Paragon of Skills

chapter 263

Baal closes his eyes.

Around him, Iskara is still roaring. Her aura spikes in wild bursts. She is gathering for another charge, malformed limbs digging into the arena floor for leverage.

"Domain of the Rose."

The words are quiet.

The air changes.

It starts as color. A single petal appears in the air beside his left hand, vivid red, so saturated it looks painted rather than grown. The edges glow with a thin border of blazing orange, warm and bright.

Then more.

They pour into existence around him. Not falling, not rising. Simply appearing, filling the air in every direction. Hundreds. Then thousands. Each one turning slowly in invisible currents, each one burning at the edges with that same orange warmth.

Students in the stands lean forward. The petals catch the sunlight. The orange borders flare like embers suspended in midair.

Iskara roars and charges through the field.

The first petal she touches does not move.

It holds. Then it cuts.

The edge of the petal slices across her leading arm and a line of black blood opens along the forearm. She does not slow. A second petal catches her across the shoulder. A third across the face. A fourth severs a malformed finger from one of her grown limbs.

She pushes deeper.

The petals close around her. Every movement she makes puts her in contact with a dozen more, and every contact draws blood. They position, adjust, interpose themselves between her and Baal with the precision of a living defense. Each one destroyed is replaced by two more that drift into the gap.

Iskara's remaining arms flail in wide arcs, ripping through petals by the handful. But each swing opens a new angle and the petals pour in. Her regeneration fires constantly; black flesh knits and splits and knits and splits as the Domain cuts faster than she can heal.

She cannot reach him.

Baal stands at the center of his Domain with his eyes closed. His breathing is shallow... he has very little left.

Iskara slams both fists into the ground and the stone erupts upward in chunks that scatter the petals momentarily. She launches herself through the gap, closing three paces in an instant, her malformed mouth open wide.

Baal opens his eyes.

A wall of petals condenses between them, so dense it looks solid. It catches Iskara mid-leap. The edges grind into her flesh. She howls and pushes through and loses most of the skin on her leading arm. She keeps coming.

Baal sidesteps. A circle of petals spirals inward and slices across Iskara's legs, severing the tendons behind both knees. She drops. The tendons regenerate in two heartbeats. She rises.

The Domain can contain her. It cannot kill her.

He feels the oath.

It comes like fire through his blood. Maelthra's voice, not words, not language, just will, pressing through the channels that the oaths carved into him. The meaning is absolute: Do not kill her. Kill Jacob Cloud.

The oath burns brighter than the oaths in the inn. Brighter than the seizure in the walkway. Maelthra's full weight pressed through the oath-channels and the corrupted seal simultaneously.

His body seizes for a fraction of a second, and the petals closest to him shudder.

She's using both. The oath and the seal. Together.

Varen's technique is already active, absorbing the cost since he turned away from Jacob and moved toward Cecilia. But even though the Devilish technique can technically absorb any single oath, it cannot absorb both at maximum power indefinitely.

There is one way to finish this.

Baal looks up. Through the swirling petals, through the chaos of the ring, he finds the VIP box. Maelthra is there. She is standing at the railing, claws sunk into stone, knuckles white.

He speaks to her.

"No one has ever witnessed this technique." His voice carries across the arena floor.

The petals around him begin to move faster. The orange borders intensify. The air grows warm.

Behind his back, something shifts.

It starts as light. Two lines of luminance tracing outward from his shoulder blades, through the fabric of his robes. They spread in twin arcs, translucent and bright, shaped like feathered wings.

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"Maelthra," Baal says.

Her claws dig deeper into stone.

"Let me show you The Devil's Gauntlet."

***

His left foot moves forward and the Mana flows through his veins in a single clean arc.

Second step. Right foot. The Mana changes direction, curving back through his forearms and into his core. Inversion. The old man's lesson from the underground room. Force turned against its own channel. The two flows, outward and inward, run simultaneously and the contradiction sends a pulse through the stone that cracks it in a circle around his feet.

Third step. The flows multiply. A third current opens along his spine, threading between the other two, and the interaction produces a harmonic he can feel in his teeth. The wings behind him brighten.

The petals accelerate, spiraling inward toward Iskara, cutting deeper. Black blood pours from wounds that stay open a fraction of a second longer than before.

Fourth step.

The fourth contradicts the first three.

This is the trap. Every child who attempted the Devil's Gauntlet fails on the fourth step. The Mana flows collide and, caught between pressures that demand opposite things, simply stop. In some, when practiced too harshly, it can even stop your heart.

Baal's heart does not stop.

It stutters. Pauses for one terrible beat. The bruising across his chest darkens to purple. His wings flicker. A line of blood runs from his left nostril.

Then the heart resumes. A new Mana vein opens. A ghost-circuit.

Fifth step.

Iskara's roaring changes. The corrupted flesh on her arms begins to thin. The corruption pulls inward, retreating from the edges of her body toward the core.

Sixth step.

The wings behind him are fully formed now. They cast light across the arena floor, something older and cleaner than Infernal magic.

Seventh step.

Iskara's malformed limbs begin to shrink. The extra arms lose definition, edges blurring, corrupted flesh softening. The bone crown recedes by an inch. There is less of the monster with each step he takes.

Eighth step.

He can feel muscles tearing along his right thigh. His left hand has stopped responding, the fingers curling inward, locked.

Ninth step.

Iskara's mouth stops producing sound.

Her jaw is still open, the throat still working. Nothing comes out. The corruption has receded from her face. The obsidian chitin cracks inward, collapses. Underneath, red skin. Infernal skin.

Tenth step.

The extra limbs are gone. The corruption has pulled inward to a mass in her chest, a dense knot of void-fire that pulses visibly through her skin. The bone crown dissolves.

Eleventh step.

Baal's right leg gives out. He drops to one knee. The wings flare behind him, compensating, and he pushes himself back up. Blood is running from his ears now. His vision has narrowed to a tunnel and at the end of it is Iskara.

Twelfth step.

Iskara's face clears.

The chitin is gone. The void-fire eyes dim to something that is almost, almost the color they used to be. The impossible mouth seals itself shut, shrinks, becomes a mouth again.

And for one moment, her eyes focus.

She is standing in the arena with her body wrecked and her robes torn and the remnants of corruption still burning in her chest and she is seeing.

She looks at Baal with open eyes. Yet, what the Devil finds there is not anger, but regret.

She seems to know what happened very well. And when she sees him, briefly looking at the otherworldly, heavenly wings behind him, something in her face collapses.

Tears, falling from eyes that are finally, briefly, her own. The corruption is still there, still coiled in her chest, still pulling her back. She opens her mouth, but life is leaving her and she does not have a chance to say anything.

Baal catches her.

She falls forward and he catches her with his one working arm, the right one, the black sword dissolving into blood particles. His hand presses against the back of her head.

His fingers curl into her hair the way they used to curl into pale blonde hair like his own, and for one half-second everything behind his eyes goes quiet and there is nothing in its place.

He closes her eyes with his trembling, barely-working fingers.

He takes the last step of The Devil's Gauntlet.

The ghost-circuit fires. The flows converge on the mass of corruption in Iskara's chest. It resists for half a heartbeat. Then it doesn't.

Iskara goes limp.

She is light. Lighter than she should be. Her face is slack, the red skin smooth, and for one moment she looks like the proud Infernal Princess. Then her edges soften. Her skin turns translucent. Motes of light begin to rise from her body, drifting upward like embers from a fire that has finally gone out.

The corruption was the only thing holding her together. Without it, there is nothing left.

Baal lays her down on the stone. Or what remains of her. She is dissolving under his hands, warm light slipping through his fingers.

His wings dissolve. The petals wink out one by one. Cracked stone. Scorched earth. A fading shape on the ground where a girl used to be.

Baal falls.

His knees hit the stone first. Then his hands. Then he is on his side, cheek against warm stone. The seal's counter-rhythm drowns out his own heartbeat. Varen's technique has eaten everything it could reach.

That's done, then.

He turns his head, cheek dragging against the stone.

He finds Cecilia.

Her wooden leg is braced against the railing in front of her and her hand is pressed against her chest.

He smiles.

Behind him, the fighting has changed. The rhythm is different.

Jacob's aura blooms.

It is enormous. Larger than Nimirea, larger than the Dark Champions combined. The silvery sword burns steady and white and absolute.

Jacob won.

Good.

The seal pulses, moments from killing him.

He does not close his eyes.

He keeps them on Cecilia and slowly mouths the words. He has no air to speak them.

I kept the promise.

The Sacrifice lies on the arena floor.

But it's Baal basking in the sun, feeling only warmth as he slowly slips away.