Wexxon the Great Alien Warrior - Juno Wells Page 0,54

knuckles, at least enough to watch him bleed underneath me.

On an alternate blow, my hand slipped against the blood on his skin, losing my balance over him for only a split second. But in a battle, I knew that a split second was all that Reddin was going to need to gain the upper hand, and he hastily took full advantage of my blunder. I soon felt his hands on my shoulders, forcing my frame over his head, throwing me onto my back right above where he’d been lying.

And then he’d grabbed his sword, wasting no time as he swung the weapon down at my head. I managed to roll away from his every blow, carefully timing my movement with his strikes, knowing that it was only a matter of time before he landed a fatal blow against my skin.

“But what if he wanted to let you live?”

Aldvirion’s words suddenly popped into my mind as I rolled away from another one of Reddin’s strikes.

“What if that was his intent? Not to kill you, but to wound you. To force you to admit weakness to the screaming crowd. Maybe even to yourself.”

To force you to admit weakness.

I inwardly cursed, trying to measure where Reddin’s next blow might land, quickly calculating in my mind the force of it; the speed of it, too.

And then, just as Reddin brought his sword down at me again, I made sure that I was directly in its path. I screamed in pain, the sword slipping right into my abdomen, just as I’d intended, but the aftermath still forced me to cry out all the same.

And as Reddin took his moment to gloat to the crowd, just as I’d hoped that he would, I hastily rose away from the ground, breaking the hilt off his sword, revealing the other end of the blade. With my fingers bloody from the effort of taking off the weapon’s hilt, shards now embedded in my skin, I grabbed for my brother, pulling him toward the blade.

And I watched as the opposite end of the blade slid into his abdomen, too.

Reddin’s eyes went wide as he stared down at the sword between us, his mind seeming like it was trying to calculate its way out of the fatal situation. But I’d already done the math for the both of us, taking into account that I’d always been a few inches taller than Reddin, the height difference meaning that while the blow to my abdomen may have given me a chance at life if I didn’t bleed out onto the sand, for Reddin, the blow was undeniably the last one he’d ever suffer.

“I’m sorry, brother.” I murmured the apology, my voice shaking as I spoke. “I’m sorry.”

“…It was always going to end this way, wasn’t it?” Reddin smiled over at me as his mouth started to fill with blood, the liquid soon dripping down his lips and onto the sand below. “Thank you…brother. For finally giving me…a chance. I hope I…I hope I was a worthwhile opponent for you.”

“You were always a worthwhile opponent for me, Reddin,” I murmured again as I watched the life leaving my brother’s eyes. “You were…you are the only warrior I have ever feared.”

“I’ll see you where the moons meets the sun…” Reddin’s voice was low. “I will wait for you until the stars…until the stars…”

“Until the stars fall into our hands like precious jewels,” I finished what Reddin was attempting to say, a proverb that’d been spoken over our father and mother while they were being buried in the ground. And as Reddin’s body slumped away from the blade, his back hitting against the sand, I felt my own frame starting to give out, too, the blood seeping from my injury beginning to stain the fabric of my clothes.

Oh.

I was going to die, too, wasn’t I?

The feeling hit me as I rested against the faux arena sand.

If Reddin happened to have any kind of medical expert in his made-up world, they’d hate me too much to want to help me. In fact, I’d probably be better off if no one who served Reddin came near me, at all, their intent probably to torture me until I died of the pain.

“Wexxon! Wexxon!” I heard Rachel calling out for me as my eyes came to a close, as it suddenly became so much harder to force a breath down my throat.

“Wexxon!” She screamed for me again, and I would’ve sworn that she was so much closer now, so close