Chương 165: Heart of Darkness

The Warbringer still bore several terrible wounds as the blade descended into the volcano. They were healing slowly, but the ragged molten edges that the axe had left were slow to cool. The Ebon Blade didn't care about any of that. The rents were healing, and they didn't affect its movement, so it had no reason to be concerned. -483 Life Force. It wasn't as if its metal wielder could feel pain.

Under normal conditions, it wouldn't have even felt anger, and even those terrible impulses were already beginning to fade. As it descended, though, the armor only traded emotional heat for the actual kind. It came as no surprise to the blade that the center of a volcano, erupting or not, would be incredibly hot, and though heat didn't cause it any discomfort, it wondered at how any wielder, even one made of steel, would handle such forces.

As it moved forward, past sulfurous geysers and cracks leaking magma into the passage in drops and rivulets, the temperature continued to soar. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred degrees. It kept going, little by little, until the blade had to start spending life force to offset the hidden damage that such conditions were doing somewhere in the clockwork man's interior. -266 Life Force. That didn't stop the blade from doing more than anything else.

If anything, the heat sped its pace by removing further obstacles from its path. There was no one down here besides it. That struck the blade as odd, given that demons were supposed to enjoy the fires of damnation, but it didn't know anymore. Is there some new hidden layer? It wondered. Can I only see what's truly around me if I feel joy or sorrow? It didn't know or care. It knew only that the exit was here, and that it would breach it.

Still, it took the best part of an hour to wander the infernal, stygian maze of cracks and crevices that led it ever deeper into the bowls of Mount Knoeal. Eventually, though, even the mountain revealed its secrets, and soon enough it found a cave that led to the caldera proper. From there, it could see the heart of the place, and even what might have been a shimmering doorway on a rocky island at its very heart. -119 Life Force.

While the blade could only make out bare shapes from where it stood because of the out-of-control heat shimmer, in the weave of the world, it could see the energies of creation leaking in, in a way that it hadn't seen since it was pulled into the infernal realm. That made its choice easy, even if it wasn't quite sure how to cross. The volcano's caldera was a vast, swirling lake of magma that reached from wall to the other.

Amidst its chaotic currents were various islands, but they breached the surface or sank without apparent rhyme or reason, making crossing safely on the chancy. Even those attempts would be less dangerous than trying to cross the gap with one long Bolt -powered leap.

While the blade could spare the hundreds of Life Force such a maneuver would cost, being exposed to the full force of the volcano's heat for a minute or more without any of the rocky islands to shield it might prove fatal, even for something as hardy as the Warbringer. The blade had already been forced to step back from the edge as the lower side of its forearms and its feet had begun to glow a dull red in the endless heat of this place. -79 Life Force.

While the blade pondered its options, it tapped its wielder's chest with the flat of its blade and used Deathly Touch, creating an icy coating across the chestplate. That ice melted almost immediately. But it was still enough to lower the armor's temperature enough to make it pop and groan from the differential heating caused by the metal being cooled unevenly.

That didn't bother the blade, it was just relieved that the demands to supply the soul steel working with ever greater amounts of Life Force had, at least for the moment, abated. -146 Life Force. So that's the answer then, the blade decided, trying to judge which floating rock made the best choice to start from. Move fast, cool down Warbringer as many times as I have to to keep it from becoming slag until after I'm through the portal.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. It was a simple plan, but even so, it was still fraught with danger. While the odds of it drowning in the lava were small, every minute it was forced to soar above bare lava, unshielded by stone, it was basically stepping into a blast furnace, and no amount of ice could counter that for long.

As if to prove that point, as it leaped from the cliffside to the first stone, the wave of heat made the Warbringer start glowing red even before it landed hard on that rock that first time. The blade used Deathly Touch on the worst-affected locations, including the chest, the helmet, and both arms, while it waited for the next stone to swing into view. Examining the tapestry of the currents made it decide against leaping on that one, which was good, because it vanished beneath the molten stone a few seconds later.

Instead, it chose to use Bolt to jump nearly instantaneously to the next surface. -226 Life Force. There, its feet began to heat up even more quickly because of the pooling magma that remained on this rock, but there was little it could do. It repeated the pattern: coat its wielder's most vital and overexposed parts in ice to stave off the worst damage, and then look for the way forward. The blade repeated this technique time after time, though it took eight leaps to reach its goal. -2217 Life Force.

By the time it reached the island in the center, the Warbringer was a mess. It glowed red and orange, and summoned ice simply evaporated as it sprang into existence. There was nothing left that it could do but escape this oppressive place. The heat might be white hot, but the fabric of reality that underlaid this place, at the very center of hell, was as black as it could get.

The threads of magic made its tainted soul look almost clean by comparison, and the sweet flows of essence cleaning from creation called to it. The blade itself was hardly out of danger either. The heat had risen to dangerous levels. Critical parts inside its wielder were melting and deforming as its armor crept from dull red to an angry orange, and it limped forward, unable to lift the thing's arms high enough to direct another Bolt. -869 Life Force.

Almost there, it told itself, not willing to let the arms fail and drop it before it reached the finish line. That would be a catastrophe, because no one would ever find it again in this place. Even as it moved forward, though, it wondered where the Prime Evil herself was. She can't be hiding, the blade told itself as it scanned the chamber over and over again.

In the web that was the world, she would have been a spider that glowed as brightly as the sun, but still, the only sun that it could see was the warm light of creation that it was limping toward. Even if she's waiting to ambush you, that changes nothing, it told itself. There's still only one way out of here. That was true, but it did not comfort the weapon at all as it closed the gap one faltering step at a time.

A hundred feet, fifty feet, ten feet, when nothing happened, and the portal was close enough that it could almost touch it, it truly believed that it was going to make it. Then she appeared. -665 Life Force. As the blade continued forward, smoldering and smoking, Nuella, the demon queen herself, materialized out of the light leaking through that rift. No, not out of it, the weapon realized.

She hadn't stepped through from creation, its brightness had simply blinded it to her presence as she'd hidden behind the portal. Aside from the horns of twined gold and ivory that twisted together in the shape of an eight-peaked organic crown, she appeared almost human. She had dusky skin, gold eyes, large breasts, and a gown that was women out of smoke and fire. She was strikingly beautiful, even if the Ebon Blade didn't care about such details.

It cared only about the danger and the menace that was radiating from her. She might be beautiful, but that did nothing to hide the monstrous amounts of power that filled her.

"Well, if it isn't a visitor," she said, smiling, "We haven't had one of those in a long time. And to think it's the Black Blade of Baraga, too. The souls of many of the damned sing of your brutality; it is high praise. She seemed pleased to meet it. It didn't appear to be an act. She seemed quite sincere.

"It's so nice to finally meet someone I've heard so much about I—" +62 Life Force. As Nuella stepped forward to embrace him, the blade stabbed her right through the chest. Hesitation in the face of overwhelming power would have been a crucial mistake, given the poor state of its wielder. It needed to take any opening that was offered. In this case, though, she ignored the mortal blow that cleaved right through her breast and embraced the searing metal of its wielder as if she hadn't been impaled.

She didn't actually seem to be in pain at all. Instead of crying out, she wrapped her arms around its wielder in a hug that made her skin crisp and sizzle. -782 Life Force. Then, just like that, the world stopped and faded away into an overwhelming field of white light. It was like the rend in the fabric of creation consumed both of them, and the volcano they were standing in, in that moment, but the energy looked wrong. This isn't creation; the blade, contemplated as its indestructible blade, dissolved.

This isn't hell, either, it's her soul itself.