The Coreless Vanguard - Collateral Damage
Dawn didn’t arrive with gold or warmth
Dawn didn’t arrive with gold or warmth.
It crept into the bottom of the ravine like a greasy gray stain, turning the black shadow into a world of wet slate and freezing mud.Silas didn’t launch himself into the air like a heroic knight from a tapestry.
He miscalculated.When he squeezed his right arm and unleashed the
Gale-Wolf rune, the pressurized air erupted from his palm with the violent, uncontrolled kick of a overloaded hand-cannon.
It didn’t lift him gracefully; it threw him sideways.
He smashed knee-first into an icy limestone ledge ten feet up, his leg buckling with a sickening pop that sent a fresh wave of nausea straight to his brain.He didn’t land on his feet.
He fell off the ledge like a sack of wet flour, dropping straight onto the wedge-shaped head of the
Basilisk.The beast gave a guttural, startled shriek.Silas clawed frantically at the armored plates, his fingers slipping over the cold, slick slime coating its hide.
He smelled the rancid bait grease on his own collar, mixed with the beast’s foul, acidic breath.
With his left arm wrapped around a jagged iron spike behind its ear, he reached to his belt with his right hand, his numb fingers fumbling for his iron skinning knife—a four-inch piece of dull, pitted metal he used for scraping boots and cleaning fish.He didn’t aim for a magical pressure point.
He didn’t know any.
He just drove the blade downward into the only soft spot he could see: the milky, blind eye on the left side of its skull.The knife went in up to the hilt.The
Basilisk went mad.A sound tore out of the creature’s throat—a high-pitched, metallic screech that rattled the loose gravel for fifty yards around.
The massive wedge-shaped head slammed sideways into the canyon wall, trying to scrape
Silas off like a tick.BANG.Silas’s left arm was caught between the beast’s jaw and the solid granite face.He felt the bones in his forearm grind together.
Pain didn’t register as a feeling; it registered as a blinding flash of white light that wiped out his hearing and filled his mouth with the taste of copper.
Muscle tore.
The iron scales of the monster scraped the skin right off his wrist, exposing raw, crimson meat.”Gah!” Silas choked, his jaw locking so tight his teeth creaked.He didn’t let go of the knife.
With his right hand—burning with the wild, wild current of the wolf rune —he grabbed the wooden hilt and twisted.
He ground the steel deeper, leaning his entire body weight into the socket, searching for the brain behind the bone.The
Basilisk violently thrash-rolled.
The sheer weight of twelve feet of muscle and iron plates threw
Silas off, launching him across the floor of the fissure.He hit the gravel hard, rolling three times before slamming into a pile of sharp scree.
He lay there, gasping, his left arm draped over his stomach like a dead branch, completely useless, bleeding heavily through a ragged tear in his sleeve.Across the canyon floor, the
Basilisk was dying, but it didn’t know it yet.
The knife was buried to the tang in its brain, and the monster was in a frantic, blind death-spasm.
Its massive, spiked tail whipped wildly through the fog, smashing boulders into clouds of gray dust, its heavy legs tearing deep trenches into the limestone floor.Above, on the lip of the canyon, a shouted command broke the morning quiet.”It’s down!
The beast is thrashing!
Move, move!”A thick hemp rope dropped down the canyon wall, slapping against the wet rock.
A moment later, a figure dropped lightly into the gravel, his boots making a crisp, arrogant crunch.Cassius
Thorne.He looked immaculate in the morning gray.
His light steel breastplate gleamed, free of a single speck of dirt.
His long, silver-hilted dueling saber was already drawn, humming with a faint, elegant blue aura.
Behind him, two guards rappelled down the rope, their heavy crossbows raised.Cassius glanced at
Silas lying in the mud, then dismissively turned his back on the boy.”Useless trash couldn’t even finish it,” Cassius spat, his voice full of casual, aristocratic disgust. “Look at him, bleeding out like a dog.
Get the core before the meat spoils.
I’m delivering the killing blow.”Cassius stepped forward, raising his saber with a flourish, aiming for the soft gap beneath the
Basilisk’s thrashing throat.
He wanted the glory.
He wanted to tell the
Academy recruiters that he had stepped into the dark and slain a tier-three beast with a single, precise thrust.He took two quick, elegant steps toward the monster.He misjudged the death throes of a mountain predator.A dying beast doesn’t have an
It doesn’t have a plan.
It just has five tons of thrashing, spasming iron and meat.As
Cassius raised his sword to strike, the
Basilisk’s heavy, armored tail—thick as an oak trunk and studded with obsidian spikes—swept back in a blind, involuntary reflex.
It cut through the morning fog with the speed of a falling guillotine.CRACK.The sound was wet, loud, and sickeningly final.It sounded like a ripe melon being dropped onto a stone floor from a high window.The tail caught
Cassius square in the midsection, driving him sideways and flattening him against the vertical limestone wall.
The polished steel breastplate didn’t protect him; it buckled inward like a stepped-on tin cup, folding his ribs into his spine.Cassius didn’t scream.
He couldn’t.
The air in his lungs was exploded out of him instantly, along with a thick jet of dark, frothy blood that sprayed across the gray rock.His expensive, silver-hilted saber dropped into the gravel, snapped in two.The two
Thorne guards froze on the rope, their faces turning the color of curdled milk. “Young…
Master!” one of them shrieked, his voice cracking into a panicked, terrified pitch.The
Basilisk gave one final, long shudder.
A thick, yellow fluid oozed from its ruined eye, and its massive head collapsed into the gray scree, motionless at last.Silence returned to the ravine, heavy and suffocating.Cassius slid slowly down the rock face, leaving a wide, dark streak on the limestone.
He slumped into a sitting position against the base of the wall, his legs twisted at unnatural, broken angles beneath him.
His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and filled with a frantic, uncomprehending horror.He looked at his own chest, crushed inward like a caved-in barrel, then slowly turned his head toward
Silas.Silas didn’t move from his spot in the gravel.
He sat propped against a boulder, clutching his ruined left arm against his ribs.
His face was covered in black bait grease, gray stone dust, and drying blood.Cassius’s lips moved.
Blood bubbled up from his throat, spilling over his chin, staining the silver embroidery of his buckskin jacket.”Va…
Vance…” Cassius gasped, a wet, rattling sound echoing in his crushed chest.
His hand twitched toward
Silas, his fingers clawing weakly at the stones. “Help… my family… the… the potion in my…”Silas stared at him.He didn’t feel a surge of dark, vengeful joy.
He didn’t feel triumph.
He just felt cold—a deep, bitter cold that seemed to come from the wet rocks beneath his thighs and the heavy, black shard resting against his own ribs.He watched the light flicker in
Cassius’s pale gray eyes.
He watched the boy who had worn tailored leather and smelled of expensive lavender oil choke on his own destroyed lungs in a ditch that smelled of rotten eggs and beast dung.Up on the ropes, the two guards were screaming, scrambling frantically to climb back down, their boots slipping on the wet limestone.Silas didn’t say a word.
He didn’t move a inch.He just watched
Cassius’s hand fall limp into the red mud.When the last rattle left the noble boy’s throat,
Silas slowly turned his head, looking down at his own right forearm.
Beneath the dirty bandages, the silver-gray nodes of the wolf rune were dimming, returning to a dull, aching throbbing.The morning sun finally broke over the high peaks of the
Mountains, casting long, pale shadows across the three corpses in the ravine: the beast, the noble, and the boy who was no longer quite human.