Burning Starlight [Science-Fantasy Cultivation LitRPG] (Book 1 Complete!)

Within the crystalline architecture of Caprea's re-forming mind, projections hung in the non-space, windows into the physical world. Kitt watched on intently, her own consciousness a still point in the swirling currents of the Leviathan's nascent thoughts. To one side, Medea's avatar sat, a construct of memory and polished sorrow, her feline features thoughtful. On Kitt's other side, Caprea's presence felt like new light, bright and barely contained, her focus entirely on the man fighting for her life.

The main projection showed Blake on the second-floor concourse of the derelict mall. That area had been damaged during Caprea's crash, and a massive fissure split the ceiling, a jagged wound that ran the length of the space. The floor directly beneath it was a spiderweb of deep, structural cracks, a promise of collapse waiting for the right encouragement. Blake was currently taking cover behind a ruined kiosk on the very edge of that unstable zone.

The Husks advanced. They were not a mindless horde. Their movements were coordinated, a slow, deliberate shepherd's press. Every feint, every shambling step, was designed to cut off his retreat to solid ground, to herd him onto the compromised flooring.

"They trap him, your pilot," Caprea said. Kitt could empathize with how the elder leviathan seemed to struggle with the concept of using words, but appreciated that she was trying. "He must find gap. Small one."

"He fights with such… intensity," Medea murmured, seemingly to herself. She watched Blake, and her gaze seemed to see another man entirely. "Vylaas only ever mustered that sort of energy if there was someone to save."

"I remember how he got when we were on the front, yeah. He would wade through an entire battalion if he thought he could save just one more life. But how is this different?" Kitt did not turn her focus from the projection. "Blake's fighting to save Caprea, and to stop the Outsider from escaping."

Medea's eyes, the color of twilight, shifted from the projection to Kitt. "Vylaas fought for what he could hold, what he could touch. A child. A garden. A specific injustice. His fury was a fire that burned brightest when the threat was immediate, when he could reach out and feel the individual's suffering."

She paused, then her gaze flickered back to Blake, a figure of contained violence on the shimmering screen. "Blake… he seems different. He's comfortable fighting for concepts. For the ship, for the world beyond, for the vague notion of 'stopping the Outsider.' It's a war waged against an idea as much as a physical enemy."

Kitt felt the truth in the words. Blake's drive wasn't born of proximity, not like Vylaas's had been. Blake had thrown himself into this impossible battle not because he had seen Caprea's grief, not because he had touched the fractured essence of her pain, but because the threat existed. It was enough. It was a cold, distant sort of duty, one born from a lifetime of confronting distant, often faceless threats.

"Not to mention that Vylaas considered any act of violence a stain. A personal moral failing," Medea continued, a nostalgic sadness coloring her tone. "You remember what he was like. He only ever focused on healing, shielding, and crowd control. To strike out was to admit you had already lost control of the situation."

As if to punctuate her point, a Cutter lunged from behind a shattered storefront, its bone scythes whistling. Blake didn't meet it head-on. A flick of his wrist, a surge of will Kitt could feel distantly in their shared core even from this distance, and a large sheet-metal sign ripped free from its moorings. It slammed into the Cutter like a dull guillotine. The impact was brutal, folding the creature in on itself and sending it crashing to the floor. The blow also dislodged a huge slab of the composite flooring, sending tile and structural materials raining down onto the first floor.

"Yes!" Caprea's presence flared with delight. A sharp, triumphent chime rang through the prism halls of her mind. "He got another one!"

"A fine philosophy," Kitt said, her own thoughts clipped. "It would have seen him dead in the first five minutes here."

"I can see that," Medea said, giving a slow, sad nod of her head. "I'm just considering how different your … our … hosts have been. Vylaas saw weapons as… an extension of a corrupt will. He refused to even hold a blade unless absolutely necessary. Blake…" She paused, her gaze analytical. "He is different. He uses weapons like a craftsman selecting a tool. There is no malice in it. I don't think Vylaas would even understand such a thing."

A Brute, one of the hulking ones with fists like petrified stone, closed the distance. It moved with deceptive speed for its size, its heavy footfalls making the unstable ground tremble. It brought a massive limb down in a powerful overhead swing, aiming to pulp Blake where he stood.

Blake moved. A dancer's pivot, a slide of motion that was almost too fast to follow. The blow missed him by inches, striking the floor with immense force. The weakened composite shattered. A jarring tremor ran through the entire concourse, and the cracks spiderwebbing the floor visibly widened, groaning under the strain.

The display of overwhelming, brutal force seemed to trigger something in Medea. The nostalgia in her presence evaporated, replaced by a fresh, sharp pain. "That kind of power… it broke him, you know. Vylaas."

Kitt waited.

"When he was forced into command of the Colossus. The Titan armor," Medea said, her voice barely a whisper in the mindscape. "He had fought for years without killing, and they put him into an impossible position. For politics. He had to choose between getting strung up by his enemies for refusing orders … or becoming a war criminal. He wept for days after that first deployment."

"I wouldn't know," Kitt responded bitterly. "He left me in the cockpit after that day."

"I know. That was when he split us up into two, after all. You in the Colossus, and me kept in his armor."

"Taking life is hard," Caprea said, doing her best to sound sympathetic.

"He didn't take anyone's lives, though. I did." A thread of pure, unadulterated bitterness coiled in Kitt's consciousness; the words were acid.

Medea turned to her, her expression sorrowful.

"He didn't try and stop me, either," Kitt repeated, her mental voice flat and cold. "He couldn't. He sat there in the dark doing nothing. He was going to get us killed. So I had to do it. It was either pilot the machine or get killed. So I stepped up. I took those lives. He watched while I pulled the trigger for him."

"Yes," Medea conceded, the word a sigh of profound grief. "He did. And seeing our willingness to fight for him, to do what he could not… it only proved his own weakness to himself. It shattered the man he thought he was."

"The man he was turned out to be something of a disappointment," Kitt said. "He was too weak to kill, and too weak to accept others doing it for him."

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"That was his failure," Medea affirmed, her gaze distant, lost in the wreckage of the past. "The true, core failure. He was unwilling to face the consequence of his own pacifism—to be executed for refusing an order. So he chose another path. He let you bear the moral cost. He sacrificed your innocence to preserve his own life, while still clinging to the purity of his ideals. That hypocrisy… that is what truly destroyed his spirit. Not the violence, but the cowardice."

While they spoke, the battle on the projection had reached its grim conclusion. The remaining Husks had successfully herded Blake onto the most unstable section of the floor. The stairwells to his left and right shimmered with a faint, malevolent energy Kitt recognized as Outsider corruption. Death traps. The only apparent path forward was a collapsed skybridge that spanned the chasm, its surface slick and treacherous. A perfect ambush point.

Blake ignored the closing enemies. He ignored the obvious, suicidal path across the bridge. Instead, he did something that got the attention of all three women.

He raised Verdict, cobalt light leaking like smoke from the barrel, and aimed it at the floor beneath his feet.

"What is he doing?" Caprea asked. "That feels dangerous."

"He's refusing to be penned in," Kitt replied.

"Clever, if reckless," Medea said, leaning forward with an appraising expression. "They're trying to maneuver him like a game piece, and his solution is to destroy the board."

A flicker of amusement pulsed from Kitt, a silent wink aimed at Medea. And then Blake fired the Singularity Shot.

The mindscape was actually rumbled ever so softly as it did, a wave of pressure passing through the space. Kitt chalked it up to Caprea reacting to the violent tearing of space-time within the confines of her own spatially expanded interior.

"Dangerous," Caprea said again. "He is still young and weak. Dangerous for him too."

"Maybe," Kitt replied. "But he's made good use of it so far. And the sooner he acclimates to our shared Spatial affinity the better off we'll both be."

The floor beneath Blake's feet collapsed inward. A point of crushing gravity opened, a swirling maw of violet and black energy that devoured shattered flooring. The two closest Husks were dragged into the singularity, their forms distorting and tearing apart.

A silent beat, and then detonation.

A wave of kinetic force erupted outward, blowing a ragged hole through the concourse. The entire section of unstable floor vanished. Blake was already dropping through the chasm, having kicked off the back of a kiosk an instant before firing.

Kitt felt Caprea's worry as Blake jumped. The space around them seemed to pull close with the elder Leviathan's anxiety. Kitt sent out a wave of reassurance through the temporary bond she and Caprea shared. In the next breath, Blake proved her faith in him.

He didn't fall down the hole; he was running.

Shimmering planes of force, thin as glass and just as translucent, materialized under his boots with each step. They held his weight for a fraction of a second before winking out of existence, a phantom staircase he built as he raced downward.

Caprea cheered, and a warm pleasure curled through Kitt's core. Just weeks ago, Blake had struggled to create a single, stable platform. He would summon one, put a foot on it, and it would dissolve, sending him tumbling. Now each pane snapped into place the instant he willed it, vanishing a heartbeat later. Thought slid straight into motion, no fumbling pause in between. He slipped through the torn concourse, every step spare, exact. It was good to see him learning and adapting not just with his physical weapons, but with the raw weave of his power.

He landed on the first floor in a crouch, the last force construct vanishing above him. The Husks on the upper level gathered at the edge of the chasm, their shambling advance halted. They stared down into the darkness where Blake had vanished. Blake was already moving, melting into the shadows of the lower level.

"He is close to locus," Caprea said. Kitt was confused for only a second before realizing that the Leviathan was referring to her next sub-core.

"Yes," Kitt agreed. "Let's just hope he moves quickly. How do things look right outside?"

Caprea tilted her head, and at the motion, one of the smaller projections expanded to sit alongside Blake's. It looked up from a low angle, the view warped and fisheye. They were seeing through the sub-core's own senses, a direct feed from the locus itself.

And looming over her—over it—was the source of the Husks. The puppeteer at the end of the ethereal strings.

It was a nightmare of mismatched limbs and ravenous hunger. Spider-like legs, tipped with scythes, clicked and scraped on the tiled floor. One limb was dedicated solely to feeding, a tireless shuttle that scooped up the twitching remains of non-husk undead and shoved them into a gaping, drooling maw set in the creature's chest. The bodies were shredded, consumed with a wet, grinding finality.

Beneath the maw, a vile, pulsating organ glistened. Even as Kitt watched, it contracted violently. A new Husk, slick with birthing fluids and hideously formed, slithered out onto the floor. It spasmed once, twice, then staggered to its feet, joining the ranks of its brethren.

The creature's other limbs were busy. They danced in the air, manipulating dozens of shimmering threads of energy. Hundreds were cast out into the wider mall, searching for prey and attacking Blake, but others were put to a more sinister purpose. They were wrapped around the sub-core, taut with strain, trying to rip it from its moorings.

The crystal housing groaned, the sound a psychic shriek of pain that vibrated through the mindscape. A half-dozen Husks surrounded the locus, their dead hands adding their strength to the puppeteer's efforts, pulling and tearing at the structure.

"It is hungry," Caprea whispered, her mental voice thin with fear. "It wants to eat me."

"Yeah," Kitt replied, not seeing a point in lying. "That would be a problem. I don't know if it would be better or worse than just trying to corrupt it."

"The distinction is … academic," Medea observed dryly. Her avatar had risen to its feet, her posture tense. "Either way we're in danger. Blake might not arrive in time."

A spike of raw, undiluted panic shot through Caprea's consciousness, a wave of terror so potent it made the crystalline walls of the mindscape tremble. The projections flickered.

"Relax," Kitt commanded, her own thoughts a blade of ice. She pushed her own stability into the link, reinforcing Caprea's fraying will. "Do not break. Not yet. Losing a single locus won't kill you."

"The damage won't be insignificant," Medea countered. "And who knows how much that creature will gain from consuming the crystal?"

Kitt knew she was right, but didn't vocalize her agreement. Caprea didn't need any more turmoil. What they needed was a plan. Her mind raced, running through possibilities, eliminating dead ends as she encountered them.

"I'll grant you that Blake has been more efficient than Vylaas would have been fighting through those creatures, but I do wish we had some of his defensive techniques now," Medea said wistfully.

Kitt's brain practically short-circuited as the comment sparked a new idea. She grinned.

"Caprea, now that you're conscious, do you think I could unlock my normal bond with Blake?"

"Yes … Dangerous, but yes. We must be careful I do not come through. I do not want to hurt him."

"We'll have to be careful, sure. But I've got an idea, and you might just have to hurt Blake a little bit to make it work." Caprea didn't seem to like the idea, but Kitt had no better paths forward.

"He's used to pain, Caprea. But I'll make sure he agrees before we do anything crazy. Now, here's the plan."