The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (11 page)

Once the skull piece was lodged nearly flush within the gray matter, Jav placed his right palm upon the protruding edge and, using AI, gave it an impossibly hard and sudden shove, sending it down through the rest of the brain, the beast’s throat, and into the chest cavity. As the projectile ripped downwards, the lower, blue half of the dragon undulated strangely and separated from the upper white portion just in time to escape the triangle of bone, which shot out through the white abdomen. The bone missile continued down in a streak to shatter on the stony plates of the ground below. The pierced corpse of the white dragon followed, but Jav remained in the air, as if he could not be bothered by gravity.

He and the blue dragon glared at one another, but Jav was faster to move. This time the Kaiser Kick was not thwarted. The great blue head exploded as Jav impacted into it with the combined power of two separate sets of AI calculations backed by his own prodigious physical strength. The shock to the head was catastrophic, but the beast’s body was rocked only slightly by the attack and presently dropped to the ground, where it hit, not far from where the white one had, with a suite of nauseating sounds.

Jav took a moment to regard the other skirmishes. He could see that Nils was moving through strategies with Peshil and was not overly concerned—Nils would come through. What did concern him, though, was the unchecked progress made by the black dragon, which was on the verge of bypassing the courtyard wall. The other white dragon, too, had somehow passed Hilene and was close behind the black one, coming up on Gran Mal. He watched Gran Lej attempting unsuccessfully to wrestle the black dragon to the ground, the contest ending in moments when the black dragon struck with a fore claw, driving Gran Lej skidding and splintering upon the ground.

“Icsain! Where are your Relic Cords?” Jav cried through his Artifact.

“The brute appears to be immune.” Icsain replied.

“It’s true, General Holson,” Hilene added. “The black one is solid iron, through and through. Flesh, organs, bone: everything is iron.”

“And the white one?”

There was the slightest pause before Hilene responded. “The white one is the exact opposite, sir: no substance.”

“Suggestions? Anyone?”

“Maybe
we
can add to the mix,” Vays replied.

Jav glanced to the smoking hulk of Gran Mal. Having emerged from a port upon the great turtle-shell back, near Gran Mal’s hind quarters, Vays stood, all angular and silver, supporting Brin Karvasti. Brin’s eyes shone a brilliant yellow and the Dharma Engine appeared at her back, petals of what looked like fine filigreed black steel blossoming from between her shoulder blades.

“Stop!” Brin cried out after the white cloud of mist. The mist dragon stopped and took on the semblance of solidity, though it continued to waver. The dragon struggled against unseen bonds for a moment before its limbs spread out with sudden force to form a giant X as it were crucified upon Brin’s Dharma Clock.

Vays stepped away from Brin and looked towards Jav. “Should I try the black one?”

“If Brin’s got the white one, let me try the black one,” Jav said. “You go see if you can help Nils finish off Peshil.”

Vays nodded and leapt from Gran Mal, gripping with his right hand the horn of his helmet—the hilt of his Titan Saber—which he pulled free. He darted towards the ground beneath the sky occupied by Nils and Peshil.

Jav began calculations for another Kaiser Kick, executing them in seconds to strike the back of the black dragon’s head. The strike pealed with a deafening note, staggering the iron monstrosity for the first time and sending it face first to the ground.

“He
is
solid,” Jav said, marveling, “but I’ve got just the thing.” He moved through the air towards the fallen dragon, holding his hands low, to his right, palms facing each other, fingers bent into stiff claws.

In the midst of his flitting, Gim Peshil noted that something had happened to Sera Fontessa. Pausing only for an instant to take in her predicament—that she was somehow pinned to the air upon the spokes of a giant wheel—was all the time that Nils Porta needed to act. For in that instant, Peshil became solid and Nils’s cloud of gnats stripped him bare of his skin, exposing the bright red flesh beneath. Though his eyes bugged from their sockets and his blood splashed to the ground, Peshil hardly seemed to notice, so quickly did he take on the aspect of light, flashing to Sera Fontessa’s aid.

“I’ve got him, Nils!” Vays cried.

Jav was not alone in the development his martial prowess over the years. Vays had perfected his techniques—which past masters had sometimes needed a full minute to effect—making them nearly instantaneous. So even as Peshil was transforming into light, Vays was leaping into the air, his sword supported by both hands sweeping from overhead as he cried out, “Union Blade!”

Reality itself seemed to be drawn into the Single Element Ghost Sword, Peshil’s light, too, substantiating the blade so that it was
all
that was real.

Vays passed through Peshil and Peshil’s light failed utterly. In two great halves, skinless, bloody and separating according to the angle of the Titan Saber’s edge, Peshil arced to the ground, dead.

Nils, already making his way back to the Palace, reformed the Porta Fighter and swooped low to accompany his squad leader. As Vays rose to his feet from his landing place he turned towards the Palace but before he could take a step, he froze in place, a perfect statue of not silver but gold.

“Commander Vays?” Nils called as he neared, but then he too became an inert mass of solid gold, his momentum keeping him aloft briefly until he crashed to the ground.

As Jav passed over Gran Mal on his way to the black dragon he beheld a very disturbing sight. Below him, Brin Karvasti flashed and in her place there gleamed a perfect likeness in immaculate gold. The Dharma Clock disappeared, freeing the white dragon from its punishment. Jav looked further and knew that the gold of Gran Mal was not its own.

“Scanlan?” he called through his Artifact, but got no response. Brin, he knew would be the same. He turned in his place in the air and saw that Gran Mid was still and shining gold. Gran Pham and Raus’s lower half, too, were a single, fused statue.

Jav saw the new golden dragon approaching, but continued his progress, now backwards and at a greater pace, towards the black dragon. “Hilene! See what you can do with this new one! Icsain, you, too!”

Hilene responded in the affirmative, but as Icsain started to comply in silence, he and Gran Lej were turned to a mass of solid gold. Hilene had seen what appeared to be a liquid stream of molten gold shoot from between the new dragon’s eyes, transforming all that it touched to the heavy, lustrous metal. Before she could get close enough to attack, that stream was aimed her way. Because of her psychic facility, she had gotten over her fears of receiving physical pain when still a small child. This lack of fear had done much to condition her natural reflexes, which were already superb and further honed by her practice of the Darkness Piercing Spear Hand. But hers were not the reflexes of normal human beings, or even those of other F-Gene fighters. She had trained tirelessly to ignore physical threats, so she did not flinch when the liquid beam came her way, and so what happened on impact startled her all the more. As the beam—for that is in fact what it was, its appearance alone was that of a liquid—penetrated her form, it triggered the Attenuated Splitter, overriding her will or ignoring it altogether. This unintentional splitting was painful in a way that she had never experienced and had difficulty explaining. It was also very disorienting. As she recombined, she found herself again being fragmented, and the process repeated itself three more times until she drifted senseless but still intangible towards the ground.

Jav had turned again towards the black dragon and now landed upon its broad head, taking two steps before leaping forward, turning again and jamming the Kaiser Claw into its right eye socket as he descended. The iron eyeball was huge and Jav’s arms were spread as wide as was possible while still enabling him to grip it. Though worry had affected him somewhat, he’d been preparing the calculations for the Kaiser Claw all along the way so the solid metal eye quickly buckled and imploded in punctuated steps so that it was reduced eventually to nothing.

Sustained golden light streamed over Jav’s shoulder, nearly missing both him and the black dragon, but the growing light at his back didn’t bode well. He shot a glance behind him and saw that the Root Palace largely was, and was still becoming, a treasure of gold, the likes of which no god had ever witnessed or had the hopes to possess. The metallic condition had overwhelmed the Palace proper and the courtyard walls and was still spreading upwards as the beam was finally exhausted. A great iron claw rose up and swatted him then, sending him to the stony ground. The force of the blow and the impact upon the ground dazed him. He looked up and saw the black dragon cover its right empty eye socket with the same claw it used to strike him as it turned to retreat from the Palace.

“Toth Talpas!” Jav heard it speak for the first time. “You are late.”

“But most welcome, Kels Ansrath, am I not?” the other replied.

“You are. Come, Sera Fontessa. Toth Talpas has done what the lot of us could not. Let us return home and nurse our wounds.”

“There is one more that yet moves,” Toth Talpas said, fixing his gaze on Jav as he started to sit up. The golden beam flashed and Jav was dashed to smoke as the ground shone gold for several meters in every direction of the impact point.

Jav stepped away from his hiding place and watched as the three dragons flew off. He rose up into the air and tracked them with his vision. It didn’t matter how far they went, and the curvature of the planet offered no obstacle to his sight when it was supplemented by AI. After a fashion, Hilene rose up to join him, but remained silent, knowing what he was about. For an hour he watched them until he was sure of their destination, another castle very similar to Peshil’s.

Together they looked on in further silence at the Root Palace. Its gold exterior reached several kilometers up and Jav had little hope that anyone inside had been spared the fate shared by all of their fellows.

“It would be a simple matter for me to check,” Hilene said, almost reading his mind.

He nodded. “Be careful, Hilene.”

Now she nodded in little self-conscious jerks. Still Dark, neither could see the others’s face, but she was sure he knew she was blushing furiously.

Her first impression was that this was like swimming, only the water was solid gold. Though she had the ability, she rarely descended into the ground or into other massive solid bodies. They posed no real danger to her, but the thought of getting lost inside and not knowing when she might be able to find her way out was a compelling deterrent. The gold felt odd, too, exerting some vague, constant pressure upon the Attenuated Splitter. She was able to maintain control and was in constant contact with Jav, though, which helped her stay calm.

She soon saw that while the gold beam did a fair job of joining contiguous objects, it didn’t fill large intervening spaces, so after passing through the initial outer husk of the Vine, she entered into lovely golden apartments occupied by perfect golden statues. She tried to take a straight line course in the unrealistic hope that the gold effect might have lessened as it reached the center of the Vine. From the outside it was obvious that the entirety of the Palace had been affected, so this was the
only
possible hope for survivors. And though perhaps unrealistic, she was not disappointed, for as she proceeded, she found herself in a vast open cylindrical space, twenty meters or so from wall to wall but rising up and continuing down interminably. She was certain that this was the hollow core of the Vine. The space was just that, though: space, empty. She refused to believe that everyone was lost and that the nearly eleven thousand year history of the Viscain Empire would end here on this barren rock.

“You have not searched in vain, Miss Tanser,” a familiar voice echoed from above. “Rise. The next obstacle you pass through will be the floor of the war room. I await your arrival.”

Hilene did as bid and rose up through the war room floor to see that neither the room nor its sole occupant had been turned to gold.

“Minister of Affairs Witchlan! You’re all right.”

“Yes,” he said, musingly. “We do appear to be all right in spite of what has befallen us. The hollow you found continues up nearly indefinitely. Twenty-seven kilometers up, you will find an aperture open to the outside. Please go at once to retrieve General Holson and then we can make our strategy, though I fear that, in the end, it will be rather simple and direct,” he said this last almost as an aside. “Go on now. Hurry.”

“Kill the gold dragon,” Jav repeated.

“Yes, I know it’s overly simple,” Witchlan said dismissively, “but we believe that by doing so this metallic affliction will be lifted.”

Jav, no longer Dark, pursed his lips and nodded. “As a matter of course, we’ll kill the dragons. I can only hope that your optimism is borne out. What makes you think that the effects will be reversed, though?”

“Call it a hunch, Mr. Holson,” Witchlan said, refusing to call it instead Salton Stoakes. “And
reverse
isn’t quite right. I believe all that the gold dragon has done requires an effort of will to maintain. I believe that a transformed volume of this order may be heretofore unknown to it and that it may soon tax the creature’s mind. Of course it is speculation, and I charge the two of you with confirming the truth of it.”

And it
was
speculation. When the Emperor had debriefed Salton Stoakes—who was himself a fine statue of gold at this moment—Stoakes had told him how one of the dragons had temporarily stolen his Artifact. Had the theft been clean and permanent, Stoakes would have died a messy death upon separation, but he had not. The Emperor could only hope now that the effects of the gold dragon’s abilities were similar, that they were, though perhaps long-lasting, or even without actual limits, not permanent.