[Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Novel - Episode 25] A Long Breath Beneath the Lightning
The first bolt struck before the passage came to an end.
Blue light swept across the floor, and dust rose all at once from between the stones. Alucard pressed himself to the wall. The current climbed through the soles of his boots and locked the muscles in his calves. Before the Heart could even react, the Tooth made his jaw clench, and the Rib forced his rigid body upright.
He could not refuse the relics' help.
Instead, he let out his breath a beat late. He made the tiniest gap between the moment he meant to move and the moment the relics moved his body. That gap was still his.
The Floating Catacombs were quieter than any other place in the castle. Coffins hung in midair instead of lining the walls, and ancient gravestones drifted among inverted stalactites. Wherever the floor was broken away, blue mist welled up from below. Each time lightning flashed, the shadows of enormous bones and pillars appeared in the fog for an instant.
The sound of a staff striking stone drew steadily nearer.
The final door had frozen half-open. Alucard wedged the tip of his sword into the gap and pushed. As the door moved, powdered stone that had built up inside spilled out like a waterfall. On the far left of the wide chamber stood a low ledge, while most of the right side lay drowned in darkness.
Something in that darkness began to straighten its knees.
At first he thought a pillar was rising. Bent legs unfolded, the waist lifted, and even when the shoulders neared the ceiling, he still could not see where the body ended. A colossal staff adorned with gold touched down on the floor. A face that seemed to blend a beast's head with a human form looked down at him. In its eyes, before the anger of waking, there lingered the boredom of one who had waited too long.
As Galamoth rose to his full height, the air in the room seemed to compress.
Alucard ran first. Before that massive body could settle into stance, he meant to cut behind the knee and bring it down. His long blade split the thick skin of the shin, but the wound was shallow. The instant he tried to follow with a second cut, the end of the staff came down to the floor.
It did not strike him directly.
Even so, the impact hurled his body upward through the stone. Lightning spread from beneath the staff in a wide ring. Alucard twisted in midair, but the current punched through his side and left arm. His fingers sprang open, and he nearly dropped the sword.
Galamoth's knee moved.
A gigantic foot kicked sideways. Alucard raised his sword to block, but his whole body flew into the left wall. His back slammed into stone, and armor already bent inward crumpled deeper still. His breath cut off, and white burst across his vision.
He abandoned his first judgment.
Simply staying close would not nullify the advantage of that enormous frame. Galamoth did not need to see the enemy at his feet; staff and legs erased a broad space around him. If Alucard allowed even one discharge while cutting at the knees, his body would fail before the giant did.
Alucard climbed onto the low ledge on the left.
Galamoth lifted the staff in both hands. Blue spheres formed between the ornaments at its tip. What had looked like tiny stars swelled in an instant larger than a fist. The first sphere shot straight at him, and five more followed, spreading at slightly different heights.
Alucard stepped back. The spheres could not cross the entire room; they lost force and vanished in front of the ledge. It was an attack that did not reach all the way.
He memorized that distance.
Galamoth soon leveled the staff sideways. Crescent-shaped lightning slashed across the room. Its height was about level with his waist on the ledge. Alucard leaped over it, and the blue edge skimmed beneath his boots.
He thought the next bolt would come lower, near the floor.
But Galamoth did not fire again at the same height. The tip of the staff dipped slightly, and a lower discharge shaved stone from the ledge. Alucard dropped his body the instant he landed, but the lightning still grazed his left shoulder. The wound opened in the light, and he smelled the cloth of his fresh bandage burning.
The giant was slow, but the pauses between attacks were short.
When the staff stood upright, lightning fell to cover the floor. When it was raised high, energy spheres spread out. When it tilted sideways, a discharge flew across the chamber. If he came close, the shaft of the staff slammed down or a foot swept out. There was no safe place. Safety only appeared for an instant, depending on the kind of attack, and vanished just as quickly.
Alucard waited at the edge of the ledge.
As the energy spheres formed, he retreated to the farthest point and marked where they disappeared. The moment the last sphere winked out, he ran forward. He reached Galamoth's feet before the staff could come down and cut the shin twice. He did not attempt a third strike. At the warning sound of the descending staff, he turned at once into a bat and flew upward.
Lightning flooded the floor.
He rose to the height of Galamoth's waist. The giant's face came close. The head seemed less heavily armored than the rest of the body. Alucard returned to human form and brought his sword down. As the tip grazed the temple, Galamoth turned his head for the first time.
The wound was deep.
But while Alucard was falling, new spheres formed at the tip of the staff. At that range there was nowhere to vanish. The first sphere struck his chest, the second his side, the third bent his left arm. He hit the floor and rolled several times.
Galamoth looked down at him without taking a single step.
Alucard pushed himself up on his sword. Every breath stabbed his ribs like needles. The Rib tried to smother the pain, but he did not surrender to it completely. If the pain vanished, he would no longer know how badly his body was broken.
The next attack came.
Lightning that covered the floor. Energy spheres. Crescents that changed height. A short downward smash of the staff.
Alucard repeated the same responses. On the ledge he jumped the discharge, then retreated to the point where the spheres could not reach before running forward again. He cut at shin and knee once or twice, then withdrew at once. When he rose as a bat to the height of the head, he did not attack, only confirmed the direction in which the spheres formed. When he passed beneath the staff as mist, he changed little by little the place where he took back his body.
The longer the fight dragged on, the faster his concentration wore down than his wounds did.
Once, he misread the height of a crescent. He tried to jump it and took it in the chest, falling from the ledge. Once, thinking the staff's ground lightning had ended, he moved in too soon and the lingering current locked his leg. Galamoth's foot lifted right in front of him.
He could not evade it.
The kick caught him in the side. His body lifted into the air, and blood filled his mouth. Before he struck the wall, he tried to become a bat, but the pain in his left arm cut through his thoughts. He fell in human form.
His sword skidded far away.
Galamoth raised the staff. Blue spheres gathered.
Alucard did not reach for the weapon. The distance to the sword was short, but if he rose and ran, he would never avoid the first sphere. He dissolved his body into mist and flowed low across the floor. The sphere passed through the mist and vanished against the wall. The second and third changed direction to follow, but a body without form took the impact in fragments.
The mist became human again above the sword.
He seized the hilt with his right hand. His left would not move. Beneath the bandage on his shoulder, the blood was turning cold.
All five relics leaped at once.
The Ring bound his pulse into one rhythm, the Rib straightened his upper body, and the Heart drove poison and fever from his blood. The Tooth made him grip the sword as if to crush it, and the Eye showed him, with unbearable clarity, the changes in muscle and light before Galamoth's staff moved.
The world slowed.
Before Galamoth brought the staff down, he could see which finger bent first. Before the energy spheres formed, he could see where the air twisted between the ornaments. He could tell the height of the coming crescent from the angle of the staff's tip alone.
They were not his senses.
Alucard closed his eyes.
When he refused the perfect path the Eye showed him, the world became fast and heavy again. But it did not go wholly dark. The warning sounds and distances he had learned for himself remained. It was a rhythm carved into his body by dozens of evasions and blows.
The staff pointed toward the floor.
Before the lightning spread, Alucard sprang for the ledge. While the current covered the ground below, he changed into a bat from that higher place and flew behind Galamoth's shoulder. As the giant turned his head, Alucard returned to human form and drove his sword into it.
Galamoth roared.
This time he did not fall away at once. The sword caught in a gap in the skull and held his weight. When Galamoth shook his head, his left shoulder felt as though it would tear apart. Clinging to the sword with one hand, Alucard hooked a foot into an ornament at the neck. The giant's hand rose to seize him.
He tore the sword free and dropped.
Fingertips brushed over his head. The instant he landed, he cut behind the knee. The wound he had worried at for so long finally split deep. One of Galamoth's legs buckled.
The giant dropped to one knee.
The whole chamber shook, and gravestones collided in midair. For the first time, Galamoth's head came down near Alucard's height. But the staff was still in his hand. From that kneeling posture, he thrust its tip forward, and lightning spread wide.
Alucard did not dodge. He went inside it.
The discharge burned his back and legs. Light poured through the cracks in his armor, and his muscles contracted wildly. He nearly lost the sword, but the Tooth locked his fingers shut. The urge to destroy climbed his arm.
He did not swing blindly at the head.
With the first cut, he split the wrist that held the staff. With the second, he cut through the finger joints. The enormous staff crashed to the floor, and the direction of the lightning broke apart. In that opening, Alucard stepped on Galamoth's arm and climbed to the shoulder.
Energy spheres formed above the head.
Even without the staff, the light gathered. As Galamoth opened his mouth, blue spheres rose around his face. At that distance there was nowhere to evade.
For the last time, Alucard became a bat.
He flew through the spheres until he was directly before the giant's face. One wing was struck by light and his shape wavered, but he did not release the transformation. Right before Galamoth's brow, he returned to human form.
He raised the heavy sword in both hands.
His left hand could lend almost no strength. It rested on the hilt only to keep the blade from wavering. He gathered his right arm, the drop of his body, and every scrap of weight he had left into a single line.
The blade drove in along the wound in the forehead.
Galamoth's roar stopped.
The blue spheres lost their light and went out one by one. For a while the giant remained motionless on one knee. Then the head bowed forward, the shoulders and back collapsed, and when the enormous body crashed facedown to the floor, part of the ledge and several coffins shattered with it.
Alucard could not pull the sword free at once.
Kneeling atop Galamoth's head, he steadied his breathing, then gripped the hilt with both hands and slowly drew it out. From his left shoulder flowed no longer hot blood, but cold. His fingertips had gone pale.
As the light drained from the giant's body, the floating gravestones lost the gravity that had held them in place, one by one. Some fell upward, some downward. From the end of the passage came the sound of bells tolling through the entire castle.
Once, then twice.
When the thirteenth bell rang, the five relics at Alucard's chest and waist shifted toward one another. Though each had been wrapped separately in cloth and metal, their separate weights drew toward the center. The Ring grew hot, and the Eye inside its dark glass vessel trembled like a lid.
Alucard planted the sword on the floor and forced himself upright.
Far away, from the heart of the castle, came the sound of a massive door opening. Beneath the grinding of stone and iron, another sound was mixed in, very faintly: human laughter.
That laughter was not Galamoth's.
It was the breath of the one who had been waiting for the five relics, finally exhaled from beyond the door.
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