Outworld Liberators-Chapter 222: Battle Beneath the Watching Ceiling

Torches lined the path ahead, and here the darkness no longer pressed against them as it had near the entrance.

For a few uneasy minutes, that almost felt like mercy.

Then, behind the four disciples, the great hall they had left abruptly sealed itself.

A steel wall dropped with a thunderous crash and cut off the way back.

Oswin's pendulum jerked at once toward the sound.

There was no wind in the corridor, nothing that should have stirred it, yet the cone tipped hard in that direction and quivered there.

A chill crept through him. His pendulum never moved without cause, and never without danger.

He raised a hand.

Fay, Jackson, and Jenkii stopped with him at once, weapons already drawn.

"Is there something?" Jackson asked.

"I cannot tell for certain," Oswin said. "But my divination says there is danger behind us."

"What do you want us to do?" Fay asked, her grip tightening around the handle of her whip.

Oswin did not answer at once. He opened the turtle shell, removed the marbles, and replaced them with the steel sticks.

Then he poured qi into the shell and cast again, seeking a path.

Once. Twice. Three times.

By the third attempt, his throat had gone dry.

"What is it?" Jenkii asked.

"It's telling me to move forward," Oswin said. "And never return the way we came."

Fay, Jackson, and Jenkii all looked down at the result when he showed it to them. The sticks had not scattered cleanly this time.

They had bunched together into a tight knot, every sharp tip pointing backward, every dull end facing ahead.

"Is it supposed to do that?" Jackson asked, staring at the strange result of the divination.

Oswin shook his head. Even through the false skin stretched over his metal frame, the color had drained from his face.

Radeon had once taught him what a sign like this meant.

Not certain death. Something crueler. A struggle at the edge of death, with only a sliver of survival left to cling to.

The steel sticks still trembled on the floor.

He picked them up at once, not wanting the others to see too much of what they implied.

Even then, his eye caught a small dent in the steel. That troubled him more than the pattern itself. If the sticks had merely fallen strangely, there was still hope.

If they had warped under the force of the omen, then hope would be little more than a lie.

He drew a slow breath and steadied himself.

When he looked up, the other three were watching him.

"We go straight," Oswin said. "No turning back."

The others nodded and fell in behind him.

Soon, another chamber revealed itself.

This one dwarfed the first. At a glance alone, it stretched a hundred meters long and wide.

The floor was scored with deep slashes, as though some giant blade had carved through the stone, or some powerful fighter had once crossed weapons here and left their rage behind in the ground itself.

Two giant statues stood within the chamber, each more than ten meters tall.

They wore sandstone armor over gray bodies shaped in the image of honorable knights, still and solemn beneath the torchlight.

Yet Oswin did not trust the sight of them. His suspicion rose at once, and without quite meaning to, he found his gaze drifting upward.

Above them was only darkness. Still, he narrowed his eyes.

Jenkii caught the look on his face. Without asking, she poured fire qi into her axe and hurled it high. Flame spun through the air and briefly lit the ceiling in a wash of orange.

Nothing. Jenkii gave a small shrug. She had no idea what Oswin thought he had seen, but there was nothing above them now.

Oswin said nothing. He opened the turtle shell again, replaced the sticks with the marbles, and cast his divination toward the path ahead.

He shook it once. Twice. On the third shake, one marble caught fast inside.

Red.

At once, he took up the pendulum. It spun in a tight circle, then slowed and drew toward two directions.

Toward the statues.

"Drop the ropes. Ready for battle," Oswin ordered.

The others obeyed at once, pulling the ropes from their waists and taking their positions. Then, before the four disciples' eyes, one of the armored statues smiled.

The sound came next.

A deep series of pops and cracks echoed from within the giant frames, like old bones forcing themselves awake after long centuries of stillness.

Sandstone armor trembled, split, and sloughed away in heavy chunks. Beneath it lay rusted armor wrapped around towering undead forms.

The two giants stepped forward and raised their weapons.

Jenkii's eyes narrowed. Their stances were clean. Disciplined. There was not a single wasted angle in the way they held themselves.

She grinned anyway.

Beside her, Jackson opened the pouch at his side and drew out his own dried blood.

Under his murmur, it answered him. A thin crimson saber took shape in his hand, like a duelist's blade.

"Jackson, take the left," Oswin said. "Jenkii, right."

Both Jackson and Jenkii glanced at the diviner and gave a sharp nod. Fay drew breath and fed flame qi into the mouth of her whip.

Jackson did not waste a single word. He vanished from where he stood.

Vampiric Speed Arts did not slow the world for him. It made him monstrously fast within it, his body surging with a predator's burst that let him cheat the ordinary limits of flesh.

Marble burst beneath his foot as he launched himself forward.

The Zombie Guardian reacted at once. Its blade came down in a brutal sweep, not at where Jackson was, but at the line where he ought to appear.

Jackson dropped into an angle no ordinary body should have managed. His knees folded low, his torso flattened nearly horizontal, and his head bent so far back it seemed ready to snap. One hand skimmed the floor and bore his weight as he slid beneath the edge of the strike.

In the same motion, he drew his crimson saber and cut for the giant's Achilles heel.

The Zombie Guardian was no witless corpse.

It saw the line of attack. It knew the weakness of its own body. Just before the saber could bite, it lifted its heel and let the blade scrape the underside of its armored foot instead.

Sparks spat. The edge shrieked over metal and shaved away only a thin strip of blackened steel.

Jackson clicked his tongue and sprang back. The thing had too much battle sense. Too much awareness. Worse, it felt no fatigue.

A long exchange would only teach it his habits while his own body spent breath and blood to keep pace.

So he changed the game.

With a flick of his fingers, he scattered dry scabs from the pouch at his side.

The brittle flakes hung in the air where they landed, fixed in place as though invisible nails held them there.

Jackson retreated a step, then planted his foot on one of those floating scabs.

He broke into flashing angles and false lines, using the suspended scabs as stepping stones in midair.

Afterimages peeled away from him as he struck. His saber lashed across the Zombie Guardian's cuirass, its shoulders, its elbow joints, its gorget, its ribs, its knees.

Jackson was not attacking wildly. He was probing. Testing. Learning where the armor might fail.

This was the level expected of the cult's foremost disciple, far beyond the Giovanni whose identity Radeon had stolen.

Jenkii did not fall behind.

A mark bloomed upon her forehead as she rushed in. Her style had never depended on fine technique or clever footwork.

Jenkii fought with a simpler creed. Aim true. Hit hard. Hit again.

She sprang high with her axe swollen by raw qi and brought it down in a savage arc.

The Guardian Knight met her with its broadsword. Steel crashed against steel, and the chamber flashed white for an instant.

A second, smaller mark appeared beside the first.

This was the Blooming Lotus Consecutive Arts.

Still in midair, Jenkii twisted her body and swung again before she even landed.

Her axe hammered into the giant blade a second time. The clang rang louder than before, and the flash that burst from the collision was brighter still.

Another mark lit on her forehead. That was the nature of her art.

So long as her strikes kept landing, her power would continue to climb. Against an enemy this large, she could hardly ask for a better target.

Fay, meanwhile, pressed two fingers to her lips and began to murmur a prayer.

Teal flame flickered from her mouth with each measured breath. She did not move from where she stood. She only watched.

Then her eyes met Jackson's.

Something passed between them in that brief glance. Understanding. Timing.

At once, Jackson overcharged his blood saber until it swelled into a great blade of crimson light. The air roared as he drove it at the undead.

The Zombie Guardian raised both hands to catch the screaming blade, and for a moment it almost seemed to grin beneath its helm.

Then Fay moved. She spat the teal flame gathered in her mouth into the fire already waiting at the wolf's head set at her whip's tip, then snapped the weapon forward with such force that it let out a shrill cry.

Five flames shot from it, each no larger than a man's head, each burning with a hungry light that was wrong for any ordinary fire.

The Zombie Guardian felt the danger in them at once. It chose the lesser harm.

Rather than risk those flames, it let Jackson's blood slash crash into its pauldron while it turned to swat the teal fire aside.

That was its mistake. The flames did not fly straight. They curved.

The first slipped through the gap at its shoulder and burst within the armor.

The detonation made the giant jerk. It felt as though something had clawed at its soul itself, yet the pain was still bearable.

It struck aside two more flames, and those exploded against its sword in sharp bursts of teal. Even then, something felt wrong.

It turned too late. One flame had already crept inside its helm.

Fay's fingers tightened. That was the true strike.

The hidden flame exploded with a roar that shook the chamber. Even Jackson leapt back from it, his heart hammering at the sheer malice in that fire.

The Zombie Guardian's head went up in teal blaze, burning fierce enough to light every pit and crack in its rusted armor.

Yet its soul was not like that of the living. Under the underworld flame, it did not gutter out. It burned brighter.

The giant crashed to the ground and rolled in blind, ugly panic, trying to smother the fire. But the more it thrashed, the more the teal blaze spread across it.

The other Zombie Guardian turned its head and watched its companion's final moments in the teal blaze.

"Ugly, where are you looking?" Jenkii said with a crazed grin.

Across her forehead, the Blooming Lotus had reached its thirtieth petal.

The Zombie Guardian answered by drawing up its ghostly qi to the utmost.

Pale force gathered around its rusted frame in a cold, trembling haze.

Jenkii only laughed under her breath. Then she moved.

She spun upward in a brutal rising arc, then drove herself down with her axe held in both hands.

The Guardian brought up its sword to meet her. It did not matter. Her strike broke through the blade and kept going, splitting steel, armor, and corpse flesh in one savage line until the giant came apart in two halves.

That technique had been made for demons, and it carried a price. It traded away sanity for a monstrous increase in strength. For one breathless instant, Jenkii's eyes looked almost feral.

Then she shut them.

She steadied her breathing. Steam slipped from her lips in slow bursts, and one by one the lotus petals on her forehead receded until the wildness left her face.

Jenkii opened her eyes and, pleased with herself, shifted at once into something far more playful.

"I'm pretty strong, aren't I?" she asked.

She leaned to one side while holding the oversized axe out with one arm as though its weight were nothing. Her free hand rose near her mouth in a mock shy gesture, and one leg bent slightly as she struck the pose with surprising cuteness.

Fay recognized it at once from the poster and answered with two raised thumbs, her warm smile showing she approved of both the strength and the beauty behind it.

Oswin looked away. The girl was, in fact, quite pretty, with the sort of healthy figure he found hard to ignore. After a brief hesitation, he raised his hands and gave her a shy thumbs up.

Jackson glanced between the two of them and decided a simple nod was the wisest path. There was no profit in offending a giant woman with an axe that large.

Above them, however, something still watched.

The ceiling regarded them with something close to regret.

It had not moved yet, only continued widening itself in the dark, as though it needed to fill the whole span above before it could descend upon them.

Oswin felt that stare crawl across his skin and looked up once more.

He saw nothing. The ceiling was too high, and the darkness still too thick.

Jenkii caught him by the arm and tugged him toward the passage beyond the fallen Guardian Zombies.

"There's nothing there," she said. "Don't stress over it."