[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel - Episode 23] Three Who Do Not Fight Together
Of the three shadows hanging from the ceiling, the smallest let go first.
It was less a fall than a blade changing direction. Without lifting his head, Alucard slid his right foot half a step back. The black shape swept past his face and caught itself on one hand on the floor, a dagger slipping between its fingers to scrape across the stone and stab for his side. The instant he dropped his heavy blade to block it, his left shoulder opened. A hot line of blood ran beneath the cloth, and the left hand bracing his sword sank ever so slightly.
Into that gap came the whip.
It did not sound like leather tearing the air, but like old joints of bone striking all at once. Alucard raised the flat of his sword and deflected the whip's tip, but he could not avoid the second coil. It missed the bare shoulder and snagged in the split side plate of his armor. A metal ring tore free, and his body was dragged toward the wall.
A cold breath descended from above.
As white mist licked across the floor, the wet stone froze at once. Alucard did not resist the pull of the whip; instead he threw himself forward with it. Ice spread to just behind his heels, and the small shadow that had clung to the ceiling dropped another dagger onto it. The blade had not been aimed at Alucard's throat. It meant to shatter the last dry stone his feet could still find.
The three attacks did not wait for one another. Even so, they did not overlap by so much as an inch.
Alucard twisted the sword wrapped in the whip. The damaged ring of his armor failed and snapped away. The instant his body came free, he scattered into the form of a bat and skimmed over the frozen passage. Fire burst behind him. Red flame swallowed the place where the blue chill had vanished, and water soaked into the cracks of the stone exploded into steam. In the hot fog, the three shadows scattered once more across ceiling and walls.
He already knew those sounds.
The brief scrape made when a whip was reeled back. The thinning of the air just before a spell was completed. The way a foot braced against a wall sent stone dust scattering. Long ago, they had been the traces of people who knew one another's next move without ever looking at each other's backs.
But the three shapes before him had no breath in them.
The one on the ceiling drew back its dagger without even checking whether its companion's flames would reach it. The one with the whip did not stop even when ice trapped its own feet. The woman floating in the air cast her spells past the other two as though their bodies were no more than obstacles. Their combined assault was more precise than memory, yet no one in his memory had ever fought like that.
Alucard lowered the point of his sword and looked toward the red light beyond the corridor. Instead of rushing him to kill him, the three shadows withdrew, keeping a measured distance. The smallest vanished first along the ceiling, and the tip of the whip skimmed the corner. Last of all, the woman's body faded like frost.
They were waiting for him.
The inverted corridor, with up and down reversed, led into an ancient arena. Stairs rose toward the ceiling, and the railings of the shattered stands hung down into the void below. Red light pulsed between the pillars. The vast ceiling that had become the floor was cracked, and in every fissure black dust stirred as if breathing.
As Alucard stepped into the center, three doors slammed shut at once.
The man with the whip stood in front. The armor hanging over rotten flesh imitated Trevor's old appearance, but there was no light in his eyes that judged a person. The woman in the air wore Sypha's form, and beneath the blue hem of her garment bone showed through. The small man clinging hand and foot to the side of a pillar twirled a dagger with Grant's unsmiling face.
Alucard said nothing.
The false Trevor struck first with the whip. It swept low for his ankles, then, with the force of the recoil, hurled a bone cross. Alucard leapt over the first strike, but the cross did not fly as expected. It spun forward and then curved back. The moment he moved to knock it aside with his sword, lightning split from false Sypha's fingertips. Two lines of light linked pillar and floor, and the cross passed between them, spitting black sparks.
Alucard lowered his body and let the cross pass, but from behind a dagger pierced the bandage on his left shoulder.
The point did not sink deep into flesh, but it cut the cloth. The pressure of the binding came loose, and the wound opened again. His left hand slipped from the sword for an instant. False Grant, without so much as a laugh, drew another dagger.
Alucard raised his blade with his right hand alone.
His first judgment had leaned on old memory. When Trevor bound the front, Sypha covered the opening, and Grant drove in from an angle that would not wound his companions. But these imitations did not protect one another. False Trevor's whip grazed Grant's ankle and never slowed, and Sypha's flames burned Trevor's shoulder before reaching Alucard. Dead bodies did not share pain. They only moved under the same command.
The moment he understood that, Alucard stepped inside the whip instead of retreating.
The bony links smashed across his right ribs. His breath cut off, but he did not swing his sword. Pressed close near false Trevor's elbow, he waited for the glint of the dagger descending from the ceiling. At the instant it fell, Alucard shoved Trevor at the waist and changed their positions.
The dagger buried itself in false Trevor's collarbone.
No one stopped.
As false Sypha brought her hands together, blue mist covered the floor again. Alucard did not use Trevor's body as a shield. He calculated that Trevor would retreat and guided him so that ice would form along that retreating path. When Trevor's heel slipped on the ice, the circle of the whip tilted toward the pillar. False Grant came inside that arc.
Grant did not evade. The whip lashed his side and tore his body from the ceiling.
That was when Alucard moved. As he lifted the heavy sword in both hands, a hot bolt of pain shot from his left shoulder into his neck. His left hand could not fully close around the hilt, and the sword's weight leaned into his right arm. He did not bring it down with force. He placed the point in the path of Grant's fall.
The body came down onto the blade.
Rotten cloth and ribs tore apart, and false Grant rolled across the floor and reached out again. A living man would have taken time to catch his breath and bind the wound. The imitation drew a dagger from between broken ribs and threw it. Alucard twisted his head aside, but the blade scraped across the frame of his cracked glasses.
Grant sprang for the pillar. He meant to climb back to the ceiling.
Alucard did not become a bat. Sypha was waiting for that brief instant of transformation. Instead he drove the point of his sword into the frozen floor and spun his body. The long blade shattered ice and sent chips of stone flying. Fragments struck false Grant's fingers, and with nothing left to seize, the body fell again.
This time the back of the blade struck the neck.
Even after the sound of bone snapping, the body moved for a moment. Fingers scraped the floor, searching for a dagger. Alucard drove the point deep into its chest and twisted. As black force seeped into the wound, the imitation's body dried out from within. The face was Grant's, but to the very end there was neither surprise nor anger in it.
What turned to ash was not a man, only the shape of one.
False Sypha let out a low scream. It was not grief. It was the sound of something cracking when part of a command was severed.
Her spell changed.
The rhythm of alternating ice and flame vanished, and a gray cloud slowly spread across the entire arena. Wherever it touched, the surface of the pillars hardened and split like stone. Alucard adjusted his glasses. Through the cracked lens he could see the particles in the cloud, but they offered no path of escape. He held his breath and stepped back.
False Trevor drew the whip from within the cloud.
The unseen tip coiled around Alucard's ankle. As he fell, his left shoulder struck the floor. The bandage was soaked through completely. When the gray cloud touched the old traces of petrification on his cheek, his skin began to stiffen with cold.
Alucard did not take the Heart from his inner pocket. His heart was already beating wildly beneath cloth and armor. Each time that pulse drove back poison and curses, it became briefly unclear which heart was his own. Gritting his teeth, he did not cut the whip coiled around his ankle with his sword. Instead, he let his body dissolve into mist.
The loop of the whip tightened around empty space.
As the gray cloud mingled with his mist, false Sypha raised her hand. Lightning gathered at her fingertips. Alucard saw that she was not aiming at him. She was placing the lightning where his mist would return to flesh, at the endpoint where the whip would draw him back.
He did not return there.
The mist slid along the floor and passed behind false Trevor's heel. The instant he regained his body, Alucard swung low. The back of Trevor's knee was cut, and the pull of the whip collapsed. At the same moment, Sypha's lightning struck the place she had prepared. Instead of Alucard, the light pierced the back of the fallen Trevor.
False Trevor dropped to one knee.
Alucard moved in to finish him. Then many-colored light spread from Trevor's body. Red and blue lines gathered beneath the rotten skin, and the arm holding the whip went still. The silence before the attack lasted too long. The daggers scattered all around the arena began to tremble, then rose one by one into the air.
Dozens of blades turned their points toward Alucard.
He did not take wing as a bat. Sypha was in the air. During the brief time Trevor gathered power, Alucard instead closed the distance. When the first wave of daggers poured down, he turned his body to mist and let them pass through. The second wave spread low, waiting for the instant the mist unraveled. He raised his sword and knocked several away, but the rest struck the armor at his side and thigh. Plate buckled, and one blade sliced his flesh shallowly.
Before the third wave came, Alucard drove his sword into Trevor's chest.
The light went out.
False Trevor fell backward and let go of the whip. But before the body even struck the floor, a low incantation flowed from false Sypha's lips. Her finger pointed at the dead body, and the red light lingering beneath the arena gathered into Trevor's wound.
The corpse rose again.
This time even Trevor's face was no longer properly there. The jaw sagged to one side, and black fluid ran from the wound in his chest. He had not the strength to lift the whip; his arm hung limp as he staggered forward. Wherever his hand touched, letters of curse spread across the stone surface.
Alucard did not look long at that shape.
He had to finish Sypha first.
She rose higher and hurled fire. Alucard slipped behind a pillar, then, the instant the flames wrapped around the stone, kicked off the wall and became a bat. Small wings cut upward through the heat. Sypha at once breathed out freezing mist to block his flight path. Alucard folded his wings and dropped. Ice passed by, whitening the tips of his hair.
He returned to human form in the middle of the fall.
The heavy sword hung downward. At the moment Sypha brought her hands together to gather lightning, Alucard did not slash upward. Instead he caught the point of his sword in the hem of her robe and dragged down with the weight of his body. His left shoulder failed to bear it and his hand slipped, but from the pocket holding the Tooth of Vlad, hot strength spread into his fingers. His grip became too strong, and pain shot through the joints.
He borrowed that strength, but did not obey it.
Sypha's body was dragged to the floor. Without releasing the sword, Alucard pinned her arm with his knee. The angle of spells once free in the air was bound to the ground. Fire spilled sideways and burned false Trevor's leg, while ice stiffened Sypha's own wrist.
Her mouth tried to shape the resurrection spell again.
Alucard drove the point into her throat.
A sound escaped, brief as a breath. The blue light leaving Sypha's body rose toward the arena ceiling and went out. The ice and flame she had left behind lost their force at once, and only wet ash remained on the floor.
From behind, a rotten hand seized Alucard's throat.
It was the resurrected false Trevor. A curse spread through the skin where those fingertips touched, and the feeling in Alucard's left arm began to harden again. He had no strength to turn his body. He let go of the sword and caught Trevor's wrist with his right hand. The Tooth of Vlad whispered to crush it. Strength flooded his fingers.
Instead of twisting the wrist, Alucard stepped back one pace.
Trevor's body followed. Lowering his shoulder, Alucard took the corpse across his back and threw it over. The instant the false body hit the floor, he drove a knee into its chest. His sword lay beside him, but he did not seize it at once. In that rotten body still remained the shape of the arm that had swung a whip, the shape of the man who had stood in front to protect humans.
"You are not him."
The words were low, meant for no one to hear.
Alucard picked up the sword and drove it through false Trevor's heart. This time there was no spell from Sypha. The rotten body collapsed together with its letters of curse, and the bone whip too crumbled into powder and sifted down between his fingers.
What remained in the arena was not the trace of three people. It was only three heaps of ash that had failed in trying to imitate memory.
Alucard planted the point of his sword on the floor and leaned on it for a while. Every breath twisted his ribs from within. The cloth at his left shoulder was black with blood, and his damaged armor had now lost even one of its side plates. The pulses of the five relics tried to mesh together and force his body upright, but he did not follow at once.
He waited until his own breathing returned.
A door beneath the stands slowly opened. From beyond it flowed a warm, sticky wind. Behind a sweetness like fruit left to rot too long clung the smell of flesh and grease decaying together.
At first he thought it was rain falling far away.
But the sound struck no stone. It was the sound of thousands of tiny wings colliding in the dark. A single black fly rose over the threshold and settled on Alucard's bloodstained bandage.
Before he could even move his hand, the fly's abdomen burst.
Yellowish fluid spread over the wound, and deep within the open passage a single massive chain began to sway slowly.
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