Chapter 29 27

Feldman.Colonel Kassad followed Moneta through the portal and found himself standing on a vast lunar plain where a terrible thorn tree, five kilometers high, jutted into a blood-red heaven.The human body twists and turns on countless branches and spikes!The closer body can be seen as human, and the pain is unbearable.The ones farther away have become as small as clusters of pale grapes because of the distance. Kassad blinked, took a deep breath under his quicksilver armor, and looked around, past the silent Moneta, not at the horror in the tree. What he thought was the plain on the surface of the moon was actually the floor of Hyperion, at the entrance to the Valley of Time, but Hyperion had become terrible.The dunes froze and deformed, as if blasted into glass; and the great boulders and cliff faces flowed down, congealed like rivers of white stone glaciers, where there was no air and the sky was black, and everywhere was like an airless moon.Nor is the sun of Hyperion, the kind of sunlight humans have never experienced.Kassad looked up, the eye filters on the tight armor polarizing to deal with the terrifying energy filling the air in streaks of blood red and bursts of intense white light.

Below him, the valley seemed to vibrate with imperceptible vibrations.The time mounds glow with their own internal energy, and flickering cold light shoots from every entrance, doorway, and crevice to the valley floor for several meters.Those tombstones all look new and smooth and shiny. Kassad found that only the tight armor allowed him to breathe and protect his skin from the frostbite that replaced the heat of the desert.He turned to look at Moneta, wanted to ask a clever question, couldn't, and raised his eyes to look at the terrible tree again. The thorn tree seemed to be made of the same steel and chrome and cartilage as the Thorn Demon: clearly artificial, yet eerily organic.The root of the trunk is two to three hundred meters thick, and some branches below are almost as thick, but the smaller branches and thorns quickly become as thin as daggers, and the fruits that pierced the human body horribly stretched out to the sky.

It is impossible for a person to live for a long time after being pierced like this; it is doubly impossible to live in a vacuum outside of time and space.But they all live there and suffer.Kassad watched them writhe.All of them were alive and in agony. Kassad found the pain to be a loud, inaudible sound.It was a gigantic, constant foghorn of misery, as if thousands of untrained fingers resting on thousands of keys were playing a gigantic organ of misery.The pain was so obvious that he searched the dazzling sky, as if the tree were a funeral pyre or a giant lighthouse, with visible waves of pain coming.

But there is only blinding light and a dead silence like the moon. Kassad turned up the magnification of the binoculars on his body armor and looked from twig to twig, thorn to thorn.There were men and women writhing there, young and old, in varying torn clothes and makeup, spanning decades, if not centuries.There were many styles Kassad was unfamiliar with, and he assumed those were future victims.Thousands and tens of thousands of people are alive and suffering. Kassad stopped and carefully looked at a branch four hundred meters above the ground. On top of a pile of thorns and the body far away from the trunk, there was a three-meter-long thorn with a familiar purple color on it. The cloak fluttered.The figure writhed, then turned to Feldman.Kassad.

He was looking at Martin, who had been impaled and hung from it.Cylenos. Kassad cursed and clenched his fists so hard that the bones in both hands ached.He looked around for his weapon, zoomed up his binoculars, and looked into the crystal monolith. There was nothing there. Colonel Kassad shook his head, thinking that his body armor was a weapon far superior to those he had brought to Hyperion, and began striding towards the tree.He didn't know how he'd get there, but he'd find a way.He didn't know how to save Cylenos alive and save all the victims, but he had to do it, or die there.

Kassad took ten steps and stopped on a curved surface of a frozen dune.The Thorn Demon God stood between him and the tree. He found himself grinning against the chrome steel force field of his tight armor.This is something he's been waiting for for years.It was an honorable battle he had sworn on life and honor twenty years ago in the Masada Ceremony of the Overlord.Single combat between fighters.Fight for the innocent.Kassad grinned, flattened the edge of his right hand into a silver blade, and walked forward! (Kassad!) He heard Moneta's call and looked back.Light reflected on the quicksilver surface of her naked body, and she pointed into the valley.

The second Jing Demon God came out of the time tomb called the Sphinx.A little further in the valley, a thorn demon walked out of the entrance of the jade tomb.The dazzling light was reflected from the spikes and the brake wire, and another one came out from the obelisk a kilometer away. Kassad ignored them, turning to the tree and its guardians. A hundred thorn demon gods stood between Kassad and the tree.He blinked, and a hundred more appeared to his left.He looked behind him, a large group of thorn demon gods stood indifferently like statues on the cold sand dunes and melted gravel in the desert.

Kassad hit the knee with his fist. (damn it.) Moneta moved beside him, so close that their arms touched.The tight armor melted together, and he felt the warm skin of her forearm touching his.She pressed her thighs against his and stood with him. (I love you, Kassad.) He looked at the perfect lines of her face, ignored the clutter of images and colors reflected there, and tried to recall the first time he saw her, in the woods of Achan Arc, and he remembered her startling green eyes and short Short brown hair, her full lower lip, and the taste of tears he tasted when he accidentally bit it.

He reached out and touched her cheek, feeling the warmth of her skin under the tights. (If you hate me,) he teleported, (Stay here.) Feldman.Colonel Kassad then turned away, letting out a scream that only he could hear in the dead silence of the moon. The scream was partly the cry of rebellion from the ancient past of mankind, partly the roar of the Bajun military academy graduates, and partly Part of the karate yelling is pure challenge.He ran across the sand dune and rushed towards the thorn tree and the Thorn Demon God standing directly in front of him. Now there are thousands of Thorn Demon Gods on the hills and in the valleys, and the steel claws slammed open at the same time, and the light reflected thousands of sharp blades and steel thorns.

Kassad ignored the others and ran towards what he believed to be the first Thorn Demon God he had seen.Above that monster, countless human figures writhed in solitary agony. The thorn demon he was charging at stretched out all his arms as if to embrace him, and the curved blades on the wrists, joints and chest seemed to protrude from hidden holes. Kassad screamed wildly and charged the remaining distance.