Instantly, a spike of sand shot upwards, skewering Baby Boots through the knee. He screamed, and before Nic could follow through, he vanished with a flicker of silver light.

  “BEHIND YOU!”

  Nic heard and knew what it meant. He shot forward, dropping to all fours and zig-zagging wildly as bolt after bolt of flame shot at him from behind. Baby Boots had teleported to his back, and one of the flaming projectiles lashed close enough to leave a burning strip across Nic’s shoulders.

  He dropped, rolled, and kicked a foot upwards. The motion translated into a wall of sand, rising and absorbing the next shot for him as he smothered the fire and swung back onto his feet, cursing.

  Blood trailed down Baby Boots’ leg as he hung a few feet above the ground. Nic had gone all out to try and score a killing wound in the first seconds of combat.

  Now his opponent knew Nic could control the earth, the odds of him touching down again were slim.

  He had paused his assault, either winded or simply having come to his senses enough to realize he was wasting aura. Which was a shame. Nic’s second idea for winning the fight was to simply outlast his enemy’s tendency to throw big, flashy attacks.

  Nic stomped, and a long platform of sand emerged under his feet. He used the familiar trick, using the desert to propel him forward as if he was surfing over water, and he took off on a wide arc around the floating opponent.

  For a moment, they watched each other. Nic could still see Inkspur, circling distantly, but they were too far to coordinate an attack.

  For a moment Baby Boots hung in place, hesitating, thinking, or just trying to recover from a blow that likely shattered the bone of his leg.

  Then he snarled—a loud, wordless roar that carried across the desert—and rushed towards Nic, building a furious spiral of flame in the palm of his hand.

  Nic swerved and turned to meet him head-on. This was perfect. The idiot was rushing ahead on brute strength, and Nic was happy to match him blow-for-blow as long as he could. He fed all his power into the sand underfoot, making it shoot him forward in a billowing cloud of dust.

  Baby Boot’s hand moved. A scything wave of flame expanded outwards, a crescent moon of dripping ruby fire that rushed across the ground turning it into glass. Nic kicked off his sand-board and lifted the ground underfoot into stairs, running over the blast. Two steps. Three…

  The blast hit the base of his platforms and tore them away underfoot. He had just enough time to kick off the final step and jump towards his enemy.

  But his Eight-Eyed Mantle stopped him as a warning siren pierced through his skull. There was a flash of silver in Baby Boot’s hand. A tool or a weapon. A hidden plan.

  Nic would jump forward, and the moment he was in the air and unable to dodge, Baby Boots would annihilate him.

  Instead, he thrust his hatchet forward and called up the many-legged Centurion to leap forward in his place. There was a ripple of mist, and the centipede appeared, unfurling through the air with jaws outstretched to rip into Baby Boot’s throat. At the same time, Nic hurled himself downwards towards safety.

  Baby Boots had to make a split-second decision. A less-shaken opponent might have aimed for Nic and bet on surviving the centipede’s attack.

  Instead, Baby Boots unleashed the carved silver bead in his hand on Centurion, and a wave of rippling blue energy unfolded from his palm. Each strand of energy formed a scythe-shaped blade, and they erupted in all directions to cut the centipede-spirit to pieces.

  Nic hit the ground and almost screamed, feeling the half-liquid molten glass singe his body. He landed on his feet and spun, ready to send the hatchet in his hand flying into his opponent’s back.

  There was only a silver shimmer. Baby Boots reappeared high in the sky, unleashing a single arrow of piercing green-gold flame.

  Nic shot away, again lifting the sand into a moving platform and sailing across the desert. Behind him, the arrow slammed into the ground and shattered the dune into spears of glass. Two more arrows raced through the sky.

  Neither caught him. He took a long, curved path, circling his foe. Waiting for the next play.

  The two combatants stared each other down across the desert. Neither saw the other as a rival, an equal, as anything but a stepping stone on the way to the real battle.

  The wind blew through the orange-red sands.

  Chapter 106

  Burying the Hatchet

  Baby Boots hovered high in the sky, while Nic raced across the desert on a platform of shaped sand.

  They watched each other like hawks.

  Nic shifted his axe into his jaws, drew his bow from his back, and readied to fire. The arrow shot high and was instantly swatted aside by a minor puff of flame.

  But Nic had already drawn two more in quick succession, filling the air with flitting, shadowy missiles. Baby Boots was forced to dodge aside, parrying one after the other with quick jets of fire and then thrusting out a fist. The motion extended into a massive lance of flame that seared the air and burnt a shadow into Nic’s eyes as it plunged overhead…and missed entirely, detonating in the sand far beyond Nic.

  Baby Boots wasn’t too good at actually aiming. Or rather, he couldn’t aim and dodge at the same time—being threatened ate up too much of his focus for him to counterattack efficiently.

  It was the same with the explosive bead. Baby Boots had the tools, but he was too clumsy in using them. He’d tried to hide the killing tool under a weak initial attack, luring Nic into a counterattack that would’ve ended in his death.

  If he’d had the resilience to stay the course and attack Nic instead of shifting attention to Centurion, he probably could have survived the centipede’s assault and struck a deadly blow.

  Worse, he was giving his enemy time to think. And Nic’s thoughts were dangerous, vengeful things.

  Right now, his opponent was getting more and more cautious. While Nic had barely come out ahead in the exchange, he was steadily wearing away Baby Boots’s aura and his reserve of magical tools. The cost of this fight was only growing higher with no win in sight.

  Nic had to act before Baby Boots tried to fly away.

  “Hey!” he called out. A second later, Inkspur echoed him, speaking so that Baby Boots could understand.

  “I’ve got your secret, Baby Boots. I know where you get those shiny toys! Same reason you go burning everything that flies!” His words echoed across the desert, and he thought he saw Baby Boots gritting his teeth. “Islands in the sky, huh? Pretty neat!”

  He had one goal. Get his opponent to commit to killing him.

  It worked.

  As Nic spoke, he shot off two more arrows, and Baby Boots swatted them aside, each of his hands trailing a comet-tail of fire. He moved them in a circle, forming a flame spiral in front of his torso. The maelstrom of rippling gold-green fire swirled and contracted into a single brilliant sphere, so bright Nic could barely stand to look at it.

  Nic set his jaw and braced—that might have worked too well.

  With a single outthrust palm, Baby Boots sent the fireball hurtling towards the ground. Nic zig-zagged to evade, and it whistled far over his shoulder, but the mere proximity was enough to scorch his skin and make tears sting from his eye as the raw heat cooked it in its socket, half-blinding him and leaving a scorched streak of white across his vision.

  Then it slammed into the ground, and Nic went flying. Shards of molten glass stabbed and splattered against his skin, and the force lifted him off the ground and slammed him back down brutally, sending him into a long tumble with no air in his lungs.

  Still.

  On sheer instinct.

  He got his feet under him and dodged out of the way as a second, smaller attack—a sharp arrow of flame—pierced through where he’d been.

  With his vision still ruined, Nic lifted his bow and drew an arrow from his bag, palming a pair of paper talismans into his hand as he did so. The world swayed and blurred. He bit down onto his tongue for focus, aimed, and fired up at the distant figure.

  Baby Boots swatted the attack out of the sky with ease.

  And as he broke the featherflight arrow, Nic flickered out of place and appeared in the sky alongside his foe with a flash of lightning.

  Baby Boots blinked.

  Things happened in slow motion.

  As Baby Boots turned towards him, eyes full of surprise, his form flickered. He was about to teleport away again. But Nic was already moving. Full of spite and strength, he thrust his palm forward, slamming an open-hand blow into Baby Boots’s chest.

  Sticking the talismans onto the brat’s body with his own blood.

  Baby Boots dissolved into mist, reforming even higher in the sky, and Nic smirked as he fell backward. As Baby Boots raised a hand to deliver the killing blow on his opponent, unable to dodge or change the arc of his fall, Nic spoke the names of the talismans.

  An explosion caved in Baby Boots’ chest with a quick puff of fire.

  And a pulse of unruly aura carved through his magical effects, disrupting his ability to fly.

  With a blank stare of disbelief, Baby Boots toppled out of the sky, plummeting past Nic, as they both headed for the ground.

  Nic hit the sand hard, and the black unconscious night took him.

  When Nic blinked his eyes open, he was dizzy, weak, and in pain. His entire body throbbed, his skin covered in brutal burns and lacerated by flying glass. Bruised from the muscle down into the bone, he could feel his ribcage snapping back into place as his regeneration took over. It was agonizing. He breathed a small, pained croak, and rolled onto his feet for what felt like the millionth time.

  His vision was healed. That was good. His bow had snapped in two under his body when he fell. That was bad. He found his axe lying in the sand beside him and lifted it into his hands, limping forward to go find Baby Boots and finish this.

  His body was healing rapidly. The human wouldn’t be so lucky.

  If he moved fast and got lucky, Baby Boots might not even be conscious.

  But, as ever, Nic wasn’t lucky.

  He found Baby Boots at the bottom of a dune, struggling to shift himself up onto a rocky ledge where he’d be safe from Nic’s power over sand. One leg was snapped so brutally the bone bulged against the skin and bit through in pricking points of white surrounded by red. His arm was even worse. It twisted at an impossible angle. Blood flowed from his chest.

  And after all that, Baby Boots was still a terrible actor. His entire pose was meant to convey weakness and to hide the fact his left hand was curled up, hiding some final trick up his sleeve.

  Nic sighed and lowered his axe to point down the hill. “You picked this fight, you know. There’s a lesson there. Shame you can only learn it by dying.”

  Baby Boots stared at him, then laughed. “You idiot monster. I can’t understand a word.”

  Nic paused. Inkspur was nowhere to be found. Then he shrugged. It wasn’t as if Baby Boots was any great conversation anyway.

  He reeled back to hurl his axe and wasn’t at all surprised when Baby Boots threw his left hand forward. In the center of his palm was a strange green stone in the shape of an eye.

  And it erupted into power.

  Nic felt the aura and Essence freeze cold in his veins. He was locked down completely in the span of a blink, the strength torn out of his body by a sudden otherworldly presence.

  The sand billowed backward in a rushing wind as a green hand formed in the sky above Nic and came crashing down. He activated the Sun God’s Plates, summoning up his shield of daylight as the massive hand reached out with long, rotting fingers ending in ragged yellow nails like tombstones. In the center of the palm was an open eye, staring and bloodshot.

  It slammed into the shield, and grey flame erupted on all sides. The sand was torn aside, revealing what was underneath. Ancient ruins saw the sun for the first time in hundreds of years, and exposed alongside them, the wind peeling the sand away from their empty eyes, were thousands of bodies. A city had been here, once. It had been annihilated.

  And now, Nic faced a similar fate. Cracks spread across his barrier as the palm closed, leaving him face-to-face with that horrible eye. It stared down at him, and he felt his blood boil.

  Why?

  Why did such a miserable, talentless creature get so many lucky breaks? Why did the universe heap treasures at Baby Boots’s feet while Nic had to struggle for every break he’d ever had? Azel had shaken him by hinting that the System might have rigged the Lottery for Nic, might have twisted fate to help him arrive on this new Earth.

  But the fact remained, Nic was one in ten thousand. No doubt the System had hundreds, thousands of candidates like him, and no doubt almost all of them were already dead.

  He had risen by his own hand.

  He wouldn’t die by the hand of some rich asshole.

  Igniting the Concept of Sacrifice, he boiled his own blood and Essence in his veins. Red smoke rose from his skin as he focused everything into the nodes on his throat, breathed in, and allowed the shield to collapse.

  As the hand’s fingers swept down, he breathed out a lance of billowing mist.

  The hand began to crumble. Faced with the power of ages, the flesh shriveled down to reveal bone, and the bone dissolved into smoke and grey fire. Cold flames fell across Nic, eating away at his life force, but the hand broke apart. Only the eye remained for a second more—and as it dissolved, a black, writhing strand of power shot out from the pupil to plunge into Nic’s core.

  Fire engulfed him.

  It poured over his skin like the wave of a frozen ocean, pushing him backward, his feet skidding against the rock and stone exposed as the sand was carved away on all sides. He lifted his arms to protect his face and watched the healthy muscle he’d built up for a week shrivel to nothing.

  It was aging him.

  But he was full of life, and as he pushed his aura to ignite, burning away the accumulation of Essence he’d stored, his regeneration flowed into his limbs. Muscle restored itself, and his skin lost the greying tint it had gained.

  He wouldn’t die. Not here.

  The fires poured past like a burning wind, howling with a thousand voices. Nic stood tall, the last embers still clinging to his skin as he stepped forward.

  Baby Boots flung a fireball at his head.

  Nic stepped around it. His axe whistled down, and Baby Boots teleported again, flickering up a few feet into the sky.

  His eyes were wide with fear. He turned to fly away.

  Inkspur struck him out of nowhere, diving down with his claws outstretched to rip an eye from its socket. Baby Boots screamed, high-pitched and frantic, trying to strike Inkspur with a wild bolt of fire. It missed by miles.

  Nic drew the stone dagger he’d whittled yesterday and flung it into the back of his skull.

  Baby Boots fell.

  Chapter 107

  Face-to-Face

  Nic didn’t bother to strip the corpse. Instead, he shoved the whole body into his mystic bag and headed onwards. In the background, Inkspur gulped down his prize.

  He could already see flashes of energy coming from the core of the ruins. Blue-white frost from Sula. Blood-red lightning from Azmin. The two forces had met while he was busy cleaning up the trash.

  Scowling, Nic pressed onwards.

  Dead bodies littered the way. Frost clung to the archways of the ruins, a terrible wind blowing out from the battlefield, and all the way there, corpses of elves littered the ground. They had all been killed the same way. A single chopping blow.

  There was no blood.

  Nic had worked in a slaughterhouse for a year before the scent began to haunt him in his dreams. The dead looked like the carcasses after they’d been hung upside down and drained dry. The cuts were pink instead of red.

  He continued on. A ship was burning, its sails covered in red flames.

  Sula came flying through the air. She was holding her arm in front of her, creating a shield, her feet skidding across the ground as she generated a path of ice. Spears of red that crackled with black powers were pierced through the barrier at a dozen points.

  She turned grimly towards Nic. “I see you caught up.”

  The shield turned into a curved dagger made from translucent frost. As delicate as the weapon looked, it was so sharp light bent around the blade.

  Nic nodded towards the distant crack and boom of thunder. “Let’s take care of her, then talk.”

  His body had mostly healed back. The bruised feeling was still there, most of his muscle regrown and freshly sensitive. The real issue was his aura. Healing him back from so many wounds and unleashing the full power of the Primordial Mist? That had a cost.

  He had purposefully not spent any of his Essence, allowing it to build up to be burned with Sacrifice. That foresight was the only reason he had any reserves left at all.

  As they approached, he couldn’t help but notice Sula was limping. She was wounded, even if the strange bloodless cuts left little sign except for a rip across her tunic. He thought he saw a flash of bone underneath.

  “It was a mistake bringing so many people. She ate them and got stronger. But she’s not mobile. If you can get behind her and destroy those pillars, they’re powering her up,” Sula said.

  Nic nodded.

  And then they’d settle things between them.

  Azmin Hale sat atop a stub of ruined masonry, her body wrapped in halos of thorned lightning, red and black. She wore an armored set of straps that covered her heart with a round bronze plate carved in the shape of a howling lion and extended down her arm in overlapping segments of leather. With one hand, she guided a vortex of bloody ribbons to swirl under her control—a trapped storm. In the other, she held a long, thin sword with a simple handle and an unadorned black blade.

  Behind her rose five pillars of blood-red wood, carved into totems bearing the faces of the weeping dead. Raw and undisguised power extended from each totem-pillar and was absorbed by Asmin, and Nic could feel the presence of the dead, trapped inside. She imprisoned the ones she killed to feed off their strength.

 

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