Thresholder

Jeff nearly ended the fight with a single punch. He powered forward, glowing golden, and at the last moment, twisted his body around to leverage the full force of power, moving forward and spinning around. The hit was brutal, denting the metal of Perry’s helmet, but March, as always, had thought to lock the armor in place, which left them spinning through the air and minimized the chance of concussion.

Perry righted himself and then let the sword stop holding him up, which sent him plummeting toward the ground. Jeff was faster though, and after a chance to reorient himself, dashed downward, catching up quickly. Perry had done his best to twist around, and brought up his sword to intercept. In theory, he had the advantage of reach.

Jeff grabbed the sword with one hand and pushed it aside. He had cut open the palm of his left hand, but he seemed not to mind, and with the opening, punched Perry again, this time in the center of his chest. It was a weaker strike, the force more spread out, but the metal of the armor shifted, and Perry felt his heart leap.

They were falling down, and March was monitoring the distance on the HUD. A yellow alert popped up, telling Perry that it was time to start thinking about pulling up.

When Jeff came in for another attack, this time he was aiming for a squeeze. Perry had wound up with broken ribs last time, fixed only with a transformation, and he didn’t think that he would come away so lucky this time. Jeff batted the sword away again, taking a deep cut to the forearm from a sword that could easily slice through a normal man’s bones. He wrapped his arms around Perry, screaming in pain from his wounds and his red flesh pressing against the armor, but hugging tight all the same.

Perry was ready this time though, and had studied the footage. He positioned his sword to point just below Jeff’s last rib and pushed in hard, straining to use his entire bodyweight, and felt the flesh slowly give until the sword had pierced it. One inch slipped in, then another, and Perry felt the metal at his armor’s midsection give way. It was a question of which of them would surrender first, a deranged game of chicken as they plummeted to the ground, but Perry was pinned and couldn’t have slipped the grip if he wanted to.

The warning on the HUD had changed from yellow to orange, and now was red, not ‘hey, pull up now or you’ll crash into the ground’ but ‘you are going to crash, it’s just a matter of how bad it hurts’.

Perry released the sword and took a different tactic, making a split second decision. He pulled a long needle from a compartment in the armor’s forearm and jammed it right into Jeff’s ear, using his left hand as a hammer to push it in deeper.

Jeff released his grip, shoving Perry away, and the sudden absence of pressure made Perry fully aware of just how badly the squeeze had injured him. He almost passed out as the fluids began shifting around, the broken ribs grinding against each other with an intake of breath. It took him a full second to realize that he was still falling. He recalled his sword to him and had it reverse his direction, but he hit the ground before it could do much good.

His body broke on contact with the ground. The armor buckled, cracking and bending in places, and he might have died if he hadn’t been pushing all his internal power into keeping himself together. The moment he was on the ground, smashed and broken, he transformed.

Two years had given him time to test the new form, its quirks and advantages. He was stronger with it, more capable, better able to control his impulses and understand his limits. Jeff had seen the battles, and probably most of the training, but this was the best tool that Perry possessed.

The transformation was still an ugly thing, like slamming his body against a wall of metal in all directions at once, painful in places and awkward in others, but it was fast and familiar. His teeth were metal, his claws alloy, the reactor burning away in his chest, feeding into the Wolf Vessel, energy soaking his body, metal and flesh entwined with each other. He was faster, stronger, even in the twilight with no moon overhead, and his prey was close by, the scent of blood already in the air.

Jeff landed on the ground, radiated body looking worse for the wear. His eyes had gotten worse, and where the two men had rubbed up against each other, some of the skin had sloughed off. He was bleeding from his left hand, which he’d used to grab the sword, and from a deep cut that must have gone to bone when the sword had struck his arm. He shook it, spattering blood onto the ground, and gave the wounds an appraising look. The pin was still stuck in the side of his head, and he extracted it with a grimace, looking at it like a baker might look at a toothpick pulled from a cake. He tossed it to the side with a careless gesture.

“There he is,” said Jeff, looking at the wolf. “He’s come out to play.”

The metal wolf sprang forward, launching himself with all four limbs. His mouth was open, willing to bite down hard on any limb that presented itself, and Jeff reared back for a haymaker even as Perry was still in the air. Jeff had misjudged the mechawolf’s speed though, and Perry arrived before the fist could reach him. Claws sank into Jeff’s chest, though not as deep as they should have gone, and the teeth found purchase on Jeff’s face for just a moment before the punch came in.

Perry was tossed, the injury rippling through him, damaged servos and a broken exterior camera, but not major damage, and the injuries faded right away, healed back as though it had never happened, the internal alarms quelled. He landed on his feet, motions deft, and launched himself forward a second time with no hesitation.

Jeff’s red face was leaking blood, and a piece of his lip was missing. The claws had sunk in, but hadn’t eviscerated in the way they should have. It was like scratching a tree, the claws peeling back bark but not driving down to the core.

The second attack went less well than the first. Jeff bent down and rushed toward it, getting up under the open jaws, taking the claws to his chest again. He spun around and slammed Perry into the ground, though Perry was the larger of the two now. Frantic, scrabbling claws were slicing into Jeff’s chest and legs, but Jeff had a hold, and that hold was strong enough to hurt. With one hand gripping Perry’s thick neck, the other arm was punching Perry’s muzzle, over and over, more damage with every strike, as though he was getting more powerful with each hit he landed. The claws were doing damage, but not enough, and the meat within the metal was being bruised by each strike to the head.

Perry was no dumb animal though, and he twisted around within the hold, pushing backward with immense force. Jeff lost his grip and fell to the ground, and when he did, Perry’s jaws snapped. The taste of blood was instant.

Jeff was bleeding badly, mostly from the claws. While the claws hadn’t gone in deep, they had left hundreds of gouges all over Jeff’s body. He was missing three fingers on his right hand, which were still in Perry’s mouth. Perry spat them into the radioactive dirt as fiery dust from the explosion swirled around them.

“You fucker,” said Jeff, slurring the words slightly. He rose from the ground, glowing golden, rising up, framed by the mushroom cloud above them. They weren’t far from ground zero. “Didn’t want to have to do this.”

It started with a howl that came from deep within his chest, blood dripping down to the ground, but as the howl went on, Jeff grew taller, stretching from his waist like a jack-in-the-box, his midsection gaining more abs, six pack becoming a twenty-four pack as he wiggled and grew into the air. Eventually he was mostly torso, the wounds also stretched out, and then he began to transform, feet curling into claws, knuckles of his fists shifting and spreading. His hair grew back, gold with streaks of white, curling and clean, and the red and white skin was replaced by shimmering scales of a purer white.

When the transformation was complete, he was three hundred feet long, a sinuous dragon like a giant flying snake, legs seeming miniscule in comparison, vestigial almost. His mouth was large enough to swallow Perry whole, head oversized in comparison to the body. The wounds weren’t gone, but they were diminished, the slashes from the claws seeming miniscule.

In places, the scales were damaged, red and raw in the same radiation-burned way. He had not been healed like Perry was healed, had not become whole in the process of becoming different. The howl had not stopped since it started, but it had changed to something like the sound of a horn, low and vibrating. Jeff flew through the air like a snake, body winding back and forth, claws moving fruitlessly. He made a wide, lazy circle, far above, then positioned himself pointed toward Perry, down on the ground.

Perry watched all this, minds racing. He called the sword to him, and it floated from where it had landed until the hilt was positioned in front of him. He gripped it in his teeth gently and flew up in the air to meet the dragon.

Two years was a very long time. It was long enough that Perry had put work into this sort of thing, flying as a wolf, just in case it came in handy. The sword offered relatively slow flight, especially for the wolf, which was more massive, but there were tricks to use, namely harnessing the power of gravity. Dropping was fast, and as the jaws of the dragon came near, that was exactly what Perry did, moving out of their path. Once he was clear of them, the two creatures beginning to pass by each other, Perry went back up, sword turned to point skyward, and scored a long slice along the belly of the snake-like dragon.

When Jeff came back around, he was dripping blood and heaving. His lip was still damaged, even with the transformation, a ragged bit that was missing, and he snarled in pain.

Perry tried the trick again, dodging downward, but this time the dragon was ready for it. When Perry fell, the dragon dipped his head and glowed golden, a burst of unnatural speed beyond the whipping swiftness that it had shown before. It bit the metal wolf on the shoulder, long teeth sliding across metal before finding purchase and crunching down. The bite passed through the metal and into the flesh, but the teeth didn’t meet each other, stopped by the alloy. The dragon kept on flying, dragging Perry through the air. It shook its head back and forth, trying to snap Perry’s neck or just cause more damage, but the only casualty was the sword, which slipped free from Perry’s jaws.

Perry poured energy from the Wolf Vessel into his body, healing even as the teeth were still penetrating him. The metal was closing up around the teeth, trapping them both in that position, and the ongoing howl, which had not stopped, was vibrating through Perry’s whole body.

Jeff brought them to the ground, serpentine motion through the air ending ungracefully as his claws came to rest in the earth. Once they did, he began slamming his head against the ground, crushing Perry each time, the motion becoming more exaggerated, rearing up to a full half his length. Each hit was a shock to the system, things torn and broken, but while Perry was being slammed, he was able to curl his hind legs in and begin scratching away at the mouth that was holding him, rending the lips and scales.

Eventually, Jeff shook him free, teeth dislodging from the shoulder, and spat Perry down to the ground. The dragon’s face was more injured than Perry would have imagined, and one of the dragon’s eyes had been gouged open, the fluid emptied and the eye sack collapsed.

The dragon’s howl stopped. The wolf healed back from the damage as the dragon looked around, searching for something. The Wolf Vessel was almost half empty, but between the two of them, it was clear that the wolf had better healing.

When the dragon found what it was looking for, it surged forward, whipping across the ground, no longer bothering to fly. It was heading back to where their battle had begun, moving fast, and Perry could only think to move faster, racing across the planet’s surface. Whatever it was that Jeff had been looking for, Perry wasn’t going to let him have it.

The dragon’s size made it slow and unwieldy, at least compared to the human he had been, and the wolf’s four legs were built for speed, especially bursts of energy. The second sphere focused power into them, granting traction and an extra burst of force. The wolf reached the site just before, and Perry had a split second to figure out the reason Jeff had moved in that direction. He saw blood, both of theirs, smeared and dripped all over the place, but he spotted what Jeff must be going for only a split second before the dragon actually arrived.

Three fingers were laying on the ground, and the wolf gobbled them up just before the dragon came for them. They clashed, and Perry was momentarily in the air, staring down teeth that were coming up for him, jaw opened wide.

Perry dove down at them, making his body as small as possible. Whether Jeff had meant to or not, he’d told Perry exactly how he’d defeated the dragon in the first place, and with a push of force — pure force, reacting against nothing — Perry slipped between the teeth and into the mouth, tail barely clearing the snap of teeth.

He burrowed into the mouth, pushing his snout down the throat. It was only barely large enough for him, and the muscles were working against him as the dragon tried to hack him up, but he dug his claws in and began rending the soft flesh of the tongue and esophagus. He got in deeper, clawing as much as he could, and he’d have drowned in blood if he still needed to breathe. The slick blood helped him get in further, against the action of the throat. That had to be an artery somewhere, something that carried blood to the brain, and Perry clawed desperately at the flesh, trying to slice through something vital.

The dragon coughed, and from the inside it felt like a momentary death grip. The second cough broke his spine, which mended only slowly, and the third cough was enough to dislodge him in spite of the claws of all four legs sunk in as deep as they would go.

Perry was spat out onto the ground, legs no longer working, but the healing factor was strong, and he was aware of himself after a moment, shaking off the blood and spit that coated him as his legs dragged limply behind him.

When he looked around, the dragon was nowhere near, and it took a moment to see it slithering through the air, already half a mile away.

Perry felt the need to howl in frustration, but the calculations had already been done: even running overland, Perry couldn’t catch up, not without draining the Wolf Vessel in the process, and it had done so much healing in such a short time, all in daylight, that there was no way he’d be able to continue the fight. Two years ago, he might not have made that decision, might not have been able to make that decision, but the wolf was more tame now than it had ever been.

The spine healed only slowly, the break severe, delicate nerves having been severed in an instant. It took time, maybe a full minute, for the wolf to get back to his feet. The dragon was long gone, but not in the direction of the Natrix, nor the Crypt, only into the wilds.

The wolf sniffed the air, just to double check what all the sensors and cameras had confirmed. The dragon was gone.

It spat the fingers from its mouth, three of them. They looked pale and insignificant on the ground.

Changing back was always an ordeal, painful and unnatural, like peeling off a scab that wasn’t quite ready to go. Perry always felt it in his face most of all, and was perpetually surprised that the helmet was able to display video after having merged into his wolf flesh, erasing the separation between the two of them.

“March, we good?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I appear to have suffered a significant error when we hit the ground.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Perry. No amount of effort had been able to make Marchand understand what was happening, not even framing it as science fiction beyond either of their understanding. “Send a message to the Natrix, to the Heimalis, to the Kjärni. Let them know that I wasn’t able to seal the deal. Let them know that if they see a giant white and gold dragon on the horizon, they should shoot to kill.” He shook his head. “Fuck.” He could still taste blood in his mouth. He bent down and picked up the three fingers. “Run analysis on these.”

“They appear to be human fingers,” said Marchand.

“Anything special about them?” asked Perry, turning them over in his hands. His heart was still beating hard in his chest. They would need to leave, and soon, given that they were standing very close to ground zero. He held out his hand and let the sword come to him, and as soon as it was in his hand, he rose into the air, flying away to where the promena had been parked. The fingers stayed clutched in his hand.

“Sir, it appears there’s some aberration in the middle finger,” said Marchand. “I would say that it’s a bump in the bone, but it appears to be something else, an implant of some kind, though … I cannot say for certain, but perhaps a wooden ring that wraps the bone rather than the flesh.”

Perry let out a long breath. He had an urge to remove his helmet and take off the suit, but there was a good chance that Jeff would attack, either starting another round of combat or attacking one of Perry’s allies in retaliation. It was hard to know which Jeff would prefer, and of course Perry had been completely in the dark about the dragon transformation. Jeff had said that he didn’t want to do it, but hadn’t said why, and Perry was hoping that it came with some kind of major crippling downside.

“We need to do decontamination,” said Perry. “Find us a lake to dip down into.”

“Sir, I must recommend against that, as radioactive fallout would contaminate the lake,” said Marchand.

“No one is going to use any body of water here for at least a hundred years,” said Perry. “All the ground we contaminated is going to be baked in the sun for sixty years. It’ll be fine.”

“The winds blow to the west, sir,” said Marchand. “There will be a significant spread of material.”

“Spread is good though, you had said,” replied Perry. “We’re watering it down.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. It really felt like that shouldn’t have been the end of the conversation, but Marchand didn’t push it all that much.

The bomb had been pretty low yield, at least by Earth standards. It had surely killed a lot of wildlife and wrecked a sizeable location, but the day side was going to wreck it anyway, and as far as the people went, there was nothing but space, so much wide open land that a hundred Natrixes could have marched across the surface and never so much as interacted with each other.

Perry would have felt a lot better about using the bomb if it had actually killed Jeff. There was a chance that a lethal dose of radiation would get him, but Perry didn’t think that luck was on his side. Whatever healing Jeff had used to recover from the gunshot that had nearly blown him apart, it hadn’t worked very well on radiation. Perry hoped that next time they fought, Jeff would be full of tumors.

A brief dip in the lake removed a lot of the fallout, and then a second dip in a second lake removed the rest, at least so far as Marchand’s ability to detect radiation went. Marchand was warning of a higher rate of cancer over the next few decades, and so far as Perry was concerned, that was the distant future, nothing worth worrying about and probably something that being second sphere would fix.

There had been no word from anyone, just confirmation that they’d received the warning. Hopefully Jeff was ineffectually licking his wounds somewhere.

Perry looked at the fingers more closely once he was far away from the blast site. The middle finger, or at least the longest of the three, had a bulge in the first knuckle. Jeff had thick fingers, so it was hard to notice, but if Perry felt it carefully, it was clear that something was wrong with it. It was the kind of thing he’d chalk up to a broken bone that had been set wrong or was still healing, if Marchand hadn’t done the sonic analysis thing.

“A bauble,” said Perry, turning the finger over.

It took some work to dig the ring out from under the flesh, and then more work to get it off the bone. It wasn’t fused with the bone, thankfully, but Perry needed to use his sword to cut off the knob at the end of the bone so it could slip free. It was small and unassuming, but Marchand assured him after a scratch test that it was nearly indestructible.

“If it were me,” said Perry. “This would be a trap.”

“How would that be possible, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Unclear,” said Perry.

He took off the power armor’s glove and held the ring up to his own middle finger. It twisted and turned in his grip, then resized itself to fit Perry.

“Just like the One Ring,” said Perry, letting out a breath. “We mustn’ts.”

“Sir?” asked Marchand.

“We wants it,” said Perry. “We needs it.” He was feeling strangely good, in spite of the brutality of the fight and the danger. He was whole, and Jeff was clearly not. He’d lost the advantage of the nuke, but Jeff had run away, and that was something.

He slipped the ring on his finger, and at first, nothing happened. Then, with a wave of his hand, a row of shelves opened up in front of him.

“Fuck yeah,” said Perry.

The room wasn’t difficult to step into, and once Perry did, the world closed behind him. The error messages immediately began lighting up, nothing more than a yellow warning signal in Perry’s peripheral vision that incremented rapidly. It was going to take some time to figure out how the ring worked, and even more time to use it as smoothly as Jeff had, but it very much appeared as though Perry had successfully stolen an immensely powerful artifact. Looking at the shelves, he’d stolen not just one, but potentially dozens.

“Now here’s where I would put a trap,” said Perry, mostly to himself. After a second’s thought, he added, “Marchand, scan for traps.”

“Scanning, sir,” said Marchand.

The space was larger than Perry had thought it would be. From the few frames of video he had, the shelfspace had seemed as though it was only two or three shelves, but there were shelves behind the shelves, and things stacked up haphazardly away from what appeared to be the entryway. If it had been an apartment, it would have been beyond a grad student’s means, but most of the space wasn’t being put to any particular use. A row of what would only be potions sat very close to where Perry had come in, but there were only seven of them, a paltry haul, and they weren’t labeled. Nothing was labeled, which was going to be a problem, especially since Marchand’s scans wouldn’t have anything to say about magic, and Jeff had mentioned during pillow talk that one of the witches had made something intended to kill him — there was a good chance at least one of the weapons on the racks was a cursed magic item.

“Sir, I’ve detected shallow breathing,” said Marchand.

“Show me,” said Perry, which didn’t need to be said, because a marker was already on his HUD.

He went to the marker, making his way down the different shelves. There was all kinds of crap collected here, including a full row of various paintings, probably raided from some museum on another world. There were plenty of clothes, ironically, because Jeff had spent his whole time on Esperide shirtless. And there were foodstuffs in tins and jars, anything that could be preserved, along with lights on the ceiling that definitely weren’t LED or incandescent. Perry had lots of questions about the place, the power, his power he was already thinking of it as, but his focus was on the back corner of the storeroom, where he could now hear the breathing that March had pointed out.

Perry moved past some cookware and found himself standing in front of a woman. She was chained to the wall, and everything even remotely in reach of her had been removed. The chain was hooked into the wall, which was made of stone, and it glowed softly, like the stars that Perry’s had on the ceiling of his bedroom when he was a kid. The manacle was around her left leg, and there were scars and scabs there, some from the chafing and others from abortive attempts at removing it.

She had been slumped up against the wall when he rounded the corner, and didn’t react to this footsteps, but after he stood there, staring at her, she raised her head.

She had dark brown hair and was thin in a way that was on the edge of looking unhealthy. She wore a simple shift, which was clean, and held a fork in one hand, clearly one of the causes of the scars around her manacled leg. There were dark circles under her eyes, and a dour expression on her face.

Her eyes went wide when she saw Perry, and her first reaction was telling, trying to see whether there was someone behind him. He was still in his full armor, sword held in one hand, and imposing, but she wasn’t concerned with that.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Peregrin,” said Perry. “I’m here to help.”