Allen1996
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Chapter 12: Ashen Covenant
🕑 Added 2025-01-26 02:32:18 +0000 UTCThe armor bloomed into existence, its arrival less a process and more an inevitability. Black, light eating Necrodermis surged over my body like a sentient shadow, clinging to my skin, pooling at my joints before hardening into segments of impenetrable Obsidian. Plates formed with a grace that defied logic, each locking into place with a quiet finality that almost seemed to whisper Nothing can touch you now. What had felt, could have been seen as vulnerabilities, once as plentiful as sand, felt nonexistent, scrubbed clean from reality by the weight of the armor.
Behind me, I heard it—the jagged rhythm of terrified breaths. The boy’s fear was palpable, a tremor in the air as much as in his small frame. He couldn’t have been more than five years old. Too young to understand what hunted him. Too young to know how close he’d come to joining the dead or maybe he did. After all, this world was wrong and I could never forget it, I would never allow myself to do so.
Not a week ago, I’d buried a child. Their blood had stained my hands, though the Cyclops that ended them had done the killing. It hadn’t mattered that I’d avenged them; vengeance didn’t erase the image of a life snuffed out, of a child consumed, eaten alive. It wasn’t my fault, it was the one of the gods yet it still felt to me as if I had failed them.
Not this time.
This time, I would make sure that the ending would be different.
I turned toward the boy, forcing a smile that I hoped was reassuring as the armor crept upward, tendrils of Necrodermis weaving across my jaw, then my cheekbones, until it consumed my face. My voice was softer than I expected when I spoke, softer than I thought It could ever be for someone other than my niece, more a promise than a reassurance.
“Everything will be alright. Don’t worry. I’m here.” I wished I could have said those words to her.
I turned back toward the monsters.
The three hellhounds prowled forward, their movements deliberate, as if savoring the hunt. In the books, they were basic monsters, kinda like noobs or low-level when you thought about it, footnotes—a passing terror that Percy Jackson and demigods could probably dispatch like pests. The reality was much worse.
Standing on all fours, they towered at least nine feet high, and if they had been standing on their hind legs, I was sure they’d be able to brush the roofs of nearby buildings. Shadows flickered from their forms, not natural shadows cast by light but a darkness too absolute, too consuming—like Vantablack come to life. Their claws had gouged trenches into the street, deep scars carved into concrete with each step.
Their fangs weren’t the kind of teeth meant for show, for intimidation. No, these were butcher’s tools, designed to rip flesh and snap bones with cruel precision. Their growls weren’t just sounds; they were vibrations that rattled the earth beneath me, a bassline that made my own body hum with unease.
They weren’t monsters you would expect from a children’s book. They were nightmares. The kind you expect to see lurking in a Silent Hill game but in real life, the kind you tried to run away from, avoid, didn't want to fight, because what would be the point? You would lose.
And these were common, monsters that were nothing, that were at the bottom of the totem pole.
Hellhounds—basic monsters, the kind that chased demigods for sport. The kind of thing after my niece.
This was a deathworld, at least for the Greek ones. The worst things imaginable were always just a breath away. That fact alone made the stories sound more tragic than fun. Luke Castellan, the oldestGreek demigod at Camp Half-Blood, had barely made it to eighteen in the books. Greek demigods didn’t live past twenty-two if they were lucky. Add in the gods themselves, and you had a cocktail of despair. Things like that are what I could not even be mad at Luke.
This place was so fucked.
The hellhounds didn’t wait any longer. They lunged as one, the earth quaking beneath their massive paws. Their forms shimmered as they ran, their movements blurring the line between flesh and shadow, as if they existed halfway between this world and another.
They were too fast. They were the kind of fast you expected from a sports car going at full speed, not from living creatures.
They were too fast or they would have been, if not for the armor I was encased in, claded in.
The Necrodermis augmented my mind as much as it did my body, my cognition accelerating until time itself felt fractured.
I could feel my heartbeat reverberating in my chest, hear the snap of my synapses firing as the world slowed to a crawl.
Every detail sharpened—the way their claws tore into the asphalt, the ripple of their muscles beneath that unnatural black fur. At that moment, I felt a paradox bloom in my chest.
I had never felt more powerless.
I had never felt more powerful.
The thrusters beneath my feet roared to life. The ground buckled as they launched me forward, the street cracking beneath the sudden force. In less than an instant, I was there, before them the distance between us erased as if it had never existed.
My plasma blade materialized in my hand, the weapon glowing with a searing light that seemed to cut through the shadows around us. I moved in an arc, the blade slashing toward the nearest hellhound’s eye in a blur of light and heat.
The monster blinked, its reaction slow, almost human in its dawning realization. This wasn’t the mindless gaze of an animal. It was the flicker of intelligence, a sapience that made its actions—its pursuit of a child—even more unforgivable.
They were sapient, probably as clever as a man and they were still out for demigod flesh. That realization made them even more monstrous. If you were an animal just hunting for survival, that was one thing. But a beast aware enough to relish the kill? That was downright evil. I guess I should have expected nothing else from something deemed a monster by the gods, the greatest monsters themselves.
The blade cut through fur and flesh, burning a path that smelled of singed hair and sulfur. I could feel the resistance, the sheer density of the monster’s body as the blade buried itself deep.
But then the world twisted.
For a fraction of a second, everything turned black. Not the natural darkness of a shadowed alley but a primordial absence of light, an endless void that swallowed everything, even thought.
The world blurred, the world stopped making sense.
D ng er
The world itself had turned into an endless night.
I t ha d a way b en s ch
Something primal, primordial in my brain was screaming danger, danger.
AL L M T ER
W T H N G
And then it was over.
The world snapped back into focus, and I found myself staring at the sky, my body no longer where it had been a moment ago.
On the edge of my vision, I saw one of the hellhounds lunging, its claws gleaming like tarnished gold, a sickly yellow that spoke of venom or decay.
The armor’s sensors screamed warnings in my mind, flashing alerts that filled my peripheral vision. Below, the two remaining hellhounds hadn’t hesitated. They moved in unison, their massive forms bounding toward me from different angles.
Three simultaneous attacks, all designed to overwhelm.
And yet, I didn’t feel fear.
My armor wouldn’t fail. I knew it wouldn’t. Nothing short of a continent-destroying force could breach its defenses. The thought settled in my mind like an anchor, and I allowed myself a single moment of clarity.
Hellhounds could teleport through shadows.
I knew this, I knew that fact and by itself, it was something interesting, fascinating. I knew that if I had more time, I could due to the C’tan star in my mind do something similar with the space time continuum.
The thing I hadn’t expected though was whatever happened, whatever I almost glanced off, whatever happened that had almost made me go mad. Even thinking about it was giving me a headache. It was as if my brain was actively working to forget it, to lock this moment in the deeper part of my mind. I didn't know what happen even if I had ideas but one thing, I was sure, I would have to take precautions so that there would not a next time or that if there was one, whatever happened would not happen again.
I shoved the thought aside for later
Below, probably looking was a child that had almost died to those monsters and I had promised didn't I? Promise that everything will be alright and what else would be better to realize this promise than to turn those monsters into ashes.
Sometimes, the only way to vainquish a fear was to burn it all before all so that no one would think it invincible again.
This was why I tightened my grip on my plasma blade, the weapon humming using adaptive material synthesis, I began to change it, to make it more.
This thing had lasted enough. This ended now.
The plasma blade in my hand burned brighter as I willed it to transform, to become more. Adaptive Material Synthesis pulsed through me, the invisible scaffolding of my thoughts guiding every atom, every molecule. The weapon shimmered as it lengthened, its edges sharpening into something that felt alive, an extension of my will.
To create a blade capable of unleashing a supernova without destroying the world was like a dance on the edge of disaster, a dance on the edge of a cliff where each step demanded perfection because one bad one would send you falling like an angel of old.
First, I stabilized the plasma, regulating its ion density and temperature to ensure the reactions remained controlled. Without that, I’d have ignited not just the alley but the city itself. I really didn't want that and I'm sure most would not like if their city turned into Crisis city.
The next step was injecting precise bursts of energy into the blade’s core, triggering micro-fusion events. Tiny stars flickered within the plasma, their energy condensed, directed.
Magnetic and electric fields materialized around the blade, synthesized by the armor’s systems to confine the energy. The fields hummed, bending the plasma’s fury into a lethal, concentrated edge.
Finally, I reinforced the molecular structure of the blade itself, weaving bonds that could endure the unimaginable heat and pressure. The blade extended further, its length growing as Adaptive Material Synthesis manipulated the ionization process.
The weapon in my hand didn't look, could not be mistaken as something akin to a sword anymore. It was a sun, bound and leashed, its fury waiting for release.
The three hellhounds lunged again, their movements blurring into streaks of shadow and muscle. They came from all directions, each one a storm of claws and teeth, death given form.
The world slowed.
Every growl, every scrape of their claws against the asphalt, every flicker of their too-dark fur was a beat in the symphony of violence. My thoughts moved faster than the monsters could blink, calculations and trajectories flooding my mind.
The first hellhound was mid-air, its jaws snapping open as it leapt toward me. I swung the blade, the plasma’s heat distorting the air around it. Shadows burned away, replaced by searing light as the blade cleaved through the monster’s torso.
Fur, flesh, sinew—it all yielded to the blade’s edge, disintegrating into ash. The hellhound didn’t even have time to scream. The force of the strike scattered its remains like dust caught in a gale.
The second hellhound was on me before the first had fully vanished, Its claws extended to surely try to rake toward my side not that it would have done anything. The armor probably would have absorbed the impact without so much as a scratch. I continued my strike spinning, arcs of plasma following in a veil of destruction, the weapon moving in a sweeping strike, what had once been a plasma blade burning, devouring through the monster’s head, the light from the weapon consuming the shadows it had once worn, leaving nothing but embers behind.
The third hellhound was smarter—or at least craftier. It didn’t lunge immediately, instead circling, its glowing red eyes locked onto me. Its growl was low, almost a vibration in my bones, as it prepared to pounce. Maybe it would have been the good thing, the wise thing if I had not made sure to reshape the weapon with the Adaptive material synthesis star in the back of my mind. Maybe it would have been a good thing if I had been hesitant, patient, ready to wait and not completely done with this bullshit.
I didn’t wait.
The plasma weapon arced upward, its heat carving through the air as it met the hellhound mid-leap.
The strike was over before it began.
The blade passed through the monster, leaving no flesh, no bone—only ashes that scattered in the wind. The light of the weapon burned away even the golden dust that should have remained, leaving no trace of the creature’s existence.
I landed softly, the armor absorbing the impact as I touched down. My feet met the ground with a whisper of sound, the energy of the thrusters dissipating into the stillness of the alley.
For a moment, the world was silent.
The plasma weapon flickered, its glow dimming as I deactivated it. The armour retracted, flowing back into the original shape I had given it, still present but in a less upfront manner.
Ashes fell around me, drifting like snow in the fading light of dusk. The golden hour bathed the alley in a warm glow, the ashes catching the light as they swirled in the air. It was surreal, beautiful in a way that felt almost cruel.
I turned to the boy.
He stood frozen, his green eyes wide as they stared at me. His face was a mixture of awe and disbelief, his small hands clutching the edges of his shirt as if to ground himself.
“Are you okay?” I asked, my voice softer now, free of the edge it had carried during the fight.
The boy nodded, the motion jerky, mechanical. He didn’t say anything, just stared at me as if I were something out of a storybook.
“That’s good,” I said, exhaling slowly as I rose to my feet. “That’s really good.”
He couldn’t have been older than 5, and the uniform he wore—clean but dishevelled—told me he was from one of the city’s private schools. A kid who should’ve been worrying about math homework, not monsters.
I knelt down to his level, offering him a small smile. “Probably not how you thought your day was gonna go, huh?”
The boy blinked, then shook his head. His lips parted as if to speak, but no words came out.
“It’s okay,” I said gently. “You’re safe now.”
I glanced back at the boy, his wide-eyed expression still fixed on me. For a moment, I saw something in his gaze—something I hadn’t seen in a long time.
Hope.
He was looking at me as if I wasn’t just some stranger who’d saved his life as if I was something more. A hero, maybe. Someone who’d done the right thing when it mattered most.
And for the first time in a long while, I felt joy and hope, joy and hope because I finally felt as if what I was doing was worthwhile and hope because one day, I hoped that it would be Thalia at the place of the boy, Thalia back with me, safe and joyful, all that I yearned for.
The ashes continued to fall, catching the light like golden snow.
I extended a hand toward the child that looked at it with way more suspicions a child should ever have before he took it.
“Let's go find your parent,” I told him as we began to walk out of the alley. It should not be hard hopefully.
I gave him a smile I hoped appeared harmless
“Before I forgot, I didn't present myself. My name is Alexander Chambers but you can call me Alex. What's your name?”
“…Alabaster, Alabaster Torrington.”
Shit.
Comments
Artman
He is what his experience makes him. Change that and you change him.
Anthony Maxwell
I am iron Man.
jaiman vatcher
Nice chapter
