Soul of Blades - Chapter 40: Sacrifice (Patreon)

Alex felt tremors running through the ground beneath his feet. The vibrations spiked and the sound and airwaves soon joined them, bursting with meaning and imagery; the sensations painted a picture of destruction. Several of the queen's limbs had crashed into the girl’s location behind him causing the stone floor to erupt in a plume of chaos, dust, and rubble. He tilted his head slightly, assessing the dust cloud and debris-covered wreckage without eyes, searching for the girl's condition.

She would live.

Alex climbed. Each stab of his blade left behind as he ascended the monstrous limb. More blades appeared in his hands, thrown forward with each leap.

“FIGHT ME HONOURABLY!”

The Queen lashed out. Alex felt the attacks before they came. Most of them. He twisted in mid-air, dodging with difficulty. Dust billowed where the Queen’s strike missed and landed on stone.

The limb's return to the queen stirred the air, cooling his face. To fight her with honour was a strange notion. Did monsters have honour? He wondered.

In his mad ascent he reached a joint. Paused. Below, the battle raged on, a maelstrom of dust and fury as his human and humanoid companions fought against monstrosity.

Maybe they did, he concluded.

But the queen was distracted.

Her martial assault had been belayed.

He saw her porcelain beauty, a human form atop a monstrous one, and sensed the chemical depth and unfathomably complex mass of mana that lay deep within her sternum. Her core lay in her upper half, the part atop the monster that so resembled a human female. He’d found the mana-heart that made up the entirety of her soul and sought to slay it.

To destroy the essence of what she was.

Alex raced up her form and summoned his Dao a final time to separate Queen from throne.

***

He dodged frantically as he raced higher, past the womb and to the base and his sword plunged deep into limbs as thick as his own body. The blade stuck, refusing to cut through entirely. Broken chitin shifted under his feet as he struggled to free it. Unable to dislodge his sword, he let it go and leapt aside just as another limb crashed past where he stood seconds before.

He summoned another edge and stabbed where he landed.

Alex rose to his feet, raising his new blade with swift motions. Drops of his Dao greedily infused his weapon with mere dregs of understanding, but the dregs were empowered by the altered space- and his Dao-infused blade bent reality wherever it moved.

A massive spear of chitin whistled through the air with speed as it shot directly at his heart.

He sidestepped, a blur to any onlooker. The movement cracked the carapace beneath his feet. He kept moving forward and upward to the base of the Queen's form; her humanoid porcelain upper half.

An upward swing. A surge of Dao. A limb fell like a bisected tree, or a stilled wave.

He felt the rush of air as another limb passed him, missing him by centimetres. But her martial form had been abandoned in her distraction. He had felt the attack even as she had begun to move, The sensation was familiar to him, now. Strikes missed and more limbs fell, separated from their royal owner. Some strikes came close, but the sensations they left- of narrowly escaping death- filled him with so much excitement he could burst. It was exhilarating. Adrenaline surged, sharpening his senses further. The world was his to view in any way he wished. He could sense everything. Anything.

He had never felt this way before. Not really. It made him wish the battle would never end.

But it had to.

Alex stood atop the base of her form; the thorax-like structure that merged with her womb. Eggs squirmed beneath his feet, protected by a thin layer of transparent chitin. The final limb blocking his way from her main body fell, and The Queen's human torso became vulnerable. She was unprotected but still a distance away from him- at the top and in the centre. Her porcelain form was bare- half human, half arachnid. Her giant limbs had been either removed by his assault or preoccupied by his companions. Her sea of spears had been quelled.

“You have been lucky.” That was all she said.

Alex shifted. Muscles tensed, then released with explosive power. He surged forward to land before her in a crouch, then he rose to look her in the eye.

And she was beautiful.

But a monster. The beauty was a facsimile. A foyer to rot that had massacred beings for uncounted years.

She had to die.

His Dao surged and his blade became the embodiment of flux, ever moving and changing and ceasing to exist in states while existing in many others. It vanished before his senses and before all present, replaced with something none could truly perceive.

The Dao surged greedily in freedom as Alex swung without a word.

Facing his impending blade, the Queen's eyes widened in a mix of emotions; there was surprise, fear, and immense shock- or more aptly, disbelief. Disbelief radiated through her, the disbelief of a giant being felled by ants. She froze as Alex’s blade connected.

It split her in two.

The strike landed beneath her navel where humanoid stomach met arachnid form, and the human form fell. She reached out as she fell, dying but clawing for survival, one arm found purchase and clung to the dying womb removed of its legs and owner, and the other arm struggled to keep her organs inside of her.

She paused as she hung there suspended between life and death and Alex drew near to end it.

The Queen eyed Alex with a complex gaze as if considering her options. Her expression was torn, and her eyes turned cloudy as if the option of her death was far less an evil than whatever act she was considering taking to survive.

She trembled as Alex stepped forward, but it wasn’t from fear- she wasn’t even paying attention to him. She was staring at her dying womb and the eggs that lay within.

Another step, he raised his sword to strike her down a final time, his senses honed like lasers into the place where he sensed the thrumming of her core. She held a strange expression.

Alex had seen the expression before, it looked like… grief?

She looked back at Alex, not with hatred or contempt, fear, or even anger. Her eyes were clouded with tears and her lips trembling with regret. She stilled as whatever internal struggle she faced had been decided. Then she did the unthinkable.

The broken queen tore open her womb and plunged herself within, consuming any eggs she found within reach.

Alex struck, then. But it was too late.

The chamber flashed white as she became something else entirely.