Chapter 121 _ Poisoned. ..
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'It's in me.' He understood. 'Through the skin. Already in.'
He hit Vrath anyway.
The golden gauntlet connected with the shaman's chest — and the impact was real, the force of a Peak Sky Rank physique behind a single strike, Vrath leaving its feet and hitting the far wall of the chamber with a crack that sent frost falling from the ceiling above.
Socrates stood in the middle of the chamber breathing hard.
The slowing in his blood was worse than it had been ten seconds ago.
Vrath slid down the wall. Sat in the frost at its base. Looked at Socrates with those multi-toned eyes.
"You hit hard." It said. Something in its voice that was almost appreciation.
"You poisoned me." Socrates said.
"Yes." Vrath said. "The fifth color. It works slowly — three minutes before full circulatory arrest." It tilted its head. "You have perhaps two minutes of useful movement remaining."
Socrates looked at his hands. The gauntlets were still there. Bloodsucker still clean. His legs still answering.
"Then I'll finish this in two minutes." He said.
He moved toward Vrath.
The remaining ice figures converged — four of them, the ones Bloodsucker hadn't reached yet, moving from the edges of the chamber with the fluid wrongness of their motion. Socrates went through the first one — shoulder, the ice coming apart — and redirected toward the second.
The second one opened its carved mouth.
A cloud came out of it — indigo, the sixth color, dense and contained, releasing directly into Socrates' face at close range before he could adjust.
He breathed it.
The indigo went into his lungs.
The effect was immediate and total — not pain, not paralysis, something worse. His perception shifted. The chamber moved. The ice formations on the walls multiplied — two of each, then four, his vision splitting what was real from what wasn't and failing to distinguish between them. The remaining ice figures blurred into more figures, the chamber walls pushed outward, the frost covered ceiling dropped.
'Hallucination.' Some part of him that was still operating correctly identified it. 'It's not real. The chamber is the same size. The figures are the same number.'
He closed his eyes.
Moved by memory — the layout of the chamber as he had read it when he entered, the positions of the ice figures as he had last seen them, Vrath's position at the far wall. He swung Bloodsucker in the direction the third figure had been.
Contact. The blade finding ice. The figure coming apart.
Fourth figure — he turned, eyes still closed, the blade coming across at the height the figures had been moving at.
Contact again.
He opened his eyes.
The hallucination was still present but thinner — his brain beginning to process through it, the doubled images settling toward single ones at the edges of his vision.
Vrath was standing.
The seventh color was at its fingertips.
Violet.
It hadn't used violet yet. Of all seven colors it had held this one back — through the whole fight, through the wall strike, through losing all four of its ice figures. It had held this one back.
Socrates looked at it.
His blood was moving wrong. His lungs carried the indigo. His legs were answering but the answers were coming slower than the questions.
"The seventh color." Vrath said. "I save it." Its multi-toned voice carried something that had replaced the professional interest of earlier. Something older. "In all my years — I have used it four times. The first three times — I used it immediately." It looked at the violet at its fingertips. "The fourth time I waited. I waited until the target had survived everything else. Until they had earned it."
It looked at Socrates.
"You've earned it."
The violet left its fingers.
It moved differently from all the others — not fast, not slow. Deliberately. The way things move when they know exactly where they're going and have no reason to rush. It spread as it traveled — not a cloud, not a stream, a field, filling the chamber from wall to wall in a single expanding wave that left no gap and no edge and no corridor that a chain could clear.
Socrates ran.
Not toward Vrath. Sideways — toward the chamber wall, toward the mounted weapons still on their brackets above the yellow covered floor. His hand found the largest stone club — the size of him, built for Asura hands — and he swung it in front of him as the violet arrived.
The club met the field.
The stone began to dissolve.
Socrates watched the dissolution traveling up the club toward his hands — the stone coming apart in slow segments, the material of it breaking down at the molecular level, the process moving toward the gauntlets at the pace of something that couldn't be stopped, only delayed.
He threw the club.
It dissolved completely before it landed.
The violet reached him.
It touched the gauntlets first — and the golden metal held for a moment, the Symbiosis armor resisting, Sun Wukong's craft doing what it was built to do — but the seventh color was the seventh color and built to end what everything else had failed to end.
The gauntlets cracked.
Then the violet found his skin.
The effect wasn't pain. It was something that pain was a subset of — a total dissolution of the boundary between what was Socrates and what was the rest of the chamber, his body's coherence becoming a question rather than a fact, every system in him receiving the same message simultaneously.
Stop.
He felt his legs go first.
Then his arms.
Then Bloodsucker leaving his grip — he didn't drop it, it simply ceased to be something he was holding, the connection between his hand and the sword becoming theoretical.
He hit the frost covered ground.
The ice was cold against his face. Real cold. The ordinary cold of the underworld that had nothing underneath it. He lay in it and felt the violet working through him and felt the blue already in his blood and the indigo already in his lungs and the accumulated weight of seven colors settling into him all at once now that his body had stopped moving.
Vrath walked toward him.
Its footsteps crossed the chamber slowly. It stopped beside him and looked down at him in the frost.
"You lasted longer than the others." It said. "The ones I've used the seventh color on." It crouched — bringing its face closer to his, the multi-toned voice dropping to something almost quiet. "Do you know what the Seven Colored Rainbow Poison does at full saturation?"
Socrates didn't answer. His mouth wasn't answering either.
"It decays." Vrath said. "From the inside. The cells themselves. Everything you are becomes everything you were — systematically, thoroughly, without exception." It stood. "It takes approximately ten minutes at full saturation. You have perhaps seven left."
It stepped back.
And then the ground beneath Socrates cracked.
Not from Vrath. Not from a technique. From the weight of what the poison was doing to his body — the cellular dissolution reaching some threshold that the frost covered ground beneath him registered as mass becoming less than mass, the ice fracturing under the changed weight distribution of a body that was in the process of ceasing to be a body.
The crack spread.
Then the floor gave way.
Socrates dropped — through the first layer of ice, through the stone beneath it, through the second layer of ice below that, the underworld's deep structure opening beneath him in layers that each gave way to the next — and the cold of the deep water rose up as the last layer broke and he hit it and went under.
The dark water closed over him.
The frost covered ceiling of the chamber was visible above the surface for a moment — Vrath's silhouette at the hole's edge, looking down, the seven colors gone from its fingertips now, its work complete.
Then the current took him.
And the surface closed.
And the underworld's deep water swallowed Socrates the Son of Trueblood into its dark and cold and absolute silence.
"HAHAHA ..." Vrath laugh out loud as he headed over to his next target ..