The Blood Solution (Approaching Infinity Book 3) (44 page)

He lurched suddenly, as blood was yanked from the existing wounds across his body. He nearly blacked out from the additional loss, but Jav cried out a final time in his mind, snapping him to attention. Abanastar focused and envisioned a series of lenses about Jav’s outstretched arms. The lenses weren’t physical and Jav had no sense of them rotating about his arms, but he did feel them focusing his strength, increasing it, enabling him to concentrate on his calculations.

Abanastar pumped everything he had left into those lenses, and Jav’s physical strength surged. This allowed his calculations to go unperturbed, even as Braams raked his fingers down through his right side, obliterating ribs and spilling freshly reclaimed blood in a wet splash. Damaged as Jav was, the strength from Abanastar was localized and unaffected by any structural requirements to maintain it. The pain was excruciating, and brought Jav closer to death than he’d ever been or ever would be again, but still he pushed the Kaiser Claw. If he could just get the cascading effect to begin on Braams, all would be worth it.

The shadow eyes of the Ritual Mask narrowed and Jav howled, driving his calculations until Abanastar slid the lenses down the lengths of Jav’s arms to encompass the AI effect taking place between his hands. At this, Jav felt something like literal infinity pour through him.

Braams had been aware of Jav’s strange facility to somehow bend space to his will, greatly adding to the velocity of his strikes, to his impact power, and making this strange wrestling hold nearly impossible to escape. He’d been aware, too, of the vast amounts of pressure Jav could bring to bear. The affect was highly focused and contained so he didn’t feel that it warranted as much concern as the horse-headed one’s artificial singularity had. Though Jav refused to let go, Braams could withstand the pressure. The blood of millions had given him the power of God and he felt that power in evidence now, resisting the press of infinity with an equal or greater infinity. Braams was sure that he could outlast Jav’s efforts. Jav had gotten a second wind somehow, but he would tire again, and Braams would kill him—again.

Or so he thought.

Someone somewhere had suddenly added to Jav’s strength. Braams felt the grip upon his head tighten, generating physical pressure greater than any the Entitled had ever been able to effect. While the strength was unprecedented, the aid was not. The Entitled themselves had learned to combine their Haloes, to chain their power, channeling it through one another to accomplish a result many times greater than that possible by a lone individual, but their methods were less subtle than the one being employed now. Obviously, in this case, close physical proximity was unnecessary. Braams could not see who was responsible. He could sense the person’s blood, could even seize control of that blood, but he could not stop the aid that was being provided and there was a danger. If that effect was somehow transferred to the assault upon the
space
between Jav’s hands, Braams could very likely lose the stamina battle.

Braams composed himself and split his focus equally between resisting the forces attempting to crush his head and preparing for the Red Beam. But time was running out; what he’d feared might happen had started to happen. He could feel the gentle shift in power from physical to spatial, and the strain upon his head abruptly went from tolerable to sanity crippling.

It was a simple adjustment for Abanastar, but the effect was incalculable, precipitating three separate processes, which quickly built to a nearly simultaneous crescendo. Abanastar pushed the last of his consciousness into his power, causing it to spike; Jav reached deeper into himself, exerting his muscles and his mind, pushing both to limits new to him; and Braams finished preparing the Red Beam.

As Abanastar passed out, but before the Red Beam fired, a thin line, like a single strand of hair, surfaced upon Braams’s helmet from chin to crown, right between the eye slits, and was punctuated by a sharp chinking sound.

The red speck flared, flashing out in that half-centimeter beam that had proven so destructive before, and Jav disappeared, leaving nothing but a smokey outline that quickly dissipated. The battlefield, too, was cleared of all in the beam’s path. Braams began to laugh a nervous and strained laugh that died when the red glare lit the far off horizon. The city of Halaam, the staging area for repelling the invasion, was gone. The blood of nearly a million people was gone, vaporized in a moment of carelessness.

“No.
No
.
No
!” Braams cried.

But his anger gave way to confusion. His vision was obscured. He put a hand to his face and briefly interrupted a fine sheet of blood spraying out the length of the crack in the Blood Frame’s helmet.

“I suppose it’s not really fair,” Jav said from behind him.

Something like electric current shot through Braams at the sound of Jav’s voice.

“I’ve had a preoccupation with fairness, you know?” Jav fairly stuttered through shivers that shook him visibly. “I always feel guilty doing what we do.”

Braams started to turn towards Jav who was crouching, hugging himself against the shakes that plagued him and to keep his guts from spilling out. “It’s a contest. It’s bigger than me, I know; there are countless others involved, but I put myself up as collateral each time.”

Braams felt a convulsion, and wasn’t sure of its source. He shrugged it off, took a step towards Jav through a fine red mist that had risen once again.

“If I lost, then I wasn’t good enough,” Jav said. “That’s what I
used
to think.” He shook his head. “But I don’t care about fair anymore. I don’t care whose fault it is. I’m tired of losing the people that are close to me. And I want to
hurt
those responsible.

“It’s over Braams,” Jav said, pulling off his shredded shirt and leather jacket. “I’ve been holding it back, but now I can satiate the Curse, maybe once and for all, with you. With all that you have to offer, I can narrow the focus, limit it to you so that no one else need suffer its effects now or ever again.”

Braams felt the alien pulse rack his body again, an indefensible hammer blow distributed across and throughout his being. He felt drawn forward physically, his head in particular, as if tugged by the escaping blood. He clasped both hands his face, to try to stop the flow, to squeeze the halves of his helmet together to seal the crack, but the pulse came again, more forcefully, and so, too, the blood gushed with greater intensity. The air was heavy with his blood now, filled with a red haze, with great red drops condensing nearly to the size of his fists. It was all spillover from a spiraling conduit, streaming from his face to Jav’s, to the Ritual Mask, where it disappeared so that the immaculate white plate was always maddeningly visible, its shadow eyes mocking.

He felt dizzy. Through the haze he saw that Jav was standing, that his right side, so recently torn open, was mending, that his right arm was whole again.

As the Mikai Curse cycled up, larger and larger volumes of blood were torn out of Braams, each loss nauseating him and debilitating him incrementally. He could do nothing to stop it. In fact, all the while, he was trapped in a loop of fever-thought: as the blood escaped him, he lost all contact with it; he struggled to connect with the blood as he had been able to do before, but because of the taint of the Mikai Curse or because the blood was not coursing through anyone’s veins, it was invisible to him in the only way that mattered. Though the blood had been collected over centuries, marked for him, for the salvation of the Three Worlds, it was gone, and worse, it was being used by the very threat they had hoped to counter with it. In an epiphany, crushing in its implications, he thought he might understand the paradox that had troubled him since Olka Stusson first approached him with the secret knowledge of Keska Kessel’s prophecy. Despondency threatened to drown him.

Jav was experiencing a rare lucidity as the Mikai Curse worked, which allowed him some degree of control, at least directionally. He couldn’t start or stop the Curse at will—not yet, anyway—as, ultimately, it was an autonomous system, but he had the sense that the Ritual Mask drank now as it never had before, first repairing his body, then filling the well of its need, bringing it to maximum power. There was something else, too, some additional reservoir that needed filling, and Jav soon realized what it was. A voice spoke in his head then, one that sounded eerily like his own. “Summon them. They will answer. They have no choice.”

Jav understood. He also understood that it was wrong somehow, but it was the only answer. He summoned the Kaiser Bones while Dark with the Ritual Mask and a change came over him immediately.

The pulses had stopped. Braams was bent over with exhaustion, but composed himself, and straightened. He looked at his hands, dark now, almost black, and withered like dried fruit. With the blood no longer coursing through the air, he could see Jav clearly, but what he saw was unexpected.

The face of the Ritual Mask was the same, but it was set within a shell of identical ivory. The ivory was an unbroken second skin, knitted together asymmetrically, perhaps a centimeter thick, molded to Jav’s body. Jav’s Raw Physical Power with the Ritual Mask was 30,660. It was double that with the Mikai Curse satisfied. This already made Jav one of the most formidable Shades ever, but when he went Dark with the Kaiser Bones, his RPP increased by another twenty times, raising it to 1,226,400.

Braams was emaciated and grotesque, but he wasn’t finished yet. “You are a perfect void to me,” he said. “But I think I understand now.
You
, as you are now, are the King of Spades and you were only made possible by my existence. The Blood Solution was our damnation, not our salvation.”

Jav said nothing.

Braams nodded, the truth of his own words sinking in, becoming real to him. “Keska Kessel couldn’t have known. And yet, it makes no difference. I will not make this easy for you.” Braams dropped into left front stance, and quivering slightly with isometric force, he pushed out his right claw hand over his crossed, lowered left arm.

It was a kind of salute to which Jav replied in kind, raising his hands to form the dragon’s head claw. When he moved, the boney shell crunched audibly, as if it were crushed and remade at every bend and with every movement. Each hand quickly resolved into a tight three-fingered claw, and Jav was moving, his hands darting out before him, one over the other, his fingers seeking Braams’s throat. His movement was broken, though, punctuated and stiff, as it was with the Ritual Mask, only more pronounced now.

Braams had some difficulty accurately reading Jav’s actions, but still managed to block each of the incoming strikes, backing away to match Jav’s advance. He stopped abruptly to bend backwards, folding almost in half, so that Jav swiped empty air and was nearly impaled on a driving right kick. Jav was unfazed, though, and scooped Braams’s leg out of the way. Braams spun with the motion and attempted to rake Jav’s covered face with a back-sweeping left claw. Jav caught his wrist, stopping him in mid spin, and shot a tight, snapping right roundhouse kick to the back of Braams’s head.

Lines shot through the Blood Frame’s helmet, spreading from back to front to connect with the already existing crack. The blow staggered Braams, but he recovered quickly, snatching his hand free. He whipped his claw hands furiously, so that sparks marked the passage of his fingers and liquid fire began to swirl about his hands. Wherever his hands went, trails of that liquid fire followed.

Jav could feel the heat, real and dangerous, pouring off of Braams. His hands came with tireless rapidity, high left, high right, high right, high left. Jav blocked with expert facility, but was lulled into a false sense of Braams’s ability. While Jav was preoccupied, blocking Braams’s high strikes, Braams’s speed was steadily increasing. Jav was matching it, but anticipating Braams’s pattern and so was not prepared when Braam’s feinted and instead of going high as he had been he drove a palm into Jav’s bone-plated chest. This upset Jav’s momentum, opening him up for two follow-up strikes that knocked him back a step each. What each strike also did, was cause a small-scale nuclear explosion. Braams proceeded through the first, the second, the third, and attempted to grab Jav by the throat with a fourth strike, should he still be in one piece.

Before the light faded enough for him to see, Braams could feel Jav’s neck, solid and unyielding in his grip. As the air burned around them, debris rising up from the ground into the glaring red sky, the two regarded each other.

Jav’s hands were like lightning and for the third time were about Braams’s head, holding him fast in the Kaiser Claw. The speed and force were sufficient enough to unbalance Braams, who nearly fell backwards as he let go of Jav’s neck reflexively.

“I’m sorry. It can’t end any other way.”

“Do it,” Braams said. “Kill me. Steal the Three Worlds. Go on your way and steal all the worlds there are. There will be a reckoning, Jav Holson. Someday someone will send you to hell and I’ll be there waiting for you.”

“Goodbye, Garlin Braams.”

With a quick, forceful jerk, Jav twisted his hands and Braams’s head was reduced to a dark red briquette between them, spinning and splintering under the opposing pressures. For a moment, the little dark shape hovered between his hands. As the effects of the technique wore off, Jav closed his fingers around what remained of Braams’s head and started to walk towards the Root Palace.

Braams’s body, still standing, began to ooze, sizzle, and burn within seconds. The white shapes of the Blood Frame blackened, cracked, and exploded like great kernels of corn.

As Jav proceeded towards the Palace, he noticed a sudden drop in temperature. He turned and continued walking backwards, scanning the horizon for who he knew must be present. She was limping, but Bela Fan was there. Jav raised two fingers in a salute and turned back to face the Palace, his stride unbroken as the ground under his feet crunched and whitened with frost. The frost, Jav noted, was beautiful, but couldn’t hide the hundreds of fused half-bodies—Palace personnel summoned to act as Braams’s army—that littered the plain.