The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 22: Chapter 22

Read chapter 22 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"A starving wolf does not question the butcher's blade, so long as it falls on another." I woke to the agonizing sensation of my own heartbeat and the remnants of a splitting headache. It wasn't just a pulse in my chest; it was a synchronized throb starting from the base of my skull, traveling down the length of both my arms, and pooling in my chest. The Circlet, the Lattice, the Chevrons, the Tetrahedrons, and the Infinite Weave etched into my palm all flared with a dim, rhythmic localized light that did nothing against the dim neon darkness. I was lying on the hard, resin-coated column just outside Vane-Uru’s segmented body. The air was still thin, smelling of ozone and ancient dust, but the immediate pressure of the sovereign's inner chamber was gone. I tried to sit up, but my muscles felt like they had been soaked in battery acid, making my rise almost bring tears to my eyes. The neurological hijack from the Toxic and Rot Qi absorption had left my central nervous system frayed. As I shifted my weight, my right hand brushed against something cold, but softer than resin or rock. It wasn't stone. It was a leather-covered mass of freezing, dense muscle. Adrenaline spiked through my exhaustion. I recoiled, my back hitting the uneven wall of Vane-Uru's carapace that wrapped the top of the broken column. The violet arrays on my arm flared, giving off no luminescence, causing me to snarl to myself as the memories of yesterday came back. Pushing away my annoyance, I felt around for my stack of chitin, and fed some Qi into the top plate. A dim light rose from the light bulb image I had etched inside the closed circuit, and I picked it up to move over the massive shape resting less than two feet from where I had been sleeping, and frowned. It was Vora, but she looked horrible. The nine-foot-tall scout leader of the Great Gem Cliff was lying on her back, but she was barely breathing; that was far from the worst of it. She was a ruin. The physical reality of a nine-hundred-or-so-pound giant attempting to walk through a sovereign-tier gravity well was written across her anatomy. Her dense, iron-hard femurs had snapped under her own weight, the bone protruding through the pale skin of her thighs. Her massive chest cavity was visibly depressed, her ribs crushed inward by the sheer atmospheric load. Dark, heavy blood had pooled from her ears, nose, and the corners of her mouth. I stared at her, completely baffled. Why was the giant who had abandoned me to the Wild Hunt lying shattered at the threshold of a forbidden zone? Just what could have been worse than this? A sharp, dissonant chitter echoed from the shadows near the base of the pillar. The Tetrahedrons driven into the knuckles of my left hand suddenly vibrated, acting as a biological receiver. The acoustic scraping translated instantly into raspy, disjointed words inside my skull. “Heavy meat. Good bone. Crushed soft inside.” Pendra stepped into the dim violet light. Her six-armed, bipedal frame moved with an eerie lack of kinetic friction. She didn't walk; she simply displaced space until she was standing over Vora's head. Her luminous gold eyes tracked the shallow and ragged rise of the giant's shattered chest. “We eat,” Pendra projected, her head tilting. “High calorie. Good fuel for the core to grow. I dragged it from the crack that is a hole now. You sleep. I hunt.” "She isn't dead," I rasped, my throat dry. “And since when did calories become part of your speech?” “I learning. It dying,” Pendra answered, and corrected instantly, the vibration in my knuckles sharp with predatory logic. “Lungs breaking. Heart slow. The heavy crushed it. Waste of protein to wait. I will open the throat.” She raised one of her bladed, chitinous lower arms. "Stop." I forced myself to my feet. The Lattice on my wrist pulsed, distributing the kinetic shock of my movement across my dermis in an electrically unsettling way. I grabbed my canvas roll of acupuncture needles from my coat. "She is not food.