Chapter 17: The Poisoned Choice
The bioluminescent tunnel throbbed like a diseased artery. Amber had Regir pinned against the pulsating wall, the edge of Leo’s ax-blade hovering inches from his throat. Violet energy, the visible manifestation of their synced souls, seethed along the metal.
“Why?” Amber demanded, her voice a low, furious rasp. Sweat traced the tattoos on her arm. “You’re a person, not a tool. How could you let her do this to you?”
Regir’s eyes, wide and watery, darted everywhere but her face. His demon-sword arm trembled, black droplets of poison sizzling where they hit the stone floor. He seemed to shrink into himself, a child expecting a blow. “She… she was the only one I’ve ever known,” he whispered, the confession hollow with loneliness. “I don’t know how to handle this.”
The raw, pathetic truth of it hit Amber like a physical thing. Her grip on Leo faltered, just for a heartbeat. The violet glow dimmed.
It was all the opening he needed.
Fear twisted into desperate violence. Regir’s wounded expression vanished, replaced by a marionette’s blank jerk. His poisoned blade, a jagged shard of living darkness, plunged straight for Amber’s heart.
She jerked sideways. The tip ripped through the fabric of her red dress, scoring a burning line across her ribs. Not deep. But contact.
“Amber!” Leo’s cry was metallic, distorted.
A strange, icy fire raced from the wound. Amber landed in a crouch, her hand slapping over the cut. She felt it—a foreign pulse, thick and tar-like, mingling with her own blood. The world’s colors saturated, then inverted at the edges. A laugh bubbled in her throat, raw and unfamiliar.
“Oh,” she giggled, staring at her fingertips, which came away smeared not with red, but with oily black. “That’s new.”
Regir stared, confused by her reaction. He lunged again, a clumsy, powerful strike.
Amber didn’t bother with a graceful parry. She swung Leo like a baseball bat, meeting the demon sword with a clang that sparked blue and black. The force rattled Regir’s bones, but she followed through, using the rebound to whip the ax’s pommel around into his stomach.
He gagged, folding over.
“You know,” Amber said, her voice suddenly cheerful, conversational, as she danced back a step. “I always wondered what poison would feel like. It’s kind of tingly. Like my insides are watching a really good rock concert.”
Amber, your soul wavelength—it’s spiking erratically. The black blood, it’s acting like a conduit, but it’s bypassing your inhibitory synapses. You’re not… you’re not thinking. Leo’s voice in her mind was tight with panic.
“Thinking’s overrated, Leo!” she sang, dodging another swipe and bringing her elbow down hard on Regir’s shoulder. There was a sickening crack. “It just gets in the way of the fun part!”
She was a whirlwind of brutal, efficient violence, but her commentary was that of a delighted spectator. “Ooh, nice try! Almost had my kneecap! Would’ve been a hassle, I like walking.” Thwack. She slammed his wrist against the wall until his grip on the sword-loosened.
This isn’t you. This is the poison. It’s turning off your humanity, your fear, your empathy. You have to fight it.
“Fight it? Leo, baby, I am it.” She ducked under a wild swing and kicked his legs out from under him. He crashed to the slick stone. “And honestly? It’s a blast. No more ‘what if I fail?’ No more ‘is this the right move?’ Just…” She planted a foot on his chest, leaning her weight onto Leo’s blade, which hovered over Regir’s eye. “Action. And consequence.”
Regir whimpered, all fight gone, just a broken thing waiting for the end. The sight of his sheer, utter defeat finally pierced the manic haze. Amber’s grinning snarl faltered. The black ichor in her veins still pulsed, but her eyes, for a second, cleared. She saw not a monster, but a used, discarded creature.
She hesitated again.
Further up the tunnel, the world was coming apart.
Angel moved with a fluid, desperate grace, Alyce’s blue flame cutting arcs of light through the gloom. The wolf-man, Sid, was faster here, stronger, fueled by the proximity of his waking god. But Angel had learned. She feinted high, drew his guard up, and as he lunged, she dropped and spun, not aiming for his body, but for the ground at his feet.
“Soul Resonance: Witch-Hunter Bind!” she cried.
Six jagged spikes of solidified soul wavelength, glowing with blue-white energy, erupted from the stone floor in a perfect hexagon around Sid’s feet. They shot upward, curving inward like the jaws of a trap, and slammed together around his torso with a sound like ringing steel. He roared, immobilized, his own violent momentum working against him.
“How?!” he snarled.
“You’re predictable!” Angel shouted back, already moving past him towards the widening chamber ahead.
Jack was not faring as well. The frog-hooded witch, Tsubaki, was not a brawler. She was a tactician. Glimmering barriers of sound and force materialized to deflect Jack’s perfectly symmetrical gunfire. Elis and Sari’s reports were deafening in the confined space, but the bullets splashed against shimmering hexes like stones in a pond.
“Your order is an illusion, little death,” Tsubaki crooned, her voice echoing from multiple points. “Chaos is the true nature of this world.”
Jack’s eye twitched, his obsession with symmetry met with perfect, infuriating asymmetry. He couldn’t pin her down.
They burst into a vast, spherical cavern—the core. In its center, a massive, amorphous form of darkness and veins of red light stirred. Azura. Before it, on a jagged dais of crystallized soul-stuff, Tsubaki raised her arms, her chanting reaching a crescendo.
“No!” Jack fired, but his bullets were swallowed by a last-second barrier.
The witch’s final syllable cut the air. A beam of pure black energy lanced from her hands into Azura’s form.
The reaction was instantaneous. The slumbering mass convulsed. A single, lidless eye of burning crimson snapped open, focusing on the witch who had awakened it. Then, a mouth of swirling void tore open beneath it.
Tsubaki’s triumph turned to terror. “Master! I am your loyal—“
The mouth expanded. A gravitational pull, sickening and absolute, yanked her off her feet. She screamed, a short, clipped sound, as she was funneled into the darkness and consumed. The beam of energy still connected them for a second, now reversing, draining her essence into the Kishin.
Its hunger was immediate, unsated. The eye swiveled. Sid, still trapped in Angel’s hex, struggled. “No! NO!”
The pull targeted him next. The soul-wavelength binds shattered. He was dragged across the stone, claws scraping uselessly, and sucked into the same devouring void without a sound.
Azura expanded, rising, formless and ravenous.
“Hit it with everything!” Jack yelled.
Angel didn’t need telling. She charged, Alyce blazing. Jack’s pistols fired a continuous volley, aiming for the central eye. Their attacks bit into the shifting mass, tearing chunks of shadow-stuff loose. It recoiled, bellowing—a sound that was less noise and more a direct assault on the soul.
“Resonance!” Angel called to Jack.
He understood. He fired not at Azura, but at the cavern wall near its base, a precise, symmetrical pattern. Angel followed, driving Alyce’s point into a fissure his bullets created. They poured their combined wavelength into the stone.
The wall exploded outward in a shower of rock and soul-filament. Daylight—the real, grey daylight of the ravaged city above—flooded in.
Azura’s form shivered, contracted, and then streamed through the new opening like smoke up a chimney, escaping into the shattered world above.
A moment of stunned silence was broken by a distant, agonized yell that echoed down from the main cavern.
Crow.
Angel’s blood went cold. She turned and sprinted back the way she came, past Amber who was standing over a sobbing, defeated Regir, her ax still raised but her body shaking as black veins traced her skin.
“Amber, with me!” Angel shouted, not stopping.
Amber blinked, the wild light in her eyes receding slightly. “Yeah. Okay. Coming, I think.” She gave Regir a last, confused look, then took off after Angel, leaving him curled on the floor.
The scene in the main cavern was a still-life of defeat.
Kilson lay across the room, his scythe form cracked and reverted to human shape, unconscious. Crow was on one knee, breathing in ragged, wet gasps. A deep gash across his chest wept blood. His silver eyes were dim.
Medusa stood between them, her robe unscathed. She turned as Angel skidded to a halt, Amber arriving a second later.
“The little students return,” Medusa smiled. “Just in time for the epilogue.”
“Get away from him,” Angel growled, raising Alyce.
Medusa sighed, a teacher disappointed by a dull student. She flicked her wrist. A single vector arrow, thick as a spear, shot out.
Angel swung. Alyce connected, but the force was overwhelming. The arrow didn’t break; it deflected her blow and slammed into her torso, lifting her off her feet. She flew backwards, the air crushed from her lungs, and hit the cavern wall with a crunch that she felt in her teeth. The stone cracked around her. She slid down, Alyce clattering from her numb fingers somewhere into the shadows.
White-hot pain blazed through her ribcage. Definitely broken.
Medusa strolled towards her, heedless of Crow’s weak attempt to rise. “You see? All that potential, snuffed out by a simple application of superior force.” She stopped in front of Angel, looking down. “Not so strong now, are you?”
Angel choked, trying to draw breath. Her vision swam. She saw Medusa’s hand rise, two vector arrows forming, aimed not at her, but at Crow’s heart.
“No,” Angel croaked.
Medusa didn’t even glance back. The arrows tensed to launch.
Something inside Angel snapped. Not a bone. Something deeper. A dam holding back an ocean of silent, screaming power. It was not a decision. It was a reflex, as instinctive as a gasp for air.
There was no blue flame, no dramatic shout.
From Angel, where a moment before there had been only empty air and pain, a blade erupted. It was long, cruel, and beautiful, a scythe of stark, brutal geometry. The metal was the grey of storm clouds and old granite, etched with a design of interlocking, shark-like teeth in polished black. It made no sound as it manifested.
It simply appeared, and then it was moving, piercing the space between Angel and the witch.
Medusa had time for a fraction of a widening of her eyes before the grey-and-black teeth punched through the center of her chest, erupting from her back in a spray of dark blood.
The vector arrows flickered and died.
Medusa looked down at the blade growing from her sternum, a look of profound, utter confusion on her face. Her lips moved. No sound came out. Then the light in her eyes guttered, and she collapsed, sliding limply off the impossible weapon, which remained, steady and sure, extending from Angel’s chest.
Then the light in her eyes guttered, and she collapsed, sliding limply off the impossible weapon, which remained, steady and sure, extending from Angel’s chest.
A warm, viscous drop landed on Angel’s cheek. Then another. She blinked, her breath hitching. The liquid wasn’t red. It was black, thick as crude oil, and it carried a scent of bitter almonds and rot. Medusa’s blood. Angel remembered the witch’s eyes in that final second—wide, shocked, calculating—but she hadn’t seen the life drain away. There was no fading, no final release. Just an absence, like a screen going dead. Did her soul have time to escape?
A cold, sucking dread pooled in Angel’s stomach. She looked down, terrified of what she would see.
The giant, grey-and-black blade protruded from her own sternum, slick with that same black blood. It didn’t hurt. She felt nothing but a numb, humming pressure where her ribs were definitely broken. Then, with a sharp, slicing sound of metal on bone, the blade retracted. It slid back into her body as smoothly as it had emerged, leaving no wound, no tear in her shirt, only a lingering, metallic echo in the air. She didn’t feel it.
A giggle, wet and unstable, cut through the silence.
Angel looked up. Amber was wobbling on her feet a few yards away, leaning heavily on Leo’s ax form. She was giggling, a hiccuping, breathless sound that held no humor. Her soul wavelength felt jagged and hot, a radio tuned to static and screams. Black veins now crawled visibly up her neck, and her eyes were too bright, the pupils contracted to pinpricks.
Across the cavern, Crow was pushing himself up, one hand clamped over the gash on his chest. Kilson groaned, stirring where he’d fallen. Their focus, however, was not on the dead witch, but on Amber’s deteriorating state.
The immediate threat was gone. Acting on an impulse deeper than thought, Angel ran. Agony lanced through her side with every step, a white-hot counterpoint to the numbness in her core. She shoved the pain down, focusing on the erratic, black-tinged pulse of Amber’s soul.
“Angel, wait—!” Crow’s voice was a ragged warning.
She didn’t. Stumbling to a halt before her giggling friend, Angel didn’t speak. She just slapped both hands onto Amber’s shoulders, ignoring the flinch, and pushed. Not a physical shove, but a projection of her own soul, a concentrated blast of raw, clarifying resonance.
“What are you doing?!” Kilson yelled, struggling to rise, his face a mask of protective fury.
The wavelength hit Amber like a bucket of ice water. Her giggle cut off into a choked gasp. Her back arched. The black veins under her skin writhed, then began to recede, retreating from her face and neck as if pulled by an unseen tide. Amber’s eyes cleared, the manic light replaced by a wave of nauseous confusion.
She doubled over, retching violently onto the cavern floor. What came up wasn’t stomach contents, but a pooling, sentient-looking black ooze that smoked and dissolved on contact with the stone. She kept heaving, purging the poison from her very spirit, until she knelt in a halo of fading darkness, trembling and pale.
Silence, heavy and exhausted, settled over them. The haunted looks they exchanged said everything. Kilson finally reached Amber, pulling her into a sitting position, his earlier anger replaced by grim concern. Crow limped over to Angel, his silver eyes scanning her chest, looking for an entry wound that wasn’t there.
“Regir,” Crow said, his voice hollow.
Jack emerged from the tunnel side passage, leading a shackled Regir by a chain of solidified soul-light. The man’s demon-sword arm was bound tightly against his body, and he walked with his head down, utterly silent. He hadn’t spoken a word since his capture.
The Headmaster’s throne room was quieter now, the air still tasting of ozone and spilled magic. The candy-striped desk had been righted. Death listened from his velvet-draped throne as they gave their fractured report. The magical lock sealing the party above had been dismantled, and through the tall windows, they could see pulsing waves of restorative energy knitting the shattered spires of Death City back together.
“Azura escaped through a breach we were forced to create,” Crow reported, his tone flat. “It consumed two of its own servants to fuel its awakening. It’s loose, and it’s hungry.”
“And Medusa?” Death asked, his gloved fingers tapping the arm of his throne.
“Killed,” Jack stated, his voice clean and precise. “By Angel.”
All eyes turned to her. She stood stiffly, her ribs wrapped tight beneath her clothes. “I’m not convinced she’s actually dead,” Angel said, the words feeling clumsy in her dry mouth. “Her soul… I didn’t see it leave. It just vanished.”
Death hummed, a noncommittal sound. “A witch of her caliber often has contingencies. We will operate under the assumption she persists.” His skull mask tilted. “The method of her… interruption… is of more immediate interest. Describe it.”
They did. The unexplained blade. Its sudden appearance from Angel’s own body. The lack of wound.
Headmaster Death steepled his fingers. “You possess the soul perception and resonance of a meister. This is dominant. Yet, the manifestation of a weapon form from your own substance is the purview of a weapon-bloodline.” He leaned forward slightly. “The conclusion is that one of your biological parents was a weapon. An extremely powerful one, to leave such a latent imprint. Under circumstances of extreme stress and mortal fear, your body bypassed its dominant programming. It accessed a recessive, physical memory.”
Angel stared at him, the world tilting on a new, terrifying axis. “So now I’m some… meister-weapon hybrid?”
“Essentially,” Death replied, his tone almost cheerful. “Yes, you are.”
A beat of silence hung in the room. Angel absorbed the reality, the bizarre truth of her own flesh. The numbness finally gave way to a weary, surreal acceptance.
“Great,” she muttered, a sigh that made her ribs protest. “New training regimens now.”