Chapter 305: The White-Phosphorus Furnace
The bottom of the narrow shell crater had been squeezed into a sealed chemical furnace. Beyond the blast shield raged a white-phosphorus firestorm past a thousand degrees, a wall of flame so dense it ate the air. The armor coating that had shrugged off armor-piercing rounds bubbled and melted under the roast, then dripped as a stinging toxic sludge into the charred mud.
The war exoskeleton bracing Chloe’s broken leg had become a device of execution. The titanium alloy struts, their matte tactical paint scorched black and flaking, glowed a bright angry red under the extreme heat conduction. The alloy clamps that pinned her snapped shin sank deep into the pale flesh of her calf as the metal warped.
Skin touched superheated metal with a sound like flesh cooking. A thick stink of carbonized protein spread through the cramped space. Pain past the limit of endurance twisted straight up her damaged nerves into the brain. Light blooms and double vision flooded Chloe’s sight. She ground her back molars and swallowed the scream, took the rust-thick taste of split gums and throat mucus and forced it down.
Leon braced the softening blast shield above his head with his one sparking ruined mechanical arm. His other hand fumbled to his belt and tore loose a tactical first-aid kit. His faceplate had warped in the heat. Every breath pulled air hot enough to scald the alveoli, and his chest tore with each draw. From the thigh slot he dug out the last canister of military liquid nitrogen with shaking fingers.
“Matriarch, hold on,” Leon growled, voice raw and cracked.
He popped the safety and jammed the nozzle against the glowing knee armor on Chloe’s right leg, slamming the valve. High-pressure nitrogen hit the red-hot titanium and met it with a violent thermal collision, a shriek of steam, a thick white condensation fog boiling up and swallowing the crater’s sight. The brutal thermal shock did not peel the exoskeleton as hoped.
The temperature span was too extreme, the precision joints seized and warped, and with a few dry snaps of metal the brace’s locks jammed shut for good. Some of the melted alloy ran backward down the nitrogen’s wash and poured into the deep split of Chloe’s broken tibia. Chloe’s oil-smeared carbon-fiber left hand clawed deep into the scorched earth.
The cold metal fingers plowed furrows in the mud. Her dark-gold vertical pupils dilated to the limit from the pain. The tendons at her temple jumped under the pale skin, her neck muscles spasming beyond her control.
“Leave it.
Hold the line,” she forced out between her teeth, and even under that torture her voice held no tremor, only the cold command of a sovereign. Leon looked at that nearly cooked shin, blood vessels bursting in his eyes. The executor hauled his fist down on the inside of the blast shield, a furious growl rolling from his throat.
The agony did not stay in the ground crater. It ran wildly along the Mate Bond in her soul and punched straight through Victor’s heart thirty thousand meters overhead. The black tornado blotting the sky was being torn to pieces by the raging gravity field. Victor clamped the Progenitor vessel’s cervical spine and hammered it into the energy barrier, his bone-wings beating with the weight of crushed space.
Great sheets of poison blood and rot vaporized in the airflow. The moment the torture-pain transmitted through the Mate Bond hit his nerve center, Victor’s back muscles seized in a fatal spasm. The focus in his crimson eyes tore from the pain. His heart was gutted by the real, transmitted sensation of bone and flesh seared raw.
The man loosed a terrible wolf howl in the heart of the storm, a sound with nothing left in it but the madness of a nest-guard beast watching its mate torn open. The Progenitor consciousness clutched in his grip sensed the opening. The vessel’s severed right-arm stump sprayed black water that condensed under pressure into a barbed high-density poison blade, driving straight at Victor’s unguarded chest.
Victor ignored the blade entirely. He let it punch into his left shoulder blade, sink deep between bones, and throw up a spray of black blood. He opened his fingers and dropped the half-dead enemy. His pale bone-wings, spanning a dozen meters, snapped shut in the storm. The man gave up the air and became a meteor wrapped in a dark-red gravity field, plummeting toward the white-phosphorus hell below.
The violently compressed air ignited in the fall, dragging a blinding trail of fire toward the horizon. The Progenitor vessel steadied its broken form midair, its dim-yellow vertical pupils flashing mechanical confusion. The high-tier abominations still sniffing at the mother’s scent around the phosphorus fire had just clawed open the scorched earth, not yet charged, when the overhead weight arrived first.
The sonic boom tore eardrums. Victor struck the crater’s edge with ten thousand tons of gravity, and the impact ripple became a solid dark-red ring-wave flattening outward, heaving the frozen soil for five hundred meters. The nearest stitched giant was crushed to pulp under the gravity press, its foul black water spraying into the fissures.
Victor rose from the deep pit. The poison blade still wept black blood from his shoulder. His expensive hand-sewn white shirt was rags, baring a chest mapped with old scars and suture lines. He strode across the burning phosphorus embers and kicked away the mangled blast shield Leon held overhead. The executor was swept meters off and slammed into the mud.
The crater’s horror hit Victor’s sight. Chloe slumped in the mire, the glowing alloy strut welded into her shredded calf, the surrounding flesh seared to a horrifying charcoal. Her lower lip was bitten white and split. The dark-gold pupils struggled to focus from the pain. Victor’s hands, smeared with black blood, trembled at his sides.
He dropped to one knee in the mud. His great frame blocked all the wind, snow, gun-smoke, and prying sight, yet he dared not touch that ruined leg.
“Chloe,” he said, voice low and broken.
Chloe’s scattered gaze found his face. Her oil-leaking mechanical left hand lifted with effort, the carbon-fiber pad brushing his clenched jaw.
“Stop with the funeral face.
I’m not dying,” she said, and even shaking from breaths that spasmed she would not show weakness, pulling a bleeding split at the corner of her cracked lips, that stark red finally snapping Victor’s reason. He reversed the black-gold dagger at his waist and cut his own left wrist, the blade opening flesh and a deep artery.
Hot pureblood fountained. He held his wrist above the glowing alloy clamp on her leg, letting the blood pour onto that branding iron. The pureblood carried the icy, heavy attribute of the deep-sea remade heart. The power met the superheated metal without exploding. It condensed into dark-red hard ice, forcibly neutralizing the titanium’s surface heat, the metal’s glare dimming under the pureblood until it became a dark blue sheathed in heavy frost.
The wrist wound tried to close with his self-healing. He tore the new skin open with his right hand, widening the cut, pouring more pureblood into the crevices of her damaged flesh. Dark-red blood ran down the metal clamps into the charred wound. The nerves burned dead by heat stopped dying the instant they met pureblood.
Fine tough dark-red threads pulled from the broken tibia’s cross-section, re-pinning the shattered bone. The extreme cold forced down the searing burn. Chloe’s spasming body relaxed under the pureblood’s comfort. She leaned against Victor’s broad chest. Her ear against his left breast caught the new heart’s violent overclocked beat. The Mate Bond carried nothing but the man’s feral, total devotion.
“Enough, Victor,” she said, pressing his bleeding wrist with her right hand, fingers firm.
“Not enough.
As long as you still hurt, it is not enough,” he said, taking her hand, his callused pad rubbing the old callus in her palm. He bent his head and knocked his war-bloodied lips to her sweat-cold forehead. The Progenitor will above the vault gave no respite. The black tornado in the clouds began to contract and collapse.
Tens of thousands of tons of Progenitor black-qi materialized in the stratosphere. The wind died. The whole Alpine sky went silent. A hundred-meter black greatsword of pure death-qi and high-dimensional static took shape in the vault, its surface running with space-rending dim-yellow light. That was the abyss main-brain’s entire kill-intent hurled from the North American altar, crossing the high-dimensional block to lock the two sovereigns below.
The sword tip pointed straight at the crater floor. The pressure bent the ground gravity field early. The frozen soil for a hundred meters around cracked, countless pebbles floating up, turning to powder the instant they touched the outer black-qi. Victor stood from the mud. He shielded Chloe behind him, his damaged bone-wings snapping open.
In the same second, Chloe and Victor both felt the coordinate resonance from across the ocean. Leo’s right-wrist abyss brand flared scarlet in the high-dimensional network. The man lifted his head to meet the descending black greatsword. His killing intent climbed bare and unchecked to its peak. The black sword fell with the force to split the European continent.
The colossal blade filled the vault, a slab of pure death descending toward the two sovereigns who stood unbroken in its path. Chloe’s blood-smeared hand found Victor’s, and neither of them looked away from the coming dark. The air itself seemed to hold its breath before the impact. He caught her chin, thumb brushing the blood at her lip, and the look he gave her was worth every fucking mile of this bastard road.
