Chương 43: Sun Saint

I tipped the bottle farther, waiting for the amber liquid caught against the glass to reach my mouth. Everything beyond my hand had faded into a distance I could no longer judge. There was nothing beneath my feet, and I kept trying to stand properly anyway. The last of the liquid touched my tongue. I swallowed, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, then checked the rim for anything I had missed. [+500 Health] I reached for the second bottle before putting the first aside.

For a moment I had both in my hands and nowhere sensible to place the empty one. I let it go. It remained close enough to distract me while I worked the other stopper loose. A drop gathered near the opening. I put my mouth over it before drinking. One drop mattered. I had spent too much time collecting ingredients and making things from whatever I could find to watch part of an elixir drift away because I had been careless with a bottle. [+500 Health] The strain eased enough for me to straighten.

I moved my injured shoulder cautiously, then farther when it answered. That alone encouraged me more than it should have. I opened the resource display while I still had the second bottle raised. [RESOURCES] [Health: 1000 / 310] [Mana: 220 / 300] [Stamina: 12 / 100] I checked the health value twice. The surplus had applied. My stamina remained exactly where I had left it, which seemed unhelpful of the elixirs, although they had never promised to do anything about that.

"What did you just take?" Mimir's voice came from my hip. A short chuckle followed before I could answer.

"You're a crazy lad."

"Both of them," I said.

"I gathered that." I lowered the bottle and looked toward the expanding red giant. Its edge had moved beyond the place where I had been watching it. I tried following a bright patch near the middle instead, but that changed shape too. Mimir said something else. I kept watching. There was a small piece of information I generally kept to myself. I had memorised the patterns of every Titan I had faced.

The Catastrophes, too, though I had encountered only two of those, and putting them in the same category as a Titan would have been a mistake. Knowing a sequence had carried me through encounters my attributes should never have allowed. I knew when an apparent opening would close. I knew which movement came before the attack that actually mattered. Sometimes I could begin moving before the enemy did. I was relying on that now. The difficulty was finding something to measure.

Without the arena, I had no floor seam to compare against a foot, no broken stone to mark the distance between us. The red expanse continued growing while I floated in front of it with an empty bottle. I released that one as well.

'Can I pull it off this time?' The thought arrived plainly enough that I had trouble ignoring it. I had asked myself the same thing on earlier floors and then occupied my hands until it went away. Here, my hands had finished their work. I wanted to go home. That was all the thought amounted to once I stopped dressing it in numbers. I wanted this attempt to carry me far enough that home became something I could approach. Warmth settled across my face. For a moment it was tolerable.

I turned my head slightly, testing whether the sensation changed with the angle. By the time I had turned back, it had become too hot to mistake for anything gentle. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. [-50] [Health: 950 / 310] I drew my arms closer and tried to keep my eyes on the display. Fifty. I could account for fifty. [-50] [Health: 900 / 310] My jaw tightened.

I loosened it deliberately because I had started pressing my teeth together hard enough to distract myself. There was another number coming, and I wanted to catch the interval between them. [-50] [Health: 850 / 310]"Lad?" I tried to answer Mimir and managed something I could not make out myself. His voice had been clear. That bothered me almost as much as the speed of the losses. We were in a vacuum. The human texts had been very definite about sound in a vacuum.

I remembered the explanation, or enough of it to know I should not be hearing a voice from my belt. They had printed diagrams beside it. Someone had taken the trouble to draw the diagrams.

'Perhaps they lied.' Another possibility was that they were stupid. I was willing to consider either, which was a poor use of my attention while I could still have been counting. [-50] [Health: 800 / 310] I turned away from the red expanse. The brightness stayed with me. I shut my eyes and tried again, as though I had merely failed to close them properly. The same image remained. [-50] [Health: 750 / 310]'Carlos. Keep track, Carlos.' I tried to open my eyes.

I could no longer distinguish that attempt from keeping them closed. The numbers remained available, but the stars and the bottles had disappeared into something I could not resolve. The heat gave me no room to investigate. I attempted to bring a hand toward my face and lost confidence in the movement halfway through. My arm should have been there. I tried again, more carefully. [-50] [Health: 700 / 310] I had known the attack was coming. That fact kept intruding, uselessly.

I had recognised it and prepared for it, and now I was trying to remember whether I had ever needed to think so hard about moving one hand. [-50] [Health: 650 / 310]'Keep reading.' The instruction was simple enough. I concentrated on the space where the next notification would appear, although there was no clear space in front of me anymore. The display had ceased to depend on where I looked. [-50] [Health: 600 / 310] Lady Livia had called it Aion. I clung to the name for a moment.

The display remained readable without anything I could recognise as sight. Whatever it was doing, it could reach me here. I could register the brackets and every number inside them while the rest of my perception failed to give me anything useful. I tried to remember how she had explained it. The wording would have mattered. I had probably been thinking about something else at the time. [-50] [Health: 550 / 310] Half the surplus was already gone, along with more than I wanted to calculate.

I began the subtraction anyway and lost my place. [-50] [Health: 500 / 310] I wanted Mimir to say something. Earlier, I had let his words pass while watching the attack. Now I searched for his voice and kept confusing the effort of listening with actually hearing him. I tried to say his name. Nothing reached me in return. [-50] [Health: 450 / 310] The pain stopped so abruptly that I waited for it to return. I held still, or believed I did. There was no longer any familiar resistance to measure myself against.

The effort of keeping my arms close had vanished. So had the sense of my feet hanging below me. For one foolish moment, I thought the attack might have finished. [-50] [Health: 400 / 310] I stayed with the number until the next one replaced it. The relief continued, and I disliked how readily I wanted to trust it. [-50] [Health: 350 / 310] I felt light. The word was inadequate, but it was the first one I could reach. I seemed to occupy a place without being able to find the edges of myself.

There was still something here to receive the notifications. I kept testing that fact with small intentions, trying to move a finger, trying to turn my head. [-50] [Health: 300 / 310] I must have been near the core by then. The neutron star filled everything I could register, and somewhere inside it I persisted as a small light of my own.

'I'm a shining star.' The thought was ridiculous. I would have been embarrassed to hear myself say it. I tried to recover something useful from the observation and managed only the uncertainty of whether I had already begun regressing. [-50] [Health: 250 / 310] The number settled that much. The attempt was still continuing. I wanted the earlier pain back long enough to know where my body was. That seemed unreasonable as soon as I thought it, but I had worked with pain before.

This left me trying to use limbs that gave no indication they were there. [-50] [Health: 200 / 310]'There is something I can do.' I repeated the thought, expecting the usual search to follow. There had always been a position to change or a decision still available. Even a failed attempt could contain one more thing worth learning before the return. I could not find the next action. [-50] [Health: 150 / 310] For more than forty thousand runs, I had kept that rule. However bad an attempt became, I continued looking.