Chapter 516: Ever His Humble Servant
CAERA DENOIR
Sh*t!
The ground erupted at my side, lifting me into the air and sending me spinning. My crest flared, and wind pushed at my shoulders and heels, righting me before I touched down lightly onto the churned soil of the battlefield.
Mana ignited in my Dicathian regalia, and illusory smoke and flames wrapped around me, disguising my physical form before jumping from my body and springing up into a handful of dim copies of myself.
An instant later, a black jet of void wind and soulfire seared the ground only a few feet to my right, passing through one of my duplicates. I didn’t even have time to look around and get my bearings before throwing myself aside as several more black beams decimated the ground all around me.
Aiming wildly, I fired back with all seven currently active orbitals, each of which emanated a similar black beam. I sensed, rather than saw, the soulfire glance off a powerful mana signature. Wraiths, I thought as I scrambled across the ground, my duplicates shifting around me, melting and then reappearing in different places to further disguise my location.
My counterattack had barely faded before I pulled the orbitals back into a defensive structure instead. The seven silver shards, zipping like little birds around me, connected with each other, their stored mana fusing into a barrier. A heartbeat later, another ray hit, this time directly into my shielding.
The barrier broke, and I sucked in a breath as mana was dragged out of me to replenish the orbitals. Desperate, I looked around for a safe place to take cover, knowing I couldn’t take another such strike. If not for the increased strength and power I’d gained since meeting Grey—or Arthur—I’d already be dead, I knew.
The battlefield was chaos. Smoke and dusk occluded everything, and the constant flashing of spellfire only served to further blind me. The original loyalist army had taken heavy losses in the first exchange, but I could hear shouted orders and sense their battle groups reforming as our own forces were trapped between them and the beasts flowing out of the two Relictombs portals.
The appearance of an entire battle group of Wraiths just as Arthur disappeared into Taegrin Caelum was the death knell of our ability to remain organized.
Before I could find a place to take cover, two loyalist Strikers caught sight of me through the gloom. I was trapped between them and the Wraith at my back, who I hadn’t even gotten a good look at. Another heartbeat passed, and I felt a swelling of mana behind me: the Wraith preparing for another volley.
A bright yellow-orange flash lit the murk, temporarily blinding me. A bright intent collided with the dark signature of the Wraith, and a gust of wind blasted away all the smoke and dust for several hundred feet in every direction. Chul!
The two Strikers had taken half a step forward before flinching back as the impact rolled over us all. I didn’t hesitate, wind pushing my feet as I sprang forward, clearing the fifteen yards with a single bound and bringing my blade around in two quick cuts. The first Striker barely got a stone-covered arm up to deflect, but my sword skated off it and caught him in the temple. Fear caused the second Striker’s mana to waver, and the flames around his sword dimmed just as my own collided with it. His cheap steel snapped at the hilt, and the red blade of my weapon buried itself in his ribs.
Before their bodies had even hit the ground, I leapt atop a boulder, which sat in the crushed remains of a large tent. From there, I was finally able to get a look around the battlefield.
Chul clashed with three Wraiths fifty feet above the battlefield.
One, a four-horned man with glowing red eyes, gripped the haft of Chul’s weapon in one hand while clawing at Chul’s throat with the other. Black flames crackled against bright orange phoenix fire, sending out whistling flares that crashed into the battlefield below them. Wherever they fell, men screamed and died.
The second Wraith, a woman wrapped so deeply in shadow that I could not make out her features, sent out tendrils to wrap around Chul’s wrists and ankles, preventing him from breaking the hold of the first.
A huge man with horns that curled down his jaw fired sparkling bullets like black diamonds that burst with acid on impact, each one finding its mark against Chul even as the other Wraiths wrestled with the half- phoenix.
On the ground, Wolfrum’s forces were struggling to reform their lines. After the Strikers broke, the Shields and Casters had been pushed back until they could go no farther due to the barrier around Taegrin Caelum. With that gone, they were falling back and regrouping, while the Strikers flowed in from around the mountain pass. Their number had already been cut in half at least.
Our own soldiers had also been forced into a defensive position, however, huddling beneath the protection of their Shields and a roving cloud of void magic controlled by Seris, who I couldn’t see through the chaos.
Up on the ridges, monsters still poured out of the Relictombs portals. Four of Arthur’s exoforms stood on each plateau, slaughtering the creatures as they appeared. I thought I had seen one pierced through by a massive blood iron spike, and I did not know where the last exoform had gone.
I took all this in with a sweeping glance, my mind racing.
Chul is the strongest combatant on the field, which is why they’re piling on him. If they take him out, there will be little the rest of us can do against them. Seris’s ability to scour away the connection between a mage and their mana is powerful, but when they’re grouped up like this, the Wraiths are stronger.
I sensed the building up of mana an instant before a spell struck me: a bullet of ice, which shattered against the mana cladding my skin but still knocked me off the rock on which I’d been perched. My orbitals all swung in the direction the spell had come from, and I locked eyes with a Caster, hidden behind a crystalline shield of mana and flanked by two Strikers. Their Shield brought up the rear, twenty feet behind them.
Gritting my teeth, I pushed mana into the orbitals. Soulfire lanced from the seven silver spikes, and the crystalline shield grew to protect the entire battle group. The crystal shattered on impact, the sound echoing like a punctuation mark throughout the valley, and soulfire gouged into all four mages almost simultaneously. The Shield had only enough time for her eyes to widen a fraction of an inch before the beam scorched her chest cavity. It took less energy to push soulfire into their flesh and let them burn from the inside, but such a death was slow and needlessly cruel.
There was a rush of air and fire; my ears popped, and the collision of mana signatures took my breath away.
I fell flat on the ground as a shadow passed over me, and the four-horned Wraith crashed through several lines of nearby tents. I jumped back to my feet and sprinted toward where the Wraith had fallen.
In the distance, a single figure was flitting around the edges of the Alacryan forces, bombarding them with spells.
Suppressing my signature as best I could in the heat of combat, I kept my focus locked on the end of the long trough left by the Wraith’s fall, watching for any hint of movement or flare of power. I could tell from the continuing mana signature that the Wraith was not dead, but his aura was weakened.
Soulfire ignited around the red blade of my sword, and I drew back for the strike just as I reached the lip of the crater—and my pulse skipped as I found it empty.
Something took hold of my hair from behind, and I felt my head begin to jerk backwards. Reacting in the only way I could think of, my weapon, already poised to strike, twisted in my hands to adjust the angle of the blade, then chopped down through my long hair, shearing it cleanly off.
I stumbled forward at the sudden release of tension and threw myself into a diving roll that brought me back up facing my opponent.
The four-horned Wraith stared down at the handful of my dark blue hair, his nose wrinkling as if in disgust. “How barbaric,” he grumbled, tossing my hair to the ground at his feet. Then, his eyes shifted to mine. “Tell me, mage, what is your blood name? For your act of cowardice, I would quite like to hunt down your lineage and exterminate them one by one.”
I swallowed heavily, unable to break eye contact with the Wraith. My orbitals hovered between states as my thoughts faltered. I could not fight this creature one on one. My Dicathian regalia was flush with mana, but I withheld the effects of the spell. Even with my illusions, turning and running was likely to result in an even quicker death than attempting to fight.
The Wraith scoffed. “Scared silent? No matter. You’re Vritra-born; someone will be able to identify your head after I rip it from your neck.” He took a casual step toward me.
Smoke and fire poured out of me, hiding my body and forming into a dozen identical copies.
The Wraith hesitated, his eyes sweeping across the collection of indistinct forms before locking directly on my own. A wry smile twisted his features cruelly. “Pathetic. You really don’t—”
A volley of spells struck the Wraith, but he didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. Two battle groups of mages were rushing toward us, split off from the main force. The Wraith raised one hand, and a black fan of soulfire and void wind emanated out from him. Conjured shields shattered like glass as the fan bisected all nine mages in an instant. As the magic retracted, their bodies splattered across the ground, each one cut cleanly in two.
I pushed even more mana into my regalia, focusing on losing myself in the midst of the copies. My orbitals spread out, haloing randomly within the cluster and launching beams of soulfire at the Wraith as I prepared to dodge his counter attack.
A black shape, rippling with reflected gold from the wound above, flew over my head and slammed bodily into the Wraith. The immediate collision triggered another shockwave, sending me skidding backwards fifteen feet and momentarily disrupting my orbitals, which flew off in every direction.
A squat figure wrapped in what looked like black diamonds pummeled the Wraith with an oversized hammer. The ground around him was cracking as he sank into it with each blow, warped gravity visible twisting the air as the dust and smoke was pulled from it.
Recognizing the form as Lance Mica Earthborn, I tossed a glance back to where the primary loyalist force had only moments ago been warding off her attacks. She had left them in disarray, but no less than ten battle groups had broken away and were closing in on our location.
Taking a fortifying breath, I steadied the flow of mana through my regalia. The scattered, smoke-and-fire copies surrounded the Wraith, some darting in to feign attacks, others continuously moving. In a moment of inspiration, I extended the smokey camouflage to Mica, and half of my copies flickered into a new shape, taking her form.
My orbitals flashed back into place around me, and seven beams of black flame bore down on Wraith, but they seemed to glance off harmlessly as he dodged back from Mica’s blows, his counterattacks piercing smokey illusions but missing the real Lance.
“He’s a Caster!” I shouted to her as I watched him fight. Wraiths, like all Alacryans except the Scythes, were primarily trained to fight in battle groups. Without Strikers to keep us off him or a Shield to defend him, he was vulnerable. “Keep him pinned down!”
His eyes flicked in my direction, and he tossed a ray of mana back at me, but it speared through one of my copies. Mica’s hammer collided with his outstretched arm, slamming it down—but the other snapped toward
her, gripping her by the throat. Flames licked between his fingers against the indistinct black diamond armor. There was a horrible crack as the armor began to break.
My orbitals bombarded him with strikes, but they did no lasting damage. He was just too powerful. With each heartbeat, more and more of Mica’s armor broke and fell away. She clawed at the Wraith’s arm with one hand and punched her hammer into the side of his head ineffectually with the other.
The seven controlled orbitals came together in front of me, their power building as I prepared a single focused strike at his arm.
But the shadows shifted, and a second Wraith appeared, cutting me off from Mica and the four-horned Caster. I released the strike, jumping backwards and adjusting my target, but shadows swallowed the soulfire. A white slash appeared in the face where the mouth might have been, and then dozens of inky tendrils lashed out in every direction.
I threw myself back, recalling my orbitals into their defensive formation, but I was too slow. The tendrils struck with whip-crack speed, cutting through each of my regalia’s conjurations and lashing across my chest, slamming me to the ground.
My vision swam. Dark motes of black and purple seemed to swallow the light, and I thought I must have hit my head. Just as quickly, my vision cleared and I rolled onto my side.
The shadowy Wraith had turned her back on me and thrown up a swirling shield, but a cloud of void magic ate right through it and then pushed into the four-horned Wraith. His mana signature flickered.
Pushing myself onto my knees, I felt for the tethers to my relic bracer’s orbitals. They had been tossed away again when I was struck, but they zipped back into position around me. I took a firm mental grip over those tethers and fed as much mana as I could into them, until each silver spike unleashed a dense, continuous beam of soulfire at the Shield Wraith’s back.
She twisted with impossible speed, a second whirling shadow shield appearing between me and her. Two beams slipped through, striking her in the hip and stomach, but the rest impacted harmless against the barrier.
Behind her, beyond the four-horned Wraith and Mica, Seris strode toward us, a look of intense concentration on her face as she fought for control over her void spell.
As Seris’s spell ate into the man’s magic, Mica—no longer covered by my smoke and flame illusions—slammed her hammer across the back of his wrist, breaking his hold over her. Her armor was broken in a dozen places, and I could feel the Wraith’s soulfire inside of her, already burning her life force.
But the Lance didn’t stop swinging. She drove the head of the hammer into his face with a sharp punching motion, then swung it over her head and around into his knee. She smashed the haft into his teeth, then lifted the hammer over her head, but a tendril of shadow from the Shield Wraith wrapped around it, fighting for control.
Somewhere nearby, there was a horrid outpouring of mana and an incredible explosion that nearly drove the air from my lungs. Choking on the power, I pushed all of my focus and as much mana as I could maneuver into my blade for a second time, then I was sprinting toward the Wraiths.
Several misty tentacles shot toward me. My orbitals flashed into their defensive mode, connecting and forming a shield around me.
A round-headed mace, blazing with phoenix fire, burned a bright line in my vision as it passed like a meteor through the shadows. The woman and tendrils both melted away, and the mace buried itself in the solid rock with a tremendous crash.
I leapt over the resulting crater, and my sword carved a dark red arc through the air.
The four-horned Wraith’s head spun around, snarling. He shoved Mica and turned a spell that had been building toward Seris on me instead.
My blade fell.
His outstretched hand, fingers splayed and palm radiating black fire, spun into the air, connected to his arm only by a trail of blood. An instant later, Mica’s hammer connected with the side of his head, and he was driven onto one knee.
Seris’s void magic rushed out of him, and I felt his mana signature wane. Spinning around him, I swung with all my physical and magical strength. Skin parted, the barrier of his mana gone, then…my arms jerked painfully as the sword caught in his neck. Soulfire blazed from his wound, his own warring with mine.
Growling like an animal, he began to stand, threatening to jerk my weapon out of my hands.
Mica’s hammer struck him between his shoulders, and he sank back down. Her hammer landed again on the back of his head, driving him to all fours. Then again, and he slumped. My blade slipped free. Mica shook, struggling to lift her hammer, her concentration waning. I could feel the soulfire beneath our skin.
She was dying.
I raised my sword to deal the killing blow.
Suddenly, Mica was flying away as a dark tendril wrapped around her waist and throat. There was a blur, and a blunt-faced woman in blood iron armor collided with Seris. The ground trembled with the force of their impacts, and I nearly lost my footing.
The four-horned Wraith rolled over onto his back, coughing up blood but grinning.
My nostrils flared, and I drove my blade into his sternum and through his core. His body tensed from the pain, then released. Those hateful eyes rolled back to stare at me, and he took his final breaths, the grin never falling away.
But at least his soulfire will no longer be devouring Mica’s life energy. “You will regret that,” a hissing voice said in my ear.
I yanked my weapon free and spun, but instead of the shadowy Wraith I found myself looking across the destroyed encampment at Wolfrum Redwater leading fifty loyalist soldiers toward me. I couldn’t see Mica. Seris and the spike-armored Wraith clashed in the distance, their struggle having already taken them far above, nearly to the mountain peaks. The force of Chul’s onslaught pulsed in my chest like the beating of my own heart. But the smoke and dust was settling again, stealing away my view of the wider battlefield.
“Well, great,” I muttered, holding Wolfrum’s two-tone eyes.
The pompous prick made a show of giving hand signals to the closest battle groups, and his forces began fanning out. In the distance, hidden within the dust, I could hear the bulk of the remaining loyalists driving toward the center of our own meager army. With a final gesture, Wolfrum surged forward, those following him spreading out to surround me.
I reached for my regalia again, this time feeling the tug on my core as I rapidly burned through my mana.
“I’m glad it’s me,” Wolfrun shouted once he was close enough to make himself heard over the din of battle. “You deserve to die at the hands of someone who respects you.”
A muscle in my jaw twitched as I considered his treachery. For years, Wolfrum had spied on Seris for Dragoth. He had revealed this fact when attempting to kill me and allow Dragoth through the barrier around Sehz Clar.
“No matter who inevitably kills you, Wolfrum, you are certain to die at the hands of someone who has no respect for you at all,” I said, my voice echoing through the illusions fanned out to my sides, further disguising my real position. I flicked the Wraith’s blood off my sword and strode toward the oncoming loyalists.
SERIS VRITRA
My senses struggled to track the remaining Wraiths as Lance Mica Earthborn pummeled the four-horned one into the ground and Caera slid her blade from his neck.
It was well orchestrated on Agrona’s part. First, he baits Arthur past the barrier and into the Decay-field, a spell that seemed designed specifically for Arthur. Then, the Wraiths—experts in shrouding their mana—appear just as Arthur takes the greater part of our strength into Taegrin Caelum and immediately vanishes.
If we had hoped to find Agrona hiding away within his fortress, weak and afraid, it seems we were denied.
Before Mica and Caera could finish the Wraith off, there was a blur, and I found myself face to face with the one woman on this battlefield I knew was truly a danger: the Wraith, Perhata. The very same one who had led the attack on Sovereign Oludari.
I raised my arms to ward off her blow, but the force of it was still enough to send me hurtling backwards.
I glanced off an outcropping of rock, then flew into the air. I could feel the twin Relictombs portals beneath me, the Dicathian exoforms holding back the monsters. Cylrit was directing the remainder of our forces on the ground. I could feel his eyes on me, too, but I did not give the signal for him to offer assistance.
Perhata flashed across the battlefield. Her lithe frame, jet black hair, and sweeping horns were hidden within an armor of interlocking black spikes.
Mana coalesced in my hand, elongating into a black, many-tailed whip. I flew to the side and snapped my wrist, and the whip cracked. Dark purple flames danced down the length of each tail as they impacted Perhata.
Her blood iron armor combusted, turning into a bomb. Burning spikes exploded toward me and rained down on the battlefield below, but there had been no body of flesh and bone inside.
I threw up a barrier, dissolving the spikes that came at me direction as I searched for the Wraith. At the last second, I dropped, and a crushing backhand blow whooshed over my head, just missing the tips of my horns. Spinning in the air, I pushed upward with my mana, sending out a wide beam of Decay infused magic, the black flecked through with veins of dark purple. Perhata caught the attack on one forearm, dividing the beam so that it flew past her to either side, her black spikes regrowing as fast as the void beam broke them down.
“Your reprieve is over, Unblooded,” the Wraith snarled as my spell faded.
“Clever of you to wait until Arthur was gone,” I answered nonchalantly, floating up until I was eye to eye with her. “I’m told your defeat at his hands was just as thorough as it was casual.”
The spikes unfolded away from her face to reveal the predatory smile beneath. “Agrona has destroyed Arthur Leywin without lifting a finger. It has been left to me to sweep up the rest of the rubbish.”
I cocked a brow at her. “Reduced to Agrona’s maid servant? How pathetic.”
Her grin only sharpened as the spikes rolled back over her face. “I am ever his humble servant, Unblooded.”
She shot forward, her hands outstretched as if to take me by the throat. I rotated around the lunge, knocking her away with a swift kick to her ribs before turning and flying away at speed.
The center of the valley was swallowed by the two armies locked in combat. Shields flashed, broke, and flashed again all over the battlefield. Despite the loyalists’ losses, they still greatly outnumbered our own forces, but Cylrit was loose in their back lines, carving down Casters and Shields like so many stalks of wheat.
Two more of Arthur’s exoforms had fallen under the endless tide of monsters.
Chul was pinned against the nearby cliffs by three other Wraiths, which meant one Wraith was missing.
I suddenly slowed, my body growing heavy as black spikes grew like frost from my own shadows, beginning to wrap around me just like Perhata’s armor. Levelling out, I spun like a top, oozing dark motes of void to break down her mana, and I nearly collided with another dark shape as it formed in front of me. Twisting away, I dodged a double- handed strike from the conjuration, but I was still slowing as I struggled to fight off the spell entombing me.
From the corner of my eye, I saw as the missing Wraith, little more than an ichorous shadow, materialized behind Cylrit. The strike fell before my eyes could even widen in fear, and my retainer went skipping across the ground like a stone, killing a dozen loyalist mages in the process.
There was movement all around me: a dozen or more suits of black, spiked armor. I dipped and wove between them, focusing all my effort on creating a void barrier around me that her mana could not pass through, but her control over her own mana was tremendous. Breaking her hold was as difficult as attempting to pry open the jaws of a pit vore.
Shadow suddenly blocked out the golden light spilling from the rift above us, and a chunk of tree-covered soil collided with the eastern cliffs, impacting directly above the Relictombs portal. The mountainside ruptured with a cataclysmic crash, and the portal frame shattered. The three exoforms were hurled off the stone shelf along with tons of rock, and I lost sight of them in the resulting cloud of dust.
My whip cracked again, hardening into several spears of mana that pierced the hearts of as many armored forms. Dark fire ruptured within them, obliterating my targets, but none were the real Perhata.
A spike hit me from behind, breaking down against my void barrier but still hitting me in the ribs like a punch and spinning me in the air. A spiked arm wrapped around my throat from behind, and my mana waged war against Perhata’s, dissolving her conjured spikes even as more continued to form in their place. Several more suits of armor surrounded me, and blows began to rain down. The spell cladding my skin shattered.
Mana formed a dark sphere around my core, which then pressed rapidly out of me. Blood iron fell away into dust at the edges, and each of the several armored forms was knocked away. I could see into the hollow space within each one: all empty except for the forearm still pinned against my throat, now exposed.
I gripped her arm in both of my hands and pushed motes of void black and dark purple into the flesh. The mana strengthening the limb dissolved, and I wrenched myself free, spun while twisting her arm, and drove both my feet into her chest, launching myself away in a flying back flip. Mana built up in front of me, and as I completed my rotation, I released it: a thin dark line split the sky, striking her in the sternum and erupting.
Perhata vanished within a sphere of purest black. All around me, the armored forms she controlled shuddered , then began to fall to pieces.
I took a steadying breath, already looking around for Cylrit. He was on one knee, surrounded by the enemy, the shadowy Wraith approaching. But the dwarven Lance was there, hurling spells and hammer blows all around her, keeping them back. I needed to reach her and Cylrit before—
Perhata flew out of the void denotation, her flesh ruptured and bleeding, her mana signature diminished, but a wild, raw look of bloodlust on her face. Blood iron spikes flew like bullets from her body, and I drew a curtain of void wind between us. The spikes ground to dust against it, until my strength gave out and the shield broke. Hot pain blossomed in my leg, stomach, and shoulder.
Mana formed a lightless spear in my hands, and I held it forward to catch her on it.
She was too fast.
With a gauntlet of black spikes wrapped around her hand, Perhata battered the spear aside and slammed into me. I was thrown backwards, unable to control my flight, until the stone of the mountainside arrested my momentum. Rock gave way, collapsing around me and cutting out the golden light that lit up the night, and everything went dark.