Three still found her — grazing the crystalline edge of her wing with low, sepulchral hisses that left thin scoring lines the Void-Ice had to imdiately re-knit. She climbed. They climbed with her. She broke left. They curved as one, twelve dark trails bending through the crimson air on a single shared instinct, each one describing a perfect, predatory arc that hooked toward her new position as though the projectiles themselves could see.
Eira’s expression cracked — as if she had been outmaneuvered by sothing that, by every law she understood, should not have possessed a mind of its own.
Phei laughed as he watched his new toys chase the one being in this entire frozen cathedral who had once believed she could still torture him and get away with it.
The bullets pursued her higher, faster, turning with her every desperate feint until he finally, lazily, willed them back.
They reversed in perfect synchrony and returned to him, orbiting his hands in patient, glistening rings like a dozen loyal hounds that had only just begun to understand what their master could now make them do.
The Primordial Blood was no longer rely awake.
**
"Eira..."
"Master, that was —"
"... they had a brain."
"Yes, master, they had a brain. Master, your skills compiles —"
"Curving. Tracking. Hunting."
"Yes, master. Master, you should sit —"
He swung at the trees instead.
The bullets took off a second ti.
Twelve dark red projectiles tore the cathedral hollow’s periter open in one long, vicious breath.
The trees fell — not one trunk per bullet, but many.
Each projectile bored through the first primordial trunk in its path and kept going, the wood parting around it in a wet, shuddering thunk of shattered fiber. It erged on the far side in a brief spray of pulped iced-bark and magic that clung to its surface like the ancient grove had offered up a taste of itself.
Then the next trunk. Then the next.
Phei watched one bullet thread ten trees in a single sustained line — ten iced-dark wet holes blooming at the sa height, the projectile flashing visible for half a heartbeat in each gap before vanishing into the next, until its substance finally guttered out between the tenth and eleventh in a small wet cloud of red.
Others managed twelve. So only seven...
...the elent was still learning its own limits.
All the while he felt Eira hovering at the edge of it — wings beating a soft, private counter-rhythm to the violence, fra limned in crimson like sothing the blood itself wanted to keep.
Her dark-diamond eyes tracked every projectile, every crack, every detonation. Not just with concern but with heat. The kind that made the hunger in him answer even while he spent himself on iced-wood and stone.
Trees sculptures folded behind the volley in slow, committed cascades.
A dozen primordial spires ca down in the ti the volley took to disperse.
The cathedral hollow was — again — paying.
Then —
His head guttered.
A sharp expanding pressure opened at the center of his skull — the equivalence of a candle fla reaching for a wick that had already been burned away.
He winced, the first real expression his face had registered since the awakening.
The elent was so costing on him.
It had not occurred to him until this exact heartbeat that the substrate it was drawing on was not infinite.
He ignored it like he was tucking a blade into his boot and tried again.
He held both hands out and the blood-mist answered.
Threads of dark red lifted from his palms and braided — long, rope-like strands twisting in the air, his fingers shaping them with the sa deliberate articulation a practiced musician uses on an unfamiliar instrunt.
He twisted his wrists.
The strands compiled into thin red whips, each tipped with edges sharp enough to vitiate the air ahead of itself.
He cracked the right one.
The whip’s tip travelled forty yards and severed a frost-spire halfway up its length. The cut was so clean the upper section did not begin to fall for a full heartbeat — the two severed faces still kissing like lovers who hadn’t yet realized they were parted.
Then physics rembered itself: the upper section ca down in a slow resonant groan, twenty feet of frost-and-stone tipping sideways in unhurried committed descent.
It kept falling because the whip-edge had cleft so cleanly that the cathedral hollow’s stone floor opened beneath the impact like cloth parting along a seam.
The upper spire sank a body-length into the broken earth before the substrate decided to hold it there.
This new fissure radiated outward across the floor from the impact point in long, crimson-edged cracks that refused to close.
He felt Eira watching that, too and the shift in her breathing — the small, sharp inhale that made the heavy, generous weight of her tits rise and settle under crystal that caught the light like it wanted to keep it.
The sight fed sothing in him that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with the woman who looked at his violence like she might look at his hands on her skin.
He flicked the left.
This whip did sothing different.
It did not strike, it coiled instead: the dark red rope extruded out into the cathedral hollow at the speed of his wrist and wrapped itself around a distant primordial trunk twenty yards away — the whip’s full length cohering around the trunk’s circumference in three complete revolutions before constricting.
The trunk made a sound the cathedral hollow had no precedent for in a wet, groaning split.
The blood-rope’s constriction tightened to the cosmic equivalent of a thousand-ton press, and the trunk exsanguinated —
"Master. That is not standard manipulation."
"Hmm."
He moved on.
He compiled a sphere.
Above his open right palm, the blood-mist condensed into a dense crimson orb the size of a lon — and inside the orb, smaller orbs assembled. Twenty. Thirty. Fifty. Each the size of a marble, rotating inside the larger sphere in deliberate orbits Phei had personally authored.
The architecture was his. The substance was the elent’s.
He flung the sphere at the canopy.
The sphere arrived among the upper frozen trees and detonated.
The inner marbles released in a synchronous blooming explosion — a single cosmic crack that rolled across the cathedral hollow’s air the way thunder rolls across a valley. Fifty individual blood-projectiles dispersed in a fifty-vector cone carving, each marble retaining the cohesion of a small bullet for the half-second its substance lasted.
The cathedral hollow’s upper icy canopy was vacated in a ten-yard cube — a perfectly cubic absence of canopy where canopy had existed a heartbeat before.
What remained was a clean ten-yard cube of empty cold air edged on every side by sheared frost-branches still dripping crimson from their cuts.
Then the rain ca, filled with frozen branches, frozen leaves, frozen birds, frozen ornant-fragnts — all of it carved into a slow falling rain of blood-and-bark that drifted down through the crimson field for a full thirty seconds before settling on the floor in soft committed tides.
His head guttered again.
Sharper this ti.
He felt his thoughts thin.
The elent’s cost was mounting at a rate his mind had begun to flag in the back of his vision and stinging pain.
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