“Nnnnngh!”
Tatsu's chest heaved violently, shallow hitches ripping through him. His lungs felt like they were lined with rusted iron, each shallow hitches of breath scraping against a chest that refused to expand.
His jaw was locked tight; teeth scraped against each other with a metallic grind, sounding out like grinding stones across the cavern.
A violent, dark crimson flush surged up his neck, the veins of his temples throbbing, each pulse hammering against his skull.
Every muscle quivered as though being kneaded by invisible hands, screaming under a weight that threatened to crush him.
Beneath his boots, the ice groaned and webs of white, jagged nerves spidered outward from his heels, the frost pulverised into a fine, sparkling dust.
The colossal ice behemoth pressing down on him showed no signs of fatigue, no hesitation—it was relentless, a mountain incarnate.
The twin blades in his hands shivered, micro-fractures spidering across their edges as the crystalline pressure pushed against them.
*I can't die yet…*
A spark ignited in the furnace of his gut, a fire that licked his bones, deep and primal. It burned, but it wasn't pain–a surge of adrenaline so thick it tasted like copper on his tongue.
His vision blurred, the world dissolving into a smear of emerald-green and crimson-red, but the fire in his blood provided a sudden, agonizing clarity.
A guttural roar tore from his throat, every sound clawing out of his lungs.
His legs, trembling like reeds in a gale, suddenly locked. His arms, corded with veins that looked like knotted rope, heaved upward.
The edges of Ryūkō and Karyū bit into the underside of the ice slab with a series of wet, crystallined crunches.
“AAARRRRGHHH!!”
With an explosive, violent snap of his hips, Tatsu drove his blades upward. The “X” of his steel became a lever that defied the mountain's weight.
He shoved, his arms locking into a nearby T-pose as he redirected the momentum.
The crystalline mass shattered, fracturing under the sudden, shearing force, tumbling away in a deafening cascade of jagged boulders and frozen sparks.
Tatsu didn't wait for the dust to settle. His muscles were screaming—a chorus of white-hot needles—but he forced his body into a desperate, sideways leap.
The heavy-hitter stood motionless for a fractional second, its faceless head tilted toward the jagged, splintered remains of its weapon as if trying to calculate the impossibility of its own brokenness.
Tatsu skidded to a halt, his chest heaving as he gulped the biting air. His hands were shaking so violently the tips of his blades traced frantic, shimmering circles in the dim light.
Before he could even find his center, the rest of the circle ignited. The remaining sentinels blurred toward him, their neon eyes cutting through the haze like hunter's lanterns.
He spat a thick glob of metallic-tasting saliva onto the ice, his fingers white-knuckled around the hilts and trying not to stumble on the ice as every fiber screamed.
“Damn…it.”
His breaths came ragged and uneven, his legs and arms trembling from enduring the heavy-hitter's crushing force. Sweat slicked the hilts of his swords, threatening his grip.
The circle closed in, and a sentinel lunged.
Its left fist carved a hook through the air, neon-white eyes burning into his.
Tatsu dropped, the punch howling over his head.
He lashed out with Ryūkō.
The steel sang as it carved clean through the sentinel's torso, splitting it in a spray of fractured ice.
Behind him–movement.
Another charged, right fist cocked.
Tatsu tried to pivot, but his left leg betrayed him. A sharp, electric sting flared in his thigh, the price of the behemoth's weight.
“Ack!”
The limb buckled.
His foot skated across the treacherous ice. Tatsu threw his blades up in a desperate cross, but the blow was too fast.
A heavy, frozen fist buried itself in his right side, a liver shot that carried the sting of sub-zero frost and white-hot agony.
Tatsu hit the ice with one knee, the world tilting. The creature loomed, its leg coiling for a finishing kick.
Driven by pure, panicked instinct, Tatsu thrust Karyū upward.
A flash of crimson dug itself in the center of the sentinel's featureless face, shattering the skull like a dropped lightbulb.
“Huff… huff…”
He forced himself upright, his knees wobbling like struck tuning forks.
Two more ice creatures blurred in from either side.
Tatsu didn't wait; he initiated a desperate, sliding perpendicular charge.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
As they entered his reach, he twisted his entire torso into a wide, scything arc.
Karyū took the head of the right-hand chaser.
Ryūkō cleaved through the torso of the left-hand chaser.
But the momentum was too much for his exhausted footing. His left heel hit a patch of pulverised ice and it skidded.
“Shit–!”
He slammed onto his back, the impact rattling his spine. He scrambled to rise, but the crowd of the entities suddenly parted.
The heavy-hitter stormed through the ranks, shoving its own kind with a brutal, mechanical indifference.
It was faceless, yet it radiated with a cold focused malice.
*Is it… angry?*
Tatsu stared at the stump where the behemoth's weapon had been. He wiped a streak of sweat from his brow, his fingers trembling, a jagged smirk ghosting his lips.
“CRACK”
A blind-side punch caught his left ribs, launching him sideways.
He tumbled across the ground, gasping.
He struggled to one knee, and before he could find his center, a second entity slammed its entire weight into his back, pinning him face-first against the frost.
“Oof!”
Tatsu bucked, twisting like a landed fish. He unsheathed a frantic slash that cleared the creature from his back.
Without rising, he hacked through the legs of the one approaching, every muscle in his forearms screamed in protest, a chorus of white-hot needles.
Suddenly, the heavy footsteps stopped.
Tatsu looked up.
The behemoth stood over him, its piercing blue stars looking down with a terrifying, silent judgement.
It raised its remaining “good” arm, the fist a massive block of ice.
“Damn it!”
The blow descended like a falling star.
Tatsu threw himself into a frantic roll, the impact detonating the ice where his head had been a millisecond prior.
The floor disintegrated, a spiderweb of deep, black fissures raced outward, the sound of the earth splitting apart echoing like cannon fire.
Tatsu pushed to one knee, lungs burning.
Three more sentinels sprinted his way, blades and fists raised.
“Oh, come on!” he spat, bracing for the clash.
But the behemoth didn't move. It stayed rooted, its fist still buried in the shattered ground.
The light in its eyes flickered and died.
*It did it on purpose!*
The floor gave way, tilting and collapsing into a yawning, pitch-black abyss.
Tatsu felt his stomach drop as gravity claimed him. Sentinels fell with him, silent. Almost obedient, their neon eyes extinguishing one by one, accepting the darkness with eerie stillness.
The heavy-hitter's massive frame plummeted alongside him, a silent, grey ghost in the void.
*Do something!!*
Panic clawed his chest.
In the free fall, that familiar, volcanic burn surged through Tatsu's chest. His panic crystallized into a sharp, kinetic focus.
In one fluid motion, he sheathed Karyu, reached out, and snagged the shoulder of a falling sentinel.
Using the creature as a morbid stepping stone, he kicked off its chest, launching himself toward the jagged wall of the pit.
“AAAAARGGGHH!!”
He hammered Ryūkō into the vertical ice. The blade bit deep, jarring his shoulder as his downward momentum snapped into a violent halt.
He dangled over the darkness, shards of ice raining past him into the infinite dark.
“Huff. Huff. Woah.”
His body heaved against the cold stone, his arms shaking with the effort of holding his own weight.
“How'd I… do that?”
He didn't wait for an answer.
With his muscles screaming with rhythmic protest, he began the grueling climb—stabbing, pulling, and kicking his way up the frozen throat of the void.
One agonizing inch at a time.
Tatsu's fingers clawed into the rim of the abyss, his knuckles white against the ice.
With a final, agonizing heave, he dragged his frame onto the solid shelf of the icy cavern floor.
His lungs were like twin bellows of fire; every hitch of breath felt like swallowing broken glass.
For a long minute, he collapsed on all fours, head hanging as sweat and melted frost dripped from the tip of his nose.
The silence of the cavern was heavy, broken only by the ragged, rhythmic saw of his own exhaustion. On his left, the monolith stood as a silent, indifferent god.
He let his numbed fingers uncurl. Ryūkō and Karyū flattered on the ice. Tatsu followed them, rolling onto his stomach and pressing his burning cheek against the frozen ground.
“Whew… finally.”
The cold seeped into his skin, a numbing mercy for his overheated blood. After a moment that felt like an hour, he forced his joints to lock, staggering to his feet like a newborn calf.
He retrieved his blades, the steel whispering as they slid into their respective scabbards: Karyū in the left scabbard and Ryūkō in the right one.
With trembling hands, he brushed the rime of frost from his white buttoned shirt and slapped the ice from his black pants.
He glanced down at his white boots. Despite the carnage, the polished white surface of his boots caught the emerald thrum of the walls. A tired, jagged smirk pulled at his mouth.
“Still shining.”
He turned his gaze toward the monolith. The translucent stone was a cathedral of trapped light—green and amber pulses swimming deep within the stone like bioluminescent ghosts.
He began to limp toward the base, his steps heavy and deliberate, wary of the treacherous floor.
The ground became different; the ice had been scoured away, leaving a floor of dense, unyielding stone covered in snow.
“If only it were like this earlier.” he muttered, his voice a dry rasp.
He traced the perimeter until a shimmer of moonlight-silver caught his eye. It was a door, flush against the stone, its surface unmarked by time.
As he stepped within ten paces, a gold, hairline beam ignited in the floor, tracing a wide, perfect semicircle in front of the entrance.
Tatsu's instincts flared, the memory of the silver line and ice sentinel-birth flashed behind his eyes.
“Why now?” he hissed, his thumbs instantly snapping his blades free. His arms felt like leaden weights, and a dull, rhythmic drumming hammered against the inside of his skull.
The gold semicircle didn’t stay a line. It fractured, a deep, complex, geometric spiderweb of light raced inward from the perimeter. It converged on a single, blinding dot at the center of the arc.
The light intensified.
Tatsu recoiled, his blades crossing a defensive “X”, but the air was already beginning to ionize.
“Crr-ack.”
A pillar of pure, concentrated radiance erupted from the floor.
Tatsu's amber eyes blew wide. He instinctively shoved Karyū into the path of the beam.
The impact was tectonic.
The steel sang a high-pitched, agonizing note of structural failure.
“Urgh—!”
The force was a physical wall, shoving him backward, his boots screaming across the stone.
He ground his teeth so hard he tasted copper, one eye squinting against the solar brilliance of light.
Beneath the glare, he saw the impossible: tiny, jagged fissures were mapping themselves across the steel of his blade.
He threw Ryūkō into the fray, adding its emerald weight to the defense, but the beam only swelled.
The pressure increased until he felt the bones in his wrist begin to groan. Splinters of his swords—shards of legendary steel—began to peel away, disintegrating into the light like ash in a furnace.
“W-What the hell?!”
His left wrist gave way, a violent twitch of exhausted muscle sending Ryūkō wide. The blade caught the stone floor and the redirected energy found its terminal point.
“BOOOM!!”
The explosion was a deafening roar of kinetic fury. Tatsu felt the Shockwave ripple through his marrow.
His stomach churned as internal vessels ruptured under the sheer atmospheric pressure.
He coughed, a spray of dark crimson painting the inside of his teeth before being whipped away by the wind of the blast.
Then, gravity lost its meaning.
The impact launched him into the air, his weight reduced to that of a dry leaf in a hurricane.
In that split second of flight, he watched in slow horror as Ryūkō and Karyū finally shattered.
The blades dissolved into a cloud of glittering dust that trailed behind him like a dying star.
*No!*
The massive building shrank into a tiny, glowing needle as he was thrown through the dim cavern.
Pain, white and consuming, finally dragged him under. His vision blurred into a grey haze, his fingers slipping from the empty hilts of his broken weapons.
Then, his body hit the deep, soft powder of a distant snowbank with a muffled thud. Silence returned, save for the whistling wind as snow fell on his body.
A few paces ahead, through the haze of falling flakes, silhouettes of Adobe chambers stood partially submerged in the snow, close enough to touch, yet far away for a body that finally surrendered.
