Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
He couldn’t wait to slice me to pieces. He would revel in every moment of my agony.
I stumbled. A curved blade caught the edge of my clothes, its tip drawing a scalding line across my ribs. I shied away, running. Heat wet my skin under my coveralls. The wound was shallow, but it bled as if I was cut with a razor.
Across the room, the skelzhar pinned Jovo down with a huge paw. Bear leaped up and bit into the cat’s ear. The skelzhar howled and shook itself, trying to fling her away, but she hung on like a pit bull.
I kept running, veering left and right. The gress drew even with me. There were ten feet between us, and he was looking right at me, his purple eyes filled with glee.
I stumbled again and stopped to catch myself.
The gress loomed in front of me, so fast his movement was a blur. He leaped, spinning, his four arms rotating like the blades of a fan.
I flexed and saw him fly toward me in slow motion. He had decided I was done. This was the Kael finishing move, brutal and impossible to counter. He knew he would hit me, and his sickles would carve me apart.
Finally.
I shied to the right, putting all of the reserves I was saving into my speed. He hurtled past me and in the instant his feet touched the ground, his back was to me.
I sliced, shaving a wide section of the shroud off his back. It fell to the ground, a writhing, grey mat. The gress’ exposed back gaped in front of me.
The devourer shroud wasn’t a garment; it was a symbiotic second skin, bound to the gress by a myriad of nerves. If I had stabbed through it, it would barely react, but I didn’t pierce it. I cut it off. The moment my blade peeled a chunk of it off of him, every neuron of the shroud screamed in agony, dumping all of that pain into its host.
The gress shrieked as the excruciating pain twisted his limbs and dropped him to his knees.
I yanked the spider lasso off my arm and looped it around his neck.
He lunged away from me. The gress were fast. They were not strong. The spider rope snapped taut, and I jerked him back and onto my blade. My sword carved through his innards.
The gress tore himself off my blade, the ragged edges of the shroud reaching for me and falling short. He tried to spin around, his sickles lashing out, but I pulled him back, stabbing into his exposed flesh again and again and again.
The gress convulsed. I sliced the top right forearm off his body. Then the top left. The other two arms followed. I jerked him off his feet and dragged him across the floor to the pillar. It took me two seconds to tie him to the anchor.
I straightened. In the corner the skelzhar was snarling, bleeding from a dozen wounds, trying to stay upright on three legs. Its right hind paw hung useless. Its left eye was gone.
Huge angry gashes marked Bear’s back. She didn’t seem to mind, chewing on the other hind leg, while Jovo clung to the skelzhar’s back, sinking his knives into the fur.
I dropped by the gress, sliced the shroud on his chest, and ripped the metal amulet free. He wailed, his voice weak and fading. He thought I held his soul in my hand.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him in his language. “Don’t go anywhere.”
It took less than a minute for the skelzhar to die. I disengaged once the cat collapsed, but Jovo was still stabbing it, drenched in blood and lost to a frenzy.
I made my way back to the gress and crouched by him, holding the amulet by the chain. The small metal disk rotated, suspended from my fingers. The gress’ eyes locked on it. His breathing was labored. The stumps of his arms weren’t bleeding. The shroud was devouring him from within, trying to repair itself, and it was draining his blood.
The Kael Order believed that during the final rite of their training their god sent a holy demon warrior to inhabit their bodies. The demon raged, and the best way to honor and satisfy it was to deliver pain and suffering. It was a very convenient construct that absolved the Kael’gress of all moral responsibility for their actions.
The ruling elite had to maintain control, and that’s where the amulets came in. According to their doctrine, the little metal circles literally contained their souls, safeguarding them from harm, and in case of the Kael, the holy fire of the demon warrior’s aura. A gress who lost the amulet was but “a bag of meat,” and their soul would never be reborn, remaining bound to the amulet for eternity.