If I could just tear out the skelebuddy life points like I could with Van Diemann ferals, I could’ve cleared the room in no time, but like Warcry had pointed out, it wouldn’t be any easier to damage a tiny line of script than it was to crush the whole gem.
Sudden Death would take a swath of skeletons out at once, but there was no telling how many years it would steal off the end of my life, or how many years I had left to gamble with.
But what about something that could both back us up and damage the gems’ protective script? According to the purple jade book, Wrathblade would fight alongside me, protecting me and carrying out my will. I didn’t know the price, only that it wasn’t a Spirit construct and didn’t subtract years off my life. Whatever it was, it was supposed to start out small and grew as Wrathblade grew more powerful. Maybe if I used it just this once, I could kill two birds with one stone—find out what exactly it cost to use and pare away some of this skeleton army so Warcry and I could finally start making some progress.
“Hey, I need some space and a couple seconds,” I yelled to Warcry.
“What for?”
“I’m going to try something.”
We cleared the circle of skelebuddies once more, then Warcry took up a defensive position, destroying anything that came at me.
I dropped Death Metal, planted my feet, and reached into the empty air beside my hip. In one smooth motion, I brought the right fist forward and grabbed it with the left, like I was drawing an invisible sword from its scabbard.
Except it wasn’t invisible. The second my hands touched, a glowing purple uchigatana appeared in my grasp with a metallic whispering sound I shouldn’t have been able to hear over the sound of rattling bones and flying weapons. As the Wrathblade solidified, the whispering got louder.
You fetid meat roach trash. It was a disgrace to die at your hands.
The hair down the back of my neck prickled and probably would’ve stood on end if it wasn’t matted down with sweat. That was Sedrick Nameless’s arrogant sneer.
Pain ripped through my left shoulder as a skelebuddy’s sword plunged in and chipped the bone. I yelled.
“Break time’s up, grav,” Warcry called, a little late on the warning.
Wrathblade ripped itself out of my hands. I spun to follow it. The glowing uchigatana lunged and slashed at the skelebuddy who’d attacked me, hacking into its ancient bones and blocking its attacks.
My brain raced to catch up. Wrathblade was pushing the skeletons back, buying Warcry and me space, but it wasn’t killing them. It slashed all the places that would kill a living thing—throat, gut, kidneys, spine—but there was no meat on these undead things.
“The gems,” I yelled, and I swear I felt the sword listen to me. “Damage their script, but don’t destroy the gemstones yet! I want to try something.”
Immediately, Wrathblade whirled, slicing around the inner circle of encroaching skelebuddies. I threw out a net of Dead Reckoning. All around me, life points went from solid, static stone to flickering candles.
I shut my eyes and focused, reaching out with a dozen Dead Man’s Hands at the same time. They closed around the flames trapped in those gemstones. I pulled, but it was like trying to pull a parachute full of water off the bottom of a lake; there was some sort of suction or inertia holding it back.
Skeletons surged in for the kill around Wrathblade. Warcry’s prosthetic rang like a baseball bat at a home run derby, over and over again, but he couldn’t hold them off by himself.
I sent Death Metal to my arms to knock the encroaching skelebuddies away from his blind spots, then pumped all the loose, uncondensed Miasma in my Spirit sea into Dead Man’s Hand. The smoky free-floating Miasma dried up fast, and I started to unwind one of my spirals to amplify the attack.
With a feeling like ripping a tree out of the ground, the first life point tore loose. As soon as the Miasma hit my Spirit sea, my power shot through the roof. Two more life points were wrenched from their gemstones, then eight.
It was like I was made of lightning and tornadoes and nuclear bombs. I’d never had that much power coursing through me in my life.
“Oi, grav!”
I ignored Warcry. In minutes, Wrathblade and Dead Man’s Hand carved the fourth-floor army in half, then in half again. Then I had all of them, every remaining life point. My Spirit sea roared with Miasma, tsunamis of it crashing against the sides and flooding my rivers.
My brain whited out with euphoria.
At the edge, I could hear someone yelling. I blinked, and the bone-dust covered room faded back in.
“You took in too much, grav!” Orange fountains of fire geysered up from under Warcry’s boots and blasted harmlessly off his flaming skin. “Condense before you kill yourself!”
Holy crap, he was right. Turquoise smoke leaked from my pores and eyes, and clouds of it rolled from my nose and mouth with every breath. Necrotizing frost grew like white moss on my skin.
I shut my eyes. My insides shivered and shuddered as I grabbed for the overflow of Miasma. There was so much. It was chaos, no direction or shape to it, just insanity.
Scrambling, I wrestled with the storm, grappling at the edges until it started to turn the right direction, corkscrewing inward.
One spiral started to condense.
It wasn’t enough. There was so much Miasma still running rampant in my system. I amped up my focus and grabbed a new section, fighting until it started to turn in a different direction.
A second spiral began pulling in Spirit. I moved on to a third.
Little by little, the boiling storm of Death eased until I stopped feeling like I was going to fly apart.
