Knives & Levels - Chapter 80

Denny spat on the ground and ran his hand over his mouth. His eyes were narrowed, his muscles tense. And that golden glow still surrounded him, a pure Edict of Subjugation that, even as they were now, wanted to press down on Colt and make him fold beneath the man who declared himself a King. Colt paced carefully past some rubble, making sure not to let any of the trees on this wild Nashville street get between him and his target.

How he got here from some kid cooking in a kitchen, to facing down an absolute tyrant, Colt didn’t know. But the thought made him want to laugh.

This was his job. The battle at the mall would decide the war; but the fight here, this is the most he could offer to win that battle. If he chopped the head off the snake fueling the warriors over there, the victory would be a complete one.

“Should’ve just run from my city when I told you to,” Denny said, the wreath of his Edict wrapping and condensing around him; the golden glow was like that of a god.

It made shadows in the trees and had a faint scent of sweat as if a man were laboring for days under its behest. Whereas Cut had the feel of nobility, this carried a sickly authority. It was a contrast of wills. Colt condensed his Edict on his knife, letting a thin layer leak out, trying to stifle the worst of the effects.

His knife was a pillar of power in his hand, and as it condensed his Edict, he felt the lethargy that was settling in him dissipate. Movement contested the will Denny was trying to press down on him to get to his knee—as it directly contested that Edict, he had domain.

It was hard to get Colt to move when he grasped the fundamental law of movement itself, which was a weighty Edict.

Denny frowned. “Get on your knees. It is time to give in.”

It was a command, and his words held the weight of his Edict, yet Colt only raised his blade in response; the attempt to force him again slid away, and his Cut flared in response.

“You’ve been given this opportunity; you were in a position to truly do the best for the people of your city, but you lied to them. Took advantage of them. You took one of yours—and you turned him into a monster. God knows what else you were planning, Denny. I’m here to end this madness for the good of the kind people in New Nashville and the world. You must answer for your crimes against humanity. We don’t have a Jury anymore to do that—so I’ll have to do so with my knife.” Colt laid out the accusations, each word buying him yet another second to refine his Edict.

Denny bristled.

“And you’re better than me?” he yelled, throwing an arm out toward the mall. “You got a bunch of people together to ambush me! You’re trying to overthrow a town that is not yours—do you think you’d be a better king?! Do you know what’s out there? They need someone powerful to protect them, they need me. There is no one else in this Kingdom with the right skillset.” he screamed.

“I don’t have any desire to be a King. I want my friend freed. I want the people you seek to subject to free. I want people to make what they want out of their lives and survive with whatever peace they can. And together, we’ll deal with the threats that come our way” Colt stepped closer, and the golden edge of his knife condensed even further; it split the air itself as it moved, and even holding the beating steel of the dagger in his hand was getting hard.

Though Cut was an Edict of control, right now, with how much of it he’d wrapped in, straining the limits of his soul, he felt the very flesh of the hand holding the knife accumulating tiny nicks and cuts by the second; it was eager.

All of him screamed to do one action.

Chop down the dictator in front of him and end the tyranny.

Denny’s eyes traveled to the knife, to the golden contesting glow there. He roared, the output of the light around him doubling as the Edict ran lines through the air, cutting a river to the people inside of the mall fighting even now, stealing away as much power as he dared to take from the soldiers fighting his war so he could win this battle.

Colt took a breath in and stared at the red eyes of the man who’d run through his head for so many nights. A problem since he’d first met him—one that he was fated to slay on this day.

Then, when the breath came out, he launched himself forward, laced as a comet through space with a quick shift of Movement; he felt Denny flare with his stolen strength, and his speed moved to supernatural lengths.

When Colt was there for his throat with a knife, his blade met a golden chain.

So, Colt sliced through the chain like butter; it evaporated in a thousandth of a second with a burst of golden lights, like miniature tiny stars in the day; but yet there was another chain, then another—one ratcheted off his shoulder and cut deep, sparking a flare of pain. The edges of the chains sharpened into miniature razors. 

Denny took a slow step away as even more chains formed—a slow step for Colt. To an observer, all of this might as well not have happened yet with the sheer condensed nature of laws and powers at play. In less than a blink of an eye, those even more chains become hundreds, wrapping around Colt like a golden tsunami of death. To bind him, bleed him, and choke the last gasp of life out of him. Seeing that the path forward was cut through, Colt flicked his knife, sending off a line of gold to meet the chains, and then yanked himself backward with another step.

There were more chains there—everywhere chains were appearing, forming this into some kind of golden hell as they came into existence. Colt was forced to slow, grasping his movement and taking careful control of his actions, knowing that a misstep would mean losing a foot.

His clash of golden energy slammed into the chains and cut, making a line of death straight at Denny, but in the prime of stealing every ounce of power, the guy managed to get out of the way.

Bad.

Colt felt his breath growing more ragged, his grip on Movement starting to go as yet more of the forest of chains came out, sliding into being and clicking as the light-based metal moved.

This was the power of an Epic class, then. Not only did he know Denny had some insanely powerful strength, but whatever Skills he was working with were busted.

Colt regrouped to think and gather himself for a second burst; his knife had collected even more power. Time slowly returned to normal speed, with Denny’s concentration lost—content to spawn a plethora of chains around him.

It was a smart tactic. Throw enough of those dangerous things around him as both a defensive barrier and an offensive one.

But Colt also saw his second tactic. Denny tried to conceal it with thicker strands of chains, but he was also forming a collection of golden swords, building momentum in them for his own assault.

Colt stared at the barrier. Each chain was essentially a trip wire, meant to eviscerate him and stall him. Then, like a spider, they would all come down and kill him. Should Colt refuse to be baited into the trap and killed nicely by the webs, Denny’s second thrust was just as easy: swords.

He stopped.

And then he saw the third plan—the Wind Mage was flying toward them from the mall. Drawn to support this fight and hasten Colt’s moves. To put additional pressure on him and make him rush.

Rush.

It was all that was left—rush in, and risk his entire life, Denny had planned. Denny had all the power. He would inevitably win this encounter; the sheer gap in strength was too much.

That was if Colt were anyone else.

Colt snorted.

Despite knowing his Edict and having witnessed what Colt had done before, Denny thought that trapping him like this would trip him up, make him hesitate too long, and paralyze him with fear.

That was not the way to beat him.

Colt, finishing collecting the Edict on his knife, drew it back and then threw it—imparting all of his momentum, imparting every single ounce of his being into the throw. Targeted directly for where Denny had stood before the chains began to erupt in this hellish tangle, it slipped through the chains, slicing that which was in its way without sacrificing much momentum at all.

And Colt followed; his body sacrificed as he tore forward at the same pace, feeling bits of flesh given to the chains as they caught him, spending bits of his flesh in the name of the journey. His legs stopped cooperating as well—the cuts deep in his muscles as he moved, weakening him.

One cut—two cuts—hundreds, even. Colt stopped tracking the tell-tale signs of pain and focused on his steps, making sure to be quick. Using his super-human dexterity to navigate the worst and take the trade-off cuts where he could.

Even doing his best, in twenty feet of navigation, he was colored by his his own blood. His body more lethargic.

Each time he touched a chain, it tried to tangle him up. These weapons were primed to react when he touched them, to cocoon him in a golden coffin, but Colt was too nimble for that. And the pain. It racked his whole body, begging him to stop, pleading for him to cease moving to stop getting wounds.

He refused to let pain control him through fear.

When the knife or he came to a particularly nasty gnarl of chains that would slow either too much, he would activate Phantom’s Gambit—both on him and the knife, bypassing it as he juggled all of his Edicts and all of his skills. Throwing it all to the wind. Trying to hold of these things in his hands at once was like juggling knives and fires; too much to focus on, and using Phantoms Gambit too frequently in this state would kill him.

His vision narrowed, the edges going black as step by step, and micro-second by micro-second, both he and his knife tore forward. As he moved, as he got closer to losing consciousness, he felt his grip on his Edicts slipping.

A single misstep and it was all for nothing.

Ultimately, Colt didn’t fear death now either; within a second, his knife reached the chosen destination an instant before him, had arrived right next to the biggest jumble of chains yet; the main blockade that Denny made between him and Colt—a tangle of roots of death that passing through would mean an unfortunate demise, dense enough to stop a simple slash of his attack long enough for Denny to get out of the way.

Inside was almost certainly death. A dense-packed part of chains that would leave nowhere for him to appear after he used Phantom’s Gambit. This had been why Colt threw the knife.

However, what the man hadn’t been counting on was the knife soaring at him, nor did he count on the fact that the knife could also simply slip through the tangle of chains with a single use of Colt’s Skill.

There was a beat as the golden edge slipped through Denny’s barrier, intangible.

Another beat and he felt it right near his target and evaporated his hold on the weapon; there was a scream from within as the barrier began to shake, the chains losing control as Denny took a dagger somewhere important, a dagger infused with the entirety of Colt’s Cut Edict—like it or not, a barrier was not the way to stop Colt.

And neither was trying to make him too fearful to move; with the barrier shaking, Colt saw his chance and, like his knife, dived into the innards of the tangle of chains, infusing himself with as much Movement as he could muster, throwing everything he could into the next second which would be life or death.

His eyes passed into the cocoon of death. Like he thought, it was riddled with traps. There were too many chains that would eviscerate him if he was unphased anywhere inside of here. It had been a death sentence. A trap.

Denny had backed away from the center, clutching the knife deeply sunk in his chest, eyes wide as even more golden light flared.

And in his pain, in his reaction to the mortal pain of a knife sticking through him, Denny had made a critical error.

The center didn’t have the same chains as everywhere else. His stumble had made a space in here; the chains behind him had bent to accommodate his stumble without hurting him, but he’d made a space in his little safe for another person.

In a second, Colt was there, face-to-face with Denny.

In the next second, his hand was on the weapon in Denny’s chest.

Then he flared his Cut, screaming as he let all of it out—let out the entirety of this new apocalypse, as he embraced the pain burning through his body from a thousand wounds, as he let the hardships of the last couple of months flare with the entirety of the gravity they deserved. 

All of the pain. All of the death he’d seen around him. The suffering; Jimmy being stolen away and thrown in a cell—the brushes with death he’d already felt, and the need for freedom, to walk with his own two feet and deal with the world in a way that he could.

He put all of into his Muscles, into his Edicts, into his might.

Then, he yanked his knife upward, the golden glow of the weapon harmonizing with Denny’s golden light, slicing through even the barrier of light itself as Denny tried to stop the weapon from cutting him from the inside out.

Inch by inch, Edict wrestling with Edict in an eternal and ephemeral battlefield, Colt twisted the knife and then brought it up, slicing first through Denny’s gut, then his ribs, his neck… And lastly, through his skull.

The chains burst in a crescendo of golden starlight, the brightness of the second blinding as Denny’s half-split corpse slopped to the ground.

Colt fell to his knees, breath ragged, the cuts he’d gained from the forest of chains bleeding him out—in the distance, he saw the wind mage. They hesitated in the air, seeing the results of a clash that had happened far too quickly for them to get involved.

Sweat and blood congealed on Colt’s skin, dripping to the street below; the Wind Mage turned around and flew off—not toward the battle in the mall—and not toward New Nashville.

Somewhere else.

Colt watched them go, his body shuddering with the effort and the pain, before laying down next to the corpse, waiting, wondering if he, too, would join the body after this fight. A plethora of notifications flooded him, but he couldn’t sort them out, giving away to the pain of the moment.

Catharsis. With this, he had freed his friend and freed a whole city. The cost was the damage to his body, and to his soul, but the price—the feeling of freedom that radiated from his core was well worth it.

He hoped that his friends had fared better.