Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Fading Force

"NO!"

His shout echoed around the room in a thunderous wave, filling the room around them with its ringing report, and with his cry still hanging on the air, not yet dissipated, Adam threw himself to the side, arms outstretched.

There was no time to do anything else.

The three black points of kazna's trident flashed in the dim red light as if their tips were already coated in blood. To Adam it seemed that time had nearly halted, and what movement there was seemed like the slow pouring of molasses. The scene around him was rot in incredibly fine detail, each line and edge standing out in sharp contrast to his mind, which unlike the world around him, ran at a thousand miles an hour.

And with him, fealty was there too, running just as fast, calculating the intercept pattern with enough time to flash him a bright red warning.

He was surprised to be relieved when he saw it.

And closed his eyes.

A large part of him expected the pain, but an even greater part of him expected it to be minor. He was wearing full SE armor, a suit designed specially for combat. A single hit shouldn't do much to him.

Shouldn't

Adam had thrown himself to the side arms outstretched, chest and torso open directly into the path of Kazna's trident, placing himself between him, and Sunny.

And then the trident hit.

He expected the jolt of course, all of that energy being poured into him from Kazna's throw. She was large, one of the biggest Drev that Adam had ever known, and she had power behind her, and thousands of hours of combat experience, so the impact was not unexpected. The jolt that ran through his body and bones was entirely predictable. He expected to be thrown to the ground, expected to skid across the floor.

But what he did not expect.

Was the armor plating of the SE armor.

To part like warm butter.

Adam lept to the side, and in an instant that seemed like a lifetime, the trident slammed into his chest punching through his armor, and burying itself deep in his flesh. He hit the ground hard adrenaline still pumping hard enough that the pain seemed distant, trapped behind a layered enclosure of glass.

He lay on the ground stunned for a moment staring at the massive metal shaft that jutted out from his chest, and the slow pooling of crimson on the floor.

Adam had been close to dying plenty of times.

In fact it was something that happened to him every other day, or so it seemed.

But this,.

This was different.

Blood leaked onto the floor, and as it did, the connection to his anima began to falter, like the struggling engine of a car with a bad battery. He gasped for air, but when he did his throat was filled with blood and frothy pink foam. He was dying, for real this time. The taste of blood in his mouth was familiar, and as he lay there the red world around him morphed.

The sky was suddenly filled with ash and the filtering of Anin's sun through the clouds turned the sky crimson.

But even then this moment could not be compared.

That had been a leg.

Traumatic sure but survivable.

This.

There was no way he could survive this. Not unless it had happened in the middle of a surgical suite with a crack team of the universe's finest. Dying might not have worried him, knowing what came after. Celex was deader than the rest of them and he had done just fine.