The two combatants circled each other warily. Memnarch moved slowly and smoldered, his shiny new form blackened and scorched, but the blast of destruction had only weakened him. The remaining serum tank on his back started to glow and pulse, and he turned to close on Glissa. The elf girl tried to get around him, but she was too near to the edge of the occultation disk.
Memnarch raised his humanoid hands, which began to glow as the Guardian summoned his own destructive spell. This was Glissa’s chance. When the Guardian shouted his incantation, she ducked under his raised arms, seized the Miracore in slippery, bloody hands, and jerked it free, breaking the chain from which it hung. She dove under Memnarch’s torso and through his arachnoid legs, emerging on the other side, and onto her feet in one smooth gymnastic motion. Dizzy, she turned back to face her foe.
Memnarch lumbered around to face her, their positions suddenly reversed. Using every ounce of will she had left, Glissa drew in the power of the Tangle above and felt the spark energy reignite. She raised the Miracore in both hands and slammed it flat against Memnarch’s chest, pouring green destruction through the ancient artifact and into the Guardian, who now had no flesh to resist her power.
Memnarch screamed anew. The Guardian, his spell forgotten, stumbled back … back. Glissa pressed forward, pain beginning to blossom in her forearms as the Miracore melted into the Guardian’s silver skin. The artifact fused with Memnarch’s metal body in the blazing heat.
Glissa still had the Miracore firmly in her grasp when Memnarch’s two rear legs slipped from the edge of the disk. Memnarch didn’t stop screaming until the entangled enemies passed through one of the wide openings in the mesh sphere and plunged headlong into the mana core.
Though his mouth hadn’t spoken a word in years, Slobad screamed when Glissa and her nemesis fell into the mana core. He saw Glissa die from a thousand different angles and points of view, each one causing him to scream anew.
The only friend he’d ever had….
But Slobad didn’t have time to scream any more. The intricately planned Ascension Web was still operating as designed, despite the deaths of the two beings that were supposed to be on the receiving end. Slobad watched from his bug constructs’ eyes as the web sent more and more magical energy into the mana core, which started to glow brighter and brighter until even his remote crystal eyes couldn’t stand the glare.
As the mana core reached its limit-something no being on Mirrodin had the power to change, even Memnarch-the energy boomeranged back into the web and immediately exceeded the carrying capacity of even a plane-sized artifact. Purified, amplified, and devastating, the wash of power was like nothing Slobad had ever felt before, even in the last five years of being connected to the machine.
The magic surged into the goblin’s withered, limbless body through his connection to the rack. Slobad suspected he screamed again, but if he did he couldn’t hear it. Millions of tiny pinpricks of pain stabbed his mind from the inside as the energy of all the soul traps on Mirrodin forced its way in.
Raksha Golden Cub, back broken, legs useless, pulled himself through the small narrow door at the base of the diamond structre in his best attempt to escape the blistering heat of the core. He flopped onto his back in the small room, neither knowing nor caring that his bare feet still protruded from the entrance.
The energy struck the occultation disk like a tidal wave, but the leonin, protected by darksteel, easily survived the initial blast.
The victory was short lived. Rolling on to collide with the reflective silver surface of the interior, the wave shattered a small, square, glowing object, one of thousands within the needle spires that lined the lacunae above.
Raksha Golden Cub was dead before he hit the floor.
In a narrow draw lined with craggy ironstone walls, a wizened old goblin prophet stood between a pair of lumbering megathreshers and a few hundred of the last free people on Mirrodin. Even Vektro’s bomb had not ended the attack, and things looked grim once more. Dwugget had both hands raised, palms out, and they started to glow red. His guilt over his complicity long forgotten, if not forgiven, the goblin was determined to save those he still could.
“Hochocha!” Dwugget cried, and twin spheroids of devastation launched from each hand. The fireball clusters engulfed the mighty constructs in flame, and after a few seconds the fire was no longer magical as the creatures’ delicate innards ignited. Black, oily smoke roiled into the sky.
Dwugget spun around to see who was still with him. He’d been fighting so long, he didn’t even know if the Khanha or Bruenna were alive. They’d left so long ago, and if the battle had reached this far, he suspected they were already dead.
Three seconds later, so was Dwugget. It was a small blessing that the long-suffering goblin didn’t see that the people he had tried to save, leonin and goblin, young and old, dropped dead at the same time. Krark-Home went from refuge to graveyard in a heartbeat.
“Lyese, I’m hit,” Bruenna said. An aerophin blast had finally scored. She whipped out an arm and blasted the flying artifact, one of the last stragglers on the field. It spiraled out of control and collided with a pile of dead nim, which burst into green flame. Bruenna listed in her saddle and nearly fell off. She placed a palm against her ribs and they came away wet and red. Blood poured from a hole in the mage’s side.
The elf girl jumped from her zauk and helped the mage dismount. Bruenna felt a wave of nausea as she saw claret running down Lyese’s forearms. She slumped into the elf girl, who gently lowered the human to the ground. “Bruenna, what can I do?”
“My belt,” Bruenna said. “There’s a vial. Just pop the top and-”
Lyese’s eyes opened wide and she threw her head back. She flopped back onto the ground as Bruenna spasmed once, coughed, and fell still.
CHAPTER 29
Slobad felt fluid running from his ears, and hoped it wasn’t his brains. Despite his pathetic condition and the dark, suicidal thoughts his hidden self had entertained over the last few years, the goblin’s self-preservation instinct was very much intact. He gritted his remaining teeth and fought the urge to pass out as his hollow body bounced and jerked in the rack, muscles spasmodically twitching as a plane’s worth of mana and souls entered him, surrounded him, consumed him, and vice versa. Slobad’s body glowed with a dim white light, grew more luminous by the millisecond, and was soon almost as bright as the mana core itself.
With one last rolling boom of thunder, it was over.
Slobad gulped deep, sweet breaths of ozone-charged air. He blinked, and squinted against the unbearably bright core.
Actually, it wasn’t that bright. He opened his eyes a little more and stared directly into the mana core, which the book of Krark promised would burn your eyes to cinders and cause your feet to turn into hooves. He’d never understood that last part, but the first part had always made sense.
Only it didn’t hurt to look at it. Not even a little.
The goblin unbuckled the leather straps that had held him in the rack and stepped down from the device for the first time in five years. He searched, but didn’t see Glissa anywhere. Or Memnarch. He scratched the top of his head and tried to rember the last place he had seen-
He was scratching his head. With his finger. Which was attached to his hand, leading naturally to an arm. Slobad’s eyes kept going down his body, which ended, as they once had, in a pair of short legs with wide, bare feet.
Slobad wiggled his toes and was gratified to see the toes wiggle back. Yes, those were his feet.