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The sun had cleared the rooftops by the time they moved.
Lu Changcheng walked at the front. Behind him came every Mythical-rank hunter, every S-rank assigned to the engagement, a column moving through the cordoned district while the A and B-rank armies held the perimeter and watched. Their job was the cordon. The engagement inside was not theirs.
The district was quiet. Two days of occupation had stripped out whatever ambient noise a populated area usually carried, leaving only wind through empty streets and the silence of a space that had held thousands and now held none. The cold from the convention hall extended two full blocks outward. You felt it before you saw the building.
Nobody in the column spoke on the approach. Evan checked his right hand twice without appearing to realize he was doing it. Armand walked with his hand on his sword. Suture walked beside him, her gaze on the building ahead. Elias walked with his jaw set and his eyes on the building, nothing readable in his face.
Ren walked in the middle of the column with his white mask in place and his hands in his pockets.
The convention hall was cold before they entered it.
The Overlord sat on the bone throne where he had been sitting since he arrived, utterly still, the stillness of something that had outlived every urgency it had encountered. His court stood around him: the undead dragon coiled at the base of the throne, the Ancient Wraith drifting at his left, the Death Knight upright at his right, the Elder Lich behind him. Four extinction-rank presences in one space. The ambient mana hit you in the chest as you entered.
The assembled hunters spread out across the hall floor and stopped.
The Overlord looked at them.
"Thou hast considered this Lord's terms."
"We have," Lu said.
"And thy answer."
Lu smiled.
"We have considered your offer," he said. "And this is our answer."
He snapped his fingers.
The space cracked across the hall in multiple places simultaneously, each tear precise, each one opening at the exact position Lu had set for it, the output of a Legendary-rank Immortal who had spent forty years learning what space could be made to do. The Wraith and Elias went first, the tear sealing behind them before either had fully passed through. Then the Lich and Chu Xinghe, then the dragon and Armand, then the Death Knight and Bone Saw, whose obsidian frame caught the light badly.
The hall emptied around them, each tear sealing as it closed, until only Lu Changcheng and Malachar the Pale Sovereign remained. The quiet between them was complete.
The Overlord did not move from the throne.
He looked at Lu as he had two days ago, measuring.
Then he rose to his feet.
He was taller standing. The robes settled around him. He reached for the staff at his side and lifted it. The cold in the hall shifted.
"Foolish choice."
Lu's smile did not change.
"We'll see if it's foolish."
. . .
Ren opened his eyes.
Grass. Open plain. The city sat on the horizon behind him, distant enough that no sound from the engagement reached him. Lu had placed him with precision: outside the city's damage radius, but not so far that retrieval was a problem.
Which implies, Ren thought, that something might go wrong. Reassuring.
He checked his surroundings.
Three calamity-rank undead, spread across the grass at fifty meters. A Mutated Ghoul to the left, three times the standard size, the extra mass distributed in the wrong places, the proportions of something that had gone wrong mid-evolution. An Ancient Mummy at center, wrapped in material that had blackened with age, the preservation mana around it visible as a shimmer that ran cold rather than warm. A Grim Reaper to the right, its scythe resting on the ground at its side, its hollow eye sockets fixed on him without blinking, because it did not blink.
They held their positions.
They recognize a domain and they're waiting to see what it does before they commit, he thought. Calamity rank. Smart enough to be cautious.
Fuck.
Ren put his hand in his jacket pocket.
"A guild doctor," he said. "He sent a guild doctor." He pulled out a cigarette and put it between his teeth. "I should have asked for a bonus."
He lit it. Inhaled. Let the smoke out slowly while he watched the three of them watch him.
The red mist came without being called, spreading outward from him in every direction, covering the ground and rising, thickening, until five hundred meters of plain had turned a deep arterial red that took the morning light and held it. The grass was gone under it. The horizon blurred. The three calamity-ranks held their ground in the mist, visible as shapes, watching.
Ren exhaled smoke toward the mist.
"Come," he said.
The portals opened on either side of him, pulled by Eon from wherever he had been waiting. On his right, a monk in saffron kasaya stepped out onto the grass. His prayer beads caught the red light. He was smiling.
"Amitabha," Eon said.
On his left, an old man in purple alchemist robes stepped out and adjusted his collar. His skull was open. The brain beneath it was gold, glistening in the morning air, a thin film of cerebrospinal fluid catching the light and running down toward his temple.
Ren looked at it and closed his eyes.
The blood and gore desensitization has improved, he thought. The skull is manageable. The exposed brain is manageable. It is the mucus produced by a brain sitting open in morning air that remains too much.
He exhaled smoke.
"Forceps. Retractor."
"Yes, Father." From his left.
"Yes, Father." From his right.
Ren looked at the three calamity-ranks waiting in the red mist across the field: the Ghoul, the Mummy, the Reaper. He thought about his clinic. He thought about Silas standing beside him with an open skull.
He flicked the cigarette toward the undead.
"Fuck em up," he said.
Both of them smiled. Eon's prayer beads lit. Silas's gold brain pulsed, the Cerebral Tendrils threading outward through the red mist toward the nearest target.
The red mist poured from both of them, joining Ren's domain, and the plain turned a deeper red.
The three calamity-ranks broke from their positions.
Ren stepped back and put his hands in his pockets. He watched.