Rudy Whitehart

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  Rudy’s first clear thought was that Jin shouldn’t still be in the air.

  Trish or whatever was donning her face and body had its head burst open like a watermelon, spewing darkened flesh and gore all over.

  Rudy gritted his teeth as he, for the 18th time, now slashed open the tar monsters barring him from helping Jin. Rudy slashed with anger as his heartbeat rose like a drum.

  When a voice slammed into his head and pushed down on his thoughts like a hand.

  You had to go and ruin my fun time.

  Rudy staggered a half-step. The Colossus mantle behind him reacted before he did. His essence surged, and a hazy titan of flame and muscle reared up at his back, bracing his mind against the pressure.

  He roared, pushing back with everything he had.

  “JIN!”

  Jin’s form flickered.

  For a second, he was there, and the next heartbeat, his outline glitched, and Rudy realized it was the [Helldiver charm] trying to yank him to safety, but the entity wearing Trish’s body still had him refusing to let go.

  Oh, no, you don’t! Rudy threw himself forward into the tar-slick floor, white flame flaring along his arms. His feet slid, traction gone. The world rang in his ears. That pressure in his skull dug in, trying to turn his thoughts to sludge.

  He pushed anyway.

  The air around Jin ripped. Space tore like cloth. Reality grabbed him and yanked.

  Jin vanished along with “Trish’s” arm—leaving behind a clean cauterized stump.

  “Thank the heavens,” Rudy breathed. The sound was more breath than word.

  The tar at his boots surged higher, hungry tendrils creeping up his shins. His mark sparked, on the edge of triggering.

  He didn’t care as he focused his attention solely on “Trish,” letting his shield tank the tar monsters and the tar attacks.

  “Trish” had a fanatic look on her face as she reached with her remaining hand, glowing with dense essence manifestation, as she tore through the air like she was ripping open a curtain.

  A gash appeared, edges jagged and dripping the same black essence that crawled across the floor. Behind it, Rudy saw nothing.

  “Oh no, you aren’t leaving!”

  He didn’t think about it.

  He turned, dug his heel in, and swung.

  The greatsword howled through the air. White fire blossomed along the blade, tinged red at the edges. Steel slammed into Trish’s left side, right at the stump where her arm had been.

  He felt a bone crunch. Felt the sword bite deep enough to scrape something that sparked.

  The flames ate into her, chewing through flesh that sizzled and popped and reformed as fast as it burned.

  Trish didn’t move, didn’t even so much flinch or register Rudy’s attack. Her mouth curled, amused, like Rudy was a draft brushing past.

  His flames climbed her side. The stink of burning not?meat filled the air.

  She finally glanced down. Not at the wound. At him.

  “This body was actually kind of fond of you, Rudy,” she said. Her tone was bright like the one he remembered from actual Trish. “She thought you were sweet.”

  But that’s where the similarities ended… her eyes were wrong… it was like looking at a mask nailed over rot.

  Trish wiggled her fingers on the hand still clawed in the air, widening the rift another inch. The stone around her hand cracked like glass under a too?hot cup.

  “So, as the inheritor, I guess I’m… a tiny bit fond of you too,” she went on. “Like a pet rock I forgot I had.”

  Her gaze shifted, sliding past him to the empty air where Jin had been.

  “But your friend?” she said, and now there was heat under the sugar. “He didn’t just expose me. He stabbed me all the way down. And then even stole parts of me!”

  Her smile stretched. “I’m going to find him first.”

  The tar under Rudy exploded upward.

  It jumped from puddle to column, black tendrils reaching for his waist, his chest, his throat. Searing cold hit his exposed skin.

  A hand clamped around the back of his cuirass and ripped him backward like a kite on a string.

  A wall of gray essence slammed down in front of him. It rose from floor to ceiling, solid as poured stone. The tar hit it and stopped, hissing and writhing, leaving oily streaks that didn’t soak in.

  “Stay behind the line,” Mathew said.

  Rudy twisted in his father’s grip, fighting it on reflex.

  “We can’t just let her go!” he snarled. White fire flared at his shoulders.

  “Then get your own house in order first,” Mathew snapped back. He shoved Rudy’s greatsword into his hands without looking away from the rift. “Focus. Feel your channels.”

  Rudy wanted to swear.

  Instead, he did what he’d been told since he was old enough to lift a wooden sword.

  He checked.

  He pulled his awareness inward, the way Jin and his cultivation path had drilled into his skull. Essence flowed through his limbs. His core. His spine.

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  It didn’t feel right.

  His fire wasn’t smooth. It dragged. Like something had mixed sludge into his veins and told him to sprint.

  “Shit,” Rudy whispered.

  “There it is,” Mathew said. “That tar isn’t just eating the floor. It’s in anyone who got too close. You push hard with that still sitting in your channels, and it eats you from the inside out. You’ll end up one of its toys.”

  Rudy ground his teeth and started forcing it out.

  He drove his flames through his pathways, not in a clean cultivation cycle but like you’d clear a blocked pipe. Wherever his fire met that sticky wrongness, it burned. Pain followed. He felt it bleeding out of him in faint threads that seeped through his skin and evaporated against Mathew’s gray barrier.

  It was like trying to cough out smoke that had settled on his lungs.

  He kept going until the drag eased. Until his fire moved how it was supposed to again.

  While he burned out contamination, he refused to look away from Trish.

  The rift behind her yawned wider, its edges trembling.

  Mathew’s gray wall thinned a fraction as he split attention.

  Trish glanced back one last time. Their eyes met over the top of the fortification.

  “Don’t die before I get back, okay?” she said. “It’ll make him sad.”

  She winked.

  Then stepped backward into the tear and was gone. The rift zipped closed shortly behind her.

  The darkness she’d left behind started to drain away. The tar sank back into hairline cracks, leaving streaks and pooled corruption where it had clung. The tar abominations writhed on the floor, half-melted things stuck between summoned shape and whatever they were made from.

  Mathew held the wall for another slow breath, then let it drop. Gray essence peeled away, dissolving back into him. The air smelled like burned tar and copper.

  Mathew dragged a gloved hand down his face, expression going from holy shit back to Commander with a visible click.

  “Silas!” he barked.

  Silas staggered over, tar streaked across his armor and cheek. One of his pauldrons looked half?melted.

  “Sir?”

  “Report.”

  Silas took a breath, forced it even. “No casualties among us. Ward anchors are holding but degraded. Our communication wards are not working, I reckon it's because of what Trish—” He paused for a moment “—that thing was done with the space.”

  Mathew gave a curt nod. “Then your first task is to mobilize those with clearance for ‘Operation Purging Vipers’.”

  Silas straightened, eyes clearing with something like grim relief. “Yes, sir. I’ll get personnel mustered and also priming the arrays.”

  “Before the vipers and rats realize what has happened, see to it we are set up and ready to go.” Mathew’s gaze swept the room, weighing every wounded soldier, every smear of tar.

  “Yes, sir,” Silas said, then hesitated.

  Mathew’s eyes flicked to the black streaks on his armor. “And get yourself cleaned. That slime is corruption. You walk around with that in your channels, you’re one snap away from stabbing me in the spine.”

  Silas grimaced, nodded once, and turned to move, shouting for runners, for warders, for medics.

  Rudy blew out a breath, throat raw. “Operation what?”

  Mathew didn’t look at him right away. His gaze lingered on the place where the rift had been, like he could still see it.

  “Pre-planned cleanse protocol,” he said at last. “We always assumed infiltration and only recently got exact details on those hiding… It’s just I didn’t assume… that.”

  “So you’ve had a ‘we’re full of traitors’ button this whole time, and nobody thought to mention it?” Rudy asked. Flame still licked at his fingers, itching for something to hit.

  “You don’t tell terrified people there are likely vipers under their beds,” Mathew said. “You just make sure you’ve got boots on when you start stomping.”

  “Besides, you are here for what 10 minutes, Rudy? And already acting like a boss.” Mathew sighed with a slight smile. “I’ll have to tell your mom.”

  Rudy snorted. It came out more tired than amused.

  “Can you track where she went?” he asked. “Trish. Whatever. That thing.”

  Mathew shook his head. “Not her. I had her scanned so many times before letting her in closer circles… Old Hobbs, I failed you again… Haa.” His mouth twisted as he bit back his anger. “Whatever she is, she’s above what our systems were built to read. But the cultists we know about? Yes. I can track them. For a while.”

  “How long’s ‘a while’?”

  “Minutes,” Mathew said. “Once we start pinging them, I’m sure they’ll realize and start cutting nodes.”

  Rudy nodded. His mantle flickered behind him.

  “And I’m glad to see you okay, Dad,” Rudy said, matching his father’s gaze. “Though Mom would kill you for losing an eye.”

  Before Mathew could answer, the air in one corner of the room shimmered.

  A plain weathered oak door with silver inlays manifested in the room, and from it a blood?smeared figure with burning crimson eyes walked out.

  Mathew was already there. Fist cocked back, gray essence wrapping it into a hammer of solid force aimed straight at the newcomer’s skull.

  “Dad, wait!” Rudy yelled.

  Mathew froze with his knuckles a breath away from Joe’s nose.

  Joe stared cross-eyed at the hammer. “Whoa,” he said. “Hi. Please don’t turn my head into soup.”

  Rudy’s shoulders sagged as he walked up to them and put his hand on his father’s shoulder before addressing Joe. “Joe. Where the hell were you?”

  Joe pointed at himself, then at the blood. “I got stuck in the traffic… the people were not very nice, and it all turned to bloodshed!”

  Rudy bit back on his retort and looked at Joe. Joe looked like he’d gone through a meat grinder and come back to complain about the service. His usually white clothes were soaked in red, sleeve half-burned. Somehow, he still managed to look like he’d just rolled out of bed late to class.

  “Turns out someone among the cultists had learned of my powers,” Joe went on, “And specifically for me, any teleports I made were booby-trapped. The old ancient bony bastard should just accept that their time in this world is over and be on their merry way to heaven… no, should be hell.”

  Mathew’s eye narrowed.

  Rudy sighed. “Joe, if you haven’t noticed, we have a bit of a situation here, and I’d love for some good news/”

  “Oh,” Joe’s mouth curved, feral. “Well, on the upside, there are a lot fewer high-ranking cultists in cult closets now.”

  Mathew glanced at Rudy over Joe’s shoulder. “This one yours too?”

  “Unfortunately,” Rudy said.

  “Rude,” Joe muttered, but he didn’t sound hurt, and then turned to Rudy. “So, the situation? Seeing dear Reyana and Jin are not here… something big happened?”

  Rudy stepped closer. “Yeah, we faced an enemy hidden. She, or rather it, gave me vibes similar to Master but twisted.”

  Mathew raised an eyebrow at the mention of a master but kept his silence.

  Joe’s expression changed a bit as he closed his eyes, and Rudy felt his essence flutter.

  “Yeah… I can feel a lord rank presence… It's subdued to an underlord, but the quality is definitely that of a lord.” Joe said, opening his eyes.

  Rudy nodded. “I feared as much. Besides, I need your help?”

  Joe’s bloody brows went up. “In killing that thing?”

  “Yes… but not now.” Rudy said. “Right now, I need you to locate Reyana and Jin. Both of them were teleported away by their [Helldiver charm]. Then I need you fix why our comms are not working and send some data through the mask to Jin.”

  Joe whistled. “That’s a lot of things… You have something in mind?”

  “Dad says he can light up cultists they’ve tagged. For a few minutes before they notice, and if we have that info sent over to Jin—” Rudy started.

  “—who could mark them with his skill.” Joe completed his plan as he trailed off in his own thoughts. “That’s a solid plan… A risky move depending on the number of cultists, but it's Jin and that idiot have more essence than anyone.”

  Mathew folded his arms. “Care to enlighten me on things?”

  “You’ll understand,” Rudy said. “Besides, you always told me you don’t wait until a fight lands in your lap to sharpen your sword.”

  Mathew’s mouth opened, shut, then pulled into a snort.

  Rudy shrugged and turned to Joe. “Fix the comms first.”

  Joe smiled. “Yeah. Okay. That’s rude, not even asking me to clean myself, but well… Fine, I’ll fix the comms first.”

  “Do that,” Rudy said. “Then be ready to move the second Dad sends coordinates.”

  Joe opened his mouth. Paused. Narrowed his eyes at Rudy like he was seeing something new.

  “You know,” Joe said, “leave you alone for ten minutes, and suddenly you’re not just a walking sword anymore.”

  Rudy rolled his eyes. “I was never that muscle?brained. Jin just like saying it.”

  “Admitting is the first step,” Joe said, already pulling a crystal focus from his ring. His gaze went absent as he sank into the comm grid.

  Mathew moved back toward the main map table. Crystals around its edge flickered as he fed essence into them. And the map and design of the underground bastion sprang to life.

  Rudy watched the blueprint and layout. His hand tightened on the hilt of his greatsword until his knuckles went white.

  Should be hundreds of cultists, and as for Trish, she’s probably after Jin…

  He’ll be fine. I’m sure of it.

  Rudy sighed, relaxing his shoulders. He did not doubt even for a second that if any of them could survive the wrath of literal gods, it was Jin.

  And Trish was only a monster...

  ~~~

  PS: Psst~ Psst~ Advanced chapters are already up on patreon, you can read upto one month ahead... It would be awesome if you guys, you know...

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