BOOK ONE: The New World
CHAPTER 9: The First Death
Arkyn quickly sat up to inspect his injuries, thinking he was going to find another bleeding gash on his body. The warmth on Arkyn's side was in fact blood, just not his.
Instead, he saw that Kuge's knife was no longer in his hand. It was embedded deep between two of Jeddin's lower ribs, exactly as he had landed on the blade.
Pilm opened his eyes to see his father now dying in front of him. He let out a shriek that could have been from pain or mourning, Arkyn had no idea. The boy frantically tried to stand fumbled with his now broken arm. He continued yelling when he saw Arkyn covered in his father's blood.
Kuge began screaming too, his face grew red at the sight of his father and the ground that encased his hands began to crack.
'It was an accident.' That is all Arkyn wanted to say, but the words would not come out. A cold shock had run through his body as he digested what just happened.
'I just killed a man.'
The blood-covered armor began to fall off Arkyn in pieces, his mind could not process what know what to do. He felt guilty, scared, and somehow . . . angry at the situation. The way Jehdin's eyes stared off into space, glassy and unfocused was strangely peaceful.
'No they-this . . . this was their own fault.' His thoughts and emotional turmoil were derailed as a hand yanked at his shoulder, spinning him around.
Kuge had broken himself free and picked up the blade his father dropped. He stabbed at the shattered spots Pilm had created in the collapsing armor. An overhanded stab landed below his collarbone, Arkyn felt the blade go through and stop against his sternum.
Arkyn shoved Kuge away, his magic reacted to the panic of his movements, launching the earth armor off his body and throwing his attacker even further away.
Pilm stopped screaming when the stabbing happened, but Arkyn hadn't noticed. The entire left side of his torso screamed in pain. His arm became useless, the slash along his hand and deep carving along his chest made anything past his shoulder unmovable.
The amount of blood now spilling out made Arkyn feel dizzy. The cold shiver from Jehdin's death suddenly grew worse, and Arkyn began to understand that he had lost too much blood.
He started to kneel down, hoping to alleviate the spinning sensation, but it didn't help much. The thought of death started creeping into his mind, forcing him to focus.
'I spent my whole life being a part of Odbrane. It can't end here, not yet, not with everything having just blinked out of existence.'
Arkyn extended his undamaged arm out and flicked his hand towards himself, unleashing crude mana tether that sent a small burst of earth magic into his own makeshift tent. A rapid swell in the dirt launched his bag towards him.
Just when it was in range, Kuge had kicked it out of the air. He had recovered quickly from the barrage of dirt and watched Arkyn collapse.
Kuge thought his attempt for the bag was a grab for another weapon, so he kicked the bag away before it landed. The action kept the bag out of Arkyn's reach as he collapsed fully onto his side. He didn't even seem to care that he was laying along still burning sticks and coals from the fire.
Based on Arkyn's expression of pain and quick breaths, Kuge believed was right. Arkyn was attempting to grab something vital from within, even though it was futile now.
"Planning on taking out some sort of weapon to slay all us pathetic humans?" The oldest son asked in a mocking tone. "Well too bad you'll get to taste it yourself instead, filthy hybrid."
He kicked Arkyn in the side before grabbing at the bag, he shoved aside some books before spotting the rugged handle of some kind of weapon jutting out the side.
He yanked the dark-colored whip out and it seemed to shimmer in the light of the fire. It wasn't until he realized how warm the whip was in his grasp that it wasn't a whip at all.
Dusk shot upward, using the hand grasping his tail as a leverage point and sprung like a coil into the young man's neck. The sudden appearance of a small beast and the burning pain of being bit through the front of the neck made the Kuge stumble back.
He tripped over the half-risen Arkyn and rolled into the dirt. Dusk was still in his throat, and despite his best efforts to pull him away, the Fractal Snake would simply release and bite in a new spot over and over again.
The panic made him ignore everything else, his father's knife fell somewhere out of reach and Kuge didn't think to search for it. Only pain motivated his thrashing.
Nothing mattered until he heard Arkyn cough just beside him.
Kuge turned to see two white suns staring at him from the dark, Arkyn was kneeling in front of him with [Mage Sight] active, and a still burning log in one hand.
"I am sorry." Arkyn whispered with a quiet rage. "But you did this to yourself."
Arkyn pulsed the mana out of his hand in waves, converging it right into the log and igniting it into a cone of yellow fire. He doused Kuge from the shoulders up with an intense heat, vaporizing his hair and melting his flesh.
He repeated the pulse of fire three more times, leaving a quarter of his mana circuit full of mana after killing Kuge.
When the light of the flames finally died out, all that stood was a charred and half melted blob for a head. Kuge's corpse slumped over and made a quiet thud when sprawling into the dirt.
Dusk was still latched onto the sizzling neck, his normally black scales were now glowing orange and red from assimilating a lot of fire magic .
"You're not as lucky as my friend there." Arkyn heaved out his own mockery against the eldest son. He didn't care if Kuge's ears were burned beyond all sense of hearing, he just needed to distract himself from the burning pain across his arm and shoulder.
"Fractal Snakes are basically half [Mana Crystal] thanks to those obsidian-like scales of theirs. He gets fed off of it while you get to smell like roasted pig."
Arkyn spat at the collapsing corpse before quickly turning over to assess the damage he sustained. He needed to close the cuts up soon, otherwise he'd bleed out in just a few minutes.
"Dusk, the kid is not gonna get up. Can you help me reach into my bag?"
Dusk unlatched himself from the smoldering neck and tugged the bag over with his tail. The snake said nothing and did so with no resistance.
Through the link they shared, Dusk could feel the fear of death creeping out of Arkyn's mind. There was no certainty that he would survive tonight without help.
Arkyn grasped at the spilled contents but found nothing he had packed could help treat the sliced flesh.
'I'd try to cauterize the cuts, but I don't know how to do that without accidentally sending myself into shock. If they're too deep and I can't fully seal them, I'd just bleed out internally. Shit!'
He tried squeezing the skin together on his chest with his good hand, but the pain grew to an even worse degree. The action made him see spots and lose any chance of generating enough fire on the still burning log to merge the skin together.
He couldn't just leave them untreated though, he needed something like the other arrays within the castle.
Arkyn was starting to regret not replicating the other arrays that were a part of the [Golden Array Matrix] into his amulet. Now he was realizing his intentions to leave the castle were rushed. Sure he locked away the armory and packed according to the unknowing world, but the thought of such violence never crossed his mind.
It was too late to worry about regrets, instead he worried about making the rest of his blood remain inside his body.
"Dusk, where's the [Array Grimoire]?"
The main reason Arkyn hadn't added all the arrays to the [Cinder Spark] was the lack of surface area along the amulet and its chain. So instead he was going to have to improvise and write the runes directly across his skin.
'You're gonna have to point, I haven't taken my Odbrane reading lessons yet.' Dusk said while looking at the several books that had been scattered out of the bag.
"The gray one you ass." Arkyn felt a coughing fit start building up, and his breathing was starting to shorten. Neither was a good sign, a lung might have collapsed from the second stab he thought.
'I'll just quickly write the [Mending Matrix] with my own mana, and use my skin as the surface. No time to try carving this stuff in the dirt. Even if it'll last a few minutes based on my mana, the accelerated repair would still give me hours instead of minutes to live.
Arkyn found the page while raising a shaking finger to his chest, the tip of his index began glowing white as he drew a circle. Having a quarter of his mana remaining, he had little room for error.
He was going to have to write the array across his chest to get both injuries inside the boundaries of the array.
'Once it surrounds the carvings of my chest, I can hold my arm against the array to fix that as well.' He thought. 'Now, the base of every array requires its outer border.'