My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 745: Ten Conscious Titans

Click.

Eira clicked her tongue.

She was hovering twenty feet up on a frost-disc of her own assembly, eyes regarding him with the patient teeth fully out.

"Master."

Her voice was pleasant.

"Stop. Fucking. Relying. On. Just. Your. Physical. Strength."

He spat blood. It arced. Landed on the cracked stone beside his knee.

"I’m working on it."

"You have Void-Ice, master. Fucking. Use it. Reach inside of you. Command what is rightfully yours."

"I can’t —"

"You can. You are choosing not to. The second one is on you in a beat, master, I’d recommend solving the difference."

He reached inward.

The Void-Ice element seated in his chest returned the same patient dismissal it had been returning for the past hour and forty-three minutes.

He could ice his daggers.

He could command a small frost cloud and conjure a few other thing but that was the ceiling of his current limit.

Nothing he could use for this fight.

The second Titan’s kick was already coming.

Phei grinned.

He launched himself sideways from the kneeling position — using both dagger handles as twin pivot points, his body torquing at an angle the kick was not arriving at, the construct’s massive crystalline shin missing his head by perhaps four inches in a small dilated whisper of air.

He caught the Titan’s planted leg in passing, his both arms wrapped around the crystalline shin at the apex of his sideways launch.

He groaned and planted both feet against the cracked stone floor with all his mighty.

And roared and it carried the spite of a seventeen-year-old whose body had absorbed more than twelve trees in a single training and was, at this exact moment, deeply unwilling to absorb any more.

He heaved heavily and twelve feet of Void-Ice construct toppled off the stone.

The Titan’s leg, gripped in his arms, became a lever.

The construct’s massive crystalline body became its own weight.

Phei pivoted at the apex of the heave — using the construct’s own mass against itself, the way a hammer-thrower used the hammer — and threw, the entire output of his 340-Strength body channelled into a single discrete vector, directly into the third incoming Titan, which had been running toward the engagement from the southwest under the assumption that its sibling would handle the master before backup became necessary.

The two constructs collided mid-air.

The flash dimmed the cathedral hollow’s moss-green ambient light briefly. He felt the impact in his chest from forty yards away — a deep concussion that travelled through the cathedral hollow’s stone floor and made the soles of his ruined shoes vibrate.

The two Titans, fused in the impact, hit the ground at the western arc and skidded fifty yards through a tree corridor that became an instant clearing under their passage. and the trees folded.

Ground tore, the titan limbs flailed.

The two came to rest against the western root-wall in a tangled heap that took several seconds to stop twitching.

A long quiet groove of fresh devastation marked their passage.

Phei rose.

Slowly.

His left ribcage was screaming, shin bleeding, down below his shoes were ruined. Tunic sap-and-blood. Bark in his hair. Dried frost at his temple.

The bond patiently working along the deepest wounds while leaving the surface ones to instruct him.

He looked across the cathedral hollow.

The aftermath was a battlefield he’d been in for nearly two hours now since he left Roxanne’s apartment.

Eastern arc — a corridor of unmade trees in two distinct paths.

Western arc — a freshly forged clearing where the two constructs had skidded.

Northern arc — the broken remains of the fourth Titan he’d killed but Eira had refused to erase, to encourage him.

The cathedral hollow had been quietly hosting a war for the last hundred and three minutes, and it looked it.

He reached inward again.

Pushed harder than he had pushed before. Furious clear intent. He had just thrown a twelve-foot construct fifty yards using only his arms, and he was not interested in being told the element that seated in his chest was unavailable.

The Void-Ice answered with the same dismissal... nothing like he wanted it to do.

The third Titan was rising. The second was already up. The first was fully recovered.

Three Titans. Standing.

Phei looked up.

Eira clapped her hands.

Once.

The cathedral hollow’s ambient frost-resonance answered.

In the air around the wreckage of the Titans — at points Eira had pre-seeded in her preparation — seven new Void-Ice constructs unfolded out of nothingness in a simultaneous patient bloom of cosmic origami.

Twelve feet each. Faceless. Pale crystalline blue-white. Standing in a slow widening ring around their three already-active siblings.

Ten Titans.

A small cold vertical line of dread settled along the inside of his chest.

Eira clapped a second time.

The horror began.

The Titans’ crystalline skins, semi-translucent until this moment, hardened — colour deepening from pale blue-white to a denser ice-cobalt, patient mineral veining surfacing across chests and arms.

Their hands unfolded.

Long crystalline sabers on three, double-bladed crystalline halberds on two. Massive crystalline maces on some.

The unfolding was slow and patient and beautiful and obscene, the way watching an insect’s wing unfold in real time is beautiful and obscene.

In their other hands, between spread crystalline fingers, the Void-Ice element he was trying to much to bring out began to compile itself into projectile form. Frozen javelins. Crystalline shards. Patient compressed disks of compounded ice manipulation that the cathedral hollow’s resident physics watched assemble with the small, offended expression of a discipline being asked to host things outside its agreed-upon scope.

And as Phei watched —

their crystalline foreheads shifted.

Subtle architecture rose along the upper third of each Titan’s faceless skull. Eyes did not open, because the Titans had no eyes, but the suggestion of awareness assembled itself across each of the ten constructs in a slow patient bloom — a doll registering, in real time, that it had been given a soul and was now interested in its visitor.

The Titans were gaining consciousness.

Becoming, in slow real-time, alive.

Phei’s mouth had gone dry.

"Eira."

"Yes master."

"You’re not actually going to —"

"Master." Her voice was pleasant. "You have two pathways. Pathway one — you keep relying on your physical body, you keep refusing to use the Void-Ice seated in your chest, and you receive endless pain for as long as my patience holds. Which by my estimate is several days. Pathway two — you reach inward, you command what is rightfully yours, and you learn how to actually fight with the cosmic inheritance you already possess."

"Eira."

"My Vitality Sustaining bond will keep your body in maximum operational vitality regardless of damage. Bones will heal mid-strike. Muscles will rebuild before the next swing reaches them. Internal bleeding will reverse. You will not die. You cannot die. Death has been removed, by my deliberate act, from your immediate menu of options."

His expression had gone very still.

Eira smiled.

"Until you kill all ten of these constructs — or learn, in the process, to wield the cosmic element you have been treating like a decorative scarf for the past weeks — they will continue to receive your full attention. Endlessly. For days, if it comes to that. Their consciousness will keep growing. Their adaptation will keep deepening. Their attacks will keep escalating."

"And I’ll keep being —"

"In technical terms, alive."

A small pause.

"Welcome to training, master."

The ten Titans took a single synchronised step inward.

Ten simultaneous spider-web fissures opened across the cathedral hollow’s stone floor.

Phei — daggers in hand, blood on his teeth, his Void-Ice silent in his chest and his fairy’s smile patient above him —

took a slow breath in.