Chapter 18: Sir Gawain
Iskander
The Dragon Puppet moved with the terrible, grinding inevitability of a glacier. Each block, each shove of its silver-plated forearm against my crossed guard sent shockwaves of agony through my already screaming muscles and protesting bones.
My Asuran physique, capable of shattering stone, felt like green wood beneath a hydraulic press.
The chainmail bit into my forearms, the leather of its tunic creaked with unnatural tension, and the vacant, frozen blue eyes inches from mine held no recognition, no fury, only the chilling emptiness of absolute control.
It wasn't trying to kill me, not quickly at least. It was grinding me down, testing the limits of the vessel Agrona had crafted, its mana and aether-infused strength a crushing, purple-tinged weight against my pale gold defiance.
"Can't... shake... him..." The words gritted out between clenched teeth tasted like copper and dust. My boots skidded on the blood-slick stone, gouging grooves as I fought for purchase against the relentless advance.
Every joint shrieked in protest—shoulders, elbows, hips, knees—a symphony of impending structural failure.
Creation flared desperately within me, a frantic furnace trying to mend micro-fractures faster than the Dragon Puppet could inflict them, but it was a losing battle against this tidal force.
It was the weight of the aether woven into its dead flesh, the spatial anchoring that made it immovable as a mountain itself.
"Then we don't shake him!" Renhart's roar cut through the grinding cacophony, a whip-crack of command that brooked no dissent. It wasn't a suggestion; it was the cold calculus of survival. "Attack together! NOW!"
They moved with the desperate coordination of cornered animals. Delilah, her face pale beneath the grime but eyes blazing with a fervor that momentarily eclipsed fear, lunged. Her lance became a conduit for her magic.
Vines of pure, incandescent fire erupted along the shaft, coiling and snapping like hungry serpents as she aimed for the gap between the Dragon Puppet's silver-plated arm and its chainmail side.
Simultaneously, Renhart, a mountain of scarred fury in motion, brought his mace down in a devastating overhead arc, aiming not for the Dragon Puppet, but for the wrist of the hand gripping the greatsword, hoping to break its hold or deflect the blade.
The Dragon Puppet began to pivot, a smooth, inhuman twist of its torso to meet the new threats. Those empty eyes flickered towards Delilah's fiery lance. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through me. If it turned fully, if it brought that blade to bear on her…
No.
The vow screamed in my skull. No one dies.
Instinct, forged in pain and desperation, overrode thought. I abandoned defense. With a guttural roar that tore my throat raw, I shoved forward, not away, but into the grinding pressure. My left arm, already bruised and bleeding from the earlier sword bite, slammed up, not to block the sword hand, but to pin its forearm against the Dragon Puppet's own chainmail-clad chest.
My right fist, still wreathed in the two spinning rings of pale gold aether, wasn't aimed at the head this time.
I drove it down, hard, into the center of its torso, right below the broken crown symbol. At the same moment, my legs did something impossible, something that would have liquefied the joints and shredded the ligaments of my old body. They scissored, hooked, and locked around the Puppet's leading leg above the thick leather boot, using its own immovable mass as an anchor.
CRUNCH-SNAP!
The sound was sickeningly internal. Not just from the impact of my aether-ringed fist against the surprisingly resilient torso, but from within me. My hips screamed. Ligaments in my groin, knees and ankles tore like overstretched cables. Vertebrae in my lower spine compressed with an agonizing grind.
The rings of Creation around my fist detonated on impact, a localized sunburst of pale gold energy that rocked the Dragon Puppet back a fraction and scorched the leather black, but failed to penetrate deep.
The cost was written in the white-hot agony searing up my nerves and the grotesque, unnatural angle of my trapped leg.
It was a gruesome parody of a dance. A tango of mutual destruction. Alfred's ghost might have recognized the move—a sacrificial lock from some brutal, forgotten martial art, designed to immobilize at the cost of the user's body.
Litres of blood seemed to soak the stone beneath me, the scent of torn muscle and grinding bone thick in my nostrils, almost overpowering the tang of sulfur, ash and incineration.
My muscles were dissolving under the strain, roaring their final protest before catastrophic failure.
Only the constant, frantic surge of Creation, burning through my core like wildfire, stitched the worst tears, reinforced crumbling bone, and numbed the edges of the agony into a bearable inferno.
Perks of being Agrona's masterpiece: I could break myself repeatedly, aether always there to pick up the pieces, however messily.
Through the haze of pain and the golden shimmer of constant healing, I saw Yorick stumble back, clapping a hand over his mouth, his face a sickly green. The raw, visceral brutality of my self-destruction was too much for his analytical mind.
He retched, the sound barely audible over the clash of Renhart's mace and the sizzle of Delilah's fiery vines against the Dragon Puppet's defenses. My desperate gambit had bought them the crucial half-second.
Renhart's blow landed true, a thunderous impact that jarred the greatsword in the Dragon Puppet's grip, though the silver gauntlet held. Delilah's lance, wreathed in fire, struck the chainmail, the vines searing and snapping, failing to pierce but scoring deep, glowing gouges and forcing the Dragon Puppet to momentarily divert its focus to reinforce the point of impact.
They'd disrupted its counter-attack. They'd bought me a sliver of space.
I wrenched my shattered leg free with a gasp that was half-sob, collapsing backwards onto the bloodied stone. Every breath was a knife in my ribs. My left arm hung limp, the bone knitting visibly but agonizingly slow. I scrambled back, dragging myself with my one functional arm and my screaming, rapidly healing leg.
"Are you BATSHIT CRAZY?!" Renhart bellowed, his voice raw with a mixture of fury and something dangerously close to horrified disbelief. He disengaged, putting himself slightly between me and the momentarily stalled Dragon Puppet.
His eyes, usually narrowed in perpetual annoyance, were wide, scanning the grotesque angles my body was only just beginning to correct. "You fucking destroyed yourself! What kind of suicidal idiot—?!"
"Don't... worry..." I rasped, the words bubbling with blood I hastily swallowed. Pale gold light flared along my broken limbs, knitting bone, weaving muscle fiber, smoothing torn skin into fresh, pink scars. The process was horrifically visible, a sped-up nightmare of biology.
"...Aether... heals... me." It was a grotesque understatement.
It healed the damage, yes.
But it didn't erase the memory of the agony, the sound of my own bones breaking, or the terrifying fragility the Dragon Puppet had just exposed.
I focused inward, pouring will into Creation, directing the golden river to mend the worst of the internal trauma, forcing my lungs to expand fully despite the protest of bruised tissue.
Yorick, wiping his mouth, stared at me, his yellow eyes wide behind his cracked spectacles, filled with a primal terror that had nothing to do with the Dragon Puppet anymore.
"What... are you?" The question was a whisper, trembling with the weight of witnessing something profoundly wrong, something that defied the natural order as he understood it.
"The Aetherman," I gasped, pushing myself shakily upright onto my newly whole, though throbbing, leg. My voice gained strength, fueled by the vow and the pale gold fire within. "...the best superhero you never heard of. Until now."
The declaration anchored me, cutting through the lingering haze of agony. I turned my head, ignoring the protesting muscles in my neck, to meet Renhart's stormy eyes.
"Now... what do we do?" The question was tactical, deferring to his experience in this lethal dance.
Renhart stared at me, his jaw working. He saw the fading golden light, the rapidly smoothing scars, the sheer, unnatural resilience. The fury in his eyes banked, replaced by a chilling, pragmatic assessment.
"If you really can tank that kind of punishment... and bounce back..." He spat a gob of blood onto the stone. "...then we use it. We do exactly what we just did. You lock it down. We hit it. Hard. Again and again. Until something gives."
His gaze flicked to the Dragon Puppet, which was slowly turning its head back towards us, the awther aura around its greatsword pulsing stronger.
"It's got armor tougher than Sovereign-blessed plate and hits like a collapsing tomb. But it's slow to shift focus. We exploit that. You're the anvil. We're the hammers."
"We can't do that!" Delilah protested, her voice tight with distress, her eyes fixed on the livid, freshly healed scars visible through my torn sleeve and trouser leg.
"He'll... he'll get torn apart!"
I stepped forward, placing myself slightly ahead of Renhart, facing the slowly advancing Dragon Puppet. A grim, blood-stained smile touched my lips.
"Bah," I said, the sound rough but clear. "Pain?" I rolled my newly healed shoulder, feeling the phantom ache deep in the bone. "Pain's been my oldest companion since... well, since ever."
The specter of a hospital bed, the endless, grinding ache of a failing body, the helplessness—it flooded back, a familiar shadow. This physical agony? It was sharp, immediate, honest. And I had the power to fight it.
"This?" I gestured vaguely at my body. "This is just a conversation we're used to having."
"Child..." Sylvia's sigh in my mind was a wave of profound, weary sorrow. She'd seen my old suffering, she understood the dark wellspring of that statement, and it broke her heart anew. She would never reconcile herself to this embrace of agony as a tool.
The Dragon Puppet had fully reoriented. The brief stun from our combined assault had passed. It took a single, deliberate step forward. Its head turned, and those horrifically empty blue eyes fixed solely on me.
"He's preparing a magic attack!" Yorick's warning was sharp, immediate. His Sentry Crest flared visibly for a moment, a faint silver nimbus.
But I didn't need mana sense. I felt the aether shift. Not ambient, but the deep, bruised purple aether within the Dragon Puppet coalescing, flowing like poisoned mercury down the length of the greatsword.
The blade began to hum, a low, subsonic vibration that made the stone beneath our feet tremble. The air around it warped visibly, shimmering like heat haze, promising spatial rending on a scale far beyond the previous cuts.
Sylvia's voice, laced with ancient dread, confirmed it:
"Us dragons can influence it, Child. Shape it. Not wield it as you do, not from a core, but... it is still Aether. Spatium. He is focusing it for a dimensional shear. It will cut through space itself."
Renhart's strategy was our only play. "Positions!" he barked. "Same as before! Iskander, lock it down!"
I didn't hesitate. The vow was my compass. Protect them. Buy time. Pale gold fire erupted anew around my right fist, forming two compact, fiercely spinning rings.
I surged forward, not with grace, but with the terrifying, direct speed of my Asuran body augmented by desperation. I didn't aim to dodge the gathering spatial storm; I aimed to disrupt it at the source.
I slammed into the Dragon Puppet just as the purple light along the blade intensified to a painful glare. My reinforced left forearm smashed against the flat of the blade near the hilt, not to stop the swing, but to jar its alignment.
My right fist, wreathed in the humming golden rings, drove towards its face again, a brutal distraction. At the same time, I did something reckless, instinctive, born of Sylvia's words about dragon aether affinity. I reached out with Creation, not to attack the Dragon Puppet's body, but to touch the flow of the bruised purple Spatium coiling around the sword.
It was like grabbing a live high-voltage cable made of razor blades and ice. Agony, different from the physical, lanced through my aether channells—a freezing, shredding violation.
But Creation and my pale gold core, reacted. Like a lightning rod diverting a strike, I pulled threads of that violent purple energy away from the blade and into myself.
It burned, it tore, but my core, fueled by my desperate will and the vow, consumed it. I funneled it directly into reinforcing my own body, into the healing furnace, into the spinning rings around my fist. My skin crackled with purple-gold energy, veins standing out like live wires. It hurt like hell, but the intense glow along the Dragon Puppet's sword flickered, dimmed, the subsonic hum faltering.
My fist connected with its jaw. A solid hit. It didn't flinch. It didn't need to. But the spatial shear it had been preparing fizzled, collapsing into a localized distortion that merely shredded the stone at its feet instead of bisecting the mountain.
Behind me, the hammers fell. Renhart's mace crashed onto the silver-plated shoulder with skull-shattering force. Delilah's fiery lance, channeling her fear and fury, stabbed deep into the scorched leather at its side, emerald vines burrowing, seeking weakness. Yorick, overcoming his nausea, darted in low, his black halberd sweeping at the back of its knee joint, a precise, debilitating strike.
The sounds were brutal: shrieking metal, sizzling flesh, the dull thunk of impact on dense bone and enchanted armor.
And nothing. No stagger. No cry of pain. No significant damage. Renhart's mace left a dent in the silver pauldron. Delilah's lance point lodged deep but was halted by layers of scale beneath the leather. Yorick's halberd blade skittered off the thick leather boot and reinforced joint. It was like attacking a fortress carved from diamond.
The sheer, impossible durability was demoralizing. How could we break something forged from dragon-flesh and saturated with defensive Spatium?
Then Sylvia spoke. Her voice, when it finally came, was a shattered thing, raw with a horror that dwarfed anything I'd ever heard from her—not the desperate fear of the Office Zone, nor the grim resolve of the Fog. This was the sound of foundational beliefs crumbling, of history itself vomiting up a nightmare.
"CHILD!" The mental scream was pure, undiluted terror. "YOU NEED TO RUN! NOW! ALL OF YOU! YOU CANNOT WIN AGAINST HIM! NOT HERE! NOT LIKE THIS!"
The raw panic in her tone, so utterly alien, froze the blood in my veins even as aether mended a fresh gash on my forehead from a near-miss of the Puppet's backhand.
"What is this thing?" I demanded internally, my voice tight with matching dread. "Beyond a dead dragon? What made him like this?"
"If I had a fucking clue, I'd fucking say it!" Renhart roared externally, pure, frustrated rage boiling over as he danced back from a sweeping blow of the greatsword, his mace barely deflecting it.
Yorick was trembling visibly now, his knuckles white on his halberd, his analytical mind clearly calculating their rapidly diminishing odds and finding only zero.
Delilah gritted her teeth, parrying a casual backhand swipe with her lance, the impact driving her back several steps, her earlier fervor replaced by grim determination mixed with dawning terror. Renhart's rage was his answer to fear. Mine was the cold pit of realization Sylvia's terror confirmed.
"Gawain Indrath..." Sylvia whispered, the name a dirge. "He... he was a legend. One of the foremost trainers of the young Indrath generations in my Father's early centuries of rule. A master of physical combat and spatial aether arts. He... disappeared. Vanished without trace. Around the time the last of the Ancient Mages were hunted to extinction."
Guilt, ancient and profound, bled into her voice.
We weren't fighting Agrona's desecration. This horror predated him. This was older, darker. What ancient power, what forgotten enemy of dragons, could capture, kill, and transform an Indrath Asura—a being near the pinnacle of existence—into this vacant, unstoppable golem? And trap it here, in the Relictombs, as some kind of... guardian? Punishment? Experiment? Agrona having Sylvia's body was a personal violation.
This... this was a cosmic obscenity. Sylvia was right. This wasn't a fight we could win. Not without unleashing something catastrophic, something that would certainly kill Delilah, Yorick, even the formidable Renhart. I never should have joined a team.
Seris's pragmatism had led them into a deathtrap meant for me.
The Dragon Puppet, Gawain, focused entirely on me now. It raised its greatsword, not for a swing, but point-down towards the stone. Bruised purple aether erupted from the tip, not forming a blade, but sinking into the rock, spreading in rapidly expanding, glowing cracks.
The ground beneath my feet groaned, the spatial stability itself beginning to unravel. It wasn't an attack; it was the creation of a localized singularity, a spatial sinkhole designed to crush and consume.
Creation burned between my shoulder blades, not just responding, but screaming in my soul. The answer, the only answer that preserved the vow, crystallized with terrifying clarity. It defied every rule Seris had mentioned, every understanding of the Relictombs' structure.
But what was Creation if not the defiance of imposed rules? It was will given form. It was the refusal of the inevitable.
"EVERYONE GRAB YOUR SIMULETS!" I bellowed, the command ripping from my throat with the force of a detonation. I didn't have time to explain. I didn't have time for doubt.
All my focus, all my will, every shred of pale gold aether in my core and the stolen purple aether still crackling under my skin, I pulled inward. I envisioned not a weapon, but a doorway.
Not the Descension Chamber the Simulets needed, but a rupture. A tear in the very fabric of this hellish Zone, fueled by pure, desperate Creation. A portal out. Anywhere else.
"What in the Sovereign's name do you have in mind?!" Renhart roared, even as he instinctively fumbled for the disc at his belt, his eyes wide on the spreading purple cracks racing towards us.
"TRUST ME!" I screamed back, the words raw with the strain of containing the sun I was about to birth. "I'M GETTING US OUT OF HERE!"
The cold, unforgiving punch of Gawain's stomp hit the ground. The spatial cracks surged, the stone beneath my feet dissolving into chaotic purple fractals. The air screamed. The mountain groaned. Time stretched, thin and brittle.
I slammed my palms, both wreathed in a maelstrom of stolen purple and defiant gold, onto the disintegrating stone. Not to hold. To unmake.
"ACTIVATE YOUR SIMULETS! NOW!"
Creation erupted.
It wasn't light. It was sound made solid. A physical roar of pure aetheric defiance tearing reality apart. Pale gold and bruised purple exploded outwards from my point of contact in a shockwave of pure force. Solid rock didn't shatter; it vaporized into swirling debris of solidified aether—glittering gold shards and jagged purple crystals.
The air itself ripped, revealing not darkness, but a swirling, chaotic vortex of raw spatial energy, a wound in the world.
"CHILD!" Sylvia's scream was lost in the cataclysm.
Through the deafening roar and the blinding, chaotic light, I faintly heard other voices—Delilah's shrill cry of terror, Yorick's choked gasp, Renhart's furious bellow—swallowed by the howling vortex.
The world dissolved into a maelstrom of color, sound, and the terrifying sensation of being unraveled and rewoven, my desperate Creation battling the Relictombs' immutable laws, fueled by the vow and the dying echoes of a dragon's stolen power.
The last thing I felt was the terrifying pull of the vortex, and the chilling certainty that I might have just traded one deathtrap for another.