‘Ah, Miss Munene,’ Ty continued, eyes slicing to Sheba. ‘Your lover now, I suppose, god warrior? She dared to defy me, so now you get to watch her die.’
‘Don’t touch her,’ Idan grunted, the words dragging from the static in his brain and the thickness of his lips.
He fought the gravity of the field, his muscles twitching at the torturous level of the excruciating pulse, but to no avail.
‘Care for her that much, ay?’ Ty snarled.
He rushed forward and swung his armored hand out to grip Sheba’s shoulder, the hydraulic force of his suit immobilizing her.
She screamed as he squeezed her deltoid, almost breaking her bones.
Ty turned to Idan. ‘You’re immortal, so why give afokkabout this sack of flesh?’
Enraged, Idan forced his leaden limbs into motion, a surge of raw, desperate willpower overriding the dampening beam.
He lunged at speed to wrench Sheba from Ty’s grip, his fingers digging into Ty’s gaps in the black alloy armor to tear her free.
He hurled her into a dense cover of the brambles, ensuring her body hit the soft snow drift and earth behind the bush.
Ty roared in fury, raising the brass-cased cylinder in his hand and cranking up its power so that it pulsed with an unholy violet glow.
The implement released a ray of obsidian energy aimed at the center of Idan’s chest.
TheGod-Eaterbegan to harvest his essence, dragging the divine aureate quintessence in ribbons of gold light from his veins and feeding it into the cold machine.
Idan groaned, falling on both knees now, as his celestial architecture crumbled, the furnace of his soul cooling into a void.
He stared at the necromantic runes etched into the device, his mind reeling.
Ty scoffed in his face. ‘You’re asking yourself where I got this little plaything? Like I said, from a Sacran emir on Galicia, like you, a fallen god. He deals in forbidden tech stolen from the tomb-moons of the outer rim. I’m beginning to get quite fond of it.’
Ty twisted a dial, ratcheting the pain to a torturous threshold.
Even more unimaginable agony bloomed, as though a thousand white-hot needles were flaying through Idan’s nervous system.
He collapsed onto his hands and knees, his strength evaporating.
His skin shed its bronze luster, turning the flat, dead hue of spent cinders.
The world blurred into a haze of static and sulfur as theGod-Eaterdrained the last of his resistance.
Ty stepped over him, his boot heavy on Idan’s neck. ‘Tis a sight for sore eyes when a deity falls from glory,’ he sneered.
Movement flickered in the periphery.
Idan jolted as Sheba surged from the shadows of the brush, her eyes burning with a cold, focused rage.
She lunged forward, gripping a barbed, serrated shard of carbon fiber pried from one of the soldiers’ shattered chest plates.
With a wild battle cry, she swung her hand with the full payload of her desperation, sinking the black splinter deep into the unshielded joint of Ty’s neck seal.
Ty let out a pressurized hiss of shock, his hand letting go of theGod-Eaterto clamp onto his bleeding jugular.
The siphon beam flickered as the device fell to the ground.
Sheba grabbed the silver cylinder and shoved it into her back pocket.
The sudden release of its pressure acted as a stimulant to Idan’s dying core.
