Chương 236: Chapter 235 - A copy of a copy

The beach took his weight differently at the bottom of the stairs, the wet sand compressing under each step in a way that the wooden boards above had not. Pilt moved toward the creature without rushing, both hands still glowing, the gold light catching the surface of the dark water beyond. The thing was dragging itself upright again. It had landed badly, one arm bent beneath it at an angle that suggested several things had broken on impact, none of which appeared to be slowing it down in any meaningful way.

Purple fluid seeped from the cracks along its torso where the corruption had split under the force of going through the wall. Pilt watched it rise and activated his deja vu without ceremony. The thirty second window opened across his awareness. He moved through the branching outcomes with practiced efficiency, dismissing the ones that ended with property damage he'd have to explain and the ones that ended with him in the water.

He found a thread where the creature overextended its right arm in a lateral sweep and left its center mass entirely open for approximately one and a half seconds. He allocated the fate essence toward that path and let it settle into the present.

'This is not an Unfaithful,' he noted internally, watching the creature's movements with careful attention.

'Not a Fallen either. This is something else. Someone who went deep enough into corruption that the distinction stopped mattering.' He had not believed that was possible. He filed the information away without dwelling on it. The creature swept its arm exactly as he had foreseen. Pilt stepped inside the arc, both palms connecting with its torso simultaneously. Gold light detonated in a compressed burst.

The creature left its feet and traveled backward across the sand, landing in a heap that sent wet sand spraying outward in a wide fan. He straightened and waited. Then the domain rippled. Not collapsed. Not simply destabilized. The air itself folded inward, the residual domain energy from whatever had been cast inside the room above losing cohesion all at once and blowing outward across the beach in a wave that flattened the sand around him and made the twin moon reflections on the water shatter and reform.

The creature on the sand went still. Then went dark. The purple light in its eyes extinguished and its form began dissolving at the edges, corruption losing its architecture without the domain to sustain it. Pilt looked at the space where the wave had originated. A girl stood in the open sand. Present, as though the collapsing domain had simply revealed her rather than delivered her. She had lush purple hair and purple eyes that caught the moonlight and held it.

Dark robes covered most of her frame without completely concealing it, the fabric moving with a faint delay behind her actual movements, as though the air around her was slightly thicker than it should have been.

"You are as they say," she told him, her voice carrying easily across the distance between them despite the sound of water behind him. Pilt walked toward her without responding. Her expression remained composed.

"Your colleague is well. She is merely serving a temporarily transaction." He kept walking. His deja vu was already running, already searching the next thirty seconds for the thread he wanted. She did not move to meet him or retreat. She simply stood there, watching him approach with an expression that suggested she found his composure more interesting than threatening. He raised one hand. She attempted to move and found she could not.

The gold fate essence he had extended outward in a thin, invisible net during his approach had already closed around her position, anchoring her in place. She looked down at her own hands, suspended in a gesture she could not complete, and then looked back up at him. Her expression shifted into something between surprise and reassessment.

"You could have done this minutes ago," she observed.

"Which means you waited. Which means you wanted to see what I would do first."

"What did you do to Mira," Pilt said. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. She tilted her head within the constraint of what his binding allowed.

"Tell me something first. You are the one they call PIlt. The CEO of the second biggest company called Aureate." She studied him with those purple eyes, reading something in his face she seemed to find confirming.

"Why. You could have killed me the moment that domain collapsed. So why." She shook her head.

"Why... are you here in such a measly little town south of vex—" His voice cut her out.

"What. Did you do. To Mira," Pilt repeated. His awakened state was overclocking in overresonance, one of his main drawbacks as pilt. The golden light no longer just at his hands but threading upward along his forearms, visible through his sleeve fabric. His eyes had taken on the same quality, the irises lit from behind with something that made the darkness around them look darker by contrast.

She looked at the light spreading up his arms with genuine interest rather than fear, which was its own kind of information about what she was dealing with.

"Your colleague," she said, "will serve as the blood through which we intend to dethrone and take what is ours." She paused, then added with careful deliberateness, "The shepherd counts his flock at dusk, yet the one who learns the shepherd's name owns the flock by dawn." Pilt's eyes widened.

"You cannot," he said. He clenched his fist, the motion instinctive, fate essence compressing in his palm toward a detonation point.

"You do not mean she is already," he started. She exploded. Not from his attack. From within. Blood and the structural contents of whatever she had been carrying inside that form scattered outward across the sand in a radius that reached his shoes and the hem of his coat. The binding held nothing because there was suddenly nothing to hold. Where she had stood, the sand was dark and wet and the air smelled of copper and something older underneath it. In the last half second before it happened, she had smiled.

Not in defiance. In something that looked considerably more like relief. Pilt dropped to his knees. The sand took his weight and pressed cold through his trousers. He looked up at the twin moons, then at the dark water, then at the space where she had been standing. He cursed. Quietly and with feeling and in language that would have cleared a room. Then he stayed there on his knees for a moment longer than strictly necessary, which was itself unusual enough to matter. He stood up.

Brushed the sand from his coat with hands that had stopped glowing. Looked at the dissolved remnants of the creature further down the beach. Looked at the open wall above where the boarding house sat with night air moving through the gap. There were no problems. Only solutions. He reminded himself of this with less conviction than usual and turned back toward the harbor.

Pilt dodged a sickly wet limb made of intestines that pulsated in their own rhythm, the muscle contracting and releasing like something still alive despite being detached from any coherent body. His eyes flared with golden light for just a moment. The creature convulsed again. Its laughter grew more manic and pronounced, a sound that belonged nowhere in nature. He stepped to the side and extended his hand forward into the space where fate essence gathered like invisible threads waiting to be pulled.

He saw a thread of future branching ahead. Multiple possibilities collapsed into singular probability as he pulled that thread with his bright glowing hand. One of the creature's limbs became tangled in the manipulation of causality. A fish net that had washed up on the shore, carried by the current, resurfaced at precisely the moment needed. The net caught the limb and held it fast. He snapped his fingers. A briefcase fell gently from the air above him.

He caught it by the handle without looking, the motion practiced and smooth. He threw it at the creature's maw. The explosion came. The sound was deafening. Orange light bloomed across the beach. He kept summoning. Each briefcase that fell from the sky became another projectile, another catalyst for destruction.

"Die, you wretch!" he called out, his voice carrying the casual tone of someone discussing an annoying task.

"I am rich as hell and I will keep summoning as many as it takes." Loud audible explosions echoed across the domain. Sand scattered in all directions. The creature screamed, a sound that didn't belong to anything human anymore. He didn't care about the noise. They were inside a domain anyway. The normal rules of the outside world didn't apply here. Death here was temporary. Revival was possible. He could afford to be wasteful with both briefcases and fate essence.

He looked around as more figures emerged from the collapsing chaos. He saw a future thread and pulled it. Someone behind him, a figure shrouded in shadow and carrying a sickly carved dagger that reeked of corrosive fate essence, suddenly found their weapon lodged in their own throat. The dagger settled neatly into the sand and the figure fell, impaling themselves completely on the blade they had meant to use against him. Pilt scoffed at the display.

"Unlucky," he said simply. He saw another future and pulled. Multiple cloaked figures came through from an invisible barrier that rippled like water as their silhouettes entered the material space. The probability calculation had been too low. The technique failed more often than it succeeded. About eight figures closed in simultaneously from different angles. Pilt leaned back and dodged the dagger that came from his throat.

He elbowed the other hand and dislocated the shoulder and forearm with precision, using fate essence to ensure the joints broke at the exact angle needed. He tilted his head as another dagger got past him, cutting strands of yellow hair and impaling the attacker's back of head. He kicked the aggressor from behind and they fell in a heap. He summoned a briefcase and started to throw it when someone came from behind. He saw it coming but it was less than a millisecond.

They approached both of his hands underneath his armpits while another figure moved in close with a dagger prepared to stab downward through his skull. Pilt saw the dagger. Saw a future. And pulled.