Chapter 193: Chapter 193- Laugh
Julian’s voice was cold, flat as a blade. "If you lay a hand on any of them, Leo, you’ll pay for it. I promise you that."
Leo only smiled, small and cruel. "I’m more confident than ever. I’ll carve a path through them if I have to. No one will stop me."
Julian’s eyes went darker. He keyed his comm without hesitation. "Mr. Glain, I’m going to kill him, you don’t mind, do you?"
There was a brief, heavy pause over the channel. Then Glain’s calm, old-voice answered, steady and deliberate, "Understood, I’ll accept the consequences."
The words carried like a verdict. Leo, listening from wherever he’d slipped away to, laughed, sharp and arrogant. "You really think you can kill me? Don’t flatter yourself, Julian." He lifted the crimson shard so it caught the dying light and let it pulse like a heartbeat. "And don’t worry about Darwin. He’s not tangled up in all this. I will become something greater than any of you, And i will ascend into a god that leaves your rules behind."
Julian glanced at Joe, eyes narrowed like a blade. "You going to betray us too?"
Joe snorted, the sound a furnace-ruffle. He spat a little ash to one side and let out a low, humorless laugh. "Not a chance. I will not tarnish my honor again."
"Good," Julian said, voice calm and cold. "Then help me finish these insects."
From where he had been standing, Leo’s laugh trickled back over the roar of the dying storm, thin, brittle. "And what can you do, when you’re all hollowed out and burned out? When your reserves are gone and your limbs won’t answer?"
Julian’s lips were a single flat line. He answered without haste, almost conversationally, "I expected you to ask that."
Across the carcass, Leo’s grin faltered. A strange weight began to crawl up his arms, numbness at first, then a cold deadness spreading into his fingers. His boots slid in the slick gore as the world felt slightly thicker around his limbs. He blinked, puzzled, then alarmed. "What... is this?"
His hand tightened reflexively around the crimson shard. It seemed to pulse in his palm, his fingers didn’t respond the way they should. He groped at his throat, tasting iron, trying to force himself into motion. "What did you do to me?"
Julian didn’t move closer. He kept his voice level, detached. "You remember that potion you swallowed before charging the whale?" he asked.
A slow, cold realization crawled over Leo’s face. "The potion—" he hissed. "You—"
Julian finished for him. "I dosed it. Not to kill you, there wasn’t time for theatrical murder. I mixed in an immobilizing compound. Something that would slow nerve response, dull limbs, make strength leak away like water through a fist when the dose met metabolic stress. It’s keyed to the surge kinetics you got from the core boost, so it hits hardest when you try to push beyond your limits."
For a beat, the only sounds were the distant cracking of cooling embers and the complaint of torn cloud. Leo’s expression went from outrage to a thin, white-hot fury. "You—" he started, voice raw, then coughed as the numbness crawled higher. He slammed the shard against the whale’s carapace as if to wrench strength from it; the motion was slow, resisted.
Joe didn’t wait for orders then, he lunged, a living inferno, and tore into the beetle-formed insects that had been forming a curtain around Leo’s escape route. Each swing of his blistering gauntlet cleaved through chitin and scrap alike. "You want to run?" Joe snarled, moving like a hammer. "I’ll cut your exit off."
Julian’s shadows tightened around Leo in case the man tried anything desperate. "Hold him there," Julian said to Rafael. "We’re not giving him an inch."
Leo’s laugh ripped the air again, thin, high, utterly unhinged. He rocked forward on the corpse like a man possessed, crimson shard clutched to his chest as if it were feeding the madness.
Rafael swallowed hard, voice trembling. "Is—are you insane...?"
Joe spat, flames hissing at the edges of his words. "That potion hit him too hard. It’s making the insect go full maniac. You mixed that into my dose too, right? You didn’t, right?"
Julian’s face was stone. For a heartbeat he didn’t answer Joe, tired anger in his eyes did the talking.
Joe’s surprise bled into a raw, hurt bark. "What—what? I thought we were, friends."
Julian didn’t let the comment derail him. He stepped forward like a blade being drawn. "You should have given it up from the start, Leo. None of this would have happened." His voice was low, flat, no theatrics, only cold judgement.
Leo’s grin thinned, the laugh strangling in his throat. "So that’s it? You’ve won? You finally—" His words collapsed as Julian closed the distance.
The first strike was sudden and ugly. Julian’s fist cracked against Leo’s cheek, hard enough that red painted the corner of his mouth. The second hit snapped his jaw; a tooth skittered out, clinking against the whale’s shell. Blood spattered across the slab of broken sky beneath them.
Julian grabbed a fistful of Leo’s hair and hauled his head up, eyes locking onto the other man like a hunter’s glare. Up close Leo looked smaller, unmoored, his manic energy undressed and raw.
"I’m sick of your bullshit," Julian breathed, voice tight. "I never liked you. I should have stopped you the first time you aimed at my girls. You weren’t a traitor because you were loyal to someone else, you were a piece of shit, Leo. Give me the core. Now."
Leo’s breathing rattled. He tried to spit defiance, but the numbness crawled up his limbs, his fingers faltered on the shard. Around them Joe’s heavy presence hummed with barely-contained fury, and Rafael’s hands shook as he kept the magnetic snares in place.
For the first time since the carcass had tilted the sky, Leo’s bravado wavered. The manic laugh thinned into something like a sob of rage. He glared up at Julian, blood on his lips and a tooth missing, and the shard pulsed weakly in his slack fingers.
Julian didn’t smile. He tightened his grip on Leo’s hair until the man hissed, then leaned in, low enough that only Leo could hear.
"This ends without more blood if you hand it over."