Chapter 99: The Harvesters

The red light had been snuffed out by darkness.

The eyed hand felt itself ripped from Makun’s spirit body, its presence shredded like cloth caught in machinery.

Blood flowed out from it. This time, different from the blood that flowed earlier.

It was viscous and heavy, like the clotted residue that collects in the veins of a long-dead giant, finally rupturing after eons of stillness.

It poured out and fell to the ground.

BANG! BANG!

Each heavy drop struck the asphalt. The surface cratered and split on impact.

The bounded field cracked even more open. Fractures crept across the invisible dome like glass under multiple hammer blows.

BOOM!

Overwhelming spiritual pressure leaked out of it. The air warped and shuddered. The foundation of Hope Rest Shelter trembled, threatening to break.

The eyed hand flickered and dimmed. Its bloody pupil contracted, then dilated wildly.

What… was… that?

Pain. It felt pain. Something it had not experienced in millennia.

Then it stood there dazed, unable to react to the shock that ran through it.

…

Yime’s body had betrayed her.

An Elite like her, frozen. Trembling like a leaf in a hurricane.

She could not move, could hardly think. All she could do right now was endure.

She was the only one still conscious. Everyone else, Orel, Jorg, Amelia, and Makun, had fainted.

They could not withstand the pressure from the eye.

But her. She had seen it all.

She had seen the eye scan each and every one of them. She had seen Cheryl’s death. She had seen everyone losing consciousness when scanned by the eye.

Then she had seen it focus on Makun.

She had heard its exclamation and had seen the pulsing red light perforate his forehead.

At that point, even Makun had fainted.

At that point, Yime had thought they were done. This was the sort of being none of them could fathom.

The sort of being none of them could struggle against.

If it wanted them dead, they were dead.

But…

BANG!

She saw its blood drop onto the floor. The eye’s pupil dimmed and contracted.

The pressure lifted. It was not totally gone. It had lessened. A crack had formed in the overwhelming weight that crushed all of them.

It is wounded. Her hand moved before her mind caught up.

She reached for the pendant at her neck, the device within.

Now. It has to be now. Please work.

She rapidly adjusted the outer ring, pressed two glyphs carved into the metal surface in sequence. The runes inside the device lit up one by one, glowing faint.

Yime recited rapidly. She had no time to waste. Her tone was hurried as she adjusted different frequencies to match hers.

Then she poured her Ashe into the device. All of her remaining Ashe.

Then fainted, hoping it had worked.

…

Clarity crashed back.

The eye’s pupil snapped wide open. Its bloody pupil blazed.

It had lost more than it could account for during that confrontation with the Dark Mother.

Its blood was precious. Losing it was losing time, losing power, losing the essence of why it was it.

Rage. Absolute rage. One the eye had not felt in millennia erupted.

If Oya wanted to play that game, it was going to play right into it.

If she had attached herself to the boy, the boy just had to die.

Nothing mattered except righting the wrong, venting the loss, and erasing the humiliation.

The hand rose. Its eye blazing.

Die. All of you. Die.

However, as it was about to strike, the device pulsed.

Across continents, across oceans, across worlds, across layers of reality itself, a man dressed in a formal two-piece suit and shining black shoes stood.

Alerted by the disturbance of frequency, his gaze snapped and pierced through reality itself, as if he could see the truth of the world from a speck of an atom.

He noticed the situation and slowly raised his hand.

Swirl!

His long silver hair whipped around him as he gripped the massive silver sword with both hands.

In one clean, unhurried motion, he brought it down.

SLASH.

The hand’s descending strike met steel forged from something older than the Veil.

Silence.

Absolute, bone-deep silence swallowed the collision.

The world held its breath as two impossible forces pressed against each other, locked in perfect stillness.

Then.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Reality cracked.

The bounded field disappeared. Hope Rest Shelter collapsed.

Screams of agony rose and cut off as every homeless soul inside dissolved into gray wisps, erased from existence.

Yime, Makun, and the others felt the pull of nothingness clawing at their edges, until a soft halo, the chief’s final gift, flickered into being around them, shielding their forms from the unraveling aftermath.

The silver blade drove forward, clean and merciless. It pierced straight through the hand’s center, punching into the single enormous pupil.

“AARRGGH!”

The eyed hand screamed in pain at the unexpected strike it had received.

This was only its earthly projection. It had never been allowed its full might. The last scraps of energy Cheryl had fed it guttered out.

The hand could no longer hold form.

It melted, while a howling vortex spiraled open beneath it, dragging the dissolving mass inward. The single eye dimmed, flickered, then went dark.

But just before the vortex swallowed it completely, a final pulse of crimson light lashed toward Makun, carrying three cold words.

“I’ve… seen… you.”

The vortex snapped shut.

Silence.

And Bol exploded.

His body simply came apart, a sudden, silent disintegration into pale ash that scattered on the wind and was gone.

…

Thud!

Countless realities away from Hope Rest Shelter, Yime’s chief dropped to one knee. He gripped the massive silver sword tightly. The blade was driven deep into a ground covered with dead bodies.

Splurt!

He coughed up a lot of blood. The taste of rusty copper filled his mouth.

He had used too much energy for that strike. He needed rest now. He was badly hurt. But his eyes stayed sharp and focused.

That eye… that energy… it’s them.

His hand shook as he held the sword.

The Harvesters.

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