My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 747: Hell’s Whisper

The first saber came in low right after the fist that had thrown him away.

He saw it for half a heartbeat—arc sweeping across knee height in the hungry committed sweep— and he leapt away

He only cleared the blade by inches.

In the air he reversed his right dagger, drove it down through the saber-Titan’s wrist where the was thinnest. The blade sank to the hilt, the Titan’s hand was separated off, crystalline fragments showered the cathedral hollow’s broken stone.

The saber clattered down.

Phei landed in a crouch, pivoted and caught the saber off the ground in his left hand by reflex.

A halberd descended where his back had been a half-second ago.

KKKRAKK.

The hollow’s stone exploded outward in a six-foot crater. Fragments scoured the back of his fabric and opened a long horizontal cut from his right shoulder blade to his left ribs.

The ground itself shifted.

A second Titan, ten feet to his left, had stomped at the stone beneath him and from the cracked floor, in the sudden patient bloom of cosmic origami, a forest of crystalline ice-spikes erupted upward in a four-foot radius around Phei’s position. Thirty spikes, tapered and tipped sharp enough to part air.

Each one accelerating from the broken stone toward his torso at the velocity of compressed intent.

He had a heartbeat.

He used it.

He threw himself backward—a flat reverse handspring off the stone, his palms slapping cracked floor, his body torquing horizontally past where the central spike was rising—and the topmost spike grazed his ribs on the way past, opening a long shallow cut from his chest down to his hip in a single hot wet line.

He landed on the spike-field’s far edge.

On his feet.

Crouched but with a saber in his left hand, bleeding.

The third Titan was already swinging.

The halberd came at him diagonal, top-right to bottom-left, in the long committed sweep of a weapon designed to bisect him from shoulder to hip. He ducked under it, the wind of its passage lift his hair, he drove his saber up through the construct’s exposed armpit at the apex of its swing.

The blade entered the joint.

He wrenched.

Frost-iced edges expanded the wound by inches. The Titan’s right arm separated at the shoulder along a clean diagonal fault, the limb falling to the broken stone with a thump, the halberd still gripped in the crystalline fingers, and Phei caught the falling halberd off the dying limb with his free hand.

He was now armed with saber and halberd.

A fourth Titan’s foot swept low.

He did not see it coming.

The kick caught his planted left leg at the ankle in a wide horizontal arc—the construct dropping beneath his peripheral vision and sweeping—and his foot was taken out from under him.

His body was airborne. Knee-height. Ascending.

For one dilated heartbeat he was horizontal, four feet above the broken stone, both his arms still in their downward follow-through from the saber-wrench, his bodyweight committed to a downward strike that no longer had a target because his target was the sky.

A halberd descended.

He saw it coming.

The construct that had swept his leg had recovered from the sweep and was now bringing its halberd down in a vertical chop aimed not at his torso, not at his head but at his right shin.

The construct’s faceless skull tilted in patient consideration, the strike calibrated with surgical precision to land at the exact moment his airborne body had stopped rising and not yet begun to fall.

The blade arrived at his shin.

KKKRRAAAKKK.

The halberd’s frost-iced edge entered his trouser leg and continued through the skin and continued through the muscle and continued through the bone, the crystalline edge meeting the resistance of his shin-bone and passing through it with the wet snapping crunch of green wood splitting under a maul.

His shin cracked along a diagonal fault that ran from the bone’s centre down to the side of his ankle, and the bone broke — the lower third of his shin separating from the upper two-thirds and pivoting outward at a wrong angle that his trouser leg could not contain.

The bone came out.

A jagged white-and-pink shaft of his own leg-bone emerged through the torn fabric of his trouser leg, three inches of his interior visible against the cathedral hollow’s afternoon light, the broken end of the bone wet with his blood and small ribbons of marrow and the thin tissue of his calf that the bone had dragged out with it on the way through.

He hit the broken stone... by now, there was no use to cry in pain. He was already almost numb, but it still hurt like a bitch.

The fall drove the broken bone sideways against the lower fragment of his shin, and the lower fragment rotated in his flesh — Phei could feel the bone-end inside his leg grinding against the soft tissue that surrounded it — and he screamed.

It was a long high scream that did not sound like his own voice. The pain of a freshly broken weight-bearing bone with the broken end protruding his body had not been previously asked to host, and his throat delivered the scream as raw output, the cathedral hollow’s afternoon light briefly fracturing in his vision into a hundred small bright shards that overlapped his sight in a white-out of pure overflow.

The bond did not heal it.

The broken leg was not a severance.

It was a break.

He spat blood and tried to push himself up.

His right leg refused.

The bone-end ground against itself. The entire lower right quadrant of his body went white with pain.

He fell back to the broken stone, his halberd still in his right fist, his saber clattering free, his vision swimming, the construct that had broken his leg standing four feet away with patient sadistic interest in the way its faceless skull was tilted.

It raised its halberd again.

He had the time he had—a second, perhaps a second and a half—to use the halberd-haft as a brace and pivot his entire torso along his good left leg, swinging the broken right leg out of the descending halberd’s strike-zone in a long screaming arc that he felt in every bone-fragment and every torn fiber of his right calf.

The halberd buried itself in the stone where his leg had been.

He came up on his good left knee, broken right leg dragging, bone-end visible through the torn trouser, the cathedral hollow’s stone now wet with a long ribbon of his blood from where his leg had dragged.

Eira’s voice, from above —

"Master."

He could not reply.

His teeth were too clenched.

"Reach inward."

He reached inward.

The Void-Ice’s dismissal arrived inside his head with the same flat refusal it had arrived with all afternoon, and Phei, with his right shin broken and the bone protruding through his torn trouser leg, made an involuntary sound that was half-laugh and half-sob and entirely the sound of a seventeen-year-old who had just discovered that the universe was not, in fact, on his side this afternoon.

He pushed himself up onto his good left leg.

The halberd as a crutch.

The other Titans were already closing.

The Titan that had stomped the spike-field stomped again.

This time it was not at his feet.

It was at the cathedral hollow itself—the construct’s massive foot driving down into the broken stone with such force that the entire hollow’s floor bowed outward in a six-yard concentric ripple, the moss-veiled stone deforming like cloth under a thumb, and Phei felt the earth beneath his good left leg tilt.

He went sideways off-balance.

One knee — his good one — dropped.

His broken right leg dragged behind him across the moving stone, the bone-end grinding fresh fault-lines through the surrounding muscle, and he made another short involuntary sound that was not quite a scream because his throat was already too raw to produce one.

The cathedral hollow’s surface re-flattened a half-second later but the half-second had been enough.

A javelin took him in the back of his left calf.

He felt the crystalline shaft punch through his trouser leg. Through the meat. Through the calf to the other side.

The tip emerged out the front of his shin in a small flowering of pale blue-white crystal and his own dark blood, and the impact hammered him forward onto his face-down across the broken stone.

His saber had clattered free moments earlier.

The halberd stayed in his right fist.

He rolled.

A second javelin punched the stone where his head had been.

A third.

A fourth.

He was rolling sideways across the cathedral hollow’s floor with crystalline projectiles arriving at the rate of perhaps one every quarter-second, each one targeted at where he had just been, his rolling-momentum putting him a body-length ahead of each impact.

The pale blue-white shafts buried themselves in the stone behind him in a long staccato sequence of thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk, the cathedral hollow registering the volley as a sustained percussive note.

He came up on one knee at the end of the roll.

The javelin still through his calf. He could feel it grinding against his shin-bone every time the leg moved.

Above him—

The sky darkened.

He looked up.

The five Titans that had been compiling crystalline projectile-rain in their off-hands had finished compiling.

What was now arcing down from forty feet above him was not a volley.

It was two hundred crystalline shards in a falling rain that filled the cathedral hollow’s airspace from the canopy down to head-height, each shard tipped with edges that would slice meat, each one falling at terminal velocity, the whole rain-pattern designed to converge on the eight-foot circle of cathedral hollow Phei was currently occupying—a patient, beautiful, obscene execution that had been assembling itself while he bled and broke and screamed.