Tsukumo stopped beside me in front of the ship's wide-open hatch.
For a moment, our eyes met through the roar of the storm.
There was nothing left to say.
We jumped into the abyss.
The wind slammed into my face like a concrete wall, the deafening vibration from the enemy cannon's blast still echoing through the bones of my arms.
Far below, rising from the metallic depths of Gron-Tarh, a colossal cloud of drones was already climbing to intercept us, filling the darkness with red targeting lights.
"I'll take the high ground!" I shouted to Tsukumo, my voice nearly swallowed by the hurricane as I pointed toward the sky.
He cast a quick glance at the heavy clouds above us, then assessed the armed platform below.
He simply nodded.
We split apart in midair a fraction of a second before the front of the swarm came within range.
I summoned the wind beneath the soles of my boots, abruptly breaking my fall and gaining altitude through the curtain of rain while Tsukumo continued his suicidal dive.
Three drones broke away from the formation and plunged toward him with their weapons charged.
Tsukumo didn't dodge.
He simply raised one hand and spread his fingers. The three targets were swept from their trajectories by an invisible force, crashing into one another and then into the side of a tower in an explosion of twisted metal.
I pierced the first dense layer of clouds, momentarily losing sight of Gron-Tarh.
The shrill sirens and constant thunder of the anti-air batteries followed me upward.
I released the hilt of my sword for a single second, opening and closing my hand again and again until the tremor buried in my fingers finally stopped.
That was when I saw the dragon.
It wasn't flying among the clouds.
It was embedded in the memory the storm had dragged back to the surface.
I saw those enormous red wings blotting out the sun over my village.
I felt Susen's trembling hand clutching mine, and I saw Roberto step in front of us at the exact moment the creature's jaws opened.
The mournful toll of the mountain bell echoed through my mind, from the day I had held a sword far too heavy for my childhood arms.
For years, I remembered that fire only for everything it had taken from me.
And yet, years later, it was that very same dragon that had granted me the power now burning through my veins.
I still didn't know what to do with the storm of emotions I felt toward it.
"Gratitude" seemed like an impossible word. An insult to the past.
But "hatred" alone could no longer explain what I had become.
Calling this attack a tribute bordered on madness.
And maybe that was exactly why I needed to do it.
I closed my eyes and let the fire rise from the pit of my stomach. Heat spread through my chest before exploding down my arms.
Furious lines of red and gold tore across my skin, pulsing in time with my breathing.
Flames licked around my legs without burning me, and the wind began spinning with them, forming a cyclone that held me high above the chaos of the storm and flooded the night sky with incandescent light.
Far below, the atmosphere itself changed.
The dense cloud cover tore apart in concentric circles around the central towers, revealing Gron-Tarh once again.
Gravity throughout the valley seemed to go insane.
The rain stopped falling.
Droplets of water hovered in the air for one second of absolute silence before being violently sucked toward an axis far darker than the surrounding sky.
Communication antennas bent like melted plastic.
Thick armor plates were ripped from their rivets.
Entire swarms of drones lost all stability, dragged into a spiral toward that cosmic drain.
Tsukumo stood at the heart of the pandemonium.
Suspended in midair, both hands extended, fingers rigid and aimed directly at the enemy sector.
I knew that stance intimately.
Years ago, I had been the one to take that same attack straight to the chest.
"COLLAPSE!"
Tsukumo's roar tore through the storm, drowning out the mechanical chaos of Gron-Tarh.
An abyssal corridor of black and violet energy punched through space directly above the enemy batteries.
Titanic rings materialized around the distortion, rotating at different heights and speeds.
With every revolution, crushing gravity tore entire sections of metal from the towers and dragged masses of cloud into the column.
Anything that reached the center was ground down and compressed until it vanished into the darkness.
Tsukumo screamed through clenched teeth as the singular gravitational blast poured from his hands.
I could see every muscle in his body straining beneath the absurd weight of the pressure he himself was generating. The wrappings around his arms trembled and snapped under the extreme stress.
It was my turn.
I leaned forward and dove.
The wind became my catapult back into the battle.
Behind me, the flames were no longer a shapeless mass.
They tore through the air, taking form as two immense wings of fire.
A long incandescent neck rose from my back until the colossal head of the beast took shape, jaws of pure white heat aimed directly at Gron-Tarh.
The dragon plunged with me.
When I tore through the lower layer of the storm, the creature's flaming shadow swept across the towers and cleared the clouds. Cannons that were still operational spun frantically toward us and opened heavy fire.
The energy beams, however, simply passed through the wings of the extreme-heat illusion and vanished into the flames.
I kept my eyes locked on the central structure, which was already beginning to buckle violently under the pull of Collapse.
"Tsukumo!" I shouted, my voice blending with the roar of the wind.
"I SEE IT!" His answer came strained and breathless.
The gravitational pull hooked into me moments before we reached the column of destruction.
The gale surrounding me was violently dragged sideways, forcing me to use the full weight of my body and aura to correct my trajectory.
The dragon suffered the same deviation on a massive scale.
Its head, meant to crush the platform in a straight dive, was brutally dragged toward Tsukumo's rings of distortion.
The flames stretched through the vacuum, fighting not to break apart.
But I held the form together.
The dragon began circling the black column, following the choreography of shredded metal.
The first full revolution swept its wings behind the command tower. On the second, the beast's colossal body wrapped completely around Collapse, creating a monstrous spiral of fire around the dark singularity.
The infernal heat reached me, joined by a gravitational vacuum that tried to rip every trace of air from my lungs.
I had to force wind beneath the soles of my boots and launch myself backward, escaping the axis of attraction at the last possible second.
The dragon abruptly tightened its orbit for one final revolution.
Now the incandescent inferno and the spiral of debris descended together toward the same blind spot.
"Agony," I murmured, declaring the end of the attack.
The superstructure finally gave way.
Metal folded inward beneath the gravitational pull at the exact thousandth of a second that the dragon plunged onto it with its jaws wide open.
Tsukumo's Collapse crushed batteries, titanium supports, and armor toward Gron-Tarh's core, while the torrent of fire exploded across that same hyper-dense center before the collapse had even finished.
A devastating flash incinerated the night.
The entire anti-air platform vanished beneath a titanic expansion of white fire, superheated steam, and molten steel.
The shockwave spread through Gron-Tarh's foundations, snapping walkways in half, imploding support towers, and sweeping entire legions of drones from the sky.
The invisible physical impact hit me head-on.
For the first time, Gron-Tarh became daylight for a few seconds.
I spun uncontrollably through the air, forced the wind to slow me on pure instinct, and slammed violently into a distant walkway.
I dropped to my knees.
The grating buckled beneath the hard impact of my boots. The metal burned against my hands despite the merciless rain.
I lifted my head, coughing smoke.
A thick black column climbed into the clouds where the main artillery sector had once stood.
Fragments of two towers remained upright like deformed skeletons, and the colossal cannon was gone.
But there were still hundreds of hangars and internal sectors we needed to break open and keep accessible so Candice and Havelyn could do their job.
I slowly stood and found Tsukumo a few meters ahead.
His hands were braced against the scorched railing, his shoulders rising and falling hard, his arms trembling from the recoil of the attack.
He spat to the side, dragged air into his battered lungs, then straightened his posture.
His sharp eyes turned toward the smoking crater we had carved into Gron-Tarh's defenses.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!" Candice screamed over the communicator, so loudly I nearly went deaf.
I looked up. The enemy drones were no longer firing, and our ships were successfully closing in.
"You two are fucking monsters."
"Candice," I said as lightning struck a few meters away from me.
"Find your brother. Leave the rest to us."
There was a second of silence before Candice answered.
"Thanks, boys."
The rain began falling between us again.
Every light scattered across the fortress changed direction in unison.
Cannons from distant sectors rotated toward us. Thousands of drones adjusted their routes and began pouring from hangars on the far side, while new red points multiplied through the rain.
Colossal doors opened, releasing military ships that climbed between the towers still standing.
The communicator crackled.
"Troop transfer confirmed," Gordon said.
"Any idea how many?" Candice asked.
I heard the sound of controls beneath his fingers.
"Five aerial squadrons. Seven sectors are redirecting drones to the surface."
"The eastern towers changed targets too."
"And the ground forces?"
"Coming up through the central elevators."
"They're clearing the inner corridors to contain those two."
Tsukumo looked at me.
Exactly what we needed.
A formation of drones emerged from the smoke while others spread out along the sides of the walkway, keeping their distance as they locked onto us.
I drew my sword.
My arm still throbbed, but I could hold the hilt.
"Let's go all out."
The radio hissed again.
"Suki. Tsukumo," Candice called.
"Don't let that concentration drop."
"Understood."
In the distance, one of our ships plunged through the storm.
From high above, a solitary figure leapt from the edge of one of the transport ships, diving without the slightest hesitation toward the colossal crater we had just opened.
It was Candice.
She plummeted in freefall with unwavering posture, her enormous scythe already gripped in both hands, the sharpened blade reflecting the glow of the flames still devouring the twisted metal of the destroyed sector.
One heartbeat later, a black streak tore through the rain behind her.
Havelyn cut through the storm like a projectile, keeping her wings folded tight against her body to pierce the wind resistance and gain even more speed.
She caught up to Candice in midair, only a few meters before they reached the thick smoke from the explosion.
With surgical precision, Havelyn grabbed Candice firmly by the shoulders and, in one brutal motion, threw her wings wide open.
The air cracked with a deep boom, blasting the rain outward in a violent shockwave.
The impulse catapulted both of them downward, multiplying their falling speed to an absurd degree.
They became a single dark blur, tearing through the incandescent smoke and the shaft of twisted steel in a fraction of a second.
In the blink of an eye, they disappeared completely, swallowed by the darkness inside the mechanical depths of the hole.
A red light flared on the hull of the nearest drone.
I leapt from the walkway before it fired and watched three beams cut through the metal where my feet had been.
I struck the first drone on the way down. My blade split its fuselage and passed clean through.
I planted one boot against the chassis of a second to change direction, then struck the joint of one of its propellers.
The wreckage crashed into the formation coming behind it.
Tsukumo opened his hand.
Gravity dragged the front drones into one another, scattering the rest.
His breath faltered for an instant.
I saw tension climb through his bandaged arms and descended before he had to maintain the field any longer.
I crossed the open space, cutting down two machines trying to regain altitude.
A cannon fired at the walkway ahead of me.
The explosion split the floor and hurled me sideways. I rolled across the rain-soaked metal, protected my head with my forearm, and rose beside the base of a control tower.
I heard the targeting mechanism humming.
I was too close to run.
The cannon fired.
Its beam veered off course at the last second and passed only a few meters from my head.
Behind me, Tsukumo lowered the arm he had still been holding aloft.
I didn't wait for another shot.
I ran to the tower's hydraulic joint, drove my sword between two plates, and released fire through the blade.
The metal cracked.
The structure went dark in a burst of sparks, leaving the cannon locked in place and pointed toward the sky.
"One tower neutralized," I reported over the radio.
"Three more sectors have redirected patrols toward you," Gordon replied.
I looked up.
Red lights covered the storm.
"Keep sending them."
A heavy shadow dropped from the storm and struck the lower platform with enough force to shake the entire steel structure.
Sahger.
Three armored soldiers from Gron-Tarh advanced in sync to surround him.
They never had a chance to pull the trigger.
Sahger's green spear didn't move like a weapon.
It moved like solid lightning.
The tip punched through the first soldier's chest, shattering the ballistic ceramic plate before he could even finish raising his rifle.
Without withdrawing the shaft, Sahger used the weight of the impaled body as leverage, swinging the weapon through the air to sever the second soldier's throat. The man collapsed against the railing, choking on blood.
The third tried to retreat in panic, but the spear punched through his visor with a wet crack and pinned his skull to the floor.
Sahger ripped the blade free with a sharp jerk and kept marching over the corpses.
He never looked back.
The red crest of his helmet disappeared into the smoke of explosions and the relentless rain.
The hundreds of containment doors on the surface level finished opening.
Gron-Tarh began vomiting its army onto us—endless ranks of heavy infantry, swarms of drones, and shock armor.
Exactly as Candice had predicted.
Every second those soldiers spent on the surface trying to kill us was another precious second gained for her and Havelyn in the prison's depths.
The radio on my shoulder crackled, drowned in static and the continuous roar of artillery.
"Suki…" Havelyn's voice broke apart.
"I hear you!"
"We made it into the lower sectors."
The sound of tearing metal thundered in the background of the transmission.
"But this is only the first level. This place is a fucking nightmare, Suki. It's huge. Buy us as much time as you can."
I let out the breath trapped in my lungs, feeling a momentary wave of relief swallowed by the weight of the situation.
"And Candice?"
"I'm here." The hunter's voice cut into the channel, breathless and cold.
"These floors are colossal."
"They're like small underground moons. Gordon, you bastard…"
"I told you the place was big," the dwarf grumbled over the open channel without a trace of remorse for the absurd situation.
I looked at Tsukumo, who wiped soot from his face beneath the rain.
He gave a short nod.
They had only crossed the threshold of hell.
Above us, the silhouettes of the resistance ships broke through the fog, opening their side hatches while still moving.
We were no longer alone.
Dozens of allied warriors leapt onto Gron-Tarh's walkways with furious battle cries.
War erupted in all its horror.
Laser fire tore through the darkness, blades sank into thick armor, and the rain turned soot into dark sludge that quickly became stained red.
I surged through the slaughterhouse the walkway had become like an incandescent meteor.
I channeled all my fury into the sword's blade, making the metal glow white-orange and hiss violently whenever the storm struck it.
Two elite soldiers tried to block the corridor with energy shields.
I didn't slow down.
The impact of my strike didn't merely cut through the force field.
It melted it.
The blade passed through the metal shield and the man's arm in one fluid motion, cauterizing the wound before the blood could even spray.
I spun with the momentum of my own charge and decapitated the second guard.
Three more shooters took aim from the upper walkways.
I pointed my free hand toward them and let the heat loose. A dense blast of flame swallowed the elevated platform, turning the steel red-hot and silencing the soldiers' screams beneath fire and ash.
I was tearing apart, burning, and cutting down everything that wore the insignia of that fortress.
To my right, the clash between the armies reached a critical point.
A Gron-Tarh shock squad equipped with electric spears and heavy shields surrounded five resistance fighters against the edge of the abyss, forcing them back until they were almost falling over.
Before the execution could begin, the steel floor groaned beneath a brutal weight.
Tsukumo walked over to a colossal armor plate that had been torn from the foundations of a nearby watchtower.
He gripped the razor-sharp steel edges with his bare hands.
The veins in his neck bulged.
The muscles in his arms swelled against the white bandages, and with a guttural roar that seemed to tear the very air around him, the son of the God of Strength planted his legs into the floor and lifted several tons of solid metal through brute strength alone.
He twisted his torso and hurled the colossal plate through the air.
It crushed the entire shock squad at once, reducing shields, spears, and bones to a flattened heap of scrap against the walkway floor.
The guards behind them stared at Tsukumo in pure terror.
He gave them no time to retreat.
He charged through the enemy line like an enraged locomotive.
When one soldier lunged with a plasma bayonet, Tsukumo simply blocked the strike by catching the weapon's blade in his bare hand, ignoring the heat frying his skin.
He yanked the guard toward him and drove a clean punch, carrying the overwhelming weight of his divine lineage, straight into the center of the man's chest.
The breastplate imploded.
The sickening crack of shattering ribs could be heard even over the rain, and the soldier's body was launched backward like a rag doll, knocking down four more allies along the way.
Tsukumo advanced through the opening, throwing punches that crushed bulletproof helmets like aluminum cans and shattered armored joints as easily as snapping twigs.
The fortress roared around us.
Sirens, gunfire, and explosions blended with the short voices transmitted over the radio.
Above the walkways, elves dove through the air to destroy sensors, vanishing into the fog before the anti-air batteries could track them.
Resistance ships carved through the sky between the towers, bombing defensive positions or dropping warriors onto the platforms.
One of our vessels took a hit to its turbine and tilted sideways, losing altitude.
I saw draconians clinging to its sides, trying to stabilize it before they all disappeared beneath the clouds.
I never found out if they succeeded.
I had to keep following the plan.
I kept running across the metal floor, the blood from my latest kill still warm on my hands, when the deafening noise of the war suddenly vanished.
It wasn't true silence.
It was the desperate warning of my own survival instinct.
Something tore through the storm mere millimeters from my face.
Its speed was so absurd that the displaced air cracked against my ear like an electrified whip.
A sudden wet sting burned across my cheek.
When I touched my face and lowered my fingers, my skin had painted them red.
I looked back.
A black-shafted arrow was buried all the way to the fletching in the reinforced steel wall, vibrating with a lethal hum that made my teeth clench.
I spun around instantly, blood boiling beneath my skin, and swept my sword through a fast arc.
My eyes searched the darkness above us, trying to pierce the thick curtain of rain and explosion smoke.
Whoever had fired left no trail.
There was no targeting laser.
No mechanical click from Gron-Tarh's snipers.
I couldn't find them through their aura signature.
There was only murderous intent so dense and heavy that it made oxygen itself feel poisonous.
And it was everywhere.
The second crack tore through the storm.
It didn't come from the same direction.
It was a cross-shot, moving too fast for my eyes to follow.
I raised my blade in front of my face on pure instinct, forcing the fire of my aura into the sword's steel.
The collision sounded like an anvil being crushed.
The arrowhead struck the face of my blade dead-on, and the absurd kinetic force dragged me nearly a meter backward.
The soles of my boots skidded violently over the wet metal, ripping sparks from the walkway.
I deflected its trajectory at the final thousandth of a second. The projectile grazed my shoulder before burying itself in the steel floor and exploding in a shockwave that melted the grating.
I didn't even have time to blink.
The wind hissed twice more.
The airspace around us became a web of invisible death.
I drove my heel into the floor and moved.
My wrist spun in an incandescent blur, knocking away the first shot with an upward cut that split the black shaft in half and scattered energy through the rain.
For the second arrow, I threw my weight to the right and bent my knees.
The vacuum created by the projectile pulled at my hair and tore through the fabric of my coat before the arrow buried itself deeply in the metal as though the titanium were made of butter.
They weren't trying to kill me yet.
These were surgical shots, loaded with monstrous pressure, meant only to test my reflexes and keep me trapped at that exact point of the prison.
Tsukumo moved closer.
He stopped several arrows with gravity and caught another in his hand before snapping it in half.
He planted his feet firmly on the ground, muscles tense beneath the rain, and we stood back-to-back.
"Suki."
"Yeah."
Another hum cut through the air.
Tsukumo grabbed my shoulder and yanked me brutally toward the floor, throwing his weight over me.
The projectile skimmed past our hair before detonating against the metal structure ahead.
Before either of us could get back up, a deep roar swallowed the sound of the storm.
It was the sound of something colossal spinning at incredible speed, tearing through the wind like a helicopter blade.
A war axe the size of a grown man was descending from the dark sky toward us.
We leapt in opposite directions on pure animal instinct.
The monstrous blade struck the platform exactly where we had been a fraction of a second earlier.
The impact was so grotesque that Gron-Tarh's steel caved in and split apart, forming a crater that made the entire floor tremble beneath our feet.
As though pulled by a gravity of its own, the weapon reversed direction in midair and shot upward in a violent arc toward the darkness.
We heard the thunder of heavy boots stepping through pools of blood.
A gigantic man emerged from the shadows, each step making the structure itself groan.
He extended one bare hand and caught the handle of the multi-ton axe in midflight, absorbing the full impact through the monstrous muscles of his arm without so much as blinking.
Hair as red as fire and blood clung to his massive shoulders in the rain.
He rested the weapon's handle against his shoulder, breathing heavily as he looked down at us with the silence of a predator that had just cornered its prey.
With his other hand, he was eating one of our allied elves.
The sight filled me with instant disgust and hatred.
Then laughter echoed through the storm.
Slow, mocking, and infuriatingly calm.
"You two are making one hell of a mess in our backyard, don't you think?"
I raised my head.
Above us, crouched on the edge of a thick pipeline, was a slender figure.
His neon-pink hair stood out against the darkness of the complex.
He spun two curved daggers between his fingers at a dizzying speed, as though the blades were living extensions of his hands.
He smiled down at us with the same sick amusement of someone watching rats run through a maze with no exit.
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the rain.
I looked up and to the left.
At the top of the watchtower Tsukumo had nearly destroyed minutes earlier, a woman with an upright posture and snow-white hair held a longbow drawn to its absolute limit.
A thick black band completely covered her eyes.
I shifted half a step to the right, barely more than a few millimeters, just to test her.
The arrowhead followed my chest with mathematical precision and locked onto my heart.
Blind or not, she didn't need to see me to know exactly where I would die.
Tsukumo growled under his breath and took his fighting stance.
A few meters from the edge of the colossal pit we had carved into Gron-Tarh's defenses, beneath the merciless rain washing over the open battlefield, a tall man waited for us.
I hadn't even sensed him approach.
He wore a heavy black cassock beneath a short mantle draped over his shoulders, identical to the vestments of a chaplain.
Stormwater ran from the straight brim of his clerical hat, casting a hard shadow across his face, where the same strip of black cloth as the archer's covered his eyes.
His presence radiated more than the mechanical coldness of a loaded guillotine.
It carried the crushing, silent weight of a sacrificial altar.
He held a long spear etched with ancient symbols along the steel, gripping the shaft with terrifying reverence while blocking the only path that led us away from the crater.
"Until this moment, your souls have wandered through a sea of insects and false miracles," the chaplain's voice resounded.
It was deep and liturgical, cutting through the cacophony of war, explosions, and screams around us like the tolling of a funeral bell.
"But every pilgrimage reaches its end before the divine."
He lifted his blindfolded chin slightly toward us, resting both hands upon his spear as though standing at a pulpit.
"Bend your knees, heretics... for your world ends at the edge of this abyss."
The guards who had been hunting us moments earlier withdrew into the shadows of the trenches, trembling with fear and refusing to step onto the same ground profaned by those four anomalies.
The air became dense, almost suffocating, saturated with an aura of death so crushing and proud that the storm became nothing more than background noise.
I adjusted the sword in my hand.
"We have to get through."
Tsukumo didn't answer.
The air around his hand began to bend.
He took one step forward, and before he could take another, a heavy spear dropped between us and them, cracking the metal.
A heavy steel boot sank into the mixture of mud and blood beside us.
Sahger.
He walked slowly beneath the storm, the red crest of his helmet slicing through the wind toward the edge of the abyss where we had been cornered.
The man in the black cassock and clerical hat, who blocked our retreat with his engraved spear, seemed to stop breathing for a second.
Water streamed from the straight brim of his hat as he tilted his head slightly.
Slowly, he raised his free hand, pale fingers slipping beneath the black cloth covering his face.
He pulled the soaked fabric down on only one side, as though he needed physical confirmation of what his profane perception had already screamed at him.
What appeared beneath it made my stomach turn.
It was a wide-open eyeball, swollen and threaded with dark, pulsing veins.
The skin around it was stretched and raw, with no visible eyelids.
It was a horrific, frantic stare that looked as though it had never blinked since the day it was born, frozen in an expression of contained and perpetual madness.
That faded pupil locked onto Sahger's armor with sickening intensity, studying the old acquaintance beneath flashes of lightning.
"Stray sheep…" the chaplain's voice echoed, solemn and drawn-out beneath the thunder, dripping with false, icy liturgical compassion.
"How long have you wandered through the darkness, Sahger?"
Sahger didn't even flinch.
With a sharp motion, he retrieved his own spear from the wet floor, metal scraping loudly across the grating of the open platform.
High atop the ruined watchtower, the archer relaxed the tension of her bowstring by a single millimeter.
The rain beat mercilessly against the black band covering her eyes.
"Red Crest…" she murmured, her spectral voice carried away by the wind.
The familiarity in that whisper made Sahger's stance lock.
I noticed the change immediately as he planted his feet into the slippery steel, rotating his spear in a wide defensive arc to keep all four figures within his field of awareness at once, with our backs completely exposed to the vast smoking crater behind us.
"You know them?" I asked, wiping rain-mixed blood from my chin.
"I do," Sahger replied, his rough voice vibrating behind the metal of his helmet.
Tsukumo never took his eyes off the archer, who still held the unseen line of her arrow locked onto my chest from dozens of meters above.
His knuckles cracked.
"What are these guys?"
The tip of Sahger's spear rose, pointing first toward the tangled industrial pipelines extending above us, where the slender pink-haired figure stood.
"Vladimir," he said.
High above, the manic smile on the pink-haired man's face faltered for a fraction of a second.
Sahger's weapon lowered immediately, pointing toward the mountain of muscle that had just eaten the elf's head and now held the multi-ton axe in the middle of the walkway.
"Lutor."
The giant said nothing, but pooled water splashed as he shifted his weight and moved the axe handle into both hands, spitting out a bone.
His joints cracked like breaking stone.
Sahger's spear moved toward the tower.
"Yasmin."
The blind archer tilted her head slightly, almost as though greeting him at a funeral.
Finally, Sahger lowered the blade and pointed it toward the chaplain, who remained as still as a statue at the edge of the combat platform, where Gron-Tarh's troops refused to tread.
"William."
I had never heard those names in my life, but the heavy silence that settled beneath the downpour made it obvious that none of them expected anonymity.
"The Four Beasts," Sahger concluded.
His voice was low, but dense enough to cut through the roar of the wind.
High above, Vladimir resumed spinning his twin daggers, spreading that sick smile across his face once again as he hopped into a crouch on a closer pipe, balancing above the steel abyss.
"And you're still wearing that rusted tin armor to preach your false pride, Red Crest…" Vladimir mocked, his eyes gleaming with murderous amusement.
"What a depressing blasphemy."
Sahger ignored the provocation.
The communicator hissed in my ear.
"Suki. Tsukumo. Respond," Candice called.
I touched the communicator without taking my eyes off Yasmin's arrow.
"We're here."
"The defenses are changing patterns, and we need you to keep the pressure on the surface."
I looked at Sahger again.
Four against one.
"There's a different kind of resistance in our way," I warned her.
Candice took a moment to answer.
"Is Sahger with you?"
"He is."
"Then keep going."
"Candice…"
"Trust the old man."
The channel went silent.
Sahger remained between us and the Four Beasts.
He didn't ask for help.
I knew Candice needed us to keep moving, but I still couldn't force my legs to move.
Vladimir began climbing down from the pipeline, testing his weight against one of his daggers.
Sahger shifted his spear a few centimeters toward him, and the man stopped.
"Suki," Sahger said without turning around.
"If you fight here, Candice loses the opening."
"That's what they want."
Tsukumo touched my shoulder.
"Let's go."
Candice and Havelyn were moving toward Rubens.
And Laura could be somewhere deeper inside that prison.
I hated leaving him there.
"Come back alive," I said.
Sahger kept his eyes fixed on his opponents.
"Go."
Tsukumo ran toward another firefight, and I followed him.
Vladimir made a move to follow us, but Sahger struck the ground between them.
The metal split open in a long fissure.
"They go through. You stay."
I kept running.
When I looked back, he stood alone at the center of the platform.
Water ran over his armor and down his spear.
Yasmin had drawn another arrow. Lutor gripped his axe in both hands. Vladimir was already close, and William had advanced far enough to close off the exit.
Lightning illuminated all five of them.
I saw Sahger lower his stance and steady the tip of his spear.
For the first time since I had met him, there wasn't a trace of humor left in him.
"Suki!" Tsukumo called.
I turned.
Another swarm of drones tore through the storm ahead of us.
Soldiers occupied the walkways beyond them, and new towers rotated their cannons in our direction.
Gron-Tarh was still throwing everything it had onto the surface.
"Next sector," Tsukumo said.
I nodded, and we ran to meet the drones.
Laura... if you're in there, hold on a little longer.
I tightened my grip around the sword's hilt with every bit of strength I had left.
I'm coming.