The Venom’s Toll

Ironhaven's slums wheezed like a living thing—a gasping, wheezing monster suffocating on its own filth. Kael leaned back against the rusty hull of an abandoned cargo hauler, his hand clasped around a stolen vial of neurotoxins, it emitted a soft glow in the smog-muffled moonlight. Ironjaw's laughter thundered somewhere in the labyrinth of cracked concrete and hanging wire, deep and jagged, as though the man's throat was filled with shattered glass.

The Shardbearer was a monster, but not one of unthinking kind. His pounded like a festering heart in his chest, an emerald crystalline shard rent and serrated that translated toxin to energy. Kael'd witnessed him outpacing the gas of an ambush by drinking in the toxin and exhaling it as rifled fog. He'd observed him enduring necrotic venom by sloughing off skin like a snake. But Kael had sensed that lag, too—the half-second pause as the Shard cycled between venoms. A crack of vulnerability.

This evening, he would exploit it.

The ambush was a mixture of pilfered cruelty. A twisted skein of nerve-agent canisters snaked across the floor of the alley. A rusty rain barrel hung overhead, its contents full of a slurry of necrotic venom. Below, water pooled, threaded through with dissolved necrotic toxins. Ironjaw's boots pounded through detritus as he swung around the corner, his massive form silencing the refinery's yellow-green miasma.

Kael's heart thudded. Wait.

Ironjaw paused, as ever, to spit a glob of acidic poison onto the body of a stray canine. The Shard seared, emerald veins pulsating beneath his skin as it digested the rot.

"Now."

Kael triggered the tripwire.

The canisters exploded, dispensing nerve gas. Ironjaw inhaled involuntarily—then laughed, the Shard breaking down the poison into a shimmery, acid-tongued breath. But Kael was already in action. He severed the string of the rain barrel. Neecrotic venom poured down, drenching the Shardbearer. Blistered places erupted on Ironjaw's arms, only to heal an instant later as the Shard broke through the venom. 

"Who do you think you are?" Ironjaw derided, biting his fingers into the warehouse wall, his claws scoring smoldering gashes in the metal.

"A rat hoping to kill a Lion"

Kael hurled the vial of neurotoxins. Ironjaw knocked it aside, crushed it in his fist, and drank the glass-spike-laden venom off his palm. The poison hit—muscles cramped, jaws snapping shut mid-snarl but in the end Ironjaw looked Kael in the eyes and laughed.

"Did you really think i didn't notice you?"

The Shard raged, concocting a new venom from the ingested poison, ready to melt anything unfortunate enough to come in contact with it.

Ironjaw saw Kael start running, He wanted to enjoy this, make his prey fester in deapir, and so he followed him with slow but steady steps.

...

Kael managed to reach the sewers, a putrid and rotting place of the dregs, the smell of corpses remains and filth permeated the air, but Kael couldn't smell anything at all, he only smelled the approaching death.

He thought back to his actions.

Why did he think killing a shardbearer would be this easy? Why did he want to kill a sharbearer in the first place?

Then he remembered.

He remembered the power of his old friend, he could crash stone with a punch, polverize bones with a flick, he wanted that power, he wanted to be at the top, not a stepping stone but the one who stood at the top.

Kael snapped back from his thoughs and took a turn to the left.

"I have to survive no matter what, to spite them all."

Only then did Ironjaw make his move, he started to charge venom trough his shard, and then.

BOOM

Kael didn't even see the necrotic beam, he only felt the excruciating pain in his left arm, he took a glance at it and he saw some of his fesh melt away, showing the pale white of the bone.

He took cover behind a wall and when Ironjaw appeared he lauched himself at him, only to be taken and lifted by the neck. But in that moment Kael struck at the chest of his enemy with all his might, he felt something hard, not like flesh but like crystal and when he touched it he felt a vague feeling of familiarity, he snapped out of it and pulled as hard as he could.

Ironjaw stuggered back dropping Kael on the floor, blood gushing from his chest.

"You... you little rat! How dare you! I'll kill you, rip you apart! Prepare yourself!" 

Kael, ran away limping, he left Ironjaw in the floor to bled out, to rot. He slumped onto a sewer tunnel and blacked out, when he woke up he instanly pressed the Shard he obtained from Ironjaw to his chest. He felt an immense pain permeate his body and immediatly after he heard a serpentine voice in his mind.

"Once every five months, your venom will serenade your most hated foe. They will hunt. You will bleed."

A vision burned behind Kael's eyes: Jarek, his comrade, his traitor, over him in the bank vault, bag of pilfered coins in one hand and smoke grenade in the other. "Good, better one of us alive than both of us dead, eh?"

And the Shard's venom flooded.

Kael collapsed, black bile foaming from his lips. His veins contorted, poisonous green as the shard broke into his sternum, corruption tendrils spreading beneath his skin.