The taste of Koa’s own sweat was not a pleasant one.

  It was mixed with the earthy bitterness of dirt, and just a hint of the familiar coppery sensation one was forced to grow accustomed to, over many bouts with Remus. Each occasion usually leaving him with a mouthful of Ichor. Now that was a man who didn’t hold back.

  A sad croak of laughter escaped Koa’s throat. Who knew that the blood of our deities was so foul? Eating a god would be disgusting!

  It was an absurd thought, but lying in the mud of their fighting arenas, watching the sky split in half, there wasn't a sane bone left in Koa’s body.

  Koa had felt particularly energetic that evening. What the heck, he had thought, enlisting as a wildcard in the final bout of the champions’ tournament. Even after fighting with Remus, and failing miserably on three separate occasions, it still hadn’t seemed like enough. What’s a few more fights on a fine night like this?

  Everything, apparently. It might be the very thing that cost him his life. Actions always seemed so insignificant in the moment. The time of your downfall would arrive, as innocuous as a butterfly landing on your skin, and you were blind to your own undoing. To the poison that insect was secretly injecting into your flesh.

  His brother was a lot of things, but Koa had never thought that Ash was particularly smart. But waiting for Koa to exhaust himself — for all of Gold’s Bane to train so intensely that they couldn’t pick themselves up off the floor — now that was an ingenious battle tactic.

  Why use men to drain your enemies of their vigour, when they could just as easily do it themselves?

  Three fights against Remus. Thwarted by that living beast of fire and Ambition at each instance. Every time, Koa had kept himself fighting by remembering what it was all for: to stand up to his brother once more as an equal, and return some sense into the scrambled can of worms that was his brain.

  Now it hurt to stand up.

  Koa finally dragged himself onto two shaky feet, breathing heavily. His arm had a nasty cut from his last fight that had yet to be bandaged, leaving the limb hanging almost limply at his side. Koa didn’t even entertain the prospect of activating his Mark. The skin around the divine artwork was sore and blistered. Tapping into the store of Chantal’s might would only welcome in a world of pain: one he was adamant on shunning out.

  Rotting here didn’t seem like the best course of action. Something glimmered in the corner of Koa’s eye, and he glanced up to where a white light flickered. The boundaries of the arenas. They wouldn’t last against the volley of spiritual blows the Paladins were sure to be dishing out, but they would spare him a few precious seconds. Minutes, if the gods smiled upon him.

  Chantal, Ashbel, Neo, Septimus . . . Koa silently prayed to each deity he knew, the list surprisingly long.

  . . . Dwyn, Mazin, Magnolia . . .

  If only they could hear him. If only some sympathetic god would lend a proverbial hand, and sweep him out of this mess.

  Koa was suddenly overwhelmed by the need to pluck every last hair out of his scalp.

  He threw his aching arms into the air like a toddler throwing a tantrum, hot tears streaming down his face.

  It had all been going so well! For the first time in his life, Koa had found people who accepted him for him. A family that offered warmth and sincerity, with nothing expected in return but his own friendship and love. A far cry from the cold shoulder his brethren at the Wilderness Clan had always shown him. Exclusion for his weakness. Perhaps if his aptitude for scaling the Divine Ranks had emerged sooner, his so-called family would have taken to treating him better. Expectations were lofty things, and Koa was tired of carrying them.

  He’d been able to scale the Divine Ranks after Rebirths of struggle, and with stunning success! He was a Foot-Soldier, a man at war, fighting for what he believed in, and surrounded by peers who dwarfed even the power of some elders back at the Wilderness Clan.

  He had a wife, for gods’ sake. Octavia somehow cared enough about him to offer her hand in marriage. To vow to stay at his side until death did them part.

  Which, by the looks of it, may have been coming far more swiftly than Koa could have anticipated.

  Koa’s life was a puzzle, and right when all the pieces were starting to fit together — power, friendship, love — Enos had smashed the set to the smallest splinters. Now the jigsaw was far more complicated. The pieces wouldn’t connect, no matter how hard he jammed them together. Sections that he had overlooked as solved now proved more troublesome than ever, and he couldn’t see the wider picture of what he was even trying to make.

  He had hardly been sixteen for more than a Duration! He acted like a grown man, carried himself with the regal grace of a sage wise beyond his years, but he was just a boy. A boy! He didn’t know who he really was, who he was supposed to be. Did anyone?

  The birthday had seemed so insignificant compared to the dangers they were all facing, so Koa hadn’t bothered to mention it. His rationale was needing to train, not celebrate. But that wasn’t the entire truth, was it?

  He was scared. Scared to confront the reality he was still a mere boy, in way over his head.

  They were children. All of them. Many of the men that fought for Gold’s Bane were adolescents, and neither Violet nor Remus were yet to reach past the landmark age of eighteen. It was so easy to overlook how inexperienced they were. If not for the position Koa had found himself in, would he act as maturely? He wasn’t sure why, but he doubted it. If not for Enos and his Right-bearers upsetting the foundations of this world, Koa would just be another adolescent. One with no expectations placed on him but to train, as he spared his youth away in one of the Wild Clan’s training barracks. A boring life, but far simpler.

  There would have been adults to take care of disasters like these. But now the terrors that faced the world were too much for even their parents to face alone. Fate had forced them all to grow up ahead of schedule.

  Can you do nothing but whine? He reprimanded himself. Koa raised a hand and slapped it across his cheek. You don’t have the privilege to feel sorry for yourself. You might be young, but so is Ash! He’s in there, somewhere, if Juniper’s word is to be believed. Lost in the prison of his own body. Koa swallowed. It was hard to accept; infinitely easier to think that his brother was gone forever, than alive and suffering. Knowing that he still existed, captured in a fargone crevice of a mind that was no longer his, made Koa’s stomach churn..

  The sound of sweeping air guided Koa’s one eye upwards. He was too exhausted to summon his remote organs from the Sight Clan into the fray. Yet, even with only one eye at his disposal, not even a man who was half-blind could have missed it.

  There, reflecting against the lens of his eye in a shower of multicoloured light, was the universe mocking him.

  A meteorite burned up above, as if a second sun was competing with its daylight brother. The murk of night would be kept at bay this one evening, so it seemed.

  They would die not in darkness, but hellfire.

  Koa felt hot tears of frustration welling against the bridge of his nose. It was the largest asteroid he had ever witnessed Ash summoning. A great plume of dust and smoke upset the air around the descending stone, a terrible halo illuminating Gold’s Bane in a ring of death and despair.

  “We have to stop it!” A voice shrieked out. Koa wasn’t afraid to admit he jolted.

  “Who goes there?” He found himself screaming to be heard over the asteroid’s roaring approach.

  Emerging into view was a motley crew of clansmen, all equally exhausted from their own training. Through his spiritual senses, Koa identified them as heralding from the Tempest, Gravity, and Sun clans respectively — the energy that seamed from their active Marks was telltale enough.

  Koa was about to comment on how auspiciously well-suited the group seemed for dealing with the literal, overhanging threat. Then he figured the trio must have been handpicked to defend Gold’s Bane from Ash’s celestial beatdowns. While Mason could never be seen resting, with the mountain-high piles of paperwork and planning he dealt with daily, Koa couldn’t thank the general enough. His foresight and tactical planning might be the very thing that saved them from utter destruction.

  “Apologies, master Koa,” the eldest of the group, a man hailing from the Sun Clan, lifted both hands towards the air. “We should have arrived sooner.”

  The three fell into formation. Despite the utter stress they all must have been facing, little older than Koa was himself, they acted with a masterful grace. The descending orb was suddenly enveloped with a brilliant light, merging with the already present flames until the asteroid was fully encased in fire. A crouching Gravity clanswoman was pressed into the grass and dirt of the field, exerting all the force she could against Ash’s ultimate projectile – the reactive forces of which shook the bones in her fragile body. There was no way one measly person would be able to reverse the gravity of a thousand tons of stone, but Koa hoped it would slow the asteroid enough for them to knock it out of the sky.

  Lastly, Koa felt his silk cloak rustle in the air, as a desperate tempest seemed to pick up out of nowhere. The compounding force was centred wholly on the meteorite blotting out the canvas of night. With bated breath, Koa waited for his own strength to return, watching raptly to see if it would work.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Koa had to squint to see through the aggressive air pressure. Alas, it wasn’t enough. Even with the combined force of their efforts, perspiration dripping down their weary brows, the trio was failing miserably. An invincible force pressed against the meteor: reversed gravity, searing light, and an animated gale all beating at its rocky curve. And, still, it was not enough.

  With the solemn knowledge that they were all going to die if he didn’t stop that thing from colliding with the heart of Gold’s Bane, Koa called upon his Mark once more. The flesh around his divine artwork, of Chantal protecting a thicket of ruined trees against a horde of Unbounded, burnt as if coals were being pressed into his skin. Koa ignored the pain, surging Infinity through his body like the opioid of raging power it was.

  He was screaming, each second he continued to use his power an absolute agony. It felt like hot pincers were pressing in-between his organs. Koa’s internals churned within him, beaten and exhausted after being pushed to the limit four times over this day alone.

  Overtraining was hard for a Foot-Solider to achieve, with how generally quick their bodies mended themselves back together. Yet Koa achieved just that, shooting rods of oak blasting out of his back and into the underbelly of the asteroid.

  They flew upwards like any arrow shot by Eshika herself, lost into the whirling vortex of shadow, wind, and blinding light that consumed the atmosphere. For a second, he feared the technique wouldn’t even pass through the whirling mess of techniques. Alas, Koa felt – through his connection to the wood – the volley pressing into the celestial stone.

  The Gravity clanswoman gazed up, mouth wide. “We’ve failed . . .”

  The asteroid continued to press downwards, the deep rumbling of a country shaking reverberating all around. Nothing had changed.

  “When that hits, all of Gold’s Bane will be swept up by a wave of debris and destruction. A tsunami of Ichor and mud will drown out the land for miles.Gods above, how could he have broken through our defences like that, how could-?”

  Koa’s body spasmed. He clutched onto himself, dropping to his legs and not acting fast enough to cover his ears.

  The detonation was deafening.

  His eyes were still ringing as the wave of dust hit them.

  It worked. He smiled grimly, face suddenly covered by windswept grime. He’d summoned branches to grow out of the wooden pincers, breaking into the infrastructure of the asteroid and tearing it apart from within.

  Boulders of stone rained down from the sky, and it was by fortune alone that Koa wasn’t crushed to a pulp. But compared to the certain demise Ash’s meteorite would have ensured, at least taking his chances against the raining stones was a winnable gamble.

  Koa dug his fingers deep into the dirt, his body like a ragdoll caught up in the propelling tempest.

  The air was a haze of jagged rock and deafening noise. For what must have been an entire minute — an astronomical amount of time in a battle — Koa could do nothing but hope for the best, as they were pelted down at.

  He seemed to slip out of consciousness for a moment. When he returned, each of his senses were slightly off: there was a ringing to his ears; his nose was clogged with dust, stones, and Ichor; and his mouth was sickly metallic in taste. His skin had become numb to the hundreds of pebbles that were digging into him.

  It was a weakness beyond measure, but Koa rested for a few solid minutes. There, lodged between a literal rock and a hard place, Koa almost slept soundly as his body collected the sleep it demanded. By the time two strong sets of arms carried him out from under the crushing stones, Koa was only barely conscious enough to register the corpses.

  The trio hadn’t been so lucky.

  A wave of sickness forced Koa back into the moment. The idea of sleeping anywhere in this hellhole suddenly became a ludicrous notion, so much proved by a mere glance at the crushed skulls of the three men that had tried to save his life.

  They had succeeded, though definitely not in the way they’d intended.

  Lives lost trying to protect him, and now Koa couldn’t even stand up on his own.

  They barely looked older than me . . .

  It was a testament to how out of it Koa was, that he was yet to recognise the pair that had come to his rescue. Remus and Aziel.

  “Are you okay man?” Aziel asked. The look on his face told Koa he already knew the answer. If Koa looked nearly as beaten-up as he felt, then there would be dead corpses prettier than him.

  “Doing just lovely.” Koa slurred the words, slipping in and out of consciousness.

  “Ash will be getting cocky after pulling off a move like that. Cocky, but exhausted. We need to take him down.” Remus said. “Now’s our chance to strike while he recovers.”

  “Look at the state of him!” Aziel yelped. Koa had never heard the man speak to Remus with such a tone. A passionate fire scorched each syllable. Under any other circumstance, Koa would have told the man to relax. There was no need to fight over him, or his well-being. Yet, as it stood, he was a limp body bleeding out of nearly every orifice, and decorated in a neat sheen of dust. He would be doing himself no favours by complaining: there was no glory in fighting foolishly.

  “We can’t win this Remus.”

  Remus paused, swallowed, and paused again. “We can’t give up that easily.”

  “Koa’s going to die if we don’t get him some aid soon! We were already outnumbered, drained of our strength after a long day of sparring. And now Ash has thrashed our forces with just the opening barrage of his surprise attack. We need to retreat!”

  “Then we’d be playing into Ash and Edmar’s hands!”

  “Better that than dead!”

  Koa cleared his throat. “Guys-”

  “Remus, we all know I’m forever in your debt for what you’ve done for the Ambition Clan, but even a follower of Tanish needs to know when to call it quits. Stop being so goddamn selfish and look around you!”

  It began as a soft chinking sound. Koa frowned. He forced his drooping eyelids open, not sure what to expect from this world of turmoil and chaos, and gaped.

  The sky rained gold.

  The hurricane of coins dominated the air. Koa imagined them all as prisoners inside of some giant gambling machine, Inkings smacking here, there, and everywhere as Edmar waited to see if he’d hit the jackpot. There could only be one prize he was after. The complete crippling of the Talents of the Future.

  All of that hard work, those days spent training, the goddamn champion system. And for what?

  Forgive Koa for being cynical. Having your body punished four times in one day was rough, easily conjuring enough pain to wash away any speck of optimism left.

  Unable to walk himself, Remus and Aziel carried Koa under the cover of some scattered shrapnel. There, they remained for sometime, the argument broken up as the battering of metal negated the need for words. In a way, Ash had protected them by sending down his latest asteroid: it provided plenty of protection. Koa feared for the poor souls who weren’t lucky enough to find shelter.

  Remus stared up to the sky of deadly projectiles, each breath visibly raising and lowering his chest. He looked over to Koa, then clicked his fingers in front of Koa’s face a few times.

  “Stay awake Koa, you need to stay awake. We can’t risk you passing out in a condition like that. I’m- so sorry.”

  Were those tears Koa saw slipping from the man’s eyes?

  “Mason has drilled our soldiers with procedures to follow if something like this ever occurred. They’ll follow the protocols, Remus.” Aziel didn’t sound very confident himself. “ I’m . . .”

  Aziel sighed. The man was trying to disguise the fact, but the dark shadows beneath his eyes spoke only of fatigue. Somebody in the group had to be the voice of hope, but the role wasn't quite right for any of them. Like a piece of clothing that’s measurements were slightly off. Perhaps something that would have once fit any one of them, but now outgrown.

  “We have to take care of ourselves, Remus. I can only trust in our rebellion to do the same.”

  Remus could have been on a different planet, his eyes not seeing what was right before him. “Dead . . .” he muttered. “Because of me. I feared this would happen. Everybody tried to reassure me, but now it’s happened. I’ve done impossible things, but I can’t bring the dead back to life. I can’t visit the families of those we’ve lost, and tell them their sons and daughters died for me. For my pipe dreams. I’m a coward.”

  Aziel shot his friend a sympathetic look, but said nothing more as they both hoisted Koa over their shoulders. In the face of tragedy, words of comfort seemed like things of folly.

  Only once they were clear of the rocky detritus, could they spot the fiends stalking the land. They had hardly walked a couple metres when Koa felt his carriers abruptly halt.

  There were hundreds of them.

  Each of them took on a different form, but there were more talons, more sets of sharpened teeth, in all of them combined then Belindo had ever possessed. Some crawled around erratically, while others took flight, flapping their scrawny wings and cawing like carrion birds.

  Remus’ face was a mask of pure pain. A man tired to the bone. Koa hadn’t thought it possible: a warrior who had endured all the sick jokes reality had thrown at him, year after year, now forced to buckle at the proverbial knee.

  Maybe you really could draw blood from a stone. All it took was persistence.

  Koa, however, understood. “It’s Violet!”

  It took him a second to recognise the scent of her Chaotic energy, but there could only be one power teleporting the army of fiends all across the burning plain. The girl herself was nowhere in sight, but great gods of the sky! Koa thought that maybe she was controlling all the beasts, his fatigued mind snapping alert out of sheer curiosity. She had demonstrated the ability to mind-control Unbounded weaker than herself, when busting him and Remus out of the Shadow Clan’s fortress. But there was no way she would have been able to manipulate so many beasts at once. Could she?

  Before Koa could ask that aloud, a wave of exhaustion washed over him again. The moment of interest had been like a sudden tremor in otherwise calm waters, and now it was all he could do not to fall asleep. He suspected he had mere minutes left conscious at best.

  “Projections!” Aziel shouted, his delight infectious. “That girl. That brilliant woman! This gives us some breathing room to organise a retreat. We need to send off a flare, and quickly.”

  Aziel marched ahead, ready to get the hell out of there, only to give pause when he noticed how strange Remus was acting. Koa grumbled under his breath, wondering what all the fuss was about. What was so interesting to look at, that Remus was keeping them exposed in the screaming heart of the fight?

  Koa was about to nudge Remus forward. Then a wave of adrenaline swept away his fatigue a second time running. Except, this time, it wasn’t curiosity that subdued his weariness.

  No, it was the feeling of his heart leaping into his chest.

  Three corpses lay nested in blood-stricken mud. Exposed bones protruded out of wonky limbs at weird angles. An air of death suffocated Koa’s nostrils, making him feel sick, though perhaps that was just the normal response to a sight so grisly.

  His watery eye roved over to where two wagons laid, smashed against a boulder. Bundles of foodstuffs were scattered against the ground. One bounced across the sleek, rain-beaten pathway, sliding down to a stop at Remus’ feet. The man took one look at the tied bundle of rations, soaked through until the bread and meat inside was inedible, and then slowly raised his eyes back towards the bodies. Three bodies.

  Koa recognised the bodies of the Feast Clansmen, and Remus’ wails of despair soon followed.