NOVEL NEXT Chapter 431: Failed Edict
Luna took a slash to the stomach that opened her like a red flower and would have spilled her if she had not already forced her body to decide it would keep all its blood.
Aurelius' energy of time worked its way into her body, trying to undo her from ever existing, but she detached the affected area from her body, letting them fall out and blink out of existence.
With a loud roar filled with equal measures of pain and refusal, she pressed a hand to the damaged part of her body, her tissues knitting back together under her palms in a frenzy of mitosis.
She took a step and the ground erupted around her, seeds growing in fast forward. In a split second, she already had a forest hovering in the air above her.
She crashed that newborn jungle onto Aurelius like a green tide, and for a moment the Warden's halo was filled with leaves, vine, and sap.
She pumped the growth full of life energy, making even more seeds sprout throughout every moment in time they entered as passed through Aurelius' energy.
Aurelius answered by fastening his sword onto a different kind of now. A serration of minutes grew along the edge, and when he swept, he cut the plants into slices of their own lifetimes.
The wave of life fell as if a scythe had passed, but not Death's scythe. A farmer's.
Death slid in under the leafy curtain that Luna had produced, then brought both scythes down together to scissor Aurelius's head from his neck.
The Warden raised his sword and took the hit, not with steel, which would have failed, but with a shaft of fixed moment he'd anchored between both shoulders.
The scythes shrieked along an edge that wasn't a metal so much as a line of lawful time, and sparks went off like meteors.
Pushing the sword pack, he twirled, sending a wave of undoing time spreading around him. Luna leapt back towards Death, who created a cocoon of his aura, the wave dying before it could fully penetrate.
They surged towards him in attack, but he had already regained his footing. He fought without giving an inch, and after what felt like an hour, they broke his sword.
It happened when Luna and Death synchronized without even looking at each other.
Vines and bones made a cage, and Death filled it with an absence that had death trapped inside.
Aurelius had already begun to edit himself out of that box when Luna changed her mind in the middle of her own swing, reversed growth to shrink the cage even as she hardened it, and Death collapsed the space inside with a flex of death energy.
The sword in Aurelius's hand took the contradictory load of two simultaneously primordial forces and cracked from the hilt to the middle with a sound like a clock tower falling.
Aurelius looked at the broken weapon with a small tilt of his head.
Then he threw the useless length away and stepped forward barehanded.
"I don't need a weapon to erase you both," he murmured, and the gauntlets on his arms began to ripple with time energy.
He caught Death's right scythe in his left palm and arrested its future. The blade stopped trying to exist in the next second.
He shifted the metal's history a thumb's width and it corroded to gray powder around Death's grip, the grains sifting down like ash.
Death didn't look surprised. He spun the other scythe one handed into a vortex and cut with an attack that wasn't in the world until it was.
Aurelius leaned aside and let the energy sail into what remained of a building behind him. The energy slammed into the building, and an instant later, it simply ceased to exist, dead.
Luna sprinted, slid, and went low. Aurelius met her with his knee and broke her forward momentum, then grabbed the air over her shoulder and made that little patch of atmosphere as heavy as stone.
She slammed into it as if he'd clotheslined her with invisible masonry. Ribs popped. She snarled and poured life into the broken lattice of her chest, knitting it, overclocking herself, accepting that she'd pay for it later, if there was a later.
"What do you seek to achieve by doing this?" Aurelius asked, catching Death's next stroke on his bracer.
His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. They heard him loud and clear. "You will slaughter citizens to spite a city. Burn children to prove a point. Kill a nation to end a few?"
"You say children," Death said, and his aura expanded around him, trying to trap Aurelius inside of it, "as if the elders of Carthage have not been killing the futures of others for centuries."
The Warden of Law laughed softly at his words. "Then you fight to be a better tyrant?"
"I fight," Death said, "because my ambition has room for a world without your council."
His scythe swung, and Aurelius opened a slot of prior time in the air and the blade fell through and came out behind Death.
Death let it go and stepped into his own aura, hands empty, then full again as two short knives of finality formed in them.
The knives landed the first clean hit of the battle. A shockwave rolled as the Warden took both in the stomach.
He grunted, manipulating time energy, sending the knives into a present that was not linked to any future in which the damage mattered.
He kicked, and Death stumbled back with a grunt. Aurelius raised his fist and dropped it on the unbalanced man.
Luna intercepted the strike with a shield of vines, another shockwave flattening the already flat layer.
They fought on. Streets died and were born in the wake of their battle. Statues rotted and sprouted. Beasts the size of carriages lived entire lives between heartbeats so they could die as projectiles.
Finally, Aurelius' armor cracked. Luna's vines found leverage in a joint behind his left knee and twisted.
Death hit the same seam with a flat hammer-blow of unmaking, and the armor fell away.
Aurelius sidestepped and his breath hitched as Luna's thorned whip cut a shallow track over his thigh.
For a terrible minute, they pressed him. The Warden of Law did not retreat, but his boots shifted a finger's width backwards.
His halo brightened, and fine scratches began to appear on his silver mask, as if it was aging.
Then the energy around him exploded.
The time around him accelerated, and he stuttered through a thousand tiny steps to appear everywhere at once. Behind Death, in front of Luna, beside a toppled pillar, on the roof of a house that long been razed to the ground.
His gauntlet caught Luna across the face, intended to tear her out of existence, but countered by her life energy.
She stumbled out of rhythm with the world, but quickly wrapped herself in as many obstacles as possible to delay the killing blow.
Aurelius frowned, moving away. It would take less time to attack Death than to tear through those defenses.
He struck Death in the sternum with his palm, and for a ragged instant, Death's aura peeled back from that point, like smoke blown by a wind that came and went thirty times in a single second.
Death coughed, a dry noise, and his knives dropped from his hands, winking out of existence.
Aurelius extended both hands and used his Rank 9 ability, writing an Edict.
It hung in the air between his palms, invisible to all eyes and undeniable to all bodies.
"For the next three breaths, nothing that intends my death shall move."
The world obeyed.
Death froze where he had been forming another weapon, and Luna was still inside her defensive cocoon.
Death's eyes widened. He could feel his own death wrapping around his chest like a shroud. It came fast, gripping him in a way that looked like it would never let go.
His mind scrambled for the options he had as Aurelius raised his fists, ready to unmake them. That was when he remembered the trump card he'd been saving.
He reached into his chest, into the cold orb he'd been granted by the Blurred Man, and activated it.
Aurelian instincts screamed at him that death was coming. He aborted his strikes and leapt back, putting as much distance as he could between the two.
"What was that?" He snarled, eyes wide. He could feel something old waking up. Older than any time he'd ever manipulated.
A hum filled the air, so deep it was felt more than heard. Dust rose into the air, heralding the awakening of a great weapon.
A grin appeared on Death's face and he whispered, "Rise."
The valley beyond tore open.
A shape larger than any living being pulled itself out of the earth.
Made of metal, the colossus heaved to a kneel then to a stand.
Its eyes filled with the cold light of old engines being asked to remember a song their makers had forgotten. It looked down at the city with what looked like contempt.
It threw its head back, and roared into the sky.