章 2530: 113
Chapter 113: Pyrite 11-7
Pyrite 11.7
The moment hung. The scene of it skittered across my brain like a record scratch. A thing that shouldn't be, something that shouldn't exist, and it went against something so fundamental that it took me a second to wrap my mind around it.
I suppose some part of me, however withered and buried, had still thought of Alexandria as invincible. Even though I knew better, even though I'd had ample evidence to the contrary, even with Khepri's memories and my own experience, some part of me had clung to the image of Alexandria as a constant, something that existed and couldn't be destroyed. A fundamental law of reality.
Considering my powers, the strength and resilience of a fantasy wasn't an idea all that hard to grasp.
My body seemed to start moving again before my brain did. My aborted dive resumed, and I flew down as fast as I ever did. What I hoped to accomplish, even I wasn't certain of, just then. Alexandria's body was hardened, solidified, more like stone or steel than true human flesh, and it was what gave her both her incredible strength and her superhuman durability.
It was also what likely made it so difficult to heal her. Like her body resisted change of any kind, except for the essential functions of her brain.
I didn't know if that applied to Medea's Divine Words, too, but there was nothing stopping me from trying. Whatever our disagreements, whatever lingering sentiment still remained from Khepri's memories, even if she was tried and punished for the evils she'd committed in the name of human survival, I wanted her to be around to face them.
Even if a small part of me thought it was better for her to die a hero, her image unstained, than be punished as a villain.
Alexandria, however, had no intention of being killed that easily. Scion's hand was inside of her chest, his fingers must have been wrapped around her heart, and what that was like, I could barely imagine, and still, she reached back, took hold of his arm right at the elbow, and with nothing but the strength of her fingers, crushed it mercilessly. Blood and shattered bone erupted from the joint, a mangled mess that would have been crippling on any ordinary person —
But Scion was not an ordinary person. He didn't even flinch.
Alexandria wrenched the ruined joint and ripped the arm off there, whipping around to gouge out another chunk of flesh from Scion's body with her other hand, even as the one she'd torn remained lodged in her chest. From above, I took aim at Scion, because even if he could break free without any effort at all, the fraction of a second it took could make all the difference in a fight of this level.
"Ατλας!"
A dark glow surrounded Scion's body, and the hand he'd been about to swing around froze in place as he was locked down. It took only an instant more for him to shatter my spell again, but it was an instant that let Alexandria get an upper hand, and the very moment he was free, her fist ripped his jaw clean off his face.
And then Scion's hand, glowing gold, sunk into her torso and scooped away a chunk of her stomach.
I didn't try to interfere again. Maybe I would have, maybe I should have, but my brain had finally caught up with my instincts, and any thought of helping her further was abandoned. Instead, I swooped down behind her and picked up Eidolon, carrying him off and out of the way as she kept fighting, kept ripping into Scion, even as he ripped into her, as well, tearing away great hunks of her midsection. There was no rage, this time, not as there had been with Khepri. He dismantled her calmly, his face stony and silent.
"Alexandria!" Eidolon shouted, struggling weakly in my grip, and I ignored him and kept going.
It was already over. That was what had passed between Alexandria and I, I realized. She had long ago accepted her death as a possible outcome of the fight against Scion. What had passed between us was that her death was here, now, and that it would serve a purpose. It was up to me to see it through.
Bitch, I thought uncharitably. She was going to put this on my shoulders, too?
One more mess I had to clean up. I guess some of it was my fault, so I'd take that burden she left and keep going.
Nowhere was truly safe, but I carried him as safe a distance from the fight as I could and dropped him unceremoniously in a crevice in the Other's mounds of flesh. I didn't need to look back to know that Alexandria would be on her last legs, only moments from the inevitable end. It wasn't possible for me to say how essential any organ was to her, aside from her brain, but she'd only been a speedbump in Khepri's timeline, and that wouldn't change here and now.
If only it had been that easy, I found myself thinking again. But the fruitlessness of Alexandria's efforts seemed like an apt metaphor for the battle against Scion: sheer, brute force would only irritate him at best and do nothing at worst. Attacking head on with overwhelming might was pointless.
"What are you doing?" Eidolon demanded. "Alexandria is —"
"Dead, by now," I said coldly, and he choked on his next words. "If she isn't already, she will be shortly. She sacrificed her life to prolong yours."
It would be too generous to call the sharp intake of breath a gasp, but my words hit him like a blow to the stomach. I didn't have much time to do this, so there was no room to be delicate. That was fine; Medea didn't really do delicate, not as a modern person with modern sensibilities would understand it.
"Do you remember what I told you?" I asked. "Two years ago, you asked why I wanted nothing to do with you. This is why. You folded. You failed. Four words is all it took to kill the strongest man in the world."
Without anything else to work with, I had to do my best with his body language. This would have been so much easier if I could have just seen his damn face.
"You can't understand —"
Save me from that edgy teenage nonsense.
"I don't care," I cut across him. "If you really think it's true and you're responsible for the Endbringers, go ahead and kill yourself when this is all over. Or stay here and die like a scared child. I can't afford to babysit you, either way."
I lifted back up into the air, looming over him with Medea's cloak thrown wide.
"But if you happen to remember what it means to be Eidolon, the world's strongest hero," I said, "then pick yourself up and do what it is you were meant to do. The whole reason you were chosen to be a hero in the first place. Until then, I'll be the one to fight Scion."
I took back off, leaving him behind. The only way to know if I'd succeeded would be to wait for him to rejoin the fight, and I wasn't about to sit around on my hands until he got his shit together.
By the time I got back to the battle a short distance away, it was already over. Bits and pieces of Alexandria's flesh were strewn about, barely recognizable, more like chunks of a broken statue than a human being, and Scion held her head in one hand by her hair, staring down at it impassively.
Only her head. The rest of her lay below, mostly in parts no larger than a fistful.
What he was thinking, I couldn't guess. I hadn't the first idea what he saw in her face, if he saw anything at all, and if he was using some sort of Thinker power to read her history and what she'd done, why any of her evils, big or small, would mean anything to him at all.
And then, he snarled, took her head with both hands, and crushed it like an overripe grape.
As I came upon him, I let go of Medea, and my momentum carried me into an arcing plunge to land on a mound of flesh maybe twenty feet away, maybe thirty. Even as my feet touched down and the flesh beneath me jiggled, I was already reaching for my next hero.
Time to go on the offense. No more playing it safe.
Set. Install.
An instant later, I was tall, taller than usual, and clad in silvery armor over a black and gold undersuit. My hair pulled into my scalp until it formed a kind of messy, curly blond bob around my cheeks and forehead. A heavy green cloak settled over my shoulders, embroidered with golden patterns, and a much more vivid green sash was tied around my waist, made of silk. In one hand, I held a longsword, sister to two other famous blades.
I took in a breath through my nose, invigorated, as a smile bloomed unbidden on my face. For the first time in almost fifteen-hundred years, Sir Gawain stepped into the world.
And in this moment, he was unrivaled.
This battle had started in Nevada somewhere around 8:30 in the morning. That was almost noon in Brockton Bay, which was where my team and I were still based, even if I planned for us to eventually move. If we were having the fight there, then I'd have to rely on the Veil of Light to keep up Gawain's peak performance, and the amount of energy I'd be burning through to maintain that at the same time would almost triple. Gawain was one of my strongest, for certain, but he was also one of my most expensive.
But Numeral of the Saint activated from nine in the morning until noon and three in the afternoon until sunset, and we were on the Ivory Coast, five hours ahead of Brockton Bay. Even if it was noon there, it was only a little after five here.
What stood opposite of Scion now wasn't a mere Heroic Spirit, born again through my body to fight for mankind's future. What stood opposite of him was a Sun God, in all his resplendent glory.
For the next hour, at least.
I hefted Galatine in all its true glory, unfettered now by Excalibur's shadow. The edge gleamed with a light of its own, able to truly shine only now.
[With this blade, let us cleanse this great evil from the world.]
In that moment, as I kicked off of the mound of flesh beneath me, I'd never felt lighter, never felt stronger. The world raced around me in slow motion as my brain kicked into gear, and an eternity seemed to pass between my take off and my approaching Scion's floating figure — more than enough time to choose the angle of my blade, to perfect the swing and set it ablaze.
It was like cutting through wet paper. No, even that couldn't adequately capture the utter ease with which Galatine cleaved through Scion's body, the peerless sharpness of the edge as it took off his arm and split his torso in half. It couldn't begin to describe the damage done merely with the force behind my attack, the way he disintegrated away from the point of contact in much the same way he had my Thunder Feat, let alone my sword itself.
Even his bones might as well have been made of cardboard.
Scion had barely started to recoil by the time I landed and spun around. The remains of his arm, spinning off in discorporated chunks, were still falling, flung out like they'd been shot from a cannon.
Nothing remained on Galatine. Not even the tiniest fleck.
Scion turned even as his flesh filled back in. He zeroed in on me immediately, and his brow furrowed at my new form. He couldn't read me, and his Thinker powers wouldn't be returning workable answers. He might not even be able to make the connection between me, Medea, and Gawain.
"Do I have your attention, now?"
A beam of light blasted out from his body, no warning, no special poses, and as it raced towards me, I angled my sword, tip pointed out, and fed more power into Galatine's hilt. The pseudo-sun churned, circulated, and the blade glowed brilliantly from within.
I thrust, and the blade of the sword lengthened — no, the light within formed the shell of a larger blade, longer, extending out as a beam, a ray. It met Scion's head on, and the world shook as they destroyed each other, scattering light in every direction.
I had to be careful. Galatine was a city-destroying weapon at full might, and the length of the swing at full power could reach for miles. This sort of thing was fine, but the last thing I needed to do was hit the walls or the ceiling and bring the entire place down on my head.
The flesh beneath me exploded as I kicked off again, the air howling my passing. Scion tried to move, but he was too slow, far too slow, and I cleaved through him again, using my momentum to spin around as I passed. Another swing, more power into Galatine, and a tongue of flame leapt from my blade, passing through him to burn the mountain of flesh below.
A beam of light met me as I landed, fired out as he calculated my trajectory, and I put Galatine between me and the beam. Against all sense and reason, my sword stopped it cold, and the beam splashed outwards around my body like water off an umbrella. The fingers that should have been worn down, the steel gauntlets that should have disintegrated, neither was even so much as scuffed.
Galatine glowed again, forming another shell of sunlight around it, and my counterattack lashed out, cleaving through him once more — to no avail at all, really.
But it meant he was finally focused fully on me.
My grip on my sword shifted, and I plunged the blade downwards into the mound of flesh I was standing on. The pseudo-sun churned, surged, exploding outwards, and every scrap of silvery flesh within twenty feet was instantly immolated.
Scion let out a shout and fired another beam my way, bigger and broader than before, but even now, he was still snail-like by comparison, and it was effortless to leap away and out of its path. This time, I didn't attack back at him; instead, I turned away and swung, sending another tongue of flame into the misshapen mass of the Other. It all burned just as easily as anything else did.
Barely had I landed than I leapt away again, dodging another blast that consumed and obliterated the spot I kicked off from, and Galatine glowed as I flung yet more fire into the Other's corpse, searing away another elephant-sized section of limbs and cancerous growth.
My sword swung into the path of the next beam as I blocked it, and through the heat haze of the flames that burned around us, I saw Scion, his image distorted, his face contorted into a rictus of fury that wavered and twisted as the fires grew. The smell of overcooked pork and something strange I couldn't identify was strong in the air.
Suddenly, he was in front of me, so close I could count the pores on his nose, hand wreathed in gold as he reached for me to rip me apart the way he had Alexandria.
Not so fast.
But as great a swordsman as he was, Gawain was no slouch at hand-to-hand either, and my free hand snapped up to grab his wrist. The follow-up twist and pull was more instinct than thought out, and Galatine, wedged between us, slid through his stomach like a hot knife through butter. Everything from his waist down fell away like so much refuse.
Scion didn't seem to care. He snarled, and his other hand rose, covered in the same light, as he swiped for my face.
He wasn't thinking straight, I thought as I spun him around and lopped off his arm. He was reacting, getting personal, trying to use brute force to bring me down. It was sloppy and uncreative, too basic to even be called a proper tactic, and that meant that I was pushing him back into the sort of mindset I needed him in for the final blow.
Well, not quite. Anger wasn't where I needed him to be, but it was a lot closer than him calmly dismantling Alexandria or picking the right words to destroy Eidolon.
I leapt away, even as Scion's wounds bubbled and his missing parts reformed, angling myself and winding my arm back for a swing. The glow beneath Galatine grew brighter again, forming a thick shell of light around the blade, and when I swung, that shell grew and extended, and it carved straight through Scion, reached down to the floor below, and gouged a line so deep that it bit into the ground beneath the Other's flesh.
A beam of light lashed out at me, then another, and another, rapid fire one after the other, fast enough that any normal person wouldn't have been able to dodge. I parried them with an ease that almost surprised even me, scattering motes of golden light around me that ate away the Other's skin where they landed.
My feet came down on another mound, and something more like instinct than intent shifted my stance to accommodate the awkward shape and consistency of the grey flesh under me, even as I gripped Galatine with both hands and angled it tip-first in Scion's direction.
"Ha!"
The blade stabbed forwards, and the glow extended as a ray, piercing through Scion's reforming body, and then I swept it down and seared away yet more of the Other beneath him. Scion's face was twisted in rage, and even as only a head and a pair of shoulders, he gave a furious shout that seemed to shake the entire building.
And still, despite all of this damage, there was so much more of the Other left. It was like chipping away at a mountain with a pickaxe.
Scion jetted towards me as his body kept reforming, eyes wide and mouth drawn into a snarl —
And then he and I were both thrown away by an explosion of green light.
The thing that probably shocked me the most was that it actually hurt. Not badly, not seriously, but the force of it whipped at my exposed skin like a particularly harsh wind, and it rattled the gleaming metal of my armor. It wasn't enough to stop me from correcting my trajectory and landing on my feet, and I couldn't even describe it as having the wind knocked out of me.
But considering exactly how strong Gawain was like this, that attack would probably have obliterated Medea in one go.
Movement through the flames and the smoke caught my eye, and I looked over as they parted like a pair of curtains for a figure cloaked in green. They swirled around him, always keeping a distance of at least six feet on either side, as though they were afraid to touch him.
"You said I needed worthy opponents, Scion," Eidolon boomed. "You were right."
He held out his hands, and space distorted around them, twisting and spinning down to a pair of points at the center of his palms. His head tilted down until the glow of his mask gleamed menacingly out from underneath his hood.
"And I just found one."
Scion's response was to shoot a beam of light at him, even as his body continued to reform and bubble out from the scraps left of him. There was no Medea now to throw up barriers — but they weren't strictly necessary. I kicked off of the mound beneath me and interposed myself between the beam and Eidolon, and a single swipe of my sword sent the beam scattering in defiance of the laws of physics.
A strange thing to be concerned about, I realized. The laws of physics had stopped being relevant when I returned a girl's arm to her without needing any spare mass. You could have argued that they stopped being relevant the moment Scion and his counterpart landed on some far flung alternate Earth.
Eidolon took advantage of the opening and threw another ball of distorted space in Scion's direction, and then another after it. Scion concentrated a pair of blasts that unraveled them, and it opened him up enough for me to stab him once more with Galatine's elongated blade, sweeping down to cut away yet more of the Other's flesh.
And with a gesture, Scion was consumed by another flash of green light, echoing out in concentric circles.
Eidolon floated down next to me, and in the brief reprieve, he said, "You were right." He corrected himself. "Alexandria was right. You were both right. This is where I need to be. This is what I need to be doing. This is why I'm here. Everything else can wait until later. I am Eidolon, the strongest man in the world. I won't be done in by doubt, here and now."
You almost were, I didn't say. Instead, I let a little bit of Gawain through and told him, "Then I will be glad to have you fight alongside me." I nodded in Scion's direction. "We need to throw him further off balance. Keep attacking the Other's corpse, but avoid the body that Contessa stabbed. I have a plan for that."
For an instant, it looked like he would protest, and then he nodded. "Understood."
He lifted his hands again, and another gesture erased yet more flesh. Scion, fully reformed, jetted through the smoke and flames towards us, glowing so brightly it almost hurt to look at. Eidolon gestured in his direction, but the blast of green washed over him without effect, even as the aftershocks and splash damage flowed down to the mounds of gray flesh below.
Eidolon threw another ball of distorted space. Scion dismantled it without pause and kept coming.
So I leapt forward, and at several times the speed of sound, my knee collided with Scion's face. His head exploded in a shower of viscera, but it only slowed him for the scant instant it took for him to reform it, and then he kept going, ripping apart every attack Eidolon threw at him.
A second passed. My feet contacted gelatinous flesh, and it burst like an overfull balloon as I kicked back off in the direction I just left. The tip of my sword found Scion's back, power surged through the hilt, the pseudo-sun churned.
And Scion's body was instantly immolated.
Eidolon took the moment to gain some distance, and almost as an afterthought, he turned away long enough to fling another ball of distorted space, not at Scion, but at the Other's corpse below. This one, more densely packed, larger, more powerful, sucked in an absolutely enormous amount of gray flesh, grinding it, ripping it, pulling it apart with the sheer weight of its gravitational forces, dragging yet more flesh in from the alternate worlds where the rest of the corpse sat. By the time it petered out, it had to have consumed a mansion's worth of material, between the stuff that sat here and the stuff that sat on other Earths, and chewed it all up into its composite atoms, leaving nothing behind but empty space.
Scion screamed. Raw, agonized, furious, like a child who had just watched his dog get run over in the street, and it seemed to shake the very foundations of the world beneath our feet. The glow beneath his skin seemed to grow ever brighter with every second, as though it got more intense the more his emotions grew out of control.
I wasted no time, and my feet carried me to where I needed to go with a surety and grace that only Atalanta had yet outmatched. A single swipe of Galatine separated the corpse from the rest of the bulging mass, and it was featherlight in my grip as I hefted it over my shoulder and carried it to the best vantage point I could find.
Only one shot at this. Had to make it count.
Gawain disapproved, I could feel it echoing back to me from the section of my mind where his consciousness was parked. He thought it dishonorable and craven, but he didn't reject me for it, didn't pull his powers back, because he must have understood the direness of the situation and the fundamentally inhuman nature of our enemy.
As Scion advanced on Eidolon, I came up from the side, and I lifted the corpse up, stabbed Galatine into the mound beneath me so I could use both hands, took aim, and I threw it towards him. The limbs trailed behind as it soared through the air, and its great curtain of hair streamed like a cape, narrowing as the wind pulled it closer together near its bottom.
It smacked Scion in the chest, and he flinched, aborting his attack to catch the body. There was a single instant of confusion, and then he realized what he held in his hands and his expression twisted into some Frankenstein mixture of despair, horror, and longing. He looked as though he didn't know whether he wanted to cradle the body or throw it away, like he couldn't make up his mind to hug it or destroy it. He just sort of froze, the head and its long curtain of hair lolling against his shoulder, the limbs hanging limply from his grip, the legs dangling beneath his.
And then my sword sank through its back and into his chest. I met his shocked face with a grim smile, twisted my grip as I fed power into the pseudo-sun contained inside of Galatine's hilt. The blade glowed, and then ignited.
"Burn."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
NOTES
Two week vacation, starting now.
Gawain finally gets a moment to shine. I wasn't sure I was ever going to have the chance to bring him out, but this was as good a spot as any, so here we go.
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