CHAPTER SEVENTEEN TEEN
(Written by Solomon Paul)
The Crucible of Infinity
The runes collapsed around them and the world vomited them into a place that ate hope for breakfast. Stone became dust; sky became a bruise. Crimson lightning forked across a horizon stitched from war and ruin. Shards of dead worlds drifted like ash.
Elioth pushed himself up first, palms scraping at ground that felt like old scars. He tasted iron and smoke in the air, and his body hummed with the raw, angry readiness of someone who fought with bone and sinew, not steel.
"What is this hell?" Elioth spat, rolling a shoulder loose. No sword at his hip, no practiced strikes with a blade—only him and whatever his hands could do.
Amon rose slower, hands moving to empty air where his dagger should have been. His face went still for a second, a blankness edged with frustration. "It's the Crucible," he said, voice small against the roaring void. "We survive."
The earth shivered and the first wave came—things sewn from nightmares: limbs that bent wrong, mouths where eyes should be, bodies that fed on sound. They fell on them like a red tide.
Elioth met them with motion. He didn't reach for a hilt; he became the weapon. His first strike was a shoulder throw that slammed a torso into jagged stone. He followed with a spinning elbow that crushed a skull-shaped joint, boneflakes spraying like sparks. Every motion was close, brutal, practiced—kicks that snapped bones, palm-heels that shoved ribs in, joint locks snapped with the finality of a snapped branch.
Amon tried to help, but his arms felt like they moved through syrup. His feet planted and his hands burned with a power he couldn't access, as if something invisible pressed down against his will. He jabbed fist-fire at a crawling horror and watched the flame gutter out like a candle shoved into rain.
"Don't—you're wasting it!" Elioth barked between blows, voice ragged. He ducked the slash of a wing and yielded into a twisting throw that used the creature's momentum to hurl it into the maw of a bone-river. He kept moving, never pausing. Where Amon floundered, Elioth filled the gap—sweeping legs under, crushing throats with his forearm, seizing a creature's limb and snapping it like dry reed.
They doubled back-to-back. The Crucible punished them with endless reinforcements; for every corpse that thudded to the ground, three more bled from cracks in the void. The air tasted of defeat and old songs of dying things. Amon's frustration curdled to fear. He clenched his jaw until his teeth ached.
Elioth felt the tremor in his friend—the silent, keening question in his eyes: why can't I move? He answered without softness.
"Stop thinking about what you lack," Elioth growled, ducking a fang and driving his knee into its belly. The beast convulsed and evaporated into shadows. "Use what you have. Use me. Use your head. Use your feet. Move with me!"
Amon tried. He watched the flow of Elioth's body, how Elioth shifted weight, how he wrapped an arm under an attacker's elbow and pivoted his hips to throw it. Amon mirrored one motion—a simple roll, a low strike—and it landed, clearing their flank. For a breath, they moved as one.
Then the ground heaved. The sky tore open and something vast descended: a Dark Knight whose armor drank the very light. It towered like a mountain, its sword a slab of night that hummed like a world-ending bell. Each step it took smote the arena; small fissures raced outward.
Elioth's eyes narrowed. He didn't brandish a weapon—he braced. When the giant's blade crashed down, it hit not the hard edge of metal but the pounding wall of Elioth's shoulders. His arms went numb under the impact, but he dug his feet into the fractured earth and rooted himself like an iron tree. Roots of the Crucible tried to pry him up; he twisted, using wristlocks and leverage to shift the sword's arc enough to spare Amon from the shock.
Amon coughed against the taste of dust and watched Elioth choke back a scream, every muscle screaming against impossible weight. The seal inside him was a whisper, a nothing—but something in the void reached for that whisper and sniffed. A voice, thin and wet with malice, curled around Amon's name.
"…bound," it whispered, like a reed moaning. "The blood-cage holds him fast."
Amon's eyes flickered. He did not know what a seal was. He only knew the hollowness in his limbs and the burning at his chest that never flared but never left. He reached for a meaning he did not have.
A massive claw lashed from the shadow and closed around his throat. The world slowed to granular horror—Amon's knees left the ground, his vision ballooned to the size of pain. Air thinned. Elioth's head snapped toward him. No weapon now, no blade—just the animal core of him.
"Let. Him. Go!" Elioth's roar was a raw thing that ripped the air. He surged, shoulder first into the claw, palms slamming the tendon as he twisted an impossible joint. He heaved like a lever, dragging Amon back toward safety, grunting as bones protested.
The Dark Knight's shadow detached and shifted. Its shape sloughed and took on a face—one that made blood run cold in Amon's veins because it carried the curve of some memory he couldn't name, the eyes of someone he thought he had lost. The face smiled too wide, impossibly patient.
Amon choked. He could feel the seal's whisper near, not breaking, not freeing—only shivering like a caged bird. Elioth's arms trembled under the strain, sweat and blood mixing on his skin. He had bought them a breath.
Something in the Crucible watched them with cold, patient hunger. The shadow face leaned close and spoke, and its words were like ice water in a wound.
"You should have known," it said, voice thinned to a rasp. "You should have guessed what hides beneath the quiet."
Elioth slammed his shoulder, driving both of them toward a jagged fissure. Amon coughed, lungs clawing. He swallowed fear and asked, voice barely a rasp, "Who—who is that?"
Before the answer could come, the void opened under them in a new direction—an endless corridor of eyes, and at its mouth something moved that was not beast nor man but a question shaped into flesh.
Elioth tightened his grip and turned, fists coiled like springs.
"Then we finish this. Together."
The Crucible hummed, as if pleased by that answer. It had one more trick left—and it was reaching for the part of Amon that neither of them knew how to name.
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TO BE CONTINUED…