The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) by Chris Eisenlauer Read Free Book Online Page B

unaccompanied by any of Jav’s skeleton troops. The deeper they went, the smoother the walls were. Jav noticed, too, that the walls were reflective, and he wondered with grim foreboding if this might be all Gim Peshil needed in the way of defensive fortifications.
    “You are not welcome here,” Peshil’s disembodied voice echoed through the corridor.
    “No,” Jav shouted back, “but we are here nonetheless. You cannot undo what has been done, Gim Peshil. The Viscain Empire visits extinction on every native culture and civilization it encounters and has without fail for nearly eleven thousand years. It will be no different with yours.”
    The corridor brightened then. Jav had enough time to raise his right forearm to guard his face, though this was perhaps unnecessary, as laser light bounced off the Kaiser Bones covering his arm.
    Jav turned to Hilene, saw the smooth oval faceplate of her oversized, egg-shaped helmet light up with its Head Mounted Display, or HMD, attempting to identify targets. Whenever her HMD was active, the faceplate turned semi-transparent to reveal her pretty face. Behind his own skull helmet, he grinned at the look of intent determination plain on her features.
    “It was weak,” Jav said in a low voice. “Either he is weak, or too far away for the light to remain intense enough to be a real threat. Well, a threat to me, anyway.
    “Hold on. The number of skeletons has just been reduced by nearly twenty percent. Come on.”
    Jav broke into a trot and Hilene floated after him. After two significant bends, the corridor opened into a great chamber, that Jav reckoned may have been at the very heart of the castle. The chamber was like the inside of a gargantuan gem, a hundred meters across, all faceted and brilliant. At the top of the chamber, another hundred meters up, was an aperture at the bottom of a faceted parabolic dish designed to collect the light of the sun and funnel it down. Tunnels, just like the one from which Jav and Hilene had emerged, opened at intervals all around the base of the chamber, while at the center was a crystalline mass that stood three meters tall, was a meter across at its widest point, and which spun lazily by inscrutable means upon a fulcrum. Tending this crystal was a creature that shone like the sun. The beast was similar in gross outline to what Suunts had become, was just as broad, but stood taller at forty meters, was wingless, and had the ephemeral appearance of being constructed of pure light.
    “How dare you!” it thundered with Gim Peshil’s voice. It pointed its right taloned paw accusingly at Jav as it cried this and the arm stretched interminably to become a coherent beam of light.
    Jav was gone in a vaguely man-shaped puff of smoke. Gone but not destroyed. Using the Ghost Kaiser, the displacement technique he’d practiced to perfection during his initial training with Kimbal Furst, Jav stared death in the face and avoided it, but only his five decades of experience with AI enabled him to perceive the approach of light before it struck. The beam of light continued harmlessly down the corridor from which Jav and Hilene had come.
    Peshil only knew that Jav was gone after being run through by a laser of his creation. His snout curved up on one side in a terrible grin, revealing great palisade fangs of light, only slightly differentiated from the rest of him by shadowed outlines. He was wholly unprepared for the blow to his head that toppled him.
    “The appearance of light, but not light,” Jav said, floating back and down from having delivered the Kaiser Kick, another technique he’d developed and practiced with Furst.
    Peshil pushed himself up off the cavern floor with both arms. “You have the appearance of death, and may very well be death,” Peshil said rising. “But you’ll not kill me in my own nest.” Peshil stood and aimed both of his arms at the crystal in the center of the room. His arms instantly stretched to become light, his whole