Chapter 292: The Ugly Rat that Polluted the Sea (9)

A shriek like tearing metal ripped through the depths, followed by a crash that shook the world.

The Ugly Rat skidded backward, coughing up clots of blood. What came out was not merely red. It was thick with venom, a bilious fluid steeped in poison that hissed and pitted the ground it touched. The impact rattled its innards, but the creature raised its head anyway, as if pain no longer mattered. Dazed, disbelieving, it stared at Ketal.

Myst flowed through him. The world’s miracle coursed along Ketal’s limbs and sank into his bones. It moved with his breath, coiled with his stance, and brightened his eyes from within.

“That is impossible! It cannot be,” the rat rasped. “We cannot ever be like the young ones. We are something else entirely.”

A lion could not become a rabbit. It also could not love a rabbit, build a family with one, or bring forth children together. Such a thing had never happened, and yet the impossible was unfolding before the rat’s eyes.

“You... How did you do this?” the rat asked Ketal.

“I am not one of you. I am a being from the Outside,” Ketal said with a small smile. He shifted his weight forward, relaxed and certain. “So if I use a power you call fantasy, why should that be strange?”

“Nonsense,” the rat spat.

“You can deny it if you like. I have already taken hold of it,” Ketal replied, calm and unhurried. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “For Blutka.”

A pure note thrummed in the air. Divinity wrapped him like a mantle. It came from the sacred relic of Kalosia he had seized, and the holy power sealed within that relic rushed outward and scoured him clean. The poison that had burrowed toward his marrow shriveled and vanished.

The rat ground its teeth until they creaked.

“Divinity... so you have bound yourself to the young ones as well,” it hissed. “Traitor.”

“Quiet.” Ketal’s brow creased as if the noise offended him. He stepped in. He blurred and hurled himself toward the rat. “You can die here.”

A tearing cry burst from the creature, and a haze of noxious miasma fanned out, blinding and choking. Tendrils of poison coiled like snakes and darted for Ketal’s skin. Ketal’s footwork hardly changed. He slid a half step to the side, let the drifting veil of venom pass an inch from his cheek, and closed the distance in an instant.

There was no windup, no delay, only speed so clean it seemed effortless. The rat flung itself backward and threw up a shield of condensed toxin. Ketal lifted his fist. Myst gathered to his knuckles, a quiet, resonant hum. He struck with a body already strengthened beyond mortal limits. The poison shield did not crack or splinter. It was crushed to pulp.

Ketal did not pause. He drove forward and arrived where the rat’s retreat should have carried it. His fist sank into the creature’s chest. The impact folded the rat in half and hurled it through the air. It smashed into the outer wall of the Abyss, and the wall was webbed with cracks, a stubborn groan running along the fissures.

The rat staggered and nearly fell. It would have blacked out if it had not forced its mind into a narrow point.

“What is this?” it muttered, shaking.

Ketal had not struck at full power. He had attacked without burdening his frame, without the toll that true extremes demanded. It had been closer to earnest effort than to his maximum. Yet the blow had devastated the rat. It was the Myst within the strike. Even if raw force alone measured lower than his absolute peak, Myst’s strange nature made the blow land as if it were his best.

“If this were when I first took hold of it, I would not have done this so easily,” he said, flexing his fingers once and rolling his wrist.

In the beginning, he could not defend his body with Myst while also strengthening his flesh. He could do one, not both. That was his wall. However, the divinity once housed in the Holy Sword had been devoured by the beast of Myst. The two currents had learned a way to flow together. He could now sheath himself and strike in the same breath.

The rat braced and surged forward, its body hardening as it poured strength into muscle and bone. It lifted a forepaw, forcing pain aside. The moment Ketal had cloaked himself in Myst, the rat understood that smearing him with poison and drawing the fight long would fail. Even if such a plan worked, it would fall first. It had to break him directly.

It charged.

“Closing with me is not wise,” Ketal muttered with a smirk.

He was the ashen-haired barbarian of the White Snowfield, their chieftain. In close quarters, he did not yield to anyone. The forepaw flashed in, and Ketal moved just enough. He slid to the rat’s right and pressed his frame into it. The paw slashed again, broad and brutal. Ketal caught it by the wrist.

“Up you go,” Ketal said.

He turned with his hips and shoulders unified and drove the rat down. The combined weight of its own attack and Ketal’s power slammed the creature into the floor of the Abyss hard enough to make the walls ripple. He did not let it recover. He twisted the forepaw he was grabbing. Bones popped and tore through meat. The left forepaw bent backward at an angle the body could not permit.

Ketal raised his axe and brought it down. The blade bit through hide and lodged in the breastbone. The rat screamed and heaved, trying to bring its unbroken right forepaw to bear. Ketal had read the motion before it began. He set his heel on the ankle and pressed.

The Abyss trembled. The place they fought was a layered prison of compressed venom, a pit so saturated with poison that even an Elder Dragon going all out would struggle to break it.

Ketal pressed with his foot, and the ground groaned and cracked. The rat thrashed, but it could not rise. For a moment, it looked like a pup pinned by its mother’s jaw. Ketal lifted the axe again and drove it into the belly. Blood fountained hot and black. The rat poured strength through every strand of its body and screamed.

Ketal’s instincts flared as he moved without thinking. His figure simply vanished from where he stood and reappeared at the far side of the Abyss. A pillar of poison erupted where he had been, so concentrated that even with Myst cladding him it might have carved a wound.

“Good,” Ketal said, smiling.

He was not drawing on his full might, yet he was overwhelming the rat. That meant Myst could meaningfully harm the monsters of the White Snowfield. That was a satisfying result. It was also natural. He had always been stronger than the rat. In class, in rank, in weight of presence, he held the clear advantage. Only his own stubborn flaw had opened a gap the creature could exploit.

That lack was no longer empty. The pillar faded, and the rat came back into view. It swayed on its feet, ugliness made uglier by ruin, a ragged corpse that had refused to lie down.

“So that is the result of your stubbornness...,” it said softly. It laughed, low and unsettling, a sound colored by a strange calm.

“That was the only opening I could aim for, and you have filled it,” the rat went on. “If you polish this a little more, you will not be pushed aside, even fighting the old timers. In that case, I have little chance at all. Is this my grave, then? I did not think a thing like death could come for me.”

“Have you given up?” Ketal asked it. “If so, die quietly. That would be best.”

“I cannot,” the rat said. “My odds are thin, but not gone.”

It had no reason to surrender.

The poison in the Abyss vibrated. What had seeped over centuries began to creep back, sliding toward the creature in tendrils that quickened into streams. The streams turned to torrents. The torrents plunged into the rat.

***

Outside, Bayern was still fighting the bear cub. The sea had been fouled and chewed into a swamp. It stank of rot and shimmered with oil and poison. Now, that stain was draining away. The water began to remember how to be water again.

What’s going on? Has Ketal won?

Bayern wondered.

Is the corruption being cleansed because the source has fallen?

He thought so for a heartbeat, then knew he was wrong.

“It is being drawn in,” he said, frowning.

The filth that had dirtied the world was spinning like a whirlpool. It narrowed, and narrowed again, and rushed for a point somewhere far below, pulled toward the deepest place.

“I see that you’re drawing all of it to one place,” Ketal observed, deep within the Abyss.

The poison that had stained the world flooded toward the rat’s right forepaw.

“I am the second-born in the Mire of Filth,” the rat murmured. “I am the Ugly Rat that dirtied and broke the world!”

Everything must take my color,

it thought.

Acid screamed across the nail. The power packed into that claw was so dense that even the rat’s own flesh began to corrode. The being born in the mire could hardly endure the poison it had called.

Ketal’s gaze sharpened. That was dangerous. Poison of that order could slip through Myst and leave a wound that mattered.

Then he, too, had to answer in kind. He rapped his knuckles against the cage that held his inner monster. A growl rolled up from a place without light. He could pull Myst out now. He could lay it bare in the world.

Why did you take so long

? he wondered, clicking his tongue. For enemies of this caliber, the beast usually reared up eagerly. By any measure of power, it should have moved far earlier.

However, the beast balked. Some part of it disliked the rat, or perhaps found it unworthy. It did not want to run wild for prey like this. It had not been so reluctant against demons. It had been all teeth and joy then.

Yet, even that hesitation was ending. The continued fight had made the beast itch. It pushed its head between the bars.

This much would do,

he thought. Ketal stirred Myst. The current seeped along the haft of his axe and bled into the world.

“You wield it perfectly. Twisted strangely here and there, but the foundation is the Outside’s own. Truly ridiculous.” The rat let out a flat laugh. It lifted its forepaw. Venom throbbed within and threatened to overflow. “Then let us finish this battle.”

“This is the last exchange,” Ketal said.

They charged. The rat’s forepaw, heavy with every drop of poison the sea had borne, met the edge of Ketal’s Myst made manifest. Metal screamed, and bone sang. The world held its breath.

“Rot and decay!” the Rat snarled.

Poison blew apart like a shell bursting. It was the kind of venom that could defile the world itself. Elder Dragons would fail before it. No living thing on this earth could stand against it. Absolute defenses would puddle and vanish. Flesh that boasted of being unbreakable would blacken, swell, and come apart.

Even gods, even those for whom divinity was made to purify the unclean, would find such a thing alien and perilous. However, something more alien yet swallowed it whole.

The beast roared. Every thread of poison that tried to bloom was eaten before it could spread. It missed nothing, not a drop, not a grain. It jammed everything into a mouth that was more hunger than shape.

Myst swelled, and the power inside it grew. The rat let out a dry sound, the only laughter it had left.

“Monster’s whelp,” the rat muttered.

Myst fell over it like a tide. The rat vanished under the flood. However, Myst did not stop. It ran howling for the walls of the Abyss and burst through toward the surface. The sea that had been cleansed because the rat had vacuumed every toxin into itself met that flood.

The ground heaved, and the sea rose. Barbarians who had dropped to sit after the battle jerked upright as the earth bucked beneath them.

“What was that?”

“Look!”

They turned toward the water, and their mouths fell open. A wall of sea the height of a mountain bore down on them.

Bayern did not hesitate as he flung himself forward and threw everything he had left at the wave. The blow detonated the crest. The mountain of water broke apart and crashed down in a thousand lesser falls. Bayern landed, knees shaking, breath harsh. Even at his level, he had only managed to scatter the force.

“What is that?” he whispered. He drew in air and looked out again.

The sea was wide, old, and patient. It forgot most things quickly. Even a man like Bayern could part it for a breath, but it came together again, smoothed, and erased the cut. That was the way of water. Nature could not be cleaved and held the wound forever.

However, this time, it was different. The ocean did not close.

A line ran across the surface like a sword mark hewn by a hand that did not belong to this world. It went on and on until the eye lost it. The water did not fill the gap. There was emptiness there, a missing piece, as if an invisible wall kept the sea from remembering.

Cold crept along Bayern’s back. The northern sea had been marked, and the mark would not fade. An indelible scar had been carved upon it.