Chapter 131: Trial
The voice and this language. The impossibility of understanding something I’ve never learned.
I can’t deal with it now. I file it. Later.
Right now: Tide Turtarex.
A straight fight is death. Even with every upgrade I just bolted onto myself, charging a Rank B head-on is suicide. A single Turtarex can tear through three thousand of Boris’s low-rank soldiers and walk out breathing.
Four low-rankers against a fully healed one is math that doesn’t close.
I scan the hall. The massive stone pillars lining both sides are thick enough to hide three people behind each one.
Cover. That’s what we have.
"Everyone behind a pillar. NOW!"
I give the order before the Turtarex makes its first move.
I take the pillar closest to it. I want its attention on me.
Oliver ducks behind the next one over. Rhayne pulls Lola toward the far end of the hall.
Good. Maximum distance.
"Lola, fire at will! We have cover!"
My voice echoes hard off the marble and the dome. The Turtarex screams in response—reactive to the sound, its biological cannons hissing and telescoping out from the shell ridges.
Lola steps out from behind her pillar. Lullaby is already on her shoulder. She drops to one knee and fires.
"TAKE COVER!" I bark.
Lullaby unleashes a flash of blinding light, followed by a hypersonic hum that vanishes in an instant—so fast I can only track the sound.
WHUMP!
K-TANG!
Z-THOOOOM!
The sanctuary ceiling erupts in flames.
"It ricocheted... damn it."
The shot hit the Turtarex dead center, but the round struck the thick curved shell and deflected upward, punching into the ceiling in a cascade of sparks and burning stone.
"Reloading... Annoying..." she says, taking the cover again.
Her voice is tactical. Flat, clipped, stripped of every childish inflection.
I’ve never heard her sound like that before.
The Turtarex fires back. A wad of acid arcs across the hall and hits Lola’s pillar. The stone where it lands dissolves into a plastic, gummy mass, steaming and dripping.
A voice cuts through the noise. One syllable. Wrong shape. Wrong owner.
"DEN!"
Nobody calls me that except my mother. The exact syllable, the exact pitch. A jolt of wrongness makes me turn.
Rhayne.
She called me Den. Nobody calls me that except my mother. And yet the sound that came out of Rhayne’s mouth hit the same frequency, the same weight.
She’s running toward me with the Cloaked Cape active, shifting colors against the marble. The Black Sea Embrace is already in her hand—the ribbon spinning in a fast, tight orbit around her wrist. The metallic fabric cuts the air with a sound that has edges.
I didn’t know she could move it that fast.
The Turtarex hears it too. Turns toward her with its pupils dilating. And then—something strange. The massive head tilts. The aggression in its posture softens. Its eyes track the spinning ribbon, unfocused, almost drowsy.
The Void Dancer effect. Some seconds of enchantment. She’s been spinning the ribbon since she left cover—counting in her head, keeping the tip alive.
But not for long. The cannons are already reactivating. Aimed at Rhayne.
"Shit—watch out!"
The Turtarex fires.
Rhayne launches forward into a tight front flip, legs tucked, body rotating fast and clean—two full rotations—and lands on her feet beside me without a stumble. The acid wad sails through the space she vacated and eats a hole in the floor behind us.
There’s so much about my squad I don’t know that nothing surprises me anymore.
She reaches up and touches my face and smiles.
I don’t understand the smile. It isn’t relief. It isn’t flirtation. What I read suggests that it is something closer to fun.
[Void Link — Activated]
"Follow me," she says. Still smiling.
What is this lunatic trying to do?
Rhayne breaks cover and runs straight at the Turtarex. My heart fires like I’m watching family sprint toward a cliff.
"No!" I shout, but it’s useless.
My legs are already moving. Going after her.
The Turtarex swings its head, trying to catch Rhayne with the fossilized edge of its snout. She bends backward at the waist—deep, impossibly deep—and slides on her knees across the polished marble, her spine nearly flat against the floor. She passes directly underneath the beast’s belly and stops.
One stomp and she’s gone.
The ribbon lashes upward. Three fast strikes against the soft underside. Shallow cuts—not lethal, but bleeding. The metallic edge opens the hide in clean red lines.
Each hit triggers the Sovereign’s Debt passive—I can see the beast’s movements slow by a fraction after each contact, its massive limbs dragging against invisible weight.
The Turtarex tries to stomp. Once. Twice. Three times. Each impact cracks the marble where Rhayne was a quarter second before. She rolls out from behind the beast, dodging the whip of its tail by inches. Blood from the belly cuts drips onto the white marble in dark drops.
Ah. I get it. Under the belly, it can’t fire. And the Debt is stacking.
Rhayne’s plan. She had one before I did. That’s a first.
I draw Eventide and activate [Memory of Lightwaves].
"All in, then."
My eyes burn gold. Yellow vapor trails from the corners. Every motion the Turtarex makes arrives in separate frames.
A shape passes on my left. Moving fast. Oliver. He hasn’t waited for orders—he’s reading the gap Rhayne created and committing to it. Motorhead already humming.
I jump and trigger my limit of [Pressure Step] three times in sequence—each burst launching me higher.
Twelve feet into the air.
The Horizon armor amplifies everything—my legs push harder, my body rises faster, the air parts cleaner. For half a second I feel what Stats Rank C is supposed to feel like, and it’s terrifying how good it is.
I bring Eventide above my head. Every ounce of force I can stack into one descending strike.
The Turtarex looks up.
Its eyes lock onto mine.
Time crystallizes.
I’m airborne, blade raised, committed to a trajectory I can’t change. And the massive snapping jaws are opening beneath me.
Wide.
Wider.
The inside of the mouth is dark and wet and lined with rows of flat crushing teeth.
There is no stroke I can make that gets me out of this.