Bleeding Kyber Chapter 5: 05_ Freedom, at What Cost

Read chapter 5 of Bleeding Kyber by theRonin_666 on NovelPedia.

Red light, burning like blood freshly squeezed from a body, brightened the dark waters. Illuminating the murky waters surrounding him. The debris floating, half eaten bodies and the monster was currently fighting a familiar old man, Pytor, an old man at his death bed was fighting a monster that could kill him with a slap. The red light illuminating the water drew both their attention, the eyeless beast and Pytor turned towards him. "Shit! Half-half, turn off the fucking lights." The monster threw Pytor above the water surface, his body colliding against the ceiling, breaking the water surface before falling back into the water. This time, with just a few more wounds than before. The beast dived through rubble, bodies swatted away by its massive flaps as water flowed through its disgusting gills. In a few moments it was before Herald, mouth wide open. The red surrounding him blinked for a moment, the light vibrated in the water. A hum of danger coursing through the monster. Herald opened his eyes, lightning flowed through them With fear and rage burning in them. His or maybe of the souls he just saw in the dark. The red light did not fade. It bled, from the crystal, from Herald's chest, from somewhere behind his mind that no longer felt his own. The water around him began to boil without heat, churning with a force that defied common sense instilled in his past life and his short life in the mines. The monster lunged at him. And Herald, for the first time in two years of helplessness, pushed back. Not with his hands. Those stayed at his sides, fingers twitching. Not with his body. That hung suspended in the flood, held aloft by currents that shouldn't have existed. He pushed with something else, something that had been sleeping in his bones since the day the pod had opened, something the void had woken, something the dead had fed with their rage and grief and their cold, patient accusation. The Force. Though he didn't know the word yet. Though it would be years before anyone spoke its name. What he knew, in that moment, was that the monster's open mouth was three feet from his face, and he wanted it gone. A corpse thrust itself between the monster's jaws and his head. It was Kett, the bread thief, his broken neck falling, his arms still frozen in their final reach. He floated into the monster's path like a puppet pulled by invisible strings, and the creature's jaws closed on him instead of Herald. Bone crunched. The monster shook its head, trying to dislodge the dead thing from its mouth , but Herald's will held Kett in place, a human shield of flesh and blood. 'Not him,' a voice whispered in Herald's skull, his own voice, but distorted, layered with harmonics that hurt. 'He's already dead. Use him.' Herald's hand moved. He didn't tell it to. It traced an arc through the water, and the debris followed, shards of rock, a twisted ration crate, the splintered half of a pickaxe. They rose from the flood like a school of fish under his command, hanging in the dark for a heartbeat, then flew. The pickaxe hit the creature's flank and buried itself to the handle. The ration crate shattered against its eyeless head. The rocks pummeled its gills in a barrage that turned the water cloudy with pale green blood and algae. The monster screamed. Not a roar, a scream, high and vibrating, a sound that had never been designed to leave the dark depths it came from. It released Kett's ruined body and thrashed backward, limbs flailing, and Herald followed it with his fury and fear and the terrible, exhilarating understanding that he was no longer prey. Somewhere in the chaos, Pytor surfaced. The old man burst through the water coughing, one arm hanging limp at his side, his face a map of fresh cuts and bruises. He saw the monster. He saw the floating corpses, the orbiting debris, the boy hanging in the center of it all with red light in his eyes. "Half-half?" His voice was barely a rasp. "What in the!" "Down!" Herald's voice was not his own anymore