Crowned in Black: Chapter 48

Chapter 48

"Got you!" Lucien shrieked with laughter as he twisted the sword, leaning on it. "Got you, got you, got you! Both of you, dead! Now who's the king now, 'Ororgael'? Me! IT’S ME!"

Lucien was struggling to drive the sword through Ororgael's ribs and into my chest. I felt the tip of the Godslayer scrape my armor, and then an awful, cold, humming sensation as the Void-charged blade just ate it away, the point tearing the padding beneath. But it was Ororgael who saved me. He got his arms under him, fighting the corruption even as parts of his body fritzed and began to open up, inverting as the sword ate him from the inside out.

[You are immune to corruption! Warning! The Void draws neeeeeeeeeee-]

"You... you traitorous... little... bitch!" Ororgael pushed off me, spinning around viciously on his feet and forcing Lucien to turn with him to keep his grip on the sword hilt. "I made you! I made this world!"

"You made me? YOU made me? Look at me." Lucien brayed that awful hyena laugh again. "I'm better than you! Bigger than you! Better than all of you! All YOU'VE done is whine about the Drachan for six fucking months. But I grew! I got stronger! And now... now I'm going to win! I'm going to win the whole motherfucking game!"

Ororgael lurched back toward me as I rolled to my feet, reaching for my face. I staggered back, just out of reach of him as his hand liquified and distended like a thick fluid, acting against gravity as it lunged for my throat. Dodging to the side, I called the Spear to hand and Jumped onto Lirenian, careful to watch my back. Violetta wasn’t casting at me, though. She was staring in shock.

"I MADE THIS WORLD!" Ororgael thrashed back around to try and face Lucien, his body and mind unraveling from the weapon he'd created. The Assassin spun with him, staying behind his body where he couldn’t reach. "YOU BELONG TO ME!"

Lucien was about to retort when something invisible hauled him off Ororgael's back and flung him into the air, ripping the Godslayer from his body. He squealed as he flew up, then let out a stifled shout of pain as Ororgael's Spirit Guardians flew at him, striking him as he fell and knocking him back up into the air with the force of their blows. Lucien tried to orient and slash at them, but one of the half-seen figures rushed past him in a spray of his own blood - and Lucien hit the floor screaming just before his hand and the Godslayer did, clutching the stump of his arm.

"I RULE HERE!" Ororgael roared, scrambling for the weapon on the floor.

Behind me, Hyperion launched himself off Karalti at Whisper, jaws gaping with bolts of jagged black lightning. The smaller, malformed white shrieked back at his bigger brother as the platinum dragon crashed into him with claws and jaws. Tempest let go of Karalti's neck to roar in alarm at his brothers as the pair of dragons tumbled to the floor. Karalti, suddenly able to move again, brought her muzzle up and blasted the blue dragon point blank with a plume of Ghost Fire. Tempest let out a hideous, squealing cry, backpedaling, but he took the full blast directly to the eyes and the thin skin of his muzzle and skull.

"Yeah! That's what you fucking get!"Karalti rolled onto her back and rabbit-kicked with both feet, slashing his already-bleeding belly and neck. Tempest's malformed arms were too short to reach his head, but he flailed anyway, trying to put out the fire charring his scales and searing his flesh.

"VIOLETTA! DON'T LLLLET THAT QUEE-eee-EN ESCAPE!" Ororgael roared, his voice glitching and garbling.

Violetta's face twisted into a mask of fear. She flashed a look at me, wild-eyed, then ran for her dragon. Tempest moaned as she blinked out of existence and rematerialized on his back. His head was still on fire as she urged him back, raising a hand, and teleported them both out of the room.

"Karalti!" Clutching the Spear, I ran for her as she struggled up to her feet to get away from the pair of brawling dragons. She was badly hurt, panting and hopping on one back leg. The other was twisted oddly at the knee, bleeding from half a dozen deep, raking cuts.

"Hector! Stay back! They'll crush you!"Karalti used her hands and her good leg to hop to the side. The edge of her muzzle peeled back from her teeth in a reptilian sneer as she whipped her head to the side and blasted both men with a long, roaring plume of sticky white fire. Neither Lucien and Ororgael were expecting it - the flames washed over them and clung, forcing them to separate.

"I. HATE. ALL OF YOU!!" Orogael bellowed, echoing Squalor's words to me from the week before. He whirled on me, face contorted with inhuman rage. He was dissolving, patches of him blurring, writhing, and pixelating. His eye sockets burned with black fire. "I HATE YOU ALL!"

Orogael’s Void Ray tore through the room like a plasma cannon, piercing Lirenian’s body and obliterating a long core through her, the floor, and the wall behind. But he was still too slow. A feeling of certainty settled into my gut as I bounded into the air, the Spear gripped in both hands and chained different abilities to vanish into the air and reappear at random. The beam ripped up the engravings on the ground. All around us, the magic circle sputtered, sparked, and then faltered.

"Die! Die die die!" Lucien darted in, his body splitting into three different shadow copies of himself around Ororgael. One of them grabbed the Godslayer off the floor with his remaining hand and drove it at Ororgael's chest. It slid through his solid bluesteel breastplate like butter, punching out his back. Ororgael sank to hands and knees, wheezing blood as his whole body began to distort and turn inside out.

"You... little cuck! You cannot... kill me in... any way that matters!" Ororgael spat, crawling forward a step as his arms simply... unraveled. His armor was folding into his flesh, combining into it as his skin peeled away and his face seemed to disassemble. "I... WILL...!"

"I just did, dickhead!" Lucien grinned mirthlessly at me, panting and clutching the sword - and ran away, bolting for the gate leading to Solnetsi's tomb.

"No!" Ororgael coughed, reaching out toward the giggling man's back. "NNARRRGH! HECTOR! STOP-stooooop HIM! Before he ki-EEEEE-lls the Goddess! If the Caul shatters, we're a-AHHH-ll dead!"

I had never heard Ororgael's voice like that before. Terrified. Panicked. And it suddenly dawned on me that this asshole had really, truly believed that he was the fucking Chosen One. The one to save the planet.

"You fucking idiot." I was already breaking into a run after Lucien, Karalti hobbling along behind. "You motherfucking dumbass piece of shit. This is what Squalor was pushing you towards all along. It's been playing you, this whole fucking time! "

"This… IIIs your fault!" Orogael wailed, writhing on the floor as his body broke and vanished in chunks. Voids of empty, corrupted space were opening around him. "There WAS a wHoLe pLLLaaaa-aan coded into this G-GAme to ssssAAave it! And YoU rUiNed it! YOU RUINED IT!"

"Shut up! SHUT UP!" Karalti roared, limping forward, and bellowed as she stormed up on Ororgael and planted one great three-toed foot down on his back. There was a crunch and a gurgle, just before Karalti arched her neck and spat a long plume of fire down at the twitching corpse and its spreading corruption. Behind us, Hyperion howled as his sanity broke, pouncing Whisper in an insane, furious onslaught.

There was no time to even process Ororgael's perma-death: my chest was heaving as I sprinted after Lucien, knowing I wasn't going to be able to catch up. He was almost at the door, head down, legs pumping. But then there was a garbled shriek from behind - a raw scream of terror picked up by a human throat. Lucien stumbled and fell, rolling across the ground and clutching at his neck. I looked back to see Hyperion's jaws clamped onto Whisper's throat. The bigger platinum dragon with the empty black eyes shook his squealing brother like a pitbull, lashing his head from side to side as jets of blue arterial blood pumped out into the air, filling it with the stench of mana.

"AHHHRGHHHH!" Lucien staggered, clutching his head and almost cutting himself with the Godslayer as his dragon's death throes seared across the Bond. "You piece of shit dragon... weak... WEAK...! You were always so fucking WEAK! You're all weak! I'll show you what strength is!"

Whisper rolled limply to the ground as Hyperion bellowed, then warped away into a pixelated nimbus. I Shadow Danced forward to close the distance between me and Lucien, but Lucien lashed out with the sword and an unseen wave of force - dark and chittering - blew me back off my feet. Lucien looked almost as surprised as I felt, but then turned and bolted. Before I could reach him, Lucien drove the Godslayer into the prismatic shield over the door. The thousand-year old barrier surged with pure white light, then exploded back in toward the reactor, sucking me off my feet. It pulled Lucien off his feet, too... but when the debris from the backblast cleared, there was no sign of him in the wreckage of the doors, or the familiar, technomagical passage ahead.

"Fuck, fuck fuckity FUCK." Panting, I scrambled up after him. "Karalti! Get ready to get us out of here!"

Solnetsi's roars were deafening, drowning all other sound as I raced up the passage. Her presence beat through the air like heat from a furnace. Whatever Zarya had done to alter the Dragon Gate to make it sustain the Diamond Pact, it had stripped the shielding that had contained most of Solnetsi's raw power within her reactor chamber and stasis tank. And judging by the raw, insane fury that curdled from her, I had a feeling she wasn't going to be reasonable and generous like Matir.

"Lucien! You fucking moron! Stop!" I shouted, trying - and mostly failing - to pierce the wall of sound. I was fast, but Lucien was just a little bit faster, and I saw his ass vanish through the double doors that led into the core as I reached the top of the sloping ramp. I got there just in time to see Lucien raise the Godslayer over the front of Solnetsi's tank. The crystal was glowing like a tiny sun: The Goddess of Light was unable to be seen as anything but a dim writhing shape through the glass, which split under the sword as easily as Ororgael's armor had done. Cracks crawled away from the site of impact, racing up the width and breadth of the huge tear-drop shaped tank. A gush of clear fluid poured out, then five, then twenty... and I heard Lucien's insane, high-pitched laughter briefly break through as Solnetsi's roars ebbed. For a horrified second, I thought he'd stabbed her, until there was a piercing, ear-drum popping screech, and the stasis tank simply collapsed in a tsunami of broken glass and thick fluid.

"FUCK!" I threw my hands up as the mess flooded the floor in a ten foot wave. I felt something big smash into me - Lucien, careening wildly and spinning away as I was carried back out the door and down the hall. Two hundred, three hundred... eight hundred HP later, I found my feet and staggered back toward the blinding light beaming through the door, wading through the tank fluid that was still knee high. I didn't know what would happen when Lucien stuck that sword into Solnetsi. I didn't want to know. All I knew is that I had to stop it.

Lucien was just getting to his feet when I reached the doorway. He spat at me, leering, and charged me with the sword. Reflexively, I smashed it away with the Spear and Shadow Danced back, but any fight we might have had was split apart by an enormous, Godzilla-sized foot crashing down between us - a foot that was barely organic. Solnetsi snarled down at us as her killing claw, taller than both of us put together, snapped down and sunk into the metal of the floor, tearing it like tissue paper. The great dragon tipped her body forward. Solnetsi was glowing - radiant, even angelic... and made entirely of knives. Her entire body was armored with razor-edged glowing plates. One wing was purely mechanical, a prosthetic in contrast to the pure white wing that slammed down behind me, the wing-claw gripping the floor for balance as she lurched forward.

"YOU. YOU HUMANS WHO REJOICED IN THE SLAVING OF MY DAUGHTERS." Solnetsi's voice tore through the room like a typhoon, so sharp it was physically painful to listen to her. Her helmed head swiveled down toward Lucien, who had frozen like a deer in the headlights, the Godslayer clutched in both white-knuckled hands.

"PERISH."