Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

Jeb’s blood seemed to strain in his veins as the attack came close to him, seemingly attracted to the snake through some kind of gravitational force that only affected blood.

Jeb lunged forward, diving under the projection, the skin of his back rippling with burst blood vessels. With a grunt, Jeb sent his own Myst outward, a chisel-shaped projection of force.

Jeb deliberately dragged the chisel shape through the ground roughly ten feet in front of the keegan woman.

The chisel violently kicked up sand and rocks, blasting Jeb’s opponent in the face with blinding shrapnel. She screamed, covering her eyes.

Jeb lifted the chisel back up and sent it through the area where the woman’s ankles rested.

Crack! Thud!

The woman’s legs folded at the ankle, and she hit the ground, wailing at the top of her lungs.

“Who did I just maim!?” Jeb demanded out loud.

“Lady Nevair! She’s here to kill O’sut, presumably before he can testify against her!”  Zlesk shouted back.

Jeb scanned the absolute clusterfuck. He saw plenty of well-dressed keegan servants tearing at each other like rabid animals, but he didn’t see any children.

“Where are the kids!?” Jeb demanded. The kids were the evidence, and without them, he just maimed a high-class Citizen, not a reaper.

“Ron followed them up into the castle,” Zlesk shouted, pointing, “before we got caught by Nevair!”

“Can you handle the rest?” Jeb asked, glancing between the two disabled Myst users.

Zlesk swiftly broke an arm, then glued a melas’s horns to the ground before giving Jeb a firm nod.

“Alright, I’m gonna go back up Ron and get the kids out of here!” Jeb shouted, starting for a splintered door in the inner courtyard.

“I’m coming too!” Colt shouted, bolting after him.

Jeb’s eye twitched. He would much rather have the brat in the courtyard, putting his CC to good use helping Zlesk, but the teen wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and he might as well keep him within eyeshot.

“Watch my back, kid!”

Chapter 21: The O’sut Bottleneck

Jeb charged up the stairs, heart hammering as he did. At the top of the spiral staircase, he paused long enough to look left and right, keeping an eye open for homicidal keegan.

The left hall sported several dismembered zombie limbs, still wiggling. Halfway down the hall was a room with a splintered-open door. Jeb barreled down the hall, his prosthetic foot clacking against the thin carpet until he came to a screeching halt in the doorway.

For an instant, Jeb felt as though he had once again been jettisoned out of his body, watching the event take place from a distance as the fear began to grow inside him.

In the center of the room, the ginger necromancer was bleeding out on a twin-sized bed, surrounded by mutilated zombies.

Tyler’s form overlapped Ron’s, looking at him with desperation as the metal beam slowly crushed him further.

Shit, this is it, this is where it starts over again, Jeb though, his heart and lungs seizing in his chest. The recent bad trip back at the orphanage added to and enhanced the flavor of Jeb’s suffering.

“This is real,” Jeb whispered, thumbing the scar on his palm. “This is real.”

Do you mean Ron lying there dying, or being in a living hell?

¿Por qué no los dos?

Jeb’s breathing spiked as his amygdala skipped from first gear to fifth on its own like a severely fucked-up transmission.

That’s what scar tissue in the brain feels like.

“What’s going on? Who’s this guy? The fuck are you doing?” Colt asked, pushing Jeb aside and peering into the room.

Jeb followed the irritating teen’s voice like a rope through a blizzard, tugging himself out of the blinding chaos and slowly focusing on his voice, his face. There wasn’t another person there last time. All Jeb had to do was focus on the differences and keep the fear at bay.

Sure, it sounds easy.

It wasn’t a castle, Tyler wasn’t a ginger in black robes. There’s nothing actually pinning him down.

“Thanks, kid,” Jeb said, grabbing Colt’s shoulder and hauling himself to his foot, aiming for Ron.

The necromancer was paler than usual, lying on the bed with his hands clasped over his chest, covering a deep wound that was oozing blood through his fingers. His breathing came in fits and starts as he glanced over at Jeb.

“Oh hey,” Ron said weakly. “What took you so long?”

“The duel, remember?”

“Oh yeah… Did you win?”

“Sort of,” Jeb said, checking Ron’s stab wound. “Think he got you in a lung. You probably shouldn’t be talking. You do realize you’re not vanguard material, right?”

“I thought...they were behind me,” Ron wheezed.

“Colt, c’mere,” Jeb said, motioning for the teen to approach. “Press down on that, but not too hard for him to breathe.”

For all his teenage faults, Colt was willing to get his hands dirty. The kid knelt down beside Ron and pressed down where Jeb had motioned, giving Jeb the opportunity to cut some bandages out of the necromancer’s stylish robe, using his telekinetic-scissor trick.

“Zanta…silk…” Ron groaned, seeing his robes fall apart.

“Is he gonna live?”

“Eh, people have lived through pierced lungs before. He’s got as good a shot as anyone, what with his Body being as high as it is,” Jeb said. “Heart’s here.” He tapped on Ron’s bloody chest. “Liver’s here, spine down the center. There’s some major vessels somewhere in there, but I’m not a doctor. If they’d been hit, he’d be dead already.”

“I don’t…know if…I’m gonna make it,” Ron whined.

“You better fucking make it,” Jeb growled. “Lift.”

Colt put a palm under the slender man’s shoulder and lifted him up a couple inches, to an agonized groan from Ron and a gush of blood from his back.

Wasting no time, Jeb pressed a huge wad of expensive fabric to the bloody hole, then bound the