The severed root came writhing toward Zihark in a deeply unnatural way. Then, the moment it reached him, he released his control and it abruptly went still.
Purple Void light shone from the cut ends of the root, as if both sides opened into empty space.
Kai'Sa's voidskin had many glowing slits like that, mostly around her ribs. The same structure appeared when the armor plates along the outside of her thighs opened up, like little gateways into another dimension.
But Zihark had already checked. Those were not portals at all. They were exposed strands of Void energy, woven together into something like tendons.
Their main purpose was heat dissipation. Kai'Sa generated a huge amount of heat whenever she ran at high speed.
It was just that the light of the Void distorted the eye. When those purple strands gathered together, they created the illusion of infinite depth, layer upon layer, as though one were staring into a bottomless abyss.
For a while, Zihark had even been misled himself. He had thought Kai'Sa's body inside the voidskin might already have been completely assimilated into pure energy.
There was also the purple energy crystal protruding between her two shoulder pods. Even now, Zihark still had no idea what it was for. He only knew it was not something analogous to a heart.
As for Zihark himself, because his hardened armor fully covered him, there was almost no light leaking out anywhere.
The only exception was his left eye. On his helmet, it was not a narrow slit like the other one, but a circular crater, like the mark of a meteor strike, with cracks radiating outward across half his face.
Zihark waited a while. When the root still showed no sign of moving, he decided to push the test one step further.
"If it's just a small piece, it should be safe enough."
He said that mostly for Kai'Sa's benefit. Holding one arm across her to keep her back, he slowly crouched down and reached out to touch the severed root.
The moment his hand made contact, the dead-looking root came alive and wrapped around his arm with terrifying speed. Purple fluid sprayed from both cut ends, splashing onto their voidskin and being absorbed instantly.
The root coiled tighter and tighter like a python. Thanks to the armor, Zihark was not injured. It was just incredibly strong and flexible. Even with his monstrous strength, he could not rip it off in one go.
Well, not without ruining it.
The pale outer skin prevented his voidskin from devouring it, and likewise the root could not devour Zihark through his armor.
After a moment's thought, Zihark made a bone spike erupt from his other hand and drove it deep into the root, piercing it clean through. Then he began to devour it.
The sensation was revolting.
It was like imagining an assassin bug plunging its needle-like mouthpart into the plump, juicy body of a fat white maggot and sucking it dry, until nothing was left but a shriveled husk.
The root wrapped around his arm was drained through the bone spike, and the nauseating feeling gradually faded. Its outer skin hardened and turned brittle. A light tap was enough to shatter it into crumbs.
Zihark had originally thought that after absorbing this piece of root, he might be able to grow tendrils or something similar. But the voidskin failed to extract any new biological structure from it. All it got was pure nourishment.
And even that was disappointing. It looked like a lot, but once refined into usable energy, it was not much at all. The heart was the essence of a Void creature, its true energy core. A void scar had nothing like that.
It felt like water-injected meat.
"These void scars are like touch-me-nots," Zihark said in a low voice as he stood back up. "Touch them and they shrink, but there's nothing shy about them."
Kai'Sa had never seen a touch-me-not before, but she immediately understood the general idea. The comparison was vivid enough.
"So... are we still going up?" she asked.
"Of course. If we're lucky, we might even catch the sunset." Zihark himself did not feel any deep attachment to the surface. He just did not want Kai'Sa to miss out.
The last encounter had left a wound in her heart. The voidskin could not heal that. She needed something else.
"But... it's dangerous." She was worried. Those roots were violent enough that she could already picture them tearing everything apart.
"If you want to go, just nod. I'll handle the rest." Zihark thumped his chest with one hand, his fist striking the armor with a heavy sound that echoed through the shaft.
Darkness kept eating away at the light, and the shaft grew dimmer and dimmer. Pale roots occasionally leaked fluid that glimmered with a faint purple glow.
Kai'Sa was, in the end, still a girl who longed for the light. Living in darkness had only ever been a necessity. She lifted her eyes toward the desert sky above, then nodded.
"Helmet down," Zihark said.
At the same time, he controlled one enormous root to drop from the shaft wall and hang down in front of them.
The two of them lowered their helmets, and then he added, "What comes next might get a little intense."
"What exactly are you trying to do...?" Kai'Sa's mouth twitched beneath the helmet. She could already feel something terrible coming.
"Controlling a void scar from a distance isn't much of a problem. But the moment it makes physical contact, it starts resisting violently. In that state, I can only control it for a very, very short time. A few seconds. Maybe just an instant. So whatever happens, hold on to me as hard as you can."
A void scar had only a weak consciousness, so it did not resist mental control much. But it was extremely sensitive to direct contact. Dangerous to touch even if safe enough to look at.
"I won't let go even if I die!" Kai'Sa had already guessed what was coming. She really was afraid, but she was just as excited. She wrapped both arms around Zihark's solid waist, her fingertips digging into the seams of his armor.
Under the helmet, Zihark's face was tight with tension, but he still forced himself to sound calm as he began counting down.
"Three!"
"Two..."
Before he could say one, the massive root lunged forward and wrapped itself around both their waists.
A tremendous pulling force yanked at them, so violent it felt as though their waists might snap in half even through the armor. The world blurred, the scenery stretching and warping into smears.
It lasted only an instant. Then the pulling force vanished, replaced immediately by the sickening emptiness of weightlessness.
The two of them were like kites with cut strings. Their feet found no ground, and only clinging to each other kept them from feeling as though they were falling apart.
Kai'Sa's eyes went wide. For the first time in her life, she was seeing the sun from this close, and she forgot even her instinct to scream.
Zihark, meanwhile, saw the earth more than a hundred meters below them, with nothing between it and them but air.
In the space of an instant, they had gone from dozens of meters underground to more than a hundred meters above the surface.
That was... probably, maybe, possibly too high.
The two of them were now demonstrating projectile motion with their lives.
And they had just passed the highest point.
Now they were falling.
A blazing terror seized Zihark's heart, clamping the air from his lungs like a blacksmith's vise.
People said fear was the strongest emotion a human could feel. Driven by that instinct to survive, Zihark dragged back out the wing plan he had already discarded, and made it real.
Without caring about energy efficiency, the wings exploded outward in the rushing air. In the blink of an eye, they had grown vast enough to blot out the sky.
Zihark spread them as wide as he could, feeling the lift pushing up beneath them.
Their falling speed began to slow.
But not enough to let them land safely.
He dared not flap. One wrong motion might ruin their fragile balance. Kai'Sa seemed to understand that too. She stayed completely still.
Fifty meters.
He forced his upper body upward, shifting his center of gravity and turning their straight plunge into a dive.
Thirty meters.
The angled dive became a glide.
Fifteen meters.
The ground suddenly rushed up in his vision. With one final powerful beat of his wings, Zihark wrenched them around and switched positions with Kai'Sa, then sent them crashing sideways into an unnamed sand dune, throwing up a vast curtain of sand.
[End of chapter]