of a Dark Champion means he's done for.
Jacob will run out of body before they run out of power. The necrotic damage alone will kill him within minutes if the dual Domain is maintained without more energy entering his body through the Afflictions he's layering on his opponents. But he can clearly not sustain this any longer. The two are just getting faster, even with the Afflictions from before.
Dead within four minutes. Perhaps three.
The Sacrifice stands still.
I don't think I'll have to intervene for him to die. Just to retrieve Princess Iskara, I suppose.
Then something shifts, and it is not in the stands.
The students are not quiet. They are making noise. But the noise has changed. At the beginning of the fight, it is fear. The high, tight sound of people watching something they do not want to see. Now it is something else.
Students in the lower rows lean forward. Hands grip the rails. Feet brace against the benches. A boy in the fourth row is standing, fist pressed against his chest, mouth open, shouting something that gets lost in the noise.
Tension.
Not fear.
He does not understand it.
In the arena, Jacob takes another hit. Nimirea's monsterified hand catches him across the jaw and the sound of the impact carries to the upper stands. Jacob's head snaps to the side. Blood arcs from his mouth. He does not go down.
The crowd roars.
They think he can win, he realizes, finally frowning.
The Sacrifice considers this. The assessment does not support it. Jacob is losing. The necrotic damage spreads. His reactions are a fraction slower than two minutes ago. Iskara's monsterification accelerates.
They think he can win... but he cannot.
But the tension does not dissipate. It builds. Each time Jacob lands a hit, each time he forces Iskara to retreat for even a half-second, the sound from the stands intensifies. They are not watching a man lose. They are watching a man fight.
The Sacrifice does not understand the distinction at the moment. Not from their perspective.
He is about to look away when his eyes catch movement outside the arena, in the trap zone.
The mandalas are still active. Golden light pulses across the stone, each array still draining the Champion who stands on it and feeding the power back to Jacob. The arrays are indiscriminate. They will activate on anything that touches them.
A figure is moving toward the trap zone.
The Sacrifice sees her before anyone else does.
Cecilia.
She is on the ground level, not in the stands. She has come down from the western stairs, most likely, moving along the wall of the arena toward the trap zone with her crippled gait.
Her one good eye is on the arena, on Jacob, on the fight. She is going toward the floor.
She is awkwardly stumbling toward the mandalas.
The Sacrifice's left hand finds his side.
His breathing does not change. His expression does not change.
But he watches Cecilia approach the traps.