Chapter 44: Brink of the Verdant Abyss
Clayton had thought this was a marathon, a chess game he could drag out in the Forgotten Atlanta Expanse’s tangled ruins.
Well, he’d been wrong.
The Ironblood Remnants didn’t play long games. They burned the board.
He’d taken one of their pawns; a pinned soldier, roots blooming through his chest in the alley’s choke point. Three Initiate Ember grunts and their Luminous Seed leader, Commander Drayce, remained.
Clayton crouched behind a fossilized tram, his Mycoglyph gauntlet pulsing, Regalia of the Verdant Warden in bow form, its bow string taut.
His shoulder burned from a plasma graze, and his Heartseed Core throbbed under the Genesis Suppressors’ relentless pulses.
The Expanse’s roots, alive with Sovereign Bloom, whispered beneath him, but they were sluggish, weakened by the Ironblood’s tech.
"Thought you’d chase me all day, huh?" He muttered, his dark humor a thin shield against the rising soul pressure. "Guess you’re in a rush to die".
He’d baited them deeper, vines coiling through the alley’s crumbled walls, ready to trap the grunts; Rhea, the rookie, and a third soldier.
But Drayce wasn’t biting.
The leader’s black allow exosuit glinted, his chest-mounted core glowing with scavenged Genesis energy, not an Aspect. The Ironblood despised the Genesis Protocols, the cosmic code that birthed Clayton’s Verdant Tyranny.