Chapter 77: Embers

Chapter 77: Embers

The purple energy from the god-making ritual had completely faded.

The purple mist that had been swirling under the dome for so long was gone too. All that remained was a small patch of gray-blue daylight filtering in from the direction of the crater.

Cole pushed himself up with his battle blade and limped toward the altar exit.

The passage leading out of the altar had half-collapsed. Rubble from the ceiling had blocked most of the corridor, leaving a gap barely two feet wide.

Cole squeezed through.

Three Pikas crawled out of the lava.

They looked like corpses contaminated by chaos energy.

When the volcano erupted, chaos energy had seeped into the underground rock layers and turned the Pikas that had died in the crevices into chaos creatures.

Their fur had been burned away completely. Their skin was charred black and covered in cracks. Their front teeth jutted out past their lips, dripping molten lava from the tips.

They lunged at Cole from three directions at once.

Cole had no strength left to summon the golden battle blade.

The moment the first Pika leaped at him, he twisted sideways to dodge its teeth, reversed his left hand into a fist, and drove it hard into the creature's eye.

The Pika let out a piercing shriek and tumbled into the lava.

The second and third hit him at the same time.

He had no time to turn around. Both Pikas bit into his calves from either side and knocked him flat on the ground.

Then—

A flash of steel.

The lead Pika was split in two.

Marcus came charging in with his one arm raised, bringing the blade down into the second Pika's neck.

The edge cut through the spine. The Pika's head lolled to one side, its body still twitching.

He spun and drove the blade into the third Pika's spine.

Then Marcus dropped to one knee beside Cole and reached out his hand. "Alpha—we leave together."

Cole looked at him for a moment, then gave a tired nod.

Marcus switched the blade to his left hand and grabbed Cole's arm with his right, pulling it over his own shoulder.

The stump where his arm had been severed had closed over, but the nerve endings still fired with sharp bursts of pain every now and then.

He gritted his teeth, hauled Cole off the ground, and started moving toward the corridor exit with Cole's full weight on him.

They crawled up through the ventilation duct together.

It was the backup evacuation route marked in the infiltration plan—a passage running from the altar's core chamber all the way to a drainage pipe on the outside of the fortress, nearly thirteen hundred feet in total.

The duct was narrow, just wide enough for one person to crawl through. Marcus led the way, Cole right behind him.

They were almost at the exit when the top of the duct suddenly gave way. A boulder over six feet across dropped from above and sealed off the path behind them.

Massive chunks of basalt were breaking loose from above the exit, slowly closing it off.

But just then, two wolf warriors came pushing in against the falling debris from the direction of the exit.

They were the rear guard Marcus had brought. He'd posted them at the duct exit to keep watch, and when they saw the duct starting to collapse, they pushed inward. "Alpha! The exit's almost sealed! You have to move now!"

Both warriors pulled the pins on their grenades. The blasts went off behind the boulders, and the shockwave blew open a brief gap in the collapsing rock while shaking loose a path through the debris above the exit.

Marcus dragged Cole into the gap and forced their way through the crumbling duct exit.

The assault boat waiting outside was already running. The driver saw the two of them roll out of the duct opening and immediately swung the wheel hard, pulling the boat right up to the drainage outlet.

They jumped aboard. The hull dipped sharply under their weight.

Once the two wolf warriors were on as well, the driver floored the throttle, and the boat shot out across a sea thick with floating ice.

Cole collapsed onto the rear seat.

Marcus pressed his one hand against the wound on Cole's left chest. The bleeding had nearly stopped—because there was almost no blood left.

Cole's lips had gone white. His skin was ashen. But his eyes were still open, and he was still conscious.

He turned his head and looked back at the volcano receding behind them.

The entire Crow's Nest crater had been swallowed by lava and black smoke.

The rim was collapsing. The iron fortress that had stood over the dead crater—the Crow's Nest that Odin had spent more than twenty years building—was sinking piece by piece into the glowing lava below.

The core conspiracy of The Volchatnik, twenty-two years in the making, was going down with it.

Cole reached into the inner pocket of his tactical vest and found the wolf-fang amulet.

It still held his body heat. The aged patina on the fang's surface had been soaked through with blood.

He wiped the blood away with his thumb.

Cole closed his hand around the fang and shut his eyes.

It's over.

Odin was dead. The Wolf God's corruption had been purged. The god-making ritual had been stopped for good.

Though the faint trace of chaos still lingering in the air—it felt like something older, something far larger—stirred slightly, deep beneath the ice of the far north.

But Cole was too exhausted to tell whether it was a hallucination or a premonition.

He pressed the wolf-fang amulet against his chest, over the spot where his core crystal still beat faintly, and closed his eyes.

The assault boat kept moving through the ice-strewn sea. Behind them, the volcano continued to erupt, its black column of smoke rising straight up into the gray-blue Arctic sky.

……

The boat threaded through the floating ice for over an hour. When Cole came to again, someone pressed a water bottle into his hand.

He blinked and focused. It was Marcus.

Marcus didn't say anything. He just nudged the bottle a little further into Cole's grip.

Cole took a drink and handed it back. Then he closed his eyes again.

He was too tired.

By the time the boat had put nearly twenty nautical miles between itself and the crater, the ice on the water had begun to thin—from broad sheets to broken chunks, from broken chunks to scattered slush.

The outline of the Polaris appeared on the horizon.

The icebreaker was anchored in open water. A layer of volcanic ash had dulled its white hull to a gray-black, but the ship itself was intact.

The deck was lined with people—medical staff and the technicians who had stayed behind.

They leaned over the railing, watching the boat come in.

When the assault boat pulled up to the ship's gangway, Ingrid was already waiting at the top with three medics.

When she saw the through-and-through wound in Cole's chest, her lips pressed together for just a moment. She didn't say anything unnecessary. She just told the two medics to lift him off the boat onto a stretcher and wheel him into the ship.

Cole struggled to turn his head toward where Sophia was. Ingrid put her hand firmly on his shoulder. "She's in the critical care ward. Let me drain the blood out of your lungs first."

Her gloves were covered in Cole's blood—dark gold, mixed with black residue from the chaos energy.

She cut open his tactical vest. When she saw the wound that had gone clean through from his chest to his back, her hands paused for less than a second. Then she kept going.

The door to the medical bay closed behind Cole.

The critical care ward was at the end of the corridor. Sophia lay inside, her hair still a dull white, spread across the pillow, her face pale to the point of translucence.

After the last of the phoenix flame had burned out, her vitals had never recovered. Her heart rate had dropped to under thirty beats per minute. Her breathing was too faint to detect without instruments.

Ingrid wrote one line in her chart: Core energy depleted. Deep coma. Time of recovery unknown.

She didn't write may not wake up. But everyone who read the chart understood.