Dix slid through a narrow alley. In his wake, marbled tiles erupted upward; blood struck them mid-flight, smearing across their lengths before they fell.
A pair of goggles hung around his neck, their glass shattered. A long wound ran diagonally across his chest, torn open by something sharp and precise.
He swung his spear in a wide arc, plunging it into a wall. Its shaft sheared through brick and concrete, stopping only when it reached the alley's end. His knees buckled on their own, and he sank, fingers tightening around the spear to keep his upper body from collapsing entirely.
The clinking of chain-links echoed from ahead, and Dix's expression twisted as he forced himself up on trembling legs, leaning heavily on his spear for support.
Mahoraga stepped toward that alley's mouth, a space narrower than the Divine General's frame, lacking even room for its waist to pass.
"How can you still fight under my curse? What kind of monster are you!?" Dix kept his gaze locked ahead, wrenching his spear free from the wall, taking a trembling step sideways to catch his balance.
Mahoraga pressed forward. Its abdomen slammed against the alley walls as it surged ahead in a blur of white. Those flanking walls crumbled and launched upward, peeling away like two parallel ribbons caught in a harsh wind.
Dix took an unconscious step back and coiled his spear-arm, compressing every ounce of his body's force into muscles and bone, and hurled his weapon.
Air shrieked along the shaft, a furrow tearing open in its wake. Mahoraga did not dodge. That spear pierced straight into its chest, jamming between white muscles, its shaft jutting out from Mahoraga's front.
Similar perforations marked the Divine General's spine, each ringed in a thin layer of blood-red energy that pulsed against its muscles, refusing to let the flesh there knit back.
Mahoraga's charge continued, its speed dropping fractionally, and Dix noticed.
He ground his teeth together, crimson eyes burning with a maniac light, gazing straight at the Divine General.
"[Phobetor Daedalus]."
A wave of blood-red light expanded outward from Dix in a circular radius, washing over Mahoraga's white muscles and arms, painting them crimson for an instant.
The Divine General's stride broke mid-step. Its foot came down on what it thought was solid ground, only to find air. Its body pitched forward, launching over Dix and past the alley's mouth, crashing into a building straight ahead.
Mahoraga tumbled twice, scattering rubble in arcs, and skidded to a stop a dozen meters inside, one arm buried wrist-deep in the earth.
Dix's breath caught, then broke into a low laugh.
The Divine General rose. Its head turned toward Dix, then past him, toward a nearby wall where nothing stood but dust and cracked bricks.
It barreled back, right fist cocked, driving it into empty air a full meter left of where Dix stood.
Dix watched it happen, and wrapped his fingers around his dagger, unsheathing and swinging it toward Mahoraga, opening a laceration on its arm. The Divine General reacted instantly, its kick tearing through the air above just as Dix ducked below.
Twice now, he had watched it happen. Each strike landed nowhere, aimed at a phantom Dix that, in this monster's eyes, stood somewhere he was not.
His lips tugged upward on their own, shoulders shaking first, then his whole frame, laughter climbing up from him in short, broken bursts.
"Hahahaha!"
Dix rose to his feet and rushed forward, swinging his dagger without technique, each strike aimed at the areas with most nerve clusters, inducing maximum pain without hitting anything vital.
Mahoraga swept its legs in a full circle. A shockwave detonated from that strike, spraying debris outward and crumbling houses meters away. But Dix had already vaulted above the blast.
He landed, his dagger blurring as it opened dozens of lines across the Divine General.
"This is it!" he choked out, voice cracking between joy and pain. "This is it! This is—"
Clunk
Dix felt it before he saw it. A huge palm pressing against his chest. Lightly.
The way you'd place a hand on a door before pushing it open.
Then it pushed.
A low whistle rang through his ears. Air behind him split open in a straight line for meters. Then Dix's body went backward, and the world went with it—
A wall. Through it. Not slowing. Another wall. It entered his back and exited ahead of him as a ring of pulverized brick dust, and then he was in a room—a kitchen, a pot hanging from a hook, a wooden table—and then he was through a third wall, that table shattering to dust from his passage alone.
A street. His feet found it for an instant. Just long enough to see an inn—a door—a hanging sign he couldn't read—and then Mahoraga's hand was on his chest again, having crossed the distance between them.
Second push.
A storefront behind him exploded inward. Dix's back carved a trench through its floor, planks snapping and rotating end over end in his wake, and multiple shelves on either side of him blasted upward in a column that rose and fell like a geyser.
He hit a support beam. It broke. The ceiling above it sagged, then dropped, and Dix was already past it, flinging through dust and splinters into an open square.
His jaw hung loose. It swung side to side with the wind, blood spraying from his mouth like a broken faucet.
Clink.
Leftward. Chain-link ringing on chain-link, loud enough to resound over air tearing past his ears.
Clink.
Rightward. Mirrored. Same precision and rhythm.
Clink.
Everywhere. Above and below. Left and right.
Clink.
Ahea—
Third push.
Dix's chest caved inward, ribs snapping in a cascade, spine compressing in a deep arc. Air climbed from his spine to skull, detonating outward, flattening everything behind him for meters.
Sky. Ground. Sky. Each replaced the last so fast they merged into a grey-white smear.
A building entered his back and exited his front, and all he saw were fragments; a ceiling, a staircase spiraling past him, a mirror that showed him a vague shape before shattering into a thousand versions of the same shape.
Pain arrived late. And as taste. A metallic tang on his tongue, dragging up a memory from deeper down—laughs, his own, at a mermaid girl's spine bending back past its limit, screams climbing up her chest the same way this taste climbed up now.
Wind became texture, glass and splinters dragging across his skin, peeling it away in layers. A second building. A third. He stopped counting after that, because his mind was not fast enough to count them flickering past anymore. In between, his consciousness went dark, came back, went dark again.
He cratered into the ground at Daedalus' edge, sinking soil downward in a deep circle, buildings around him quaking from their foundations, cracks racing across their full lengths.
His arms were bent backward. His legs were unresponsive. His body was broken in so many places that his pain receptors had burned out entirely.
Dix's eyes, one working and the other swollen shut, found a white silhouette already standing above him.
Looking down.
Its wounds had closed entirely, its body pristine, the crimson spear nowhere to be seen.
His gaze rose. Past its chest and shoulders, to that wheel.
It sat still above Mahoraga's head, not a tremor running through it, showing no indication of turning to adapt.
Mahoraga brought a single leg up.
Ah.
I wasn't even worth a second spin.
A white foot enlarged in Dix's vision. He tried to force his mouth open to plead, curse, say something, anything—
Crunch.
...
..
.
[Author's Thoughts]
Crunch indeed, can't think of something funny, still probably sad about the wheel, but it had to be done.
Anyway, have a fabulous day, another chapter coming tomorrow.