Book 6: Chapter 38 - The Lotus Blooms (RAW)

I, Klaust Solaxe of the line Solaxe, sound of mind and steady of hand, set my will in stone on the eve of seeking the Earth Mother’s blessing and the Runes; I name my sister, Lashane Solaxe, sole blood of my house, heir and executor, and bequeath to her all my worldly possessions—coin, hoard, forge-rights, tools, arms and armor, keepsakes—and all debts owed to me, with any debts I owe to be satisfied before the remainder passes to her; if I return Runed, let this writing lie quiet until my final going-to-stone, and if I do not return, let this stand; witnessed beneath the mountain, before the Earth Mother: Klaust Solaxe, hammer-mark and seal, in the Hall of Laws.

- The Will and Testament of Klaust Solaxe in the year 175 AC.

Klaust, a giant of the Dwarves, moved quick as a falling hammer. Still, I was quicker. Yet, this did me little good, for my Strength availed me little against the impossibility that was Adamantium. What magic I could command slid from his plates like rain off slate; direct and status effect spells alike found no purchase. Nor did my fists, for I had come in arrogance and without a weapon. All in the name of preserving my dignity.

He hewed straight down, a headsman’s stroke. The black axe kissed stone, and the stone drank it; no shard leapt, no spark spat. 

The command of Earth, the voices whispered again to me as I slipped aside with the smallest of steps, keeping my lines open. He stepped through, following with a sweeping strike, wide and level. I showed him my intent, lied with it, and ghosted to the left. It galled me to resort to such trickery, but the brute was already cheating.

I called the Lotus to bloom in my palm and struck the breast of his dark harness with the flat of my hand. The Skill answered—the current my old master Fen spoke of, Kai, the river that runs through marrow and bone—passed through the heavy metal to the living flesh within. Stamina. 

You have learned Lotus Palm (lvl.3)

Though I had achieved a more perfect execution of the skill, as the system approved, his Health bar dipped by a bare eighty points.

Damnation.

Without Greater Drain, my Stamina would reach zero before his Health if I used this skill exclusively to try and kill him. What was this thing, this creature, forged of?

He told me by way of the haft of his weapon. It smashed my ribs and flung me like a child’s toy. The monster was on me before I had kissed the floor, and I had but a heartbeat to roll and find my feet.

He did not relent. He did not pause. Was this what it was to meet a mirror—an armored behemoth, near invulnerable, hammering forward without end? An education, paid for in broken flesh and bruised pride.

My regenerative blessings worked within, mending bone, threading damaged flesh together. The agony lived far away, a distant place beyond this world; Pain Nullification dulled the worst and left me cold and clear. 

It was still a humiliation.

We circled and slid and struck, and the giant Dwarf seemed content to trust in chance, knowing that he was only one strike away from victory. My opponent knew that I could hurt him, and that I did not easily die. He fought defensively now. If I did not change the measure of this contest, I would face only defeat.

Again, I called upon Lotus Palm to blossom once again. I wove between his deadly, finding myself at his flank. There, I  struck where a kidney might lie beneath the heavy plate. He had reach like a barge-pole, and each time I sought to attack like this, I risked a deathblow. Though I doubted it would be fatal, perhaps it would help debilitate him.

Life is the stacking of little stones until they make a wall. It pleased me to hear him finally grunt.

On and on, the contest with the armored thing continued. His Stamina ran almost with mine. Almost is not quite. I saw it, the faintest weight in his swing, the breath drawn a hair too long. Fatigue, a touch of slow death. I had fought enough now to know feigned exhaustion, and this was not it. It was an edge, and edges are what separate the victor and the defeated.

We ground on, strike and slip, breath and bruise. His swings lost more of their sharpness, my steps a hair of spring. Stamina bled from us both in quiet ticks. I watched the way his shoulders rose under the black plates, a fraction higher each time; heard the rasp of breath caged by black Adamantine.

He came on with a cleaving cross meant to take me from hip to shoulder. I let it have air and answered with another Lotus Palm, heel of my hand impacting with a softness that belied its power. The current ran; something inside him tore. A normal man would have been reduced to jelly in armor, but the blow was not enough. Pebbles against a fortress wall.

Klaust answered with the spike of the weapon, a brutal jab meant for my throat. I knocked it aside with my forearm, a circular motion that drew on my knowledge of the Willow Weeps. The Mimic that dwelled within it paid for it with fifty points of Health. He pressed, iron patience in motion, every blow a lesson. 

My blessings healed with their slow surety. Pain stayed far away, but fatigue crept close, a quiet thief as my Stamina ebbed. But if I felt it, he felt it too. He was mortal, and that meant he could be broken.

“Enough,” I breathed to no one, and feinted a stumble. 

All this time, being a coward, looking for a weapon to wield to turn the odds in my favor. The answer lay before all along.

Klaust took the bait. The great axe rose for a headsman’s fall. I slid under it, crowding close, inside the arc where death lived. He was a tower up close. The haft hissed past my back; the blade rang off stone with that same hungry, sparkless kiss.

I seized the wood haft with both hands as it rebounded, felt the life in it, Rune-laced. He wrenched; I went with it, turning my hips, letting his Strength become mine with the motion. Hated Fen’s voice lived in my bones: Don’t meet the flow head-on—join it, then steer.

Klaust tried to rip the weapon free and hammer me with the gauntlet. I stepped in deeper, cheek to his cuirass. One of my hands slid to his wrist. I stamped down hard on the axe-head where it bit the flagstones, pinning the bearded blade. The haft became a lever. His joint became a hinge.

I was the stronger; I knew it, but insurance was always useful. Liquid flesh dripped into the gaps between his armored fingers, threads of a monster of my own.

He barked in surprise, the first sound of dismay I had taken from him. The Dwarf retaliated with a knee like a ram, crushing into my thigh. Were it not for my natural resistance to physical damage, I am sure my leg would have been broken. Still, the blow cost me eighty-three points of Health.

I came closer, denying him room, turned my hips, and struggled with him for control of the weapon. The Runes along the metal sang low. His fingers held like iron... then like iron gone brittle. Weight shifted. Leverage became victory.

“This is mine,” I whispered, a command. 

The thumb went first as something my inner companion began to form. I felt his control of the weapon give beneath the gauntlet, heard the wet click of it. Klaust’s grip faltered. I twisted again, every tendon in my arms singing, and the greataxe tore free like a root ripped from earth. The sudden release threw us both apart. He stumbled; I staggered three steps and nearly fell down, the new weight of the axe dragging my hands to my knees.

The Mimic Shield formed completely now, a heavy thing of metal and wood that had loosened his grip and given me mastery of the weapon. 

The axe was a monstrous thing up close, its blade a square of cutting, a spike out the back, another at the crown. Unlike a sword, the balance lived far from my hands, hungry to strike. And it was heavy, very heavy. 

Klaust came again, empty-handed now, and somehow larger for it. I could feel his gaze from behind the visor filled with rage. I knew that Adamantium gauntlets still made for fearsome weapons.

I set my feet, the greataxe light but an unfamiliar balance in my hands, and rolled my shoulders to keep them from locking. We were tired. We were nearly done. But I had his weapon now, and in this place of judgment, it was I who decided the sentence.

Calling to Sage’s Sight, I knew how his steps would come. Knew the myriad of angles of his many attacks. Choices were made, destroying possibilities, until it settled on a predestined blow. Entropic Strike howled with the force of the void, howled as it was infused with the energy of Overboost and became something greater.

Destined death struck his helm, his charge adding to the force of my strike. I saw his Health plummet a few hundred points, the Runes on his armor flaring in protest. I struck again, wanting to ruin him with Entropy. Again at the same point, and again the Runes flared purple. Another Entropic Strike. Then they weakened, flaring blue. Then they flared no longer.

He stumbled about as a drunkard, concussed by the raw power behind my Strikes. I struck him behind the knees, chopping away. Klaust fell, and I was upon him.

Adamantium armor was strong, but not all of the armor could be made from it. The myriad of straps was its weakness, and I went about to shuck this black oyster. Using the axe as leverage, I tore sections of the armor plate off, exposing his chest.

Half a heartbeat did the sight of his body take from me as I tore away at the underarmor, sweatstained silk that was stronger than steel. 

Beneath it all lay no honest and true flesh.

Something pale had colonized him, made him a host.

It clung to his ribs like a winter frost that never melted, a quilt of white felt matted with gray. Thick cords wormed between the bones and cinched them tight, pulsing to their own slow rhythm. Where a man’s chest hair should be, frilled shelves had grown in tiers: little bracket fungi with bruised purple rims and a sickly sheen. Filaments threaded under his skin, lifting it into soft hills. Every breath sighed out a dust so fine it looked like smoke from where his lungs should have been. The smell was that of sweet rot.

The voices that had been whispering to me went silent.

I tore away at his gorget. Klaust snarled and clawed weakly, but he was defeated now. I hooked my strong fingers beneath the lip of his helm and wrenched. The visor tore away with a wet sound, and the helm came free like a rotten tooth.

What lay under it was more horror.

White skein had colonized his scalp, grown into a cap that fused metal to skin; my pull ripped threads by the fistful, and brown ichor wept from a thousand pinprick mouths. His beard had become a garden of cords—a mycelial beard, each hair a living thread slick with slime. Pores ringed his cheeks like tiny mouths, and in each mouth something dreamed and opened, shedding dust. One of the eyes was milky over and veined with hyphae; the other looked at me through a gelatinous veil where a cup-shaped fruiting body had grown under the lid. When he tried to shout, his tongue split into three pale laces and fluttered like kelp in a tide.

That was why the Kai of Lotus Palm slid and bled away, doing little damage. A second layer of defence beneath the first—an insulating web that drank and dispersed the resonance.

“Hold—” he gargled and spore-dust plumed. 

“No, I do not think I will,” I said, and did not.

Heat uncoiled along my fingers, and I struck him deep with Manticore Claws, tearing away at his monstrous flesh. Breaking what passed for his bones, even as the acidic venom filled him

His Health fell in my mind’s eye, the numbers tearing away in jagged bites. The mycelium fought me. It flowed to meet the wound, knitting where I unknit, throwing up curtains of white thread to catch my claws. The venom went to work. Where it touched, the white turned yellow, then clear, then black, collapsing to a sticky ash that could not hold a shape. Calling upon the spell of Decay, I made sure my victories were permanent. The smell of rot intensified, but this time it felt cleaner. A natural unnaturalness. A balancing of the universe.

I drove my hand in up to the wrist and found not a heart but a knot: a braided spool of cords, pulsing out of time with any sane rhythm. 

“Know that you will go to meet your ancestors in shame. An unarmed man beat you with your own weapon,” I laughed, a thing that came from the place where the darkness resides.

A savage twist and a rake, tearing the knot loose in long, wet ribbons. 

The once-proud warrior made a sound that started as a roar and ended as a choke. I used Manticore Claws against and again. Tearing great chunks out of him, handfuls at a time, flensing away the white growths and what remained of the meat. There was little meat. The fungus had eaten the man and worn him like a glove.

“I am the hunger that will consume the world,” I told him, and ripped.

His Health finally reached zero, the perfect number.

You have slain Klaust Solaxe. 543 experience points gained.

You have completed the Quest: Prove your Innocence in a Trial by Blood Iron. 4000 experience gained.

Everything went quiet, and the world stopped.

What little light that was in my opponent’s eyes was gone. Spore dust drifted, lazy in the air before blackening as my Improved Entropic Aura made short work of them. I held my breath until my lungs clawed at me, then let it out slow and tasted iron and dead mold. 

The greataxe slid from my thigh to the floor and rang once as I laughed like a madman.

I had won. I always won.