Page 128 of Godslayer
All I care about are the monks and what it felt like to…take. Those threads of spark. It was like… like I was being augmented. The first time, the second time, the third time.
But…better.
I can’t explain it. It’s like… a drug. Like living in the God’s Tower in Tau City as an addict. But livin’ there never feltthisgood.
Below me, the cage maze stretches down, down, down. Layers of twisted metal and brutalized bodies.
Did I do that?
Did I kill them all?
A laugh comes out of me.
Sharp, loud, disturbin’.
I want to leave here. Go back to the monks. Grab a little more of that thread.
But it’s gone. This world has my full attention. The roarin’ crowd makes the steel bars of the cage rattle like a living thing. Like it’s got a heartbeat.
Not all the fighters are dead, though. There’s three left. Just one level below me.
They don’t move.
They’re watchin’.
Waitin’.
They are augments, but the eyes are all wrong. One has yellow, one has green, one has red. All wrong. That’s what Epsilon is doin’ here. He’s using these men to make… what?
An army?
Can’t be.
These fuckers are weak. They are no match for me. Myra, all five-foot-two of her, could take these abominations out.
These three just below me, they’re not like the others. They’ve got rage, no hunger. Their chests rise and fall, their glowing eyes flicker in the floodlights, but their feet don’t move.
They don’t want to fight.
But then?—
BOOM.
A blast of static rips through the arena speakers.
Epsilon’s voice follows. Loud. Amused. Dragged into a deep, distorted growl by the speakers stacked high at the far end of the amphitheater. His face fills the giant screen. Massive. Unnatural. A grinning god of metal and scar tissue.
“Finish him.”
The words don’t just echo. They press.
Rise a god!Rise a god!Rise a god!
The augments below flinch. Their bodies jerk, muscles spasming, like puppets whose strings have just been yanked. One stumbles forward, his arms twitchin’ as they grab the bars, tryin’ not to fall.
It’s alongway down.
Another gasps—a dry, choking sound—before he lurches a step toward me.
