Mio

Mio, rest.

The voice came from everywhere. Inside her skull and in the marrow of the arm that had been his for eight hundred years before it was hers.

A man’s voice. Young.

I will steer us now.

[Initializing Chimera Sync]

[Sync Successful]

[Temporary Form: Putrid Knight’s Vigil (Active)]

The obsidian moved first. It spread from her right forearm up her bicep and over her shoulder, black and seamless. It crossed her collarbone and climbed her neck and when it reached her jaw she stopped feeling her legs.

Her gut was still open. The chitin didn’t touch it. Didn’t seal it.

The armor covered her head and both arms and left the rest of her exposed and leaking.

The helmet closed over her face and the chamber went dark for half a second before the visor lit up. Purple light, faint, the color Can’s blade used to be before it became her arm.

The obsidian pulse knocked the Queen back. Forty meters of water between them now, the Queen’s feet carving furrows in the concrete where she’d braced.

The obsidian arm reshaped. From the elbow down the chitin compressed and elongated and the edge that formed was not a sword. It was too thick at the spine and curved wrong for any fighting style she’d learned.

It was Can’s shape. Eight hundred years of muscle memory cast in mourning obsidian.

Her body moved without her.

The Reservoir dropped. Not slowly. Thousands by the second, Can burning through it the way an engine burns through a tank. She could feel it draining behind her ribs.

The first step was hers. Her foot pushed off the concrete. After that, the speed belonged to someone else.

Can crossed the forty meters in the time it took Mio to register that she’d blinked. The blade caught the Queen across the left shoulder and carved through the carapace plating and the gray skin underneath and came out below the right hip.

The Queen didn’t fall. She tore a strip of carapace from her own ribcage and raised it. Can’s second stroke shattered the plating into pieces that spun into the water.

No shield. The Queen’s hands came up, chitin ridging along her knuckles, and Can took her right hand off at the wrist.

He’s fast.

She’s slow.

Mio watched from behind the visor. Her body pivoted on the left foot and the blade opened the Queen’s thigh and then her stomach.

Viscera dropped into the water, still twitching.

The Queen tried to speak. Chi-chi’s voice started to form a word and Can put the blade through her throat before the first syllable finished.

Her body was still moving. The Queen was on her knees in the water, reforming, carapace plating crawling over the wounds.

Can took the left arm at the elbow. No wasted motion. He wasn’t angry. He was working.

The blade went through the Queen’s chest and pinned her to the floor. Can twisted it once. The carapace cracked down the center.

The Queen stopped reforming after the nineteenth cut. Can kept going.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four.

The Queen was in pieces. Spread across the chamber floor in sections that twitched but didn’t reconnect. Can walked her body through the remains without stepping on any of them.

[+122,000 Bloom]

[Level 34 → 43]

[Unallocated Points: 45]

[Reservoir: 292,811/537,500]

The warmth hit her all at once. The biggest single harvest she’d had. Her skin prickled with it.

Can stopped walking.

The girl in the water.

I can finish it, Mio-chan.

No need.

That’s all it took.

The obsidian softened. It melted. Black sludge running down her arms and pooling at her feet in the water.

The helmet went last, peeling back from her jaw to her forehead and sliding off the back of her skull in a sheet.

Her arms were still there. Obsidian right, pearl gauntlet left.

[Putrid Knight’s Vigil — Registered]

[Chimera Sync available on command]

The sludge dissolved in the water and the purple light in the visor went dark and Mio was standing in the chamber on her own legs with her intestines pressing against the inside of her abdominal wall.

[Vitalize]

Green light knit the wound from the inside. Skin closed over the gap in layers and held.

The organs went back where they belonged and the muscle sealed over them and the skin pinched shut.

She walked to Amori.

The girl was where she’d been since the first gauntlet strike. Face-down in the shallows, small and limp. Playing dead probably. Good instincts.

Mio knelt. Turned her over with the obsidian hand. The girl’s face was slack, eyes closed, water running off her cheeks.

She picked her up. Got one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and stood.

The girl weighed nothing.

Less than Nana.

Less than the blankets Nana kicked off in her sleep.

Amori’s eyes opened.

The first bite caught Mio’s collarbone. Small teeth, sharper than a child’s, breaking skin. The second hit her neck just below the ear.

Amori’s hands clawed at Mio’s face and her legs kicked and she bit whatever she could reach, latching on and tearing, and the sound that came out of her was a little girl’s sob. High and broken, with real tears running down a face that had never been real.

Mio set her down.

She lowered the girl to the concrete with both hands the way she lowered Nana into bed when she fell asleep on the couch.

Amori reached for her. Fingers opening and closing. Still crying.

Mio raised her left palm. The pearl gauntlet was steady.

She didn’t blink.

[Final Vigil]

The beam punched through Amori and through the chamber wall behind her. When the light cut out there was ash where the girl had been and a hole in the incursion that opened to black nothing.

[Reservoir: 267,711/537,500]

Mio didn’t look at it.

She turned and walked toward the corridor they’d come from. Every step pulled at the scar tissue across her stomach.

The stone wall that had sealed Path A’s entrance ground open as she reached it. Rock pulling apart in slabs, light from the staging area spilling through the gap.

Path A. Cleared.

The entrances to Path B and Path C were still shut. Stone flush against stone. No light behind them.

Mio’s legs gave out three steps past the threshold.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep