Chapter 147

The chain was set to protect the ship as fully as possible rather than do the bare minimum, which meant it wasn’t going to last more than a few minutes at the rate Luke was hammering on it. Zea winced each time the echo of another impact reverberated through the wood and the mana in the chain dimmed just a little bit more.

They were going at it hard now. Luke had been holding back before; she just hadn’t realized it until she saw him cut loose. Both figures were blurs that ranged up and down the length of the ship, leaving behind shimmering flashes of mana as the shield absorbed some of the energy they pushed into the wood just by running across it.

Something flashed across her vision, so close that for a fraction of a second, she couldn’t see anything else. Then it was gone, leaving nothing but a faint stink behind. Luke stood in its place. “Get back below deck,” he said. “Whatever Lath transformed himself into doesn’t seem to have enough brains to focus on anything but what’s right in front of it.”

Before Zea could reply, Luke was gone again. She got a brief glimpse of him twenty feet away on the main deck with his mace whipping out to the side to smack Lath’s hand away, then the pair disappeared behind the mast again. There was another loud crack, though this time it didn’t sound like wood and a quick glance at the enchanted chain showed that it hadn’t lost any more mana.

Whatever it was, it was on the other side of the ship and she had a clear opening to get below deck. Zea ran for the stairs and dove straight down.

* * *

Something was burrowing into Lath’s brain, something that had taken over his arms and legs and was quickly eroding his ability to think. He’d been pushed to hunt down the apostates as soon as he was able to stand again, and that hunger only prodded him on the closer he got. Seeing the apostate with his own eyes had driven that thing in his head completely insane, and Lath couldn’t have stopped himself from attacking even if he wanted to.

Not that he wanted to.

He wasn’t fighting with his usual tactics though. Being a revenant gave him certain advantages, advantages like complete pain nullification and no loss of strength, speed, or coordination from injuries. Lath was still getting used to that, but it didn’t matter. The revenant brain demanded he fulfill his purpose, that he destroy the man in front of him. It was his reason for still walking upright, the reason he’d held his body together as one coherent whole.

There was nothing left for him now except to finish the job. The apostate had to die. His little half-sized friend had to die. The heretical crew all had to die. Lath would tear each and every one of them apart with his bare hands, then break this ship and let it sink to the bottom of the harbor as a warning to those who would commit heresy and as a tribute to the gods.

Except this man would. Not. Die. He was too fast, too strong, and he was predicting Lath’s every move. No matter how hard or how fast Lath struck, the apostate always had that red and silver mace in place to deflect an attack, or had his feet lined up to dodge and weave out of the way. The thing in Lath’s brain burned away his reason and left him with nothing but rage and violence.

All pretenses at defending himself abandoned, Lath threw himself on the apostate. He accepted the hits, barely even felt them connect, really, and kept up his assault. Blood flew as he finally scored a solid enough hit to break the apostate’s skin.

Then the tiny apostate had appeared. He’d smelled her somewhere, but with the big one right in front of him, Lath hadn’t been able to focus enough to find her. She was weak, an easy target, and killing her would hurt the big one. It would be one apostate dead and one reeling in anguish, his focus broken and his life ready to be reaped.

Lath disengaged and moved to attack, only to find the big apostate still keeping pace with him and preventing him from reaching his goal. He was batted aside, almost thrown off the ship even. Some small sliver of intelligence left in his brain understood that if that happened, he wouldn’t be able to catch back up. The apostates would escape.

As long as Lath stayed on the ship, he could keep fighting. He clawed his way towards the woman, only to meet with more resistance that flung him half way across the deck. There were a few uninterrupted seconds he spent to reorient himself, something he desperately needed after the increased power of the last hit he’d taken.

The apostate got in front of him again, and the burning rage took over. Lath slipped through the wide-swinging mace, coming up under the apostate’s arm, and connected with an uppercut right on the man’s chin. The apostate went flying backward and up to slam into the foremast. Lath started to follow, but something slipped through the haze.

It was a flicker of movement, the tiny apostate diving back to safety. Lath’s original plan wormed its way back to the surface of his mind, and he sprinted across the deck, taking it in four great bounding steps that ended with him jumping down the hole to crash through a set of stairs.

The apostate was there, as was the heretic captain of the ship. Both would die.

* * *

Some part of Lath’s skills were still helping him, even if the man appeared to have lost his mind. Luke had stupidly left himself open when he decided to unload on the inquisitor, and he’d paid the price for that. He gave it even odds whether his jaw was broken, even with [Life Surge]working overtime to repair the damage.

When he dropped back down a moment later, Lath was nowhere in sight. That was bad, if only because it meant Lath wasn’t still focusing on him, and if Lath wasn’t in Luke’s face, that probably meant he was going after Zea again. Luke could hear the deck straining against the downward pressure of the inquisitor’s footsteps, and he knew exactly which way they were heading. He got around the mast just in time to see the man leap literally head first down the hole leading below deck.

Never before had Luke wished he had one of those skills that gave a brief burst of movement speed. He’d looked into them, and they were not cheap, but right then and there, he wished he’d dumped the AP into getting at least rank 1. His raw stats had always been enough to keep him ahead of whatever he was racing against before, but he was afraid this would finally be the exception.

Luke ran for the entrance, had a brief moment to see the creature Lath had turned into land in front of Zea and the Captain, and then his skills all aligned. [Tactical Foresight] told him exactly how Lath was going to attack, and [Unarmed Martialist] worked to get his limbs coordinated to stop it. [Mace Mastery] had the weapon practically spinning across his fingers to bring it around at the right angle, and [Counter]was already lining up how to respond to what he was predicting Lath would do.

Luke crashed into Lath feet first and drove the man to the floor. Lath rolled immediately, exactly the way Luke had predicted, and Luke went with the momentum. He spun a complete circuit in the air that arced his mace around to smash into the back of Lath’s skull, shattering bone and spraying brains and blood down the hall. Both women flinched away, but Luke wasn’t done.

Even the head shot wasn’t enough to put Lath down. Luke left the mace embedded in the back of the monster’s skull, landed with both feet planted on Lath’s shoulder blades, grabbed the inquisitor’s arms, and pulled. [Power Strike] surged down into Luke’s hands, and with a wet, tearing sound, both arms ripped free. Luke hurled them up behind him and onto the deck.

Still alive and thrashing, Lath managed to spin himself around now that Luke was no longer holding him in place with his arms. The mace smacked against the floor and fell out of the back of Lath’s skull when he rolled, but they both ignored that. Luke got hold of Lath’s shirt and heaved, tossing the inquisitor back up onto the deck.

“Gonna be hard to swim without any arms,” Luke told him.

Lath didn’t seem to care. He rolled to his feet and came back at Luke with a series of lightning-fast kicks. Luke had to let a few of them land to get a good grip on Lath again, but once he had it, he spun in place once and hurled the inquisitor over the edge of the boat.

Somehow, impossibly, Lath got a foot hooked in the railing just as he was going over it. Zea’s enchantment worked against them then. Thanks to the magical reinforcements, the wood held and Lath managed to roll back onto the deck and to his feet. He was already in the air when Luke caught a flash of red and silver out of the corner of his eye.

Someone, probably Zea, had tossed his mace back up onto the deck. It wasn’t a very good throw, and there was a real possibility of the mace tumbling overboard if Luke didn’t go after it, but there were good intentions behind it. Luke turned his back on Lath and sprinted for the weapon. He went into a roll as he snatched it up and came back to his feet just in time to lash out behind him and catch Lath with a solid smack to his ribs.

The inquisitor stumbled backwards. Without his arms to help balance, he struggled to keep fighting, but Luke could see it was only the means that was missing, not the will. If he let Lath escape, there was every possibility the man would somehow come back from even this. There was no blood coming out of the stumps. His brains were exposed to the open air, and his ribs were basically powder after all the hits he’d taken. Whatever Lath was, he wasn’t human anymore.

Luke tripped him, planted a foot in Lath’s groin, and used both hands to tear off a leg. He tossed it overboard, then repeated the process with the other leg. The whole time, Lath struggled, not to escape, but to curl up on himself and bite at Luke’s foot. It would have been an impressive display of flexibility for Lath to get his mouth down there if not for the fact that his teeth were gnashing the whole time.

“Maybe it’s just that your ribs aren’t in the way anymore,” Luke said. “There was a rumor back when I was in school about a guy who had a rib or two taken out so he could… You know what, never mind.”

With no limbs left to move him around, Lath was an easy target. [Life Surge] had worn off, but Luke still pummeled the inquisitor’s face until everything above the neck was nothing but an empty broken egg of bone. Then he worked over the chest until it too was nothing but pulp. No matter how much Luke hammered Lath, he still didn’t get the kill notification.”

“Why won’t you die?” Luke asked as he channeled one final [Power Strike]. His mace arced down in a golf swing that struck the bloody scraps of flesh in the side, and Lath’s remains went flying over the side of the ship to splash into the water.

Luke stood there, chest heaving, and stared down at the blood-stained hole he’d battered into the deck right below Lath as he’d beaten the body into mush. There was no way Lath could still be alive, not after all of that.

“System, tell me he’s dead,” Luke said.

“My apologies, but it appears that man was disconnected from the God Machine before he reached you. It’s like he’s never existed at all. I can extrapolate that whatever XP he had was returned to be recycled well before your fight with him, but only by noting an unexplained source of XP that matches what I would expect to see from someone of his level. Any records the system had of Adrevald Lath are gone.”

“So I guess we’ll never know if I actually killed him,” Luke said. “But he’s got to be dead. And I didn’t even get any XP. What bullshit.”