The Coreless Vanguard - Tearing the False Sky

Night fell over the rocky wastes li

Night fell over the rocky wastes like a dropped shroud, but the dark brought no quiet.The air between them didn’t just grow cold; it split.

Shard embedded in

Silas’s sternum and the toxic, synthetic core bolted into

Valen’s chest were grinding against each other in a sickening, high-frequency resonance.

It sounded like two massive iron plates sliding across dry gravel, a sound so violent it made the sleet turn into a white mist before it even hit the shale.Valen didn’t move like a soldier anymore.He didn’t use the measured, immovable stances of the

Driven mad by the green, poisonous fire leaking from his artificial core, the

Champion roared—a sound that was half-human, half the screech of a breaking steam-crane—and hurled his three-hundred-pound frame across the rocks.BOOM.He hit

Silas like a falling boulder.They went down together into the freezing red mud, tumbling across sharp basalt scree.

There was no skill in it, no formal geometry, no refined footwork from the

Academy.Valen’s massive, square fist slammed into the side of

Silas’s head, bursting his left ear and sending a spray of warm blood across the icy stones.

Silas’s bad knee gave a sickening SNAP as it twisted under the

Champion’s iron greaves, the canvas wraps shredding away.Silas didn’t try to parry.

He didn’t have a weapon left to parry with.When

Valen’s heavy iron-plated forearm came down across his throat to crush his windpipe,

Silas didn’t try to pull it away with his ruined, broken-wristed hands.

He tilted his head, opened his jaws, and bit down.He bit straight through the thick, salt-cured leather of

Valen’s collar, his teeth sinking deep into the dense, ropy muscle of the

Champion’s neck.”Gah!” Valen roared, his pale eyes bulging as he hammered his iron elbow repeatedly into

Silas’s ribs.CRACK.

CRACK.Ribs broke.

Silas felt the sharp bone-ends jab into his lungs, every breath blowing a red froth out of his nostrils.

But he didn’t let go.

His jaw stayed clamped like a iron vice, his teeth grinding against the

Champion’s tendon until he tasted the thick, bitter, sulfur-tainted blood of the

Phalanx general.”Get… off… you… dog!” Valen screamed, his voice breaking into a wet, wheezing rattle.The green, artificial light bleeding from

Valen’s chest flared violently, spewing a plume of toxic, emerald smoke that scorched

Silas’s face, melting the skin along his cheekbones.The fake

Shard was overheating.

It was melting the iron brackets holding it to

Valen’s ribs, cooking the

Champion’s flesh from the inside out.Silas released

Valen’s neck, his mouth full of dark blood, and brought his forehead up with every ounce of raw, animalistic weight left in his neck.BANG.Headbutt to headbutt.Valen’s nose crumpled, blood spraying across

Silas’s forehead.

The impact sent a jolt of blinding white light through

Silas’s brain, but he didn’t stop.

He did it again.BANG.And again.BANG.Valen’s grip on

Silas’s throat loosened, the

Champion’s eyes rolling back into his head, his hands twanging against the stones in involuntary spasms.Silas didn’t stand up.

He couldn’t.

His legs were ruined, his ribs pulverized, his lungs leaking blood.

He crawled up

Valen’s iron-clad chest like a half-dead scavenger climbing a rock.He shoved his bare, split right hand—the knuckles stripped to the white bone—straight through the cracked seam of

Valen’s dark cuirass.The heat inside the

Champion’s chest was appalling.

It smelled of scorched hair, boiled fat, and bitter alchemical pitch.Silas’s fingers burned, the skin on his palm blistering instantly as he reached past the shattered ribs, his callused fingers searching through the hot, slick gore until they closed around the metallic, jagged edges of the artificial core.It wasn’t a crystal.

It was a jagged chunk of slag, bolted into the bone with rusted iron screws.”No…” Valen gasped, his pale, bloody face twisting in a moment of terrible, lucid agony. “Without it… the

Phalanx…”Silas didn’t listen to the

He didn’t listen to the

He didn’t care about the

Archons or the border charters.He set his boots into the mud, locked his back, and yanked.TEAR-CRUNCH.The iron screws tore free from the bone with a sickening, wet report.Silas ripped the glowing green lump of toxic slag straight out of

Valen’s chest and threw it twenty yards across the ledge.The artificial core hit the rocks, sputtered wildly with a sharp, blinding green flash, and exploded into a harmless cloud of black, foul-smelling ash.The violent, screeching feedback in the air died instantly.Silence fell over the ledge, broken only by the howling winter wind and the wet, shallow whistling of the sleet.General

Valen lay flat on his back in the red clay, his massive iron cuirass open and dark, his chest hollow.

The pale, milky glare in his eyes faded into a dull, lifeless gray, his broad, square frame relaxing into the stone as if a heavy mountain had finally been lifted off his shoulders.The

Champion of the

Phalanx was dead.Silas collapsed sideways onto the cold shale beside the body.He lay in the mud, his face slick with blood and ash, staring up at the dark, starless sky above the

He couldn’t feel his left leg.

He couldn’t feel his fingers.

Every breath he took was a shallow, agonizing rattle that blew bloody bubbles onto his chin.Beside him, in the shadow of the rocks,

Elara’s rapid, terrified footsteps crunched through the scree as she ran toward him through the dark.