My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 743: Patient Teeth

A kick filled Phei’s entire vision before his eyes registered the leg... a pale crystalline blue, monolithic, swelling across the entire field of view in a single dilated heartbeat.

There was no time for his vision to localise the limb attached to it.

The Titan’s foot simply occupied his sky, and behind the occupying foot the cathedral hollow’s primordial canopy briefly ceased to exist, and behind the canopy the sky itself ceased to exist, and there was only the slow patient swelling blue forever until—

The impact arrived like the cathedral itself deciding to fold landing first to his ribs even before his eyes the whole scene.

His ribcage felt the shape of the impact arriving from the future — the small precognitive shudder before it broke — and then the shudder was overtaken by the actual impact and his ribs folded, the four lower-left curves bending inward in a wet collapse that punched the air from his lungs in a sound he did not hear because the doppler-shift of his sudden velocity had already begun to red-shift the world’s audio into a long descending moan.

He could not breathe or see — his peripheral vision blacked from the outside inward, the cathedral hollow narrowing to a tunnel the diameter of a coin, and at the far end of the coin a small distant point of moss-green light receding from him at the speed of his own backward flight.

He was thrown back into the first tree he felt only by the sudden interruption against his shoulder blade as his body was sent flying, a brief deceleration into the trunk, followed by a long screaming wet split as the tree opened around his back like a husk peeled by a careless thumb.

The taste of green wood and his own copper blood mixing in the back of his throat like a bad vintage felt strange before he was already going thought the next tree, still being carried by the same force of the single kick.

The second tree hit him obliquely, his shoulder catching the trunk at an angle that spun his body sideways mid-flight, and his perception briefly the cathedral hollow rotating around him in a long tilting arc before the third tree caught him across the small of his back and reset his trajectory.

Sound returned in a sudden compressed crack as his hearing came back online.

The crack was the third tree breaking.

The fourth tree was already coming, it’s root system extended down through the cathedral hollow’s bedrock into geology old enough to remember magma, and when his shoulder caught the trunk —

He cried out in pain.

It was a small involuntary sound, ripped out of his throat at the moment his right collarbone partially separated from its socket, and he did not have time to be embarrassed by it because his body had already torn through the heartwood and was now mid-spiral through the fifth tree’s lower canopy, leaves whipping his face, twigs opening fine cuts along his cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, the world a smear of moss-green and pale blue-white and the dark wet streak of his own blood across his own peripheral vision.

By the eighth he had begun to slow, his vision returning in a slow patchy smear, the cathedral hollow re-rendering itself around him in poor resolution as his nervous system finished cataloguing what had just happened to it.

The ninth tree he drove the long blade of his left dagger into the trunk in passing, and his body whipped around the embedded steel in a violent half-circle that nearly tore his shoulder fully out of its socket, and the blade carved through the wood from canopy to root in a single furious slash that screamed — wood and steel and his own dragged momentum producing a sound like a saw being sharpened on a god’s throat — and the trunk opened along the cut and the tree, finally, began to fall.

He hit the ground and skidded to a stop and lay still.

His body reached for the warm bloom of Dragon’s Regeneration his vessel had been treating, since the day his Mark on Roxanne had broken the seal, as the customary reflex to any cut, any break, any bruise of consequence.

The fast knitting of bone back into socket, the folding of broken ribs back into their proper curves and the closing of split lip and torn skin.

His body had been reaching for this for the past hour and forty-three minutes.

His body had been getting back, every single time, the same patient nothing it was getting back now.

His displaced collarbone stayed displaced. His broken ribs stayed broken while the internal bleeding kept gathering beneath his diaphragm, thesplit lip kept bleeding into his mouth.

The long horizontal cut along his cheekbone kept tracking small ribbons of blood down the side of his face and into his hair.

’Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.’

His body, at the cosmic-reflex level, had not yet stopped trying.

The muscle memory of Dragon’s Regeneration was, it seemed, more stubborn than the fact of its absence — every wound triggered the customary reach for it, every reach returned to nothing, and the loop had been running silently in his body for the entire training session from one hour and minutes ago without his body ever quite consenting to the absence as real.

Eira had cut it cleanly off before the training started.

The cathedral hollow... he had been standing where the broken stone now bore his bloodprint, and Eira had hovered her two hands an inch above his chest — "sit, master, this will sting briefly" — and a thread of pale frost had threaded itself through his chest cavity and severed something.

He had felt the disconnection at the time and had not, in that moment, asked her what she had cut. He had assumed it was a prep.

’I was wrong.’

What she had severed, it had become obvious at the first wound of the training against the titans and had become more obvious with every subsequent one, was Dragon’s Regeneration.

His only one real safety net against the damage twelve-foot crystalline constructs were equipped to deliver.

He could not, for the duration of the whole training, heal from cuts, broken bones, internal bleeding. Or from any of the damage his body was, at this exact moment, going through.

Eira’s Vitality Sustaining bond (as she called it) was not a healing bond. It was for survival and would keep his body alive — keep his organs from failing, keep his blood pressure from collapsing into shock or his consciousness from departing for too long when blows arrived that should, by every mortal metric, have killed him.

Anything short of a full severance was his to carry.

For the past hour and forty-three minutes, he had been carrying.

He spat blood. It arced. Landed on the broken stone beside his head.

"Eira."

His voice came out wet and ragged.

"Yes master."

"Tell me again why you cut my regeneration."

"Because you would have spent the past hour and forty-three minutes healing instantly through the lesson rather than receiving it, master. Your regeneration would have closed every cut and reseated every bone before your body had time to register what had been done to it. The whole point of this I require your body to feel every hell I give you. Therefore, the regeneration is, for the duration of the training, severed."

"Eira —"

"Stop wasting time! On your feet, master. The Titan that kicked you is seconds from your position, and the second of its siblings has already begun moving."

He stayed on the ground for a moment longer.

The displaced collarbone ached against his shoulder, his lower-left ribs creaked when he tried to inhale. The slow warm pool beneath his diaphragm had reached the size of a large coin and was, he could feel, still expanding.

He had no recovery. He had a fairy who would prevent his death and otherwise leave him to experience every consequence of every blow until the regimen’s end.

He coughed blood and pushed himself up onto one elbow onto one knee.

The cathedral hollow swam for a moment and then settled; Phei pushed himself up.

The Titan that had just kicked him stood twelve feet of patient pale crystalline blue-white, faceless, its weight forward in the small contrapposto of a construct preparing to deliver another kick.

The cathedral hollow’s moss-green light played across the long fluted lines of its shoulders and chest with the cold beautiful indifference of a winter river running over stones older than civilisation.

It was not, by Eira’s stated regimen, the highest-tier construct she had conjured for him.

It was only Tier One.

There were three more like it charging in across the hollow.

There was, also, a fourth, in pieces against the western root-wall — its crystalline torso shattered, its head detached, its remains preserved against Eira’s customary disintegration policy because she had decided that the master would benefit from being able to glance, occasionally, at the only construct he had so far managed to kill in the past hour and forty-three minutes.

It had taken him an hour and forty-three minutes.

He was, by the patient teeth’s classifiation, behind.