I am still on my knees.
I should stand, press the advantage, but my body refuses the command.
The warrior lowers its injured arm and lets the weapon fall. Three functional limbs remain. Three weapons. Its yellow eyes fix on me, calculating the cost, the remaining capacity, whether it can finish this before its wound becomes fatal.
It decides it can.
The chamber's organic walls pulse in rhythm with my labored breathing, their bioluminescent veins casting shadows that writhe across the warrior's form. I can see the mathematics of violence working behind those yellow eyes, measuring my capacity against its own, determining whether three functional limbs suffice to finish what four began.
The warrior advances.
I force myself upright. My left leg screams in protest, the thigh wound pulling. My shoulder grinding with each movement. The cuts across my torso and arms throbbing in rhythm with my pulse.
The silver light coating my hands has thinned to barely a shimmer. Still there. Still functional. But fragile, as though the construct is rationing what capacity it recovered.
I set my feet and raise my guard.
The warrior does not hesitate.
Two blades sweep toward my head. The third goes low. I block one high strike with my right forearm. The silver sheath hardens flesh just enough, but the impact sends reverberations through the damaged joint, and I know with the cold certainty that comes in moments like this that I cannot sustain another exchange like the first. My body has nothing left to give.
I cannot block the other two.
I twist. Let the second high strike pass. It catches my already wounded shoulder. Fresh pain. Fresh blood.
The low strike takes my legs.
I go down again.
This time I do not catch myself properly. My wounded shoulder refuses to support weight. I hit the floor hard. My head bounces off the organic surface. Vision swims.
The warrior stands over me. Three weapons raised.
I have no speed left. No strength. The silver sheath flickers weakly on my hands. We have nothing left.
The warrior's blades begin their descent.
Three angles. Perfectly coordinated. Designed to end this.
Time does not slow. My body does not surge with supernatural speed. The Skathrith cannot provide what it does not have.
I am alone.
The thought arrives with strange clarity: I will die here, on this chamber floor, cut apart by an alien warrior I barely wounded, the silver sheath too weak to matter, my body too broken to move.
The blades fall.
Something moves in my peripheral vision.
The warrior's eyes flick toward the motion. Just for an instant. A fraction of a heartbeat.
Its stance shifts. Weight redistributing. The descending strike angles change, compensating for the distraction.
The adjustment creates a gap.
I do not think. Cannot think. My hand simply moves, reaches for the bone weapon the warrior dropped, the one from its injured arm lying on the floor beside me.
My fingers close around the hilt.
The warrior's blades continue their descent.
I drive the bone weapon upward.
No strength behind it. No speed. Just the angle. The trajectory. The warrior's own momentum carrying it onto the point.
The blade meets resistance for perhaps a fraction of a heartbeat.
Then nothing.
The weapon slides through skin, muscle, bone, organ. Through everything, as though the alien's body is made of smoke, of shadow, of nothing at all.
The warrior's eyes widen with understanding.
It knows what just happened. Knows what cut through its core.
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Time stretches.
The warrior's eyes find mine and hold them, and in that suspended moment, with the bone blade buried in its torso, no, not buried, sheathed, as though the alien's flesh offers no more resistance than air, and dark blood beginning to well around the entry point, something passes between us that has no name in any language I know. Recognition. One warrior to another. Acknowledgment that this is the nature of things, that one of us would fall, that the mathematics of violence have resolved in my favor by the narrowest of margins.
Its descending strikes falter, lose coordination. The blades pass to either side of me and embed themselves in the chamber floor.
The warrior sways. The light fades from those yellow eyes.
The body becomes dead weight.
I push myself upright, legs shaking, wounded shoulder screaming, the bone weapon still gripped in my hand, still buried in the alien's torso.
The corpse slumps sideways, its own mass pulling it along the blade.
The weapon continues cutting, the silver-coated edge offers no resistance to matter and gravity does not care about the sanctity of flesh.
The blade passes through ribs, through spine, through organs I have no names for. The alien's body splits as it falls, bifurcating along the line of that impossible edge, and I can only watch as the corpse essentially cuts itself apart on a weapon that treats bone like empty air.
Dark blood erupts from the widening wound, thick and almost black in the chamber's dim light, spraying across my hand, my arm, the chamber floor.
The two halves of the warrior's body hit the ground with wet, heavy sounds.
The bone blade comes free, clean, as though withdrawn from water.
I stare at it.
At the weapon in my hand that barely weighs anything, that required almost no strength to wield, that just bisected an alien warrior through the simple act of existing in the path of falling meat.
Silver light flickers along its edge, already fading.
I look at the corpse, at what used to be a warrior, now two distinct pieces leaking dark blood across the organic floor.
I did not do that.
Gravity did.
The blade simply allowed it.
My hands shake worse now than before, not from exhaustion, but from understanding what this means, what I could do, what the Skathrith can make possible with any weapon it touches, any edge, any surface meant to cut.
The physics do not matter. The strength does not matter. Only the contact, only the silver sheath flowing through the weapon instead of trying to be the weapon.
The shimmer fades completely from the bone blade, the weapon returning to plain bone.
I drop it. The blade clatters against the chamber floor.
Silence.
I stand in place, staring at the bisected corpse, my chest heaving, each breath pulling against ribs that might be cracked, bruised at minimum.
Through our bond, the Skathrith's presence stirs, still depleted, still exhausted, but there, stable.
And offering nothing. No confirmation, no guidance, just that patient, waiting awareness, as though it expected me to learn this on my own through necessity, through nearly dying.
We survived.
Barely.
Dark blood seeps from both halves of the warrior's body, thick and almost black in the chamber's dim light, running across the organic floor.
Then stops.
The blood defies gravity, streams upward in ribbons, separates into droplets that hang suspended for a heartbeat before flowing toward the Skathrith's invisible presence above.
Through our bond, I feel the construct feeding. The sensation floods through our connection in ways I have no framework to interpret. Pure desire. Purpose fulfilled. The Skathrith converting death into capacity with the same clinical precision a body converts food into energy. But there is something beneath that cold efficiency, something that feels almost like relief, like the desperate gratitude of lungs filling after drowning.
The construct's presence strengthening with each drop consumed, the depleted feeling fading, the bond stabilizing.
I know we could fight again, if we had to.
I want more.
The realization arrives as something that has been growing in the space between my consciousness and the Skathrith's alien awareness. Not the blood itself. The visceral reality of feeding disgusts me even as it happens, but the feeling that comes with it. The certainty. The sense of function fulfilled, of survival earned through violence, of capacity restored through the death of something that tried to kill me. It is wrong. I should be horrified, disturbed by my own reaction.
But some part of me, some part I do not want to examine too closely, understands the Skathrith's relief and recognizes it as right, as natural.
The last traces of blood vanish into nothing. Consumed. Converted.
White-hot pain lances through my skull.
My vision whites out. I press my forehead against the cool chamber floor.
Glyphs burn themselves into the space behind my forehead, meaning that resolves slowly, invasively, like the torq translating alien data into something my mind can barely process.
+3 Units.
A measurement of what was taken. What was absorbed.
Opponent: Xal'rith Warrior.
The designation carries weight. Information compressed into syllables. This was a warrior. A member of a conquered race. Trained. Experienced. Dangerous.
Dead.
Energy Assimilated.
The glyphs fade but their impression lingers like a brand. I can still feel them. Still taste the way they forced themselves into my consciousness.
Less invasive than the first time. As though the construct is learning how to communicate without forcing.
Or I am learning to receive.
I open my eyes.
The chamber swims, tilts, slowly rights itself.
I limp toward the chamber wall, each step sending pain through my left leg where the thigh wound protests, threatens to tear further. When I reach the wall, I press my back against its pulsing surface and slide down until I am sitting, breath coming in short gasps, each inhalation pulling against ribs that send sharp bursts of pain. The cuts on my arms and shoulders have stopped bleeding, but the wounds throb with each heartbeat.
My hands will not stop shaking.
I look at the bone blade on the floor, then at my hands.
The warrior had four weapons, four bone blades carved for killing.
If I had understood from the start...
I close my eyes and catalog the damage.
Left thigh lacerated. I knew that already, felt it tearing with each step. The cuts across my torso and arms. But the ribs are new information: bruised or fractured, I cannot tell which without prodding. The right shoulder is worse than I thought. The joint damage goes deeper than the surface wound suggests. Cartilage torn, maybe worse. Muscle strain throughout my entire frame. Nervous system exhausted from repeated surges of energy it was never designed to channel.
I open my eyes. I can fight, survived this encounter, but barely.
I wonder if the bond will teach me through necessity like this every time, through pain, through near-death, through discovering too late what I should have known from the start.
I wonder if my body will last that long. If the Skathrith wonders the same about itself.
The chamber offers no answers, only the steady pulse of organic walls, the thick air that resists being breathed, the space where blood should be but is not.
I have won.
It does not feel like victory.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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Ablations (ongoing)