Knights of the Grey City

Chapter 41 - PUSHBACK

Endless lines of lights winked at me as I ran down the tunnel.

I soon arrived at a peculiar sight. There was a huge hole in the road, maybe sixty feet across, ringed with bent rebar and jagged chunks of concrete. As I drew closer, the flickering light revealed that it was a short jump down to the bottom of the crater, where a sword was stabbed into the earth.

It seemed like I was encountering a theme here. I hopped down into the hole, my senses pinging off the sword and whatever it was stabbed into.

It looked like it was just buried in concrete and metal, impaling a chunk of road at the centre of the crater. It was almost like the act of stabbing the sword into the road had created the crater around it.

I shrunk down into human form and the hole suddenly became enormous and strikingly dark, rising up in jagged walls around me, lit intermittently by the lights up above. I swallowed and stepped up to the sword, which was taller than I was. I reached up to grab the hilt.

It didn't budge. I scowled, pushing up to the tips of my toes to try and get a better hold. Last time it had just come out, so what the hell was going on?

Maybe I wasn't underwater this time, but there was still a time crunch. Huang had to mess up just once and then the Colossus would mess him up, and we'd be in real trouble. I squinted my eyes shut, still holding onto the hilt of the giant sword, and pushed my spatial sense into it.

It hummed like a struck tuning fork, but the more I concentrated on it, the more I sensed. Everything here was toxic with the feel of the demons, but this sword seemed to be the central point—or, more accurately, where it was stabbed down was the central point. The sword itself felt like a funnel, piercing into the district and letting the demonic permeate everything around it.

Like I had when I was in the brain of the Grey City, I tried to change it just by thinking about it. I still had no clue what the sword symbolized, why it seemed to be the indicator of demonic territory, or what any of this meant to the Grey City at large. I didn't care. All I wanted was for the sword to come loose.

This time, when I pulled on the sword, it wiggled. A surge of energy washed over my spatial sense. I braced my foot on a nearby chunk of concrete and yanked again, then fell down on my ass when the sword sprang loose, the blade clattering down beside me.

There was one still, silent moment as I sat there next to the fallen sword. Then, everything around me gave a strange shudder. My spatial sense scrambled for feedback, what I saw not matching what I felt. An electric flash of energy erupted from where I'd pulled out the sword.

The concrete and roads started to melt.

I transformed back into the Leviathan, leapt up out of the hole, and started running back the way I'd come.

The road dipped down. What the hell? It should definitely be tilting up.

"Can you hear me?" I called out, feeling my soundless voice sink into nothingness.

There was a moment, then Huang's voice faintly rang out: "Yes! You did it! Everything's changing again."

"The Colossus?" I demanded. My path turned and was getting darker rather than lighter.

"Still here," Huang reported. "Lots of mist rising up from the ground. Get back here."

"Trying." I pushed myself to run even faster.

My sense finally re-oriented itself. I now sensed that behind me, rising up out of the darkness of the walls of the tunnel, was a thick cloud of black mist, poisonous and alive. It was being forced out of the fabric of the concrete itself, but rather than drifting slowly away, it was moving with a vengeance. It was coming straight after me.