Chapter 50 - The Basilisk King.
The cave hall extended in both directions to a distance hidden behind a diffuse, multicolored shimmer. Along the limestone walls, photocytes grew in dense clusters of blue, green, amber, and deep purple, threading through the grey rock in hundreds of narrow veins, so that the stone glowed from within in even, pulsing patches that filled the entire space of the cave with a cold, even radiance without a single shadow.
The black scales reflected the photocyte radiation as a dark amber glow, forcing its way through the scale seams along the belly and flanks in uneven, smoldering lines. A ridge of horns ran from the bridge of the nose to the back of the skull in a dense, serrated crown of forward-pointing spines with sharp, curved tips, while the forked tail rose menacingly parallel to the upper body.
Aren stood at the lower edge, thirty paces from the serpent, having deliberately left his sword behind and freed both hands.
Blue energy claws covered each hand up to the elbow, casting bluish reflections on the multicolored crystals of the nearest cluster.
Slowly splitting its maw open, the basilisk bared three rows of curved fangs and pale gums, after which a sharp smell of rotting flesh spread across the nearest flat stones.
After holding a crushing pause, the basilisk threw its entire body forward at once, splitting its maw several meters wide, while Aren had already leapt to meet it, driving an explosive crack from the stone slabs beneath him with the sharp thrust of his legs.
The giant head twisted sideways at the very moment before closing, so that both massive bony arches went horizontal to the right and left, but Aren immediately threw out Ursus's magical claws, seizing both bony arches in a dead grip and locking the open maw in a rigid, unyielding brace.
The opposing force of two pairs of hands held the seized bones for exactly that brief moment which allowed the momentum of the ascent to throw his body past the three-row line of fangs over the very tip of the snout, where already in midair Aren twisted his torso into horizontal rotation, after which all four limbs swept into wide slashing arcs, tracing the first deep cuts from the base of the lower jaw along the neck and further down the upper third of the body.
Each subsequent rotation added new wounds to the previous ones, going deeper into the scale covering in an escalating pattern, so that amber blood sprayed in wide fanning bursts and scale plates flew off with a dry crack, snapping against the glowing rock.
The massive serpent let out an abrupt, grating rasp from its throat, wheeling the upper half of its body toward the source of the strikes and throwing the tip of its tail in that direction, but Aren immediately pushed off from its flank and stepped aside, outpacing the serpent's counter.
He landed on the angled stone slope, driving his claws hard into the limestone between the crystal veins, then immediately pushed off and broke into a swift run along the curve of the wall, gaining speed with every new grip.
The beast-god's tail followed in a wide horizontal sweep, carving a continuous furrow several handspans deep in the solid rock and shattering the photocyte veins into explosive clouds of multicolored dust, after which heavy fragments of the rock mass flew across the entire hall.
Aren kept himself several meters ahead of the striking tip, while from the upper edge of the furrow a cascade of crystal shards and shattered stone rained down under his feet.
Having reached the right position, Aren pushed off from a solid ledge with a powerful leap and went into a low arc directly toward the basilisk's head, but suddenly he saw a pale, scorching glow beginning to spread from the creature's chest along its ribs and throat, rising rapidly toward the opening maw and turning the entire front of its body into a pulsing, incandescent outline.
Aren instinctively pulled his legs up to his chest in midair and thrust his palm forward, deploying the magic shield.
At that same instant, a powerful stream of flame tore from the basilisk's split jaws, striking directly into the flying figure and stopping Aren in midair halfway.
The counter pressure crushed the arc of his flight and drove him down, keeping him from reaching his target, after which he slammed into the stone slabs of the floor and rolled across them several meters.
The shield took the direct impact, but the fire curled around its edges on both sides, so that the heat reached his ribs and flanks through the fabric of his clothes, raising the skin in strips of blisters from the shoulder blades to the hip bones.
Before Aren could rise from the slabs, the creature's tail came in from the side and fell in a full horizontal sweep, hurling him across the entire space of the basin toward the far wall, so that he slammed into it back-first with such force that the rock split into deep cracks and threw out a dense cloud of limestone fragments.
Aren remained in the depression that had formed, covered in stone dust, while the long slashed strip along the beast's body rapidly contracted in moments, the scale edges closing along their full length, and within a few seconds only a dark band of fresh, young scales remained where the cuts had been.
The beast-god threw the forked tip in a straight strike into the thick limestone cloud where Aren had just been, and when it entered the opaque curtain of dust, the shockwave from the contact spread in all directions, instantly blowing away the entire suspension and exposing what lay behind it.
The basilisk's eyes narrowed as it saw Aren, covered in white-stone armor that had taken the full impact and spread it across the entire body, holding both tips of the forked tail end with all four limbs at once.
Aren bared his teeth, casting a glowing blue gaze up at the giant's head, then with a short snarl pushed off from the solid base and charged forward along its body, cutting into the flesh of each successive section in sequence and pushing off from it with growing force, each following thrust surpassing the last and closing the distance to the head faster than the serpent could react.
The heated glow in the serpent's chest began rising upward along its body, after which it fired another powerful stream of flame, but Aren leapt from the last point vertically upward and drove his energy grips into the ceiling vault, hanging above the open maw.
The creature's head rose toward the ceiling, continuing the fire attack and burning Aren's grip points white-hot and showering down smoking chunks of stone, but Aren released the grips and threw himself vertically downward, outrunning the expansion of the flame stream, after which his feet barely touched the slabs before immediately leaving them with a new thrust forward and upward toward the upper body.
At that moment, Aren attacked with four parallel arcs simultaneously, tracing across the neck, the upper body, and the horn ridge in a fast, unbroken series of strikes, so that amber blood lashed in wide streams, fragments of the hide flew in all directions, and the deep cuts formed a dense net from the throat to the base of the skull.
The beast-god rolled its entire body backward from the series of strikes and reared into a vertical position, then let out a deafening roar that spread through the entire hall with such amplitude that slabs and blocks crashed from the limestone ceiling in wide sheets and two photocyte clusters collapsed from the wall, scattering into iridescent dust at the base.
At that moment, on the surface, where golden dunes stretched in every direction, the twelfth squad was surrounded by a ring of several dozen Erz, the nearest of them thirty paces from the closest soldier.
The afternoon sun laid a long shadow to the east from every motionless figure and pressed down on the open sand with hard copper light.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Every Erz in the cordon was wrapped tight in layers of faded desert cloth with a narrow horizontal slit for the eyes, and their curved blades hung lowered along their thighs.
Positioned every few warriors through the ring stood the Erz war-beasts, held on short chains. Each carried a wide body with armored dorsal plates the color of scorched bone and kept its flat snout low over the sand. Eyes with horizontal pupils swept the squad's position without pause, and the heavy bony tail of each creature lay stretched out along the ground behind it.
Lieutenant Irvis Rind stood in the center of the squad, moving his gaze slowly around the outer ring, marking the intervals between warriors, the positions of the opponents with their beasts, and the densest sections of the cordon. Sergeant Anna Lanz held position on the right flank with her body angled toward the ring. Artus Hoon and Olen Krite stood at the rear of the formation with their magic blades and kept their eyes fixed on the nearest sectors of the enemy.
Finally, one of the Erz stepped slowly out from the dense outer line, separating from the ring with a steady, straight stride and stopping in the open space before Irvis. He removed his hood, revealing white hair, silver skin, and red irises in both eyes.
"Well, well... familiar faces... didn't think you'd still be a lieutenant, Irvis." He said.
Irvis kept his gaze on the man who had stepped forward, without changing either his stance or his expression.
"Gire... So you decided to sink even lower and lead a pack of scum?"
Gire laughed quietly, then spread his arms to the sides.
"Well, you drove me out yourselves, and I had to adapt to a new life... besides, how am I supposed to reach my goal without any supporters?" He answered.
Anna stepped forward from her position on the flank, keeping her eyes on Gire.
"Whatever goals you set yourself, a piece of shit like you will never amount to anything." She said, baring her teeth.
Gire shifted his gaze to Anna and slowly lowered his arms.
"Oh... would you look at that... the bitch learned to bark... how amusing..."
Anna lunged forward with a snarl, but Irvis put his arm across her chest, without turning his head or shifting his gaze from Gire.
"What the hell are you doing on this stretch of the border?" He asked.
Gire slowly turned his head toward the scattered remains and the two craters left by the basilisk bodies.
"My people were torn apart here, and I had to find out the circumstances."
Irvis let his gaze slide across the craters and brought it back to Gire.
"Erz die every day, if not every hour, and it's perfectly normal that these unfortunates were eaten by basilisks or other desert creatures."
The red irises in Gire's eyes flared with a steady, smoldering light, and a heavy, crushing aura began spreading across the entire open space, and Artus and Olen felt a sharp tingling along their arms and necks.
"Don't take me for an idiot, pup. Maybe I'm Erz now, but don't forget that when you were still a small mutt in your platoon, I was a captain, and I fucking well know that what happened here can't be called normal."
Gire held the pause without moving from the spot or shifting his gaze from the lieutenant.
"One of the survivors, fortunately, has concealment magic and managed to escape at the right moment. And by his report, there was a certain stranger here... a foreigner, involved in the deaths of my people." He added.
Anna and Irvis exchanged a quick glance, then Irvis answered first.
"We didn't meet anyone on the way here... and besides, all the tracks point to basilisks, which most likely tore your people apart."
Gire narrowed his eyes and glanced away for a moment.
The narrow canyon and the survivor's words surfaced in his memory.
The canyon ran between two sheer walls of red-ochre rock rising several dozen meters on either side and leaving only a narrow strip of desert sky overhead. Along both slopes, in natural niches and hand-cut openings, the tribe's living quarters were arranged, hung with leather flaps. Between the outcroppings of the rock walls, wide lengths of cloth were stretched, casting broken shadow on the packed stony sand floor, along which bales of gear stood, and beside hearths of cooled ash lay sacks and coiled ropes. From the desert surface, the settlement was visible from no direction, so that the canyon opened only through a single inconspicuous break in the ridge of rock.
The survivor sat against the wall in one of the niches, leaning against the stone with his gaze lowered to the floor.
"He... he was fighting two at once... it was all so fast I couldn't really make sense of what happened... through the dust and wind, I barely managed to see both serpents already dead, and then their bodies... vanished..." He was saying.
Gire stood before him with arms slowly crossed, holding his gaze on him.
"What do you mean, 'vanished'?" He asked, indignant.
The survivor raised his gaze, opened his mouth, and for several seconds could not find the right words.
"I... I don't know... they just dissolved and... he took them..." He answered, vaguely.
Gire let out a short breath, then stood up and looked at the two fighters at the entrance to the niche.
"Get this idiot out of my sight, and gather the squad. We're moving to that location."
Gire brought his gaze back to Irvis and studied him in silence for several seconds.
"Seems Irvis genuinely knows nothing about this... and they came across this place during a routine patrol... and even so, they met no foreigner on their way... so where could he have gone?..." He thought.
Anna moved to Irvis's shoulder and turned her head toward his ear.
"This is our chance to deal with him..." She whispered.
Irvis cut her off before she could finish.
"No." He cut back.
Watching Gire's expression, Irvis added in a low voice without changing his stance.
"Something's clearly wrong here, and it seems... he knows something but isn't saying it."
Gire held his gaze on the lieutenant for a few more seconds, weighing his answer.
"I won't learn anything more here, and there's no point losing more people in an open fight without any new information."
He slowly raised his hand to the side, and the entire twelfth squad, including the sun lancers, whirlwings, and desert hawks, tensed immediately, ready for battle, but all along the cordon the Erz were vanishing into transparency one by one on the spot, while the rest simply began to withdraw, leading their beasts away by their leads.
"Thank the sun god for your luck today. Fortunately for you, we have matters more important than your lives." Gire said.
A swift whirlwind of sand rose around him, closing into a dense spinning column, and Anna lunged forward with a snarl, the photocyte hilt in her hand instantly forming a narrow blade that cut straight through the entire column, but there was already no one inside.
"Fuck!" She shouted.
Irvis frowned, then turned toward the remains and the two craters from the basilisk bodies and walked forward, carefully examining everything around him.
"A foreigner?... if he was here... then what happened to the basilisks?..." He thought, continuing to move through the site of the fight.
Anna and the others watched him, not understanding what was happening.
Several minutes later, Irvis stopped sharply, dropping his gaze to the surface of the sand. Across the loose surface layer, already nearly covered by the wind, slow, even tracks led south, showing not the slightest sign of haste or flight.
"Someone really was here... the tracks are clearly from the same time as the basilisk tracks... and the gait is slow... he wasn't running, just walking... what the hell..." He thought, his gaze fixed on the departing chain of prints.
Meanwhile, in the scorching cave saturated with bitter smoke from countless fire attacks, Aren stood with heavy, ragged breathing, covered in sweat, holding the blue energy claws lowered toward the floor, slowly raising his gaze to the beast-god.
More than half an hour of continuous fighting had left the walls blackened along every slope, while the beast-god labored to lift its body from the floor, covered in slowly closing cuts from which amber blood ran along the black scale seams.
Aren drew a deep breath, then exhaled, then took up his ready fighting stance once more, feeling certain that victory remained within reach.
The basilisk, however, showed no hurry to attack, fixing a heavy, unmoving gaze on him, then slowly and firmly closed its jaw.
The only sound in the cave was Aren's heavy breathing, when his body caught what had come before any visible change.
A pressure wave shifted from the serpent through the entire volume of the space, and Aren's heart delivered a single muffled blow against his ribs, after which a sharp electric discharge rolled through his entire body from the tips of his fingers to the back of his skull.
Aren's pupils dilated wide, and a short involuntary tremor passed through both arms.
All across the cave, the remaining crystal veins began splitting with a crack, showering the slopes with fine fragments, and a new, many times heavier aura began to radiate from the beast-god, pressing down hard on the chest.
Aren shifted his gaze to the cuts across the beast-god's body and noticed that the amber blood had begun to slow, and the wound edges were closing with visibly increased speed. He didn't move, sensing from the character of the spreading aura that approaching now would be wrong.
With a heavy guttural crunch, two new appendages began growing slowly from the flanks of the beast-god's body, lengthening and thickening with each second. The beast-god was reshaping its snout at the same time as the appendages grew: the lower portion stretched forward and narrowed, growing thinner and longer, the bony growths along the sides of the head roughened and pushed out from the scales as large angular ridges, and along the center of the forehead, through the black scales, with a steady crunch, a sharp and massive horn began forcing its way outward, growing slowly in a perfectly vertical line.
The two appendages spread suddenly wide on either side of the body and opened into broad membranous wings, filling the cave hall from slope to slope. The membranes between the dark bony ribs of the wings immediately filled with pulsing amber light from within, and that same fire spread across the entire body of the beast-god.
The basilisk threw its eyes wide open, revealing a steady, flaming amber light in the dark sockets, then a roar tore from its open maw with such amplitude that its shockwave spread through the entire volume of the cave at once, striking the walls, the vault, and the floor simultaneously.
Aren's body slid back across the stone slabs several meters under the very first blow of the wave, and the last surviving crystal veins in the slopes exploded one after another, scattering explosive fans of fragments across the walls.
He retracted the claws and pressed his palms to his ears with every ounce of force he had, and the crushing pain spread from his temples deep into the skull, clamping his teeth hard together.