As he recovered from the exhaustion of his working, Lindon felt nothing but relief. Mount Samara was still in one place. He’d made it.
The earth shook beneath his hands to a steady rhythm. Footsteps. Lindon heaved a breath and pushed himself to his feet.
He hadn’t come here to rest.
The chaos around him resembled a battlefield. More and more people poured endlessly from the Heaven’s Glory pass, stumbling over bodies, and Lindon couldn’t tell if they had been destroyed by the powerful wind or the falling boulders or if they had simply been trampled alive.
Formerly bound Remnants ran wild, darting through the crowd. Children hunkered together behind a broken and overturned cart. And everywhere, people ran from or struggled with freshly risen bloodspawn.
All the while, the dreadbeasts were on their way.
Do we have enough launchers? Lindon asked Dross.
[We need to hurry.] The earthquakes now couldn’t be compared to the ones from before; with each heavy pound of the Titan’s footsteps on the earth, Lindon was lifted off his feet. […but yeah, we have enough to eliminate a majority. The bloodspawn here are especially weak, thanks to the aura and the general flimsiness of the hosts.]
Lindon’s void key opened, causing several people nearby to scream and flee. Launcher constructs, some complete and some half-formed, flew out on gusts of air. He had stocked up, in case he needed to make another cannon. Wavedancer followed, sluggish in this aura.
Take over.
[Yes, Captain!]
Lindon rose into the air on cushions of wind aura. Though the vital aura here was weak, he still had an easier time controlling it thanks to his Overlord spirit. He wouldn’t be able to freely fly like this, but he could hover in the air, giving Dross a better vantage point. Now they could see far more targets.
Lindon controlled the aura and powered the constructs, but Dross handled targeting. The spirit’s attention split thirty, forty, fifty ways.
[Aaaannnnd done!]
Lindon triggered all the launchers at once.
Striker techniques of every color and description lanced out, tracing a web all over the pandemonium of fleeing people. Bloodspawn splattered, melted, imploded, wilted, dissolved, collapsed, and deflated.
The second, third, fourth, and fifth shots came on the heels of the first. Some of the bindings and unfinished constructs broke after the first shot, some after the second, and a few more on the third.
In only a breath, over a hundred bloodspawn had been eliminated. Not a single bystander was scratched.
Lindon let the expended launchers fall to the ground, hissing essence of every color into the air, and returned the functional constructs to his void key. His eyes were on the sky.
The footsteps were growing heavier.
The entire process had taken only a breath, but it was still time they couldn’t afford to lose. The constructs traded place with his Thousand-Mile Cloud, and he raced into the sky.
Jai Long had felt Lindon arrive.
Even exhausted and weak as his spirit was, he could sense the arrival of a spirit much stronger than anything in his immediate vicinity.
He didn’t feel any hope. He was too tired for that. Even if Lindon had come to save him specifically, Jai Long couldn’t spare any attention from the battle.
He climbed over dreadbeast corpses, hefting the halves of his broken spear in each hand. His sister screamed nonsense as she stabbed her dagger into a rabbit dreadbeast’s eye, and he hurled his spearhead through a flying bloodspawn that had tried to take advantage of her distraction.
Then the sky lit up.
Pulses of light—Striker techniques—rushed out in every color. Dreadbeasts exploded into corrupted flesh. Bloodspawn were torn to essence.
Where monsters were, light followed.
Jai Long’s weapons fell from numb, tingling fingers. He had seen sights like this before; when an entire sect of sacred artists unleashed a barrage of Striker techniques all at once.
He turned to the source.
Lindon hovered in the air, his back to Jai Long. He was surrounded by a halo of shining constructs, firing in every direction. A rainbow of colors streaked out from him, and just for that moment, he looked like he had sprouted a pair of wings made of light.
For a frozen moment he hung there, blazing like a many-colored phoenix.
Then the Striker techniques stopped. The world settled down.
Compared to the noise of battle before, the silence that settled over them in that moment felt unnatural. Jai Chen hobbled up to stand next to her brother, her mouth hanging open and an expression of awe on her blood-spattered face.
Sound returned with a deep rumble as the earth shook like a drum. A footstep of the Wandering Titan.
Lindon summoned a Thousand-Mile Cloud and flew off.
Sage of Twin Stars, Jai Long thought. He believed it now.
Then he collapsed.
18
Iteration 129: Oasis
Images, impressions, and desperate voices screamed through Suriel’s head. From a hundred Iterations at once, Abidan begged for help.
The Vroshir had held nothing back. In one world, their war machines crashed through deserts, while in another their fleets blackened planets, and all across the cosmos their champions met Abidan guardians blade-to-blade.
They were defending only a pathetic number of worlds, and only the ones held by Judges had any guarantee of victory. Dozens of Iterations called for Suriel to defend them.
As she entered Oasis, she cut off their voices.
This world needed her more than any other.
The fabric of reality itself trembled, every particle quaking in fear. Oasis’ central planet was a blue marble beneath Suriel’s feet, and she could feel the sudden terror rising from the billions of lives down below.
All across the thousands of islands that made up Oasis’ land, those sensitive to power collapsed under the weight of visions, or screamed at the feeling of a predator descended to take them all. She sent out her own influence to calm them, but there was only so much she could do.
She couldn’t hide the power of the Mad King.
Her Presence showed him drifting on the other side of the planet, eyes blazing from beneath the shadow of his bone helmet, his yellowed armor and fur cloak shrouding his figure. He clutched Ozriel’s Scythe in his right hand, and glared in her direction.
But not actually at her.
She floated next to Makiel, in his full battle gear. His seamless white armor covered him up to the neck, and he held the Sword of Makiel in both hands. The massive two-handed blade had once been used to pass capital punishment on the first generation of Abidan, and purple energy passed through its steel in complex veins.
Unlike the other Judges, he hadn’t perfected his physical form. His dark skin was weathered by his mortal life, and his hair had been touched with gray for millennia. His weary face did not turn to her as he spoke. “You could save more lives elsewhere.”
“Not yours.”
She might really be able to save an entire Iteration of her own if she left, but Makiel would be much safer with her around. Perhaps together, they could drive the Mad King away.
Together, they looked into Fate.
The future crackled and twisted, each vision unfolding with slippery uncertainty as the King’s chaotic presence warped Fate itself. But with the stabilizing presence of two Judges, and Makiel’s skill and significance at her side, they could see victory.
With the two of them together, a chance had opened up.
Not of slaying the Mad King, of course. It would take at least one more Judge joining them to make that a possibility, and they couldn’t abandon too many other worlds.