“Where I come from, this is foreplay,” I mumbled through smashed and bloody lips. “In a fight, we’re more like-” and I completed the sentence by yanking his thumb in a direction thumbs are not designed to be yanked.
The joint snapped with a satisfyingly wet crunch.
“Cesspit scum,” he snarled, his face white with killing rage. “After I beat you unconscious, I’m going to drown you in your own sewage.”
“You don’t have the balls. Remember?” I let go of his thumb, reached behind his head, and grabbed a fistful of powdered glass that I pounded into the ruin of his nose. “This is how we do it in Tidehollow, you snotty upslope bitch.”
The powdered glass spread across his face. I encouraged the spreading by pounding him with the outside of my fist as if it were a hammer. I may not know much about fist-fighting, but I do know how to swing a hammer, and there are few humans who can truthfully say they do it better.
Renn gasped from the impact, and when his mouth opened I hit him again, this time downward on his lower incisors, hyperextending his jaw with another wet crunch. He howled. In Tidehollow, that would be the moment to pound sand into his open mouth, so I did.
A cave brat from my part of the slum would also twist his hand on Renn’s face, to grind the sand harder into his mouth and into the ruin of his nose, to force it into his eye sockets, thumb it under his eyelids, and pack it into his tear ducts.
I did that, too.
Then I hit him again. And once more for good measure.
And one to grow on.
He gagged, and choked, and tried to howl some more, acting generally helpless and beaten, which I didn’t believe for a second; I knew how tough he used to be, and I assumed that now he was likely tougher. The fight would be over when one of us was unconscious. Or dead.
My suspicious nature paid off when I glimpsed a flash of blue sparks at the corners of his eyes, and so managed to avert my eyes before his Immaculate Form-a very minor magic, barely a cantrip, used for instantly cleansing oneself and one’s clothing-blew all that sand away from his face and straight at mine. Before I could get back to business, one of his arms snaked around the back of my neck and he caught his opposite forearm to lever his other arm across my face.
I had been expecting him to throw me off. By the time I realized what he was doing, he had locked my head into the crook of his arm. His hold tightened with the mechanical progression of a bench vise. “Tidehollow’s nothing,” he whispered in my ear. “This is how men fight.”
That built-in body regeneration of his seemed to be working entirely too well.
“Uh, Tezz…?” Doc said worriedly. “It seems like we’re in trouble here. Are we in trouble? Tezz?”
I couldn’t answer because my mouth was jammed full of etherium forearm. I managed to find his hands and clawed at them, trying for another fingerhold or a grip on his broken thumb, but of course he wouldn’t let me catch him that way again. “Oh, no no no,” he hummed. “You don’t want to do that, and here’s why.”
His grip tightened. I heard an alarming crunching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the back of my skull. “Do you know how I practice this hold?” he murmured. “On granite boulders. Until they shatter.”
Apparently my rhox-berserker metaphor had been something of an understatement.
“Tezz? Tezz! Do something!” Doc was starting to panic-and he sounded calmer than I was. Sangrite exhaustion seemed to have drained every drop of my mana reserve as well. I tried to organize my mind into planeswalking configuration, thinking that maybe Doc could ‘port us back to the cavern-but all I got was a moan of dismay that indicated “It’ll be hours before I can do that again!”
This, I thought, is a stupid way to die.
“How should I kill you? Let me count the ways,” Renn mused happily. “Squashing your head like a rotten melon has a certain visceral appeal… but no, no, that will never do-it would be over all too quickly. How might I do it leisurely… as if I have all the time in the world. Because, after all, I do.”
What could I have been thinking? Had I been thinking at all? I had never beaten him. Not once. But I had let my supercharged blood boil drag me into exactly what he was best at-single combat. Idiot.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Dying-again-would be bad enough. Dying because I was too stupid to live was more than I could take. If only I had stopped to think-because, after all, the only trait in which I had a real advantage over Renn was intellect, though one couldn’t prove it by anything that happened today. I had blindly thrown myself against him, my puny, all-too-mortal flesh against his unlimited power of etherium-
Wait.
The unlimited power of etherium…
Manipulating etherium didn’t require mana. Not for me. The metal itself would furnish the power. Renn was half lost in his fantasies of torturing me to death. I was half lost in my blinding epiphany that there was one more thing I could do that Renn didn’t know I could do.
Rhabdomancy.
With only the slightest twist of will, I could perceive the etherium in the area. All of it. Renn’s body. The transit gate. The gravity sleds.
The needle in my aorta.
I chose the needle in my aorta for my first move. It withdrew from the blood vessel, leaving only a bead in place to seal the puncture. With no need for caution, I wrenched the needle back out through my ribs, my pectoral tendon, and my skin. I decided against a bravura line; why warn him? With my mind, I shaped the needle into a thin blade, then stabbed it through the iris of Renn’s right eye.
He screamed, throwing me aside, clawing at his face, ripping bloody stripes with his fingernails. I counted myself lucky that the shock hadn’t made him reflexively rip my head off, but his incredible strength nearly killed me anyway: throwing me aside involved sending me spinning through the air, twisting helplessly until my spine crashed into the arch of the transit gate hard enough that it very nearly broke me in half. Gasping, I fell to the sand, my arms and legs twitching and flopping in partial seizure.
If Renn pulled himself together before I could do the same, he was going to kill me anyway. I couldn’t even get up. Couldn’t stand and take it like a man. Maybe I could crawl. Maybe.
Power had made me stupid. I had been strong, so I didn’t bother to be smart. A mistake I swore never to make again.
Though the lesson would be wasted if learning it killed me.
I had a chance. One chance, because all that power was gone now, and my intellect was again on the job. One chance.
I reached out with my mind and activated the transit gate. A view of the zombie mob in the Netherglass opened above me, for I lay only a few feet from the gate’s threshold.
Renn stopped screaming. Perhaps the twist of power had been enough to remind him that he hadn’t killed me yet. His left eye fixed upon me, and his bloody mouth stretched like a nightmare ogre. “Running?” he shrieked, hurling himself toward me. “Run then! Run! I’ll start by severing your legs! One festering joint at a time!”
But when he got close to me, he skidded to a stop, staring down at me in open puzzlement, because I wasn’t trying to crawl through the gate. That was the moment he realized it was a trap. I saw it in his eyes.
He knew he was about to die.
His mouth opened like he was going to ask what in the hells I thought I was up to; he managed to say, “Tezzer-” before my gravity sled at full shrieking speed smashed into the small of his etherium back hard enough to cut an ordinary man in two. Renn was no ordinary man, and the gravity sled weighed less than thirty pounds, so the impact only knocked him forward, stumbling, trying to regain his balance.