Book 5. Chapter 44: Old and new monsters
He stabbed me through the chest.
No witty lines or talk, nothing cryptic, no message or even a goodbye. Just stabbed me right at where my heart would be after he was done talking.
Admittedly, some people may argue I had that coming for a while now, sure.
My hold over the edges of his soul fractal instantly slipped, dissolving away with my conceptual self. As for how a mental image of myself being stabbed through the heart would make me lose focus on it, I’m not quite sure. It didn’t exist, didn’t have actual blood, and half of it was more a lucid dream.
Still, however it worked, I found myself a bodiless soul floating out in the open air the moment I couldn’t hold onto anything. Reality attacked my essences without a beat, instantly chewing away at the edges. Like a mounting pressure.
Wrath had explained artificial souls couldn’t withstand empty space like this, but organic ones could by willpower. It took practice and deliberate training, which I’d been doing halfway by constantly keeping tendrils connected to fractals outside the soul fractal. This was just keeping the whole soul fortified instead of spare tendrils. It felt easier the closer I was to my actual body, as if body and soul still had some kind of link even while separated.
I could tell by instinct where my body was for one.
It was further off, fighting a losing fight against Father, puppeteered by the old bat and one knight within, the one who’d been eliminated early on. Cathida was an old monster in her own right - skilled, clever, willing to throw every dirty attack in the book if needed - but she was up against Father, a monster among monsters. All she was doing was holding him at bay while he flew from wall to wall, striking at her defenses with each passby. Her only support was one occult ghost cast by the knight, desperately trying to keep the air around saturated with flames.
I stretched a hand out in the empty air, flowing through the void until I snatched a hold onto one of my armor’s spare fractals, then slinked inside like a hermit crab taking shelter. Tendrils reached out to my body, feeding warmth and life through them again.