Chương 14: Chapter 13: Fatal Oversight

Before the assassin could correct his trajectory, Elma released her compressed pocket of air. The concussive blast caught him mid-flight, violently launching his dark green form backward through the willow's canopy. Branches snapped in rapid succession as he slammed heavily into the high stone wall of the courtyard. Exactly one second later, the figure rebounded off the stone, converting the impact into forward kinetic energy. He launched himself straight back toward her. He was on a strict clock.

Elma processed the movement pattern instantly. The C-series stealth line. Specifically, C-05. Nagin. He was a ghost in Beitelham, a legend among the facility's hounds. She threw her hands outward, rapidly expanding the perimeter of her Resonance field to a fifty-meter radius. The moment Nagin breached the boundary, she thickened the air around him into an invisible mire.

The drag was intended to crush his momentum, but Nagin merely shifted his center of gravity, slipping through the resistance with terrifying precision. It barely slowed his advance. The RU at this volume wasn't enough. Nagin closed half the distance, his grip tightening on his blade, ready for a strike. He only needed one. Air was the wrong caliber. She needed something with more mass behind it.

With a sharp, upward flick of her wrist, every drop of morning dew and residual moisture in the garden ripped free from the grass. Hundreds of suspended water droplets hovered for a fraction of a second before blurring toward him like a volley of high-velocity shrapnel. Nagin slipped seamlessly through the barrage, his body contorting at impossible angles to avoid the lethal spread. The water tore past him, impacting the ground behind him and detonating the earth into a series of craters.

He was closing the distance. If he breached her inner guard, she would be dead before her synapses could even fire a command. Elma gripped the ambient moisture and dirt, rotating the air into a blinding cyclone inside her field. The wall of dust and water pushed back against him, stripping his visibility. Anticipating his strike, Elma dropped completely flat onto the grass—the only evasive maneuver Nagin's predictive algorithms wouldn't account for.

His blade materialized through the dust, stabbing the empty space where her throat had just been. He instantly compensated, carrying the momentum into a sweeping downward arc. Elma triggered a burst of wind launching him backward again before he could land the strike. Nagin twisted mid-air, burying his sword into the trunk of the willow tree, and instantly used the leverage to slingshot back toward her. Just stay down for a minute. Elma met his charge with a volley of air bullets.

I can't outrun him, she calculated, backpedaling as the concussive blasts tore through the leaves. I can't hold him for long. Where are the guards? Nagin's blade spun through the air, shattering her thoughts. She barely evaded the spinning steel, tumbling backward, and felt the impact of his boots hitting the ground two feet behind her before she'd even finished rolling. Elma slammed her hands against the grass, sinking her resonance into the subterranean air pockets beneath the soil.

She detonated the ground directly under his boots. The earth erupted, throwing him upward, his body spinning through a storm of rock and dirt before he found purchase on a chunk of flying bedrock. Using the airborne debris as a springboard, he launched himself down at her. It was exactly what she wanted. Elma had already compressed her field down to a five-meter radius. Nagin crossed the threshold, hovering three meters above her. She slammed the trap shut. Barometric coffin.

Elma applied omnidirectional atmospheric pressure, crushing him from every conceivable angle. The crunch of his armor echoed through the garden. Blood burst from behind his mask, spraying into the air. His ribs gave first, a series of wet, percussive snaps. His struggling slowed, his limbs twitching with the last static charges of a body running out of ways to fight back. Not enough. She intensified the pressure, shrinking her field further.

"Who sent you?" she demanded, though she knew he wouldn't answer. His arm twitched, his fingers desperately manipulating a thick, metallic band on his wrist, two of them snapping audibly under the pressure of her field as he forced them to move.

"Don't," Elma said.

"Is it worth it?" He stilled. His broken fingers hovered over the wire, trembling with the effort of staying there. For a moment the only sound was the groan of his ribs under the pressure and the thin, labored pull of his breathing through a compromised chest. She tightened the field a fraction and felt it again—that dense, resistant quality in his armor that had been blunting her output since the moment she'd trapped him.

Whatever it was made of, it was eating her force at the boundary, dispersing it before it could translate cleanly into flesh. Without it, he would have been paste thirty seconds ago. She tightened further, compensating. He met her eyes. Then he kept moving his fingers anyway. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Elma gritted her teeth, trying to crush his cervical spine before the mechanism fired.

His broken index finger hooked into the thin wire and pulled. A high-pitched whistle tore through the air. A miniature dart shot directly toward Elma's head. Too fast. She thickened the air around it, but its narrow shape sliced through with almost no resistance. She couldn't stop it. A heavy, armored gauntlet snatched the dart out of the air—stopping the needle mere millimeters from Elma's maxilla. The elite guards of the estate—the Alloys—had finally arrived.

Elma released her hold on Nagin just as a silver spear plummeted from the sky, impaling the assassin cleanly through the thigh. Before Nagin could retreat, half a dozen heavily armored Alloys swarmed him, pinning his broken body to the cratered earth. One of the towering guards knelt beside Elma, his voice a muffled boom through his helm.

"Are you injured, my lady?" Elma gave a stiff shake of her head. The Alloy immediately stepped between her and Nagin, his massive frame completely blocking her line of sight to the subdued assassin. Elma strained to peer around the wide armor, needing to confirm the detention. More armored figures showed up, silver cloaks snapping in the wind. The garden was rapidly filling with Alloys. The Alloys tightened their perimeter around Nagin's broken form, weapons trained low.

One crouched over him, cataloguing the damage—the cratered earth, the shattered bedrock, the water craters still dark and steaming in the morning grass.

"She contained him herself." The disbelief in his voice carried even through the muffling of his helm.

"A true Altheris," came another voice, quieter. Almost reverent. It lasted approximately four seconds.

"Who was on eastern perimeter?"

"We were diverted to the fire near the maid house."

"A fire that started three minutes before the breach." Fire.

"You think it was coordinated?"

"An assassin reached Lady Altheris. What do you think?"

"Who approved the rotation? Because I was told—" Elma exhaled once, slow and controlled. The dart mechanism. The wristband. She needed someone to cut it free before he found another way to— Useless. Every last one of them. She turned back to give the order. A sharp, profound cold radiated through the center of her chest. She looked down. A jagged, blood-slicked tip of a metal scythe protruded from her sternum.

"Wha…" she couldn't finish it. Her breathing instantly accelerated, each shallow gasp dragging her punctured lungs against the freezing flat of the blade. She turned her head, her vision beginning to swim. Behind her stood a malformed Alloy forged from liquid metal, its silver armor hanging over a skeletal frame that continuously melted and rebuilt itself. The instant their eyes met, the figure dissolved into a puddle of quicksilver, abandoning the scythe lodged deep in her chest.

Multiple attackers, Elma's mind whispered, the tactical realization arriving a fatal second too late. The Alloy in front of her turned, his helm snapping down toward the sudden bloom of crimson on her dress. The guards surged toward her, shouting, but their voices sounded as if they were underwater. Elma fell backward onto the grass. The cold was spreading rapidly through her hands and feet. She felt the frantic, fluttering drum of her heart desperately trying to compensate for the sudden, catastrophic blood loss.

No. She stared up at the sky, her blood soaking into the earth. Not yet. It was too short. Above her, the three suns converged into a single, blinding point of light, before the brilliant white consumed the whole world.

Jorm had been hiding inside a small storage shack, trying to evade a scolding from Rita. She had told her to stay away from Lady Elma. They didn't know her like Jorm did. No one else had ever offered to teach her anything. No matter how much she asked. Only Lady Elma had. They just didn't understand. The world outside cracked apart. The first explosion was so loud it didn't sound like a sound at all—just a pressure that slammed into her chest and rattled her teeth. Dust sifted down from the beams above her head.

Jorm pressed her hands over her ears and didn't move, even when the shaking stopped. When she finally made herself step outside, the light was too bright and everything was wrong. High above the garden wall, the Alloys—the huge armored men she'd been told never to look at directly—were flying through the air like they were nothing. Like someone had thrown them. Jorm didn't understand what she was looking at. She just knew it was bad, the kind of bad that made grown-ups scream.

Two guards ran past her, their armor smeared black with ash.

"Get to the maid house!" one of them barked, shoving her toward the courtyard.

"Inside with the others, now!" Jorm's legs were shaking too hard to obey right away.

"Is... is the young lady okay?" she yelled, her voice cracking somewhere in the middle. The men didn't answer. They were already gone, running for the main gates like they hadn't even heard her. Ahead of her, a crowd of maids and kitchen staff were running too, all of them headed for the servants' quarters. Jorm didn't think. She just ran after them, her heart slamming so hard it hurt. Then came the whistle. It was the worst sound she had ever heard—high and thin and wrong, like something tearing.

A massive red whip, thick as an apple branch and glistening wet, cracked through the air right above her head. The maid house just... wasn't there anymore. One second it was stone and wood, and the next it was a wall of dust and flying splinters, and the noise of it hit her a half-second after the light did. The force of it slammed Jorm flat onto the grass. She pushed herself up, coughing, blinking through the smoke. People she'd just been running beside stared back at her. Not whole anymore. Just...

still, and red, and… lying right next to her like they were sleeping except they weren't, they were…" NO," she shouted, the tears came too fast. A scream tore out of her before she even knew it was coming. Then something hot and ugly flooded through her, burning right through the fear. It didn't feel like thinking. It felt like something underneath her skin had been waiting a long time to wake up. Lady Elma's lessons rose up without her even trying to remember them—reach out, feel the edge, pull it close.

A fistful of sharp garden rocks lifted off the ground on their own, hovering tight around her before she'd even told them to move. She made herself look toward where it had come from. She had to. But the dust was too thick. A wall of ash and grit stood between her and whatever was out there, hiding it completely. She couldn't see the monster. She could only hear what it was doing—wet, tearing sounds, and shouting that cut off too fast, like someone had reached out and turned it off. She wanted to charge forward.

She really did. But her feet wouldn't listen—they'd turned to stone, heavy and useless, glued to the path no matter how hard she pulled.

"I'm not a coward," she whispered, the words barely making it past her teeth. Her face went hot with something that felt like anger but tasted like shame.

"I'm not a coward. I'm not, I'm not—" Her legs didn't care. They stayed frozen. Through the haze, another massive red sinew launched straight toward her. Jorm squeezed her eyes shut and waited for it to hurt. Crack. Jorm snapped her eyes open to see a tall figure clad in dark leather standing directly in front of her. The bright western sun reflected off the jagged red and black slashes of her ceramic mask. With a single, fluid flash of her blade, the woman split the fleshy whip cleanly in half.

The shock broke whatever had been holding her legs in place. Screaming, she let the stones fall, scrambled backward off the path on her hands, and ran, not even thinking about where, just away, back toward the dark of the storage shack. She threw herself into the furthest corner and pulled her knees against her chest, holding on as tight as she could. Her teeth were rattling, clicking together no matter how hard she clenched her jaw, and she couldn't get them to stop. She rocked back and forth.

She just wanted it to be over. She just wanted it to stop.

"We are not cowards," she said into the dark, again and again, her voice breaking apart as the tears finally came.

"We are not cowards. We are not—""Right, Papa?"