THE UNBOUND MORTAL

Chapter 8

Logan did not finish the third step. He threw his heels hard into the gravel, locking his shins, and dropped his weight straight down into a dead crouch, completely arresting his forward motion within the space of two inches.

Two explosive fireballs and two heavy arrows whistled through the exact empty air where his chest would have been had he completed the stride.

The projectiles slammed into the canyon wall forty yards behind him, exploding with a deafening roar that sent a cloud of black sulfur smoke rolling over the floor of the gorge.

Christian blinked, his glowing orange interface flickering with an amber question mark. "What? The lock slipped?"

Logan didn't give him time to re-calibrate.

Before the system could process that the target had stopped, Logan exploded out of his crouch, not forward, but at a sharp thirty-degree angle to the left, taking three erratic, broken-rhythm hops like an injured crow, then throwing himself into a low, sideways slide.

Christian furiously thrust his hands forward again, firing two more plasma bolts.

The bolts blasted two deep craters into the shale, five feet to the right of Logan's sliding boots. The predictive algorithm had guessed he was continuing his leftward sprint.

"Stop jumping like a bug!" Christian screamed, his face flushing red with rage. "Stand still, you filthy blank! Shoot him! Pin his legs!"

The two Vanguard archers raised their bows, their fingers glowing with mana as they tried to manually track Logan through the swirling gray sulfur smoke.

Logan was already inside their comfortable range.He came out of his slide twenty paces from the archer on the left. 

Logan did not draw his knife. Instead, his hand dipped into his coat pocket and came out with a fist-sized river stone he had scooped from the creek bed earlier.

He threw it.

He did not have a [Marksmanship] skill. He had five years of throwing rocks at iron cans on fence posts until his shoulder was bruised purple.

The stone flew with flat, brutal trajectory. It did not strike the archer’s leather-armored chest. It struck the thin, delicate wood of the upper limb of the archer’s glowing recurve bow just as the man drew the string to full tension.

The enchanted bow limb fractured under its own immense draw-weight. The severed bowstring whipped back like a steel cable, slicing open the archer’s face from forehead to chin with a spray of bright crimson. The archer shrieked, dropping his ruined weapon and clutching his blinded eyes.

"One," Logan muttered under his breath.

"Die!" Christian roared.

The Executioner was done relying on ranged bolts. The shame of missing five consecutive shots against a mortal with no system had broken his patience. He activated his close-quarters combat skill.

[Skill Activated: Ignited Gauntlets (Rank 2)]

A sheath of blue-white flame wrapped around Christian’s hands and forearms, reaching temperatures capable of melting iron plate. He sprinted forward, his boots throwing up sparks against the rocks, closing the ten-pace gap in a second. He threw a wide, sweeping right hook aimed at taking Logan’s head off with pure magical heat.

Logan did not try to block it. Trying to parry a fist wrapped in magical fire with a steel knife would only result in a melted blade and vaporized fingers.

Instead, Logan reached into the small leather pouch at his left hip.

Inside the pouch was a dry, powdery mixture he had prepared five minutes ago beside the Stalker carcass: crushed white limestone from the gorge wall, blended with the dried, highly flammable bile salts from the dead beast’s gallbladder.

As Christian’s fiery right fist swept toward his jaw, Logan did not pull back. He leaned into the inside of the swing, ducking beneath the arc of the flame, and threw the fistful of fine gray powder directly into Christian’s burning hands.

The chemical reaction was instantaneous.

The bile powder hit the open magical flames and ignited with a blinding, deafening chemical backdraft. A blinding ball of white phosphorus-like light exploded inches from Christian’s face, accompanied by a thick, suffocating cloud of caustic lime dust.

"MY EYES!" Christian howled, stumbling backward, his hands flying to his face. "I CAN'T SEE! SYSTEM, PURGE BLINDNESS! PURGE STATUS!"

The system could not purge it. It was not a magical debuff. It was raw, burning powder physically scouring his corneas.

In that fraction of a second, as the backdraft exploded, the edge of the flame caught Logan’s left forearm.

The canvas sleeve of Logan's jacket vaporized instantly. The heat bit deep into his flesh, blistering the skin from wrist to elbow, turning the outer layer of tissue gray and black. An ordinary man would have screamed in agony and dropped to the ground.

Logan only ground his back teeth together until his jaw ached. His eyes never blinked. He ignored the screaming nerves in his arm as if the limb belonged to another man.

Through the white smoke, Logan moved.

He stepped behind Christian’s blind side. His right hand drove his remaining skinning knife into the soft space behind Christian’s left knee, severing the hamstring tendon with a single, brutal jerk.

Christian’s left leg folded like wet paper. The noble enforcer collapsed onto one knee with an ugly, wet gasp.

Before Christian could turn his burning fists around to blindly sweep the air, Logan’s left hand—blistered, burned, and bleeding—grabbed the collar of Christian’s drake-skin coat, yanking the man’s head backward to expose his neck and shoulder.