Gravity pulled us down.
We disagreed.
I spun with Medusa. A stake-chain materialized in my grip mid-turn, and I hurled it into the golem's elbow, just above the space we had just passed through.
It screamed through air, punching deep into stone and lodging fast, its chain stretching taut from that rock to my closed fist.
We plunged down in a single breath, but my arm wrenched against those metallic links, and we swung like a pendulum, curving beneath the golem's giant arm.
We had barely traced a quarter of the crescent when that chain ran short, grinding against stone. Our momentum bled away, turning every inch into a sluggish drag.
I freed my other hand from Medusa's thigh, releasing the first chain simultaneously. With both hands now free, another stake-chain flashed into my grip, already screeching vertically upward and sinking into the golem's arm overhead, its links trembling from my fist all the way to my embedded stake.
Our swing continued, riding the oscillating wave upward, sweeping past the halfway point of the crescent.
A shockwave detonated somewhere above us.
The golem's palm crashed into its own shoulder, exploding molten rock and metallic components in a volcanic eruption.
Its bicep where we had petrified it widened, shattering its arm into fragments. Debris and dust fell, and from within that devastation, a glowing silver light flashed.
Before I could focus on it, the shockwave reached us, cancelling our momentum and shoving us into a backward swing.
Medusa's arms left my neck, both stretching backward together as a stake-chain condensed in each palm. Her thighs clamped harder around my waist.
She launched them above us, sinking both into the stone near my own stake-chain. Our backward drag continued, yet now we were supported by three chains together.
After nearly halting at the apex of our backward arc, both Medusa and I pulled those chains taut.
Then we snapped forward, using them as levers.
Trailing snow burst outward, clearing the space of any snowflakes in a sphere that surged forward with us.
That sphere traced a full crescent from beneath the golem's arm to its side. We let go of the chains and drove straight up into clouds of discharged steam.
Within those white plumes, pieces of a face flashed through my vision: two clusters of hundreds of windows for eyes, and an enormous, arched gate of the castle as a mouth.
Steam blew apart as we pushed even further into the clouds. Right above our heads now, the semi-transparent dome of Einzberns clashed with Blood Fort.
Medusa tilted her head toward that Einzbern boundary field, and her eyes flew open.
Gray bled into that dome and solidified it for as far as her vision reached, freezing it into calcified rock.
My ten fingers traced right behind. Hundreds of cuts tore across the stone. It broke apart and fell in perfectly proportioned pieces, clean and silent.
Blood Fort's crimson expanded with nothing to halt it, and in a single breath, our immediate surroundings and the golem beneath warped, a metallic scent of blood hitting my nose.
Medusa shut her lashes.
Our climb slowed after ascending for nearly twenty more meters. I extended my arms forward, both hands aligning in a vertical chop, her arms closing around my neck once again.
A second later, we hung suspended in the air.
Then, we dropped.
Atmosphere howled past us, so fast that a loud whistle pierced our ears, hair whipping upward.
Sparks ignited beneath my boots, their soles melting into orange; Medusa's chest crushed against my back from sheer velocity alone.
Clouds swallowed us first.
Steam parted around my heels, then my waist, then my shoulders. The clouds split in a clean seam, moisture peeling away in two curtains that clung to our sides before ripping free.
The golem's face filled our world below.
Hundreds of window-eyes stared up at me from within that white haze, each one reflecting a different angle of our descent: my calm expression, Medusa's hair fanning behind us like a banner, Blood Fort painting everything rust-red.
Medusa opened her eyes.
Her gaze landed on those window-eyes. On the reflection of us falling, caught inside a hundred fractured mirrors.
I felt it. A shift in her breathing against my back. The way her arms tightened around my neck.
My eyes met hers there. Across glass, through reflection, straight into her.
Her irises were purple, burning a faint sky-blue at the edges, a color no stone could hold.
For one moment, and one moment only, we weren't falling.
We were just looking.
Then the moment passed, and more stones kept rushing up.
Above us, those window-eyes calcified into rock, then split apart vertically, a dozen lines racing from top to bottom, glass imploding, crushed under its own weight.
Its gate-mouth was next, molecules frozen grey, cleaved into twenty strips as we passed by, half strips tipping inward while the other half pitched outward.
The golem's whole head slid apart as we descended past its neck. Inside were pipes, gears, and conduits of molten metal running through multiple channels.
Then a hand came.
The one it had crushed its own shoulder with. It tore free in a cascade of petrified rock and molten blaze, palm torn wide, whipping horizontally toward us.
I flipped us in a half-circle, our backs against the golem's front now.
[Deca Accel]
That palm hung where it was moments prior. Melted gears halted mid-fall, broken pipes suspended like someone had hit pause on reality.
I glanced up; a burning gear hovered just near my heels, its angle of fall already calculated and adjusted when I had slashed the golem's face.
Planting my boot against it, I shoved.
The palm resumed moving, pipes continuing to descend alongside other gears.
But we were long gone, its magma fingertips grazing Medusa's hair. Her purple strands scattered into wind. The palm missed us by a margin so thin I felt a searing heat on my neck.
Fifty meters to the ground.
I flipped us, face to face with the golem again.
My boots still sparked, soles nearly gone. Medusa's grip on my neck had shifted, her forearms locked under my chin now, her heartbeat hammering against my spine.
Forty meters.
I broke the chop and drove both hands downward, fingers spread. Ten lines traced simultaneously, each one sinking into the golem's interior. Pipes. Conduits. Cables.
They split. All of them. Metal sprayed upward in ten thin jets, each one finding the gaps between my fingers.
Thirty meters.
The golem's interior was unraveling. Those cuts I'd laid down were spreading through its chambers, each severed pipe releasing pressure that stressed the next one.
Twenty meters.
I needed to stop.
Both of my hands shot forward, hooking into those seams I had opened. Its stone edge bit into my hands, cold outside, molten within, and I held. My arms stretched. My shoulders screamed. Two stake-chains punched into stone beside my fingers, metal grinding at a high pitch. Medusa.
Ten meters.
The black tattoos around my face shone darker, eyes shrinking to slits. Dozens of reinforcement magic circles ignited across my gloves.
Medusa's thighs crushed down on my waist, a bone cracking somewhere inside.
We decelerated in three meters.
Both my arms pulled from their sockets with a crunch. But we stopped.
Five meters above the ground.
I hung there for one breath. One hand buried in the golem's leg, the other dangling at my side.
I let go.
We dropped the last five meters. My boots hit stone, and their remaining soles shattered.
But I was still standing.
Medusa's arms loosened from my neck. Her feet touched the ground beside mine, silent.
I put a hand to my shoulder and wrenched. The dislocated joint popped right back in. My other shoulder got the same treatment.
Beside me, Medusa stood silent, her closed eyes flickering toward me at each pop, hair pooling around her feet.
Ahead of us, the golem's open torso was visible. My cuts ran all the way from its top to its leg. A silver light across its chest flickered.
The interior of the golem's chest was hollow, lined with thousands of glass windows. At its center, a core of writhing silver threads floated, suspended without any support.
One shot was enough.
An anti-materiel sniper rifle materialized in my grip.
I lined up my shot.
Its crosshair found the core. Silver threads writhed between glass. My finger found the trigger.
Then ground shook.
The golem's leg shifted.
An intact one I hadn't cut through, still anchored to the earth. It bent at its knee, stone grinding against stone, and the entire golem jerked.
Its back swung downward.
The golem's ruined body moved on that intact leg, and that open cavity, that exposed core, tilted upward and away, out of my line of fire.
Its foot came down.
Straight at us.
I saw it in the scope. A wall of stone, wide enough to cover ten adjacent streets, descending from above like a lowering sky.
My crosshair no longer showed the core, and I set the rifle down.
Medusa's legs tensed.
"Got you!"
Jubstacheit's voice echoed, devoid of the composure it had carried before.
I did not reply. My fingers clenched over the sniper's handle, crushing into metal.
Then, I cocked that rifle back, pivoted on my heels, and hurled it several meters behind me.
It sailed over a treeline and vanished into the distance.
"One hundred years, boy. One hundreds years of my family's work, and you think a sniper rifle ends it here!?"
I turned back toward the golem and remained silent.
"You've lost," Jubstacheit declared.
I tilted my head at that foot on its way to crushing us.
"Lost? Check again. Have I?"
"This isn't—!"
Bang.
A bullet tore upward from a considerable distance behind me, climbing up the golem's legs and torso to vanish into its hollow chest, penetrating straight into that core of threads.
Mukuro Ikusaba.
The golem's leg joint died alongside its core, its leg hovering meters above us.
I looked up and shook my head.
"You're done."
Silence held. One second. Two. Three.
"I am the Einzbern—I will not be the one who—no. No, I refuse—" Jubstacheit's voice was frantic now, any aristocracy evaporating into pure panic.
After five seconds of mumbling things.
His panic stopped.
Not because he calmed down. Because he went somewhere past reason.
"Fine."
The golem's frozen leg trembled. A last burst of silver light bled through its stone's fissures.
That leg completed its stomp, past us, thirty meters to our left. The ground liquefied. Treelines tore from their foundations.
The golem jerked on that anchored foot.
Its ruined body swung overhead. The shadow it cast covered the entire forest.
That leg bent past every tolerance. Its knee joint exploded outward, and its lean became irreversible.
The horizon disappeared behind its descending mass. What had been a skyline was now a ceiling, an entire castle falling as a single object.
Air pressure spiked. A deafening groan echoed through the snow forest as earth beneath us splintered, trees snapping like twigs.
"You'll die beneath it!" Jubstacheit's voice tore. "All of you! Everything I built, everything I sacrificed, you will not take it from me!"
Medusa's hand found mine.
I looked up and sighed. Three seconds before the golem's mass obliterated everything.
"Jubstacheit... You just went from predictable to boring."
I ignored his frantic screams and glanced at Medusa. "Expand Blood Fort. Now."
She tapped ground once. Crimson erupted outward, eating the snowfall, expanding hundreds of meters in a blink to rupture the second Einzbern boundary field.
Two seconds.
I extended my arm up, the magic circles over my glove rotating in a certain sequence.
Jubstacheit roared.
"Di—"
VROOOM
His voice was cut off by a roaring exhaust.
Two crimson headlights cut through snow, and a motorcycle soon became visible, riderless, surging toward us on its own.
It drifted to a halt right in front of me, suspension groaning with a screech.
One second. The golem's shadow swallowed us whole.
I let go of Medusa's hand, vaulted over R1's seat, and gripped its handlebars. Mukuro's blue particles drifted into me from the treeline just as Medusa took her seat, her arms locking around my waist.
I pulled the throttle. 0 to 500 mph.
The world stretched into a blur of speeding lines.
Jubstacheit howled from behind.
"NO!"
"Where are you going!? Why don't you die!?"
I ignored him.
Medusa put her forehead on my back, ignoring him too.
Even R1's exhaust continued to rumble, like it couldn't be bothered either.
"Izuru Kamukura!"
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***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
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[Author's Thoughts]
Have a goodnight... or morning, whatever you guys would like.
Take care.
...
Late Note: Medusa's eyes not turning Izuru to stone through glass is consistent mythology, and not specified anywhere in canon, despite her eyes being Jewel Rank. So I took the liberty of creating a rule that looking at Medusa's eyes through a reflected surface lowers the intensity of her Mystic Eyes by a tremendous amount.