BOOK 11: CHAPTER 42: JUSTICE

42 – Justice

As Victor stood, his body engorged with rage and null frost, the cobbles sank under his prodigious weight. If he hadn’t been filled with cold fury, focused on destroying the foe before him, he might have been concerned for the street and buildings nearby. He might have worried about the people who might yet be within them. As for the yards and lanes, they were clear—people had fled after his aura clash with the Warlord. If they hadn’t, then Thoargh’s lightning display surely got them moving.

Now, Victor stood, and bitter cold radiated off him, freezing the ground solid and halting the shifting of the cobbles. An apple tree growing in the lot beside the general store froze, its leaves falling to shatter on the ground. The Warlord watched with fiery eyes as Victor stood, utterly whole and now gigantic and bearing the weight of a glacier’s wrath. He leveled his fiery sword at him and screamed. A torrent of flaming Energy poured out of the sword, streaming toward Victor in a beam of heat that would have turned sand to glass.

Victor held up one enormous palm and caught the beam there, watching with cold amusement as his frigid flesh absorbed it. With a grunt, he stepped forward, pushing into the beam, and where he caught it in his hand, a brilliant display of sparks and smoke made the sun seem dim by comparison. As Victor closed the distance with Thoargh, the sparking blaze in his palm grew brighter and more violent, and huge globules of plasma-like liquid fire exploded away in every direction, igniting the foliage along the street and, beyond it, the buildings themselves.

Distantly, Victor was aware of the destruction, and part of him cared. Part of him wanted to stop what he was doing and put out the flames. It was a small, quiet voice, though. The majority of his consciousness was laser-focused on Thoargh. He wanted to rip him limb from limb, and everything else was just noise.

Somehow, the Warlord had grown to titanic proportions. He was tall, perhaps as tall as Victor, but his mass didn’t stack up. Victor exposed that fact by knocking aside the Warlord’s blazing sword and snaking out a gigantic hand, gripping the metal edge of the Warlord’s breastplate, and yanking with all his might. He pulled the one-winged giant off his feet and, always one to carry through, hurled his enemy over his shoulder.

The Warlord roared in surprise, and Victor had a feeling that if he weren’t so gigantic, the sound would have been almost amusing. Sadly, Victor’s fury was thoughtless, and he smashed his enemy into the tavern, shattering the front stoop, ripping away bricks, and knocking half the roof off. Thoargh carried on, tumbling past the building to crash into the high berm that separated the road from the slope leading down to the beach. The Warlord tumbled, digging a huge trough through the grassy, sandy soil there.

Victor leaped after him, his every desire focused on driving his fists into Thoargh’s flesh and feeling the crunch of the bones beneath. The Warlord surged with Energy, though, and he moved, almost faster than Victor’s eyes could track. Almost. Victor saw enough for his cold, calculating mind to know that he was too slow. If he wanted to enact his frozen rage, he’d need to move faster. In a blink, he built the pattern for Velocity Mantle, and then his ponderous movements surged with intensity and speed.

Thoargh hacked his sword, the blow so fast that observers would have seen naught but a flash of light. Victor knocked the blow aside with his forearm. One might have thought the great fiery blade would have carved away his flesh, perhaps even biting into the bone. The edge skittered off, though, making an almost metallic sound. Thoargh’s eyes widened when he saw the black scales lining Victor’s flesh.

Cruel amusement twisted Victor’s lips as he pounded a gigantic fist into Thoargh’s dumbstruck face. He felt the flesh split, and the bones start to give under the pressure of his knuckles, but then the impact threw Thoargh back, saving him from further punishment. Somehow, the Warlord caught himself, sliding down the slope toward the beach with his one wing extended for balance. Victor dove at him, but Thoargh twitched at the last second, and his sword’s angular tip found Victor’s stomach.

Reflexively, Victor shifted his flesh, pouring the potential of his primordial titan blood into more scales, and they appeared, black and gleaming, to catch the edge of Thoargh’s sword and slow it to a stop. Only a few inches were buried in Victor’s guts, and he stepped back, slapping the weapon away as his wound healed. He didn’t think Thoargh could kill him with that sword; his flesh would heal too quickly. Even so, that didn’t mean he liked being sliced and stabbed. Besides, it was worth making those scales to see Thoargh’s eyes bug out in consternation.

“You’ve learned much, boy.”

Victor snorted, but it was a disdainful sound, and his rumbling voice carried no amusement, only cold fury as he said, “You sought a dragon and found a titan. I’ll mark it on your grave.”

Thoargh’s eyes sparked with electricity, giving a hint of what was to come as he exploded in a violent, crackling ball of lightning. The field gripped Victor and threw him back, slamming him against the bank. Then, Thoargh swelled with a new power, something strange and shifting, as his fiery sword disappeared and a new one replaced it. It was a long, shimmering thing that reminded Victor of mercury, the way it gleamed and flowed almost like a liquid.

“You’re testing me, that’s certain.” Thoargh’s voice was wrong; he shouldn’t sound so smug, not after having his wing ripped off. Not after Victor shrugged off his attacks, one after another. Not after he’d been thrown about like a ragdoll. “What can you do, though, when the fates themselves are against you? What chance do you have?” Thoargh laughed, a big, stupid belly laugh that had Victor feeling positively outside himself. It was like a damn caricature of a villain.

Victor clambered to his feet, and then Thoargh lunged, faster than ever, and his shimmering sword darted out like a snake’s tongue. Victor coated his arm with scales and swiped, ready to knock it aside, but his arm met air, and the sword passed just beneath it, piercing the flesh of his pectoral. It slid into him like a toothpick into gelatin. When Thoargh yanked the blade back, he was chuckling. The wound was nothing to Victor, but even as he expected it to be closed and healed, he felt hot blood weeping from it, dribbling down his stomach, soaking the material of his half-ruined shirt and pants.

Victor stepped back, glancing at the puckered wound, and saw that it was coated, inside and out, with the silvery material of the Warlord’s sword. The blade had left a part of itself behind, interfering with Victor’s regeneration.

“Frustrating, no? When a blade isn’t where it ought to be? Like the fates took hold of my blade and moved it at the wrong second, hmm?”

Victor ignored the Warlord and stepped with his left leg, sweeping with his right. It was a brutally efficient move and quick as a stroke of lightning, but still, his foot met air, and the Warlord danced back, flicking out his long, liquid sword to slice Victor’s extended leg along the calf. The wound stung, but Victor hardly noticed. Something else had caught his attention: a surge of familiar-feeling Energy.

Subconsciously, he slapped at his pants pocket and felt the familiar lump there. The luck stone. That’s what the Energy had felt like. The Warlord was channeling something like it. Before he could do anything about it, Thoargh’s sword flicked out and pierced his stomach. Again, Victor knocked the sword away, but it sliced sideways on its way out, widening the wound and leaving more silvery metal in it, preventing Victor’s healing. Blood spattered the sand as he backed up.

The Warlord advanced, sword weaving like a serpent before him. “You’re certainly struggling to match my clever, lucky blade, aren’t you, boy?”

Victor reached into his pocket and gripped his charmed stone, clenching it as he lifted his fists before him. “You know what your problem is, Thoargh?”

“Pray tell, boy.” Again, the Warlord, grinning madly and baring his sharp fangs, darted forward, aiming to skewer Victor in the guts or maybe his groin. The stone flared hotly in Victor’s fist, and he swiped his hand down and out, knocking the blade aside with his scaled arm.

“You spend all your time looking for your next cheat, stealing from those better than yourself. You’ve never taken the time to actually just get good.”

Thoargh scowled at his sword, confusion written plainly on his face, then he lunged again, aiming for something more critical: Victor’s throat. Victor had no idea how long the magic in Dalla’s little stone would last. He could feel it blazing in his hand, and he worried the simple river stone would crumble from the Energy. With that in mind, he tried to put an end to Thoargh’s manipulation of fate. He stepped into the stab, lifting his left fist to knock the blade aside while, at the same time, driving his stone-clenching right fist with all his might at Thoargh’s ribs.

He could feel the stone burning in his fist, blazing with the Energy it was absorbing from Thoargh’s attempted manipulation of fate. He put everything into that punch, rotating at the hips, stepping through, and driving his arm forward like he was trying to hit something behind his enemy. As the quicksilver sword slid across his scales, Victor’s knuckles impacted the layered metal on the side of Thoargh’s breastplate.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

His blow was powerful enough to shift a mountain, with every ounce of that titanic force funneled down into the impact point of Victor’s knuckles. Thoargh’s armor split, tearing apart into shreds of enchanted metal. Then, Victor’s hard fist hit the Warlord’s ribs and they exploded inward, shards of bone shredding soft tissue and organs, and Victor buried his arm to the elbow in the Warlord’s guts.

Victor felt his fist sink deeply into its warm, moist sheath, and he held his trophy aloft, lifting his gigantic foe off the ground and dangling him in the air like a puppet. Thoargh’s mouth was agape, and he coughed out a globule of crimson sputum that fell to the sand to join the puddle drizzling down off Victor’s elbow. Victor shook his victim until the quicksilver sword fell from his fingers, then he stalked further onto the sand, his enormous strides devouring the slope in two steps.

He didn’t celebrate his perfect punch. He was still too angry. The cold fury of the glacier dominated his emotions, and Victor wasn’t done. Inhaling deeply, he looked at Thoargh’s listless face and then he exhaled, blasting the warlord with a cone of null frost. He didn’t let up until the warm, squishy insides of Thoargh’s torso grew stiff and cold. Then, Victor threw the man to the sand, letting his arm slide out, glistening crimson in the sunlight.

Seeing the Warlord’s blue flesh and the faint spark of life in his eyes cooled some of Victor’s fury, and he decided he could share his conquest. He reached into his spirit space and took hold of Lifedrinker’s haft, pulling her into the world. Her weight was comforting, and her voice doubly so, as she cried, “My heart-mate! My blood-king! Your grip is cold and angry! Who do we slay?”

“Feast,” Victor growled, lifting the enormous, incredibly dense axe high. That was when the Warlord disappeared. Scowling, Victor opened his inner eye and tried to see what he’d missed. A faint trail of nothingness led away from the sand at his feet. Victor glanced in the direction it seemed to drift, and there, a hundred yards down the beach, was the Warlord, struggling to his feet. “Void,” Victor growled. The Warlord had more tricks, it seemed—teleportation via void magic being one of them.

The cold, calculating wrath of the glacier had its advantages. Victor wasn’t bound by the impulsive fury of the volcano or the lustful rage of Berserk. With the logic of a thousand years of contemplation, Victor swung Lifedrinker and, at the same time, he cast Tactical Reposition. When he appeared behind the Warlord, Lifedrinker was already whistling through the air. Her blade bit, hitting Thoargh’s shoulder, cleaving halfway through his arm, and then the man disappeared again with another, larger surge of void-attuned Energy.

Victor scanned the area, but this time, he didn’t see him. Had he managed to teleport further afield—off the world, even? Victor knew Florent could travel between nearby worlds, but he also had a spatial affinity. What Victor needed, his cold, calculating mind decided, was something he no longer had: the Inevitable Huntsman. Having a mind untouched by any emotion other than the driving anger of eons-long rage had a way of bringing new clarity to a problem.

If he wanted the Huntsman, could he not recreate him? Justice was a thread he’d woven a hundred times from fear, rage, and inspiration. He still had fear and rage, and hadn’t he learned how to make inspiration out of hope? Like a machine, moving with the speed of thought, Victor let his mind do what it already had the knowledge for. He pulled a thread of hope from his Core, stripped it down to raw inspiration, and then rapidly wove it together with some fear and rage, just as he’d done back in the old days.

Perhaps if he’d been himself, he would have hesitated, hampered by his worries and fears. Gripped by Glacial Wrath, though, he was all decisive action. His quarry slipped from his grasp, and he simply couldn’t have that. The repercussions of having the Warlord loose now that he understood Victor’s weakness—his loved ones—were too severe. He simply had to chase him down, and the Huntsman was his best chance. So, with a weave of justice-attuned Energy, he cast Iron Berserk.

He did so calculatingly. When he’d first made the Inevitable Huntsman, he’d used the justice-attuned Energy in the pattern for Berserk. His glacial reasoning told him that Iron Berserk would lead to a stronger evolution of the spell he desired. As the cold fury fled his pathways and his mind struggled to return to its normal cognition, a new Energy suffused him. It was pale and bright and utterly merciless. Victor’s titanic form shrank in on itself, but only a bit; he was still a titan, just not one engorged by rage and the cold might of the glacier.

The world, full of vibrant colors one moment, though tinted by the rage of his previous form, shifted toward shades of gray. Superfluous details like the colors of flowers or the heat of the sun, or the sounds of the surf faded to the background. Other things, though, those that might lead him to his quarry, grew bright, glowing with the light of the Energy that lies inside all things. As the System threw messages across his field of view—

***Congratulations! You have learned the spell: Fate’s Harrier – Epic.***

***Fate’s Harrier – Epic: Prerequisite: affinity for justice-attuned Energy. When this spell is invoked, the caster assumes the form of Fate’s Harrier—an avatar of relentless pursuit shaped by will and guided by purpose. Upon activation, the caster designates a single target as the Chosen Quarry and will pursue that target with singular focus, drawn toward the quarry regardless of distance, obstacles, or concealment.

Fate’s Harrier will ignore concealment, illusion, and misdirection, sensing the true position of the Chosen Quarry. It will bypass terrain, barriers, and magical obstructions, phasing short distances to maintain pursuit, and teleporting across mid-range distances periodically, so long as Energy remains, to drastically close the gap.

The form is resistant to fear, charm, or distraction, and its movement is unerring—guided by threads of fate the caster alone can see. Energy Cost: Minimum 15,000. Cooldown: Very Long.***

—Victor scanned the ground at his feet, noting the swirl of strange, glowing black and red lines jumbled there. They were a jumbled mess, but he could see them drifting away, and when his gaze followed them toward the northern horizon, Victor knew that was where his quarry had fled. He started stalking that way, Lifedrinker held ready before him, his mind fixed on his foe.

He took three steps, then felt a surge building in his chest. He looked toward his Core, saw that it was still churning with Energy, though perhaps a quarter depleted. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t stop his instinct to catch his prey. The Energy crescendoed, the world shifted, and Victor found himself stalking through a field of tall blue-green grass dotted with crimson and purple flowers. A hard smile spread on his lips when he saw the Warlord before him, tilting a potion bottle to his mouth.

Like Victor, the man had lost some of his gigantic size, but he was still overlarge, swollen by the Energy of his earlier magic. Victor didn’t hesitate. Before the Warlord had even seen him, he recast Velocity Mantle and charged. He was faster than thought, but the Warlord had his haste-granting abilities, too. He was almost caught with his pants down, but some instinct warned him, and he dropped the half-consumed potion and summoned a sword into his hand.

The Warlord performed a perfect, textbook parry. His left leg fell back to brace the weight of the blow, and both his hands were on the greatsword’s hilt as he held the blade crossways before Lifedrinker’s falling edge. He might as well have tried to catch a falling mountain. Victor was absurdly strong, but Lifedrinker had a weight and momentum of her own, and she hungered. Her edge bit into Thoargh’s sword, carving deep into the fiery metal as her inevitable mass pushed the sword down.

Thoargh’s eyes widened with shock as his prodigious strength was made meaningless. His sword fell, bending his arms down and biting into his flesh as Lifedrinker followed it. Victor and Lifedrinker drove Thoargh’s blade into his shoulder, and her blade followed it in. The two blades cut into him in an X pattern, and, as Lifedrinker sank several inches in, Thoargh surged with Energy and disappeared again.

Victor growled, scanning the air for the threads that bound his quarry to him. There they were, drifting away to the north. Victor hefted Lifedrinker and started jogging. Energy built up again, and he welcomed it. When it reached a peak, the world shifted, and he found himself charging up the trail toward his villa, the beach behind him.

He saw Thoargh slip through the garden gate, and Victor’s heart began to race. The bastard was going for his loved ones. The ground shifted and blurred, his magical movement speeding him toward his quarry. He passed through the gate without opening it, and then he saw Thoargh, blade still in his shoulder.

His aura was on full display, and Efanie was before him, her back to the fountain, trying to stand against it. “Stay!” Thoargh coughed at Victor, ripping his sword out of his shoulder and lunging close to Efanie. “I’ll kill her, boy. I’ll kill her before you can—”

Thoargh’s eyes widened as Efanie disappeared and Victor suddenly stood in her place, already swinging Lifedrinker in a downward chop. She screamed through the air, too fast, too heavy, too sharp, and too furious for Thoargh to hope for anything other than a quick death. In less than a second, faster than an impulse could go from Thoargh’s eyes to his brain and then down to his hands, Lifedrinker split the Warlord’s other shoulder and buried herself near his hip. He collapsed to his knees, his insides splattering the cobbles around him. Victor held him there, hands on Lifedrinker’s haft.

He was still himself, but dispassionate, concerned with nothing more than bringing his quarry to inevitable justice. He didn’t have to ask himself what that looked like; this creature was a criminal of the worst kind, and nothing short of death would do to satisfy the hungry Energy flowing through Victor’s pathways. That said, a small part of him heard the wry humor in Efanie’s voice and managed to twist a corner of his mouth into a grin as the woman said, “He should have learned that a hostage isn’t a good plan where you’re concerned.”

Victor pushed the Warlord so he fell onto his back. He was yet alive, though barely so. Lifedrinker had a rainbow of colorful Energy veins flowing through her dark, glossy metal. She was draining him so rapidly that Victor didn’t fear his quarry escaping; the man couldn’t even speak. It didn’t matter, in any case; his fate was at hand. Victor grabbed the bent, torn edge of the Warlord’s breastplate and yanked it off. Then, as the Warlord screamed and coughed gouts of blood, he drove his fingers between his enemy’s shattered ribs and took his heart in his hand.

Clutching the warm, feebly thumping organ, Victor locked eyes with his one-time nemesis and pulled, ripping it free of the arteries. He held the steaming thing there before the Warlord’s face, watching as the light faded from those hawk-like eyes.