The Winter Sage, after all, had known the truth behind the Monarchs. She knew how to accept the world as it was.
Once everyone was ready, Reigan could have offered to transport them all together. That was usually his role, as the master of the King’s Key, but he had spent a dozen fortunes moving armies across the world recently. Time to let their host bear the cost.
He calmly sipped wine and watched Malice. She scowled at him but triggered a portal anchor instead of complaining. A tower of shadow shot up from the ground; clearly, she had been prepared for this.
“Everyone move,” Malice ordered.
The other Monarchs were already striding through the portal.
Reigan felt the familiar twisting of the Way all around him, though it was shrouded by shadows. It would take time for Lindon to sense the pillar of shadow using the constructs around the Valley, so they should be able to get into position before he realized they were coming.
Reigan Shen’s perception, like everyone else’s, was restricted by the combination of overwhelming shadow madra and spatial transport.
But the reaction times of a Monarch were nothing to underestimate, so he was able to call his Titan shield out of nowhere the instant he emerged from the portal.
A Penance arrow slammed into the Abidan panel of blue light, and Reigan felt his own death stop an inch from his nose.
Copied arrows swarmed the others. Malice covered herself in armor—not swollen to giant size, now, but called around her normal human body in an instant. Northstrider burned the illusions down with an aura of blood and hunger and struck them from the air with blurring punches.
But both staggered back as illusions ravaged their minds. Even the copies carried formidable mental weight. Without a defensive construct as advanced as Reigan’s, they were still vulnerable.
Ordinarily, Reigan would have felt smug at their struggle and perhaps worked to find a way to humiliate them over it. But he was faced with a sight that chilled him.
Dozens of miles away, Lindon hovered over Sacred Valley. The air warped around him and a halo of light ringed the sky overhead.
He had been waiting for them. And the Silent King Bow was not his only weapon.
Three streams of black dragon’s breath crashed into the Monarchs a fraction of a second after the arrows, but this they could take easily. He was more than a Sage now, but still less than a true Dreadgod.
Northstrider held out a palm, Shen summoned a shield, and Malice trusted her armor to handle it as she called her own bow.
When the bar of liquid flame struck, Reigan Shen learned how wrong he had been.
The Void authority in the dragon’s breath was on another level, even compared to when he’d fought Reigan that morning. Even considering the benefits of a time-warped pocket world, Lindon was progressing at a disgusting rate.
Clearly, the human had trained himself, not just his companions.
Black dragon’s breath annihilated a Herald-level shield, crushed a script written specifically to hold back the Path of Black Flame, and triggered Reigan’s Titan barrier again.
That was two activations within a second. This time, Reigan felt the power in the Abidan artifact flickering.
Amethyst essence streamed off Malice as the river of dark fire stripped away layers of her armor, and Northstrider grunted as his hand was burned down to the bone. It would regenerate in an instant, but even so, they had underestimated Lindon.
It wouldn’t happen again.
The Penance arrow had vanished, but there was already another volley in the air, this one made of the simple bone arrows that were a tier weaker. As Reigan had suspected, he didn’t have more Penance arrowheads. Likely only the two he’d shown.
And while it was wise of Lindon to keep the pressure on, Monarchs didn’t earn their way to the top by being slow to react.
A matching volley of arrows shot from Malice’s crystalline blue bow, and hers were Forged from a more solid madra and backed by the Bow Icon. Her arrows hunted down and destroyed his, though it wasn’t as one-sided a match as Reigan had hoped.
In the back of his mind, he felt an ugly greed for that Dreadgod weapon. No matter how else this all shook out, he needed to end up with the Silent King Bow.
Though Reigan wasn’t idle while Malice struck back. He transferred himself through space and withdrew a fine weapon of his own: a trio of blue-and-green metal claws that he gripped in his human hands. He slashed out with them, and Forged claws struck from the sky to catch Lindon between them.
At the same time, Northstrider punched with a deafening explosion of air that shook the earth like a drum. The accompanying Striker technique hurtled at Lindon, a white-edged crimson serpent of blood madra that carried the authority of an ancient dragon.
From stepping through the portal to now took less time than the blink of an Underlord’s eye, and such battles could rage on for days. Except they didn’t necessarily have days.
While the Weeping Dragon was thousands of miles north, the empowered Dreadgods could move faster than ever. If it chose, the Dragon could be here in a matter of hours.
Reigan Shen fully expected Lindon to have countermeasures in the labyrinth for this round of attacks. Reigan had more weapons of his own, and even in the worst case, his Titan shield should hold out at least until the Dreadgod attacked.
They would make Lindon play all his hidden cards. Drain his resources dry.
And, most importantly, keep him out of that pocket world.
Lindon’s pure madra domain erupted from him in a blue-white sphere, weakening the incoming techniques, but Lindon still had to tear Northstrider’s dragon and Reigan’s claws apart physically.
That was when Reigan Shen knew something was wrong.
He understood the labyrinth better than anyone alive. Grudgingly, he had to admit that Lindon probably knew some tricks with it he didn’t, as Reigan had never successfully claimed authority over it. But he was confident he knew its mechanisms better even than the young Sage.
Yet Lindon did know how to activate its defensive scripts. He had done so against Reigan Shen only hours ago.
Why hadn’t he done that now? Why was he taking Monarch attacks with his own body?
The world crawled to a halt as Reigan’s thoughts flashed. Had the labyrinth run out of power? No, he could distantly sense the mighty cores that powered the great scripts still thrumming with energy. Then was this a trick?
It had to be. Something was wrong here.
Northstrider had come to the same conclusion even faster, as he Forged a defensive layer of bloody madra around himself. Malice had strung another arrow and surely intended to trust her armor once again.
Another volley of arrows erupted from Sacred Valley…but not from Lindon.
They were a dim grey and comprised mostly of hunger madra, but Shen still recognized them. This was Malice’s technique.
A gray-white Forged dragon roared as it rushed at Northstrider, but it was when portals began to open in midair and reveal copied weapons that Reigan Shen realized he was in trouble.
The labyrinth stored copies of everyone it fed from.
He’d known that, but there was one ironclad restriction on that technique: it could only be used inside the labyrinth itself.
Except that rule no longer held true. The evidence was right in front of him.
All three of the Monarchs defended against their own techniques easily—these were from the weakened versions of themselves, after all. The true threat was the Penance arrow that thundered through space and Fate at Reigan Shen.
He trusted his Titan shield and opened up with a barrage of weapons. Until Northstrider shouted, “Malice!” Both of the other Monarchs focused their wills on Reigan.
To…protect him.
A second Penance arrow fell from the sky like black lightning. He felt his death resonating from the future, as though the universe itself had decided to kill him. The other Monarchs were underestimating him, though. The Abidan artifact was not so simple, and another Titan shield appeared above him.