My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 748: Weaponized Against Him

A/N:Guys... give this training and hell patience... it’s taking us somewhere important. I know I am giving you a spoiler right now, but I don’t mind, I hope you don’t too, otherwise, soon some question of Phei’s past are about to be answered: more or less.

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Phei in the end did not have time to think.

He ran.

The first step put weight on the javelin-impaled calf and his vision whited for a split second from the pain, but his agility carried the foot through the strike before his nervous system could veto the motion.

The second step closed twelve yards. The third step put him at the edge of the falling rain’s perimeter — the shards beginning to land behind him in a long screaming hail, the cathedral hollow’s stone floor receiving the rain in two hundred discrete cracks that overlapped into a sustained roar — and the fourth step put him under one of the still-standing primordial trees.

The canopies briefly caught the rain above him in a flurry of severed leaves and broken branches and falling crystalline shards that the bark barely kept off his head.

He breathed for at least one second as the rain stopped — the Titans’ compilation exhausted — and the air went cold.

He felt his lungs seize and lungs burn in pain.

The cathedral hollow’s ambient temperature had dropped fifty degrees in the space of a heartbeat.

The Void-Ice element compiled in volume by ten constructs at once was simply displacing the warmth of the air.

Phei’s exhale, when he managed one, came out as visible white vapour. The moisture in his throat froze in patches. The cut along his ribs, legs and even the broken one began to crystallise along its edges, the blood freezing into pink crusts before it could fully run.

He was shivering.

Phei Ryujin Tiamat, with Void-Ice in his chest and a bloodline that ate cold for breakfast, was shivering — because his body had not yet learned that the element seated inside him was the same element being weaponized against him, and his body had defaulted to mortal-mammal response.

"Master."

Eira’s voice. From above. Her frost-disc somewhere up in the canopy.

"The element you are shivering against is the same element seated in your chest, master. Reach inward. The cold is yours. Take it."

He shook his head... he could tell. he was not here yet.

He compiled a single ice-arble in his right palm and flicked it across thirty yards.

It buried itself in the eye-suggestion of one of the rain-Titans and detonated — pushing the small element-construct to release on contact — and the construct’s faceless head jerked back, a long radial fissure opening from the impact across the forehead, the blow staggering it for a full two seconds before the bond reseated the fissure and the crack closed over.

Two seconds was enough for what he needed it for.

He charged with his still bad legs.

Three steps, the third brought him inside the rain-Titan’s guard before the construct’s compilation-paused arms had reactivated.

He used the halberd.

Drove it horizontally into the construct’s lower abdomen and hauled the blade upward, the Titan’s torso parted along the cut from navel to throat.

The wound opened in a vertical canyon. The construct fractured its faceless head tilted backward, arms went limp at its sides.

For one beautiful heartbeat the Titan was a twelve-foot statue with its insides split open along its centerline.

Phei wrenched the halberd free and drove the spiked counterweight on the haft’s other end into the construct’s exposed jaw at upward angle, the spike entering through the underside and exiting out the top of the skull-architecture in a wet vertical puncture.

The Titan’s body lifted off the cathedral hollow’s stone by perhaps a foot — the small physical confession of a body hit by something it had not adequately braced for — and Phei used the halberd as a lever, threw the impaled construct sideways with the spike still through its head into the path of an oncoming Titan to his right.

KRAKKAOOOOM.

The two collided, the dying construct came apart into crystalline fragments.

The oncoming construct staggered through the wreckage, briefly inconvenienced.

Phei was already moving.

Slipped under a saber-swing from his left.

He caught the saber-Titan’s wrist as it passed. Used the construct’s own momentum against itself to twisted and snapped the wrist along its joint in a clean lateral break that separated the hand from the arm in a small wet pop.

He caught the falling saber in his free hand.

Now armed with halberd and saber.

He threw the saber; it travelled forty feet and embedded itself to the cross-guard in the exposed eye-suggestion of a Titan that had been compiling fresh javelins, the construct’s compilation collapsing as the embedded blade detonated its concentration — Phei pushing the saber’s iced edge to release at the apex of its impact — and the projectile-Titan’s head cracked horizontally along a clean transverse line.

It was the most beautiful thing he had done in the entire training.

It accomplished nothing.

The Void-Ice was already remaking even the very last before he had finished blinking.

The constructs kept coming back.

A halberd opened him from chest to thigh; he felt the cut before he heard the air part.

A long diagonal line of cold across his chest first — the patient sub-zero crystalline blade entering his chest above the collarbone — and then heat, the heat arriving a half-second after as his body finally recognized that the cold was actually a cut, the cold was actually the fact that a halberd had just opened him from his right collarbone diagonally down across his chest and his stomach and across his left thigh in a single furious sweeping arc.

The wound opened wider as he howled in gain filling the forest with a loud shriek of pain.

His tunic fell away from his torso in two halves and revealed the long brutal diagonal that ran from his collarbone to his thigh — flesh parted along the length of the cut to a depth of two inches, his chest cleaved open down the middle, his stomach split along its left side, the upper layer of his thigh muscle cleanly severed.

He saw, briefly, his own ribs.

The pain he was feeling was no other as it gripped tight, reaching his very soul, Phei kept screaming — unmediated screams, dragging it out of him in long ragged involuntary heaves — and the scream tore out of his throat.

Phei could no longer move and he fell to one knee like a broken puppet.

The next Titan was already on him.

This one carried no weapon, both its enormous hands were empty and the construct, with its faceless head tilted in a slow patient gesture of consideration, stepped over the rain of returning shards as the second projectile-volley resumed pattering down across the cathedral hollow.

It did not avoid the rain.

It let the rain hit it.

The crystalline shards skittered off its hardened skin and dispersed on the broken stone around its feet. The Titan kept walking. Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty. Ten. Phei, on his knee, halberd in one hand, his chest opened from collarbone to thigh, watched this construct approach with patient sadistic intent the others had not yet exhibited, and understood —

This one had been waiting.

The Titan stopped.

Raised both empty hands.

Phei tried to lift the halberd.

His arms were too slow.

The construct’s two enormous palms came in from both sides simultaneously — slow, patient, theatrically slow as if it were savouring it — and met at the center-line of Phei’s skull in the single most weaponless explosive strike so far.

WHHHHHAAAAMMMM.

The cymbal-clap of two crystalline palms meeting around his head with his head between them.

The cathedral hollow detonated.

A pressure-wave radiated outward from the impact point and rippled the moss-green afternoon light.

Phei’s eardrums ruptured, both of them, simultaneously, and the world’s sounds collapsed into a high pure ringing that was simultaneously the loudest and quietest sound he had ever heard and blood erupted from both his ears in matching streams down his neck.

His vision whited, teeth shattered along their edges.

The bones of Phei’s temples cracked along hairline fissures, he couldn’t even feel his ringing brain inside his skull like a struck bell, and for several seconds his entire head lost track of which direction was up.

The Titan’s palms separated.

His head was free.

His head no longer worked.

He fell sideways.