A/N
Chapter 797 came out a few mins ago, read it if you haven't :)
Chapter 798: The True Cultivation of the Two Suns' World
Lady Laelyn opened her mouth to respond, but it was far too late.
The light from Beric's body became too bright to look at directly, the white expanding in a single accelerating heartbeat from a shimmer to a blaze that washed out the colors of the clearing entirely, and then the detonation came.
The sound hit before the light did, a deep concussive burst that swept outward from where he was standing and knocked Lady Laelyn off her feet, and then the light arrived, a column of white eruption that expanded in every direction erasing everything it touched.
When the light finally cleared, there was a crater in the Sacred Ring earth roughly six meters across, and the grass around its edge was burning in low orange flames, there was no sign of Neira or of Beric beyond a dark discoloration of the soil and what the crater contained.
Two Rank 7 beings were gone, just like that.
Lady Laelyn was already back on her feet and running, she dropped to her knees at the crater's edge, and she pressed both hands flat against the earth there.
"Beric," she said, and then again, quieter. "Beric, you fool. I didn’t want this. I never wanted this."
I understood what had caused Beric to sacrifice himself like that.
The tattoo's defensive capacity was finite, it recovered given time between engagements, but in the middle of a fight against a Rank 7 elder, Beric had used his available defensive bursts absorbing blows that would have killed him outright, and when the offensive uses ran out as well there was nothing left in the tattoo to protect Lady Laelyn with, which meant the old soldier had done the math on what was coming and had found one remaining option that removed the threat permanently but also removed himself from the equation.
He had understood that a shield that couldn't defend was still a weapon if it detonated. And even though me and Beric didn’t agree on much, an act like this was something I could respect, a person like that was someone I could respect.
Bram and Corwin both pivoted to face me after the detonation's aftermath.
"Thorn's people will kill themselves to take us with them," Bram said to Corwin, his voice tighter than before. "That soldier just proved it. The servant will do the same thing."
"The soldier gave his life for his mission," Corwin replied. "I respect that, whatever side of this he was standing on." He paused. "But you’re right. That doesn't change what we have to do."
He looked at me directly, and I saw the regret and reluctance in his eyes.
"I’m sorry about this," Corwin said. "Elder Sorrin told us someone wants to speak with you, and that you need to be delivered intact. You've shown us enough that restraining you isn't a realistic option without eliminating your cultivation first, and since you've shown you'll fight until there's nothing left to fight with, I'm worried that if we continue this exchange you'll find an opportunity to do what that soldier just did." He paused again, something working in his expression. "I have no desire to kill you unnecessarily and I have no desire to die proving a point, so I'm going to take the option that ends this quickly and leaves you alive."
I couldn’t help but frown at that. The phrase "ends this quickly" coming from a Rank 6 calligrapher didn’t sound good.
"Corwin," I started. “You don’t need to do this.”
He was already writing.
The character he formed was longer than any of the previous ones, four strokes that connected into a whole, forming the word "Cripple."
It detached from his fingers and moved toward me, and the unhurried pace of it was somehow worse than the previous characters had been, because those had been fast and violent and obvious, and this one moved with the patience of something that had already arrived at its conclusion and was following through on it.
I felt my eyes go wide.
Corwin had no understanding that my cultivation wasn't housed in this body the standard way, that the soul inhabiting Tomas's frame was a world walker from somewhere else entirely, and a crippling technique aimed at the body's cultivation pathways might do something unpredictable when it contacted meridians that housed energy drawing from three suns and an inner world that shouldn't exist at this cultivation level.
I didn't know what the result would be, and I didn't want to find out.
But my arms were still pinned against my sides by Bram's metal plates, my red sun energy was still sluggish and disrupted inside the Ironclad Valley's suppression field, the word "Cripple" was four meters away and closing, and there was nothing my arms could do and nothing my runes could reliably fire in the time I had remaining.
They'd made a mistake letting themselves get distracted by Beric's sacrifice, because I hadn't been idle during those few seconds. I'd already been working the problem the entire time Bram's domain had me pinned, running through the techniques I had access to, and I had found my answer.
The word "Cripple" was a meter away when a tree branch with silver veining erupted out of my chest. The character struck the branch head on, for a moment, I was worried nothing would happen, but then the character began to dissolve, leaving nothing behind but a faint scorch mark across the bark.
Corwin stared at the branch covering my chest with his mouth open.
"What…what is that?"
I didn’t bother to reply, I dismissed the partial manifestation back into my inner world took advantage of the split second that it gave me to call upon the power of the Golden Sun, it was time to end this.
The manifestation came out of me as pure light first.
It pressed through the surface of Tomas's body like something escaping, and the Sacred Ring lit gold as the avatar materialized from the ground up, growing through the scale of human height and past it in the first second. The feet settled into the earth, the legs rose through the sky of the Vale, the torso, shoulders and arms assembled themselves until the golden figure towered over everyone in the Sacred Ring.
The Ironclad Valley did not survive the first second of the avatar's presence.
The metal plates that had been pinning my arms against my sides for the last minute buckled inward and then outward as the avatar's legs stepped through them, the compressed earth and iron construction that had held me through Blink Step and Leaf Storm and every rune I had tried to call shattering upward in fragments.
I rolled my shoulders in the sudden absence of the pressure that had been holding them in place.
Bram turned his head upward toward the avatar and opened his mouth, and what came out was the first syllable of a question that his mind had already started forming before the rest of him could catch up.
The golden fist descended.
Bram didn't have time to scream. There was a sound like something enormous meeting something small, wet and final, and where Bram had been standing there was nothing left but scattered fragments spread across the ruined grass in every direction.
The avatar rose back to its full height, towering over the Sacred Ring, over the shattered ground, over Corwin, who stood frozen with his hand still raised from the technique that had failed against my chest only moments earlier.
Corwin looked up at the golden shape looming above him, and I watched every calligraphy character that had been floating in reserve around him unravel, blue light scattering and fading into nothing as his knees hit the ground.
"This," Corwin whispered, staring up at the golden avatar wearing Tomas’ face with an expression that had abandoned every trace of the discipline he'd carried into this fight, "this is true cultivation."