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Chapter 1038: Enemies from the Abyss

Lightning pulled back on her speed and stared.

Thousands of demonic beasts swarmed the snowfield below — a black carpet laid over white, and it moved. The motion of it reminded her of ants dismantling a corpse, the patient, tireless grinding of something alive converting something else into nothing. But this time there were no corpses. What the beasts were attacking was equally alive, and equally brutal, and not retreating.

The skeleton monsters stood among them like ruined towers.

Their crooked limbs looked absurdly thin for the mass they carried — four jointed branches that suggested they would collapse under their own weight. They did not collapse. Each step crushed whatever had failed to clear the zone beneath them: demonic beasts, mostly, pulverized without acknowledgment. From a distance the limbs looked no thicker than timber. Lightning suspected that seen close up, each one would dwarf Lady Agatha’s Spellcaster Tower.

Dozens of Mad Demons clung to each monster’s abdomen, suspended over the battlefield like a second rank of soldiers, hurling spears down into the mass of beasts below. The beasts had no choice but to push forward anyway. Their counter-strikes accomplished almost nothing. They went through the gesture of attack and fell, and the ones behind them stepped over them and tried again.

Magic Power Parasite.

The term surfaced without effort — something between the living and the dead, parasitic on stone and bone, moving by magic power rather than by biology. The Spider Demons found on the Northbound Slope. The leviathan she was watching now. Almost certainly the same taxonomy.

The demonic beasts’ tusks could scratch stone but could not crack it. They had no choice but to flow around the skeleton monsters and strike at the softer targets behind — but the demons had Lords of Hell, Siege Beasts, and Spider Demons at the front, and these things slaughtered hybrid beasts almost as fast as the First Army could with organized rifle fire. Numbers were not enough. The beasts were failing.

Maggie poked her head out, felt the slowed airspeed, and looked down.

She made a sound she usually reserved for things she found deeply wrong.

“The demonic beasts and the demons… they’re fighting each other?”

“That’s why Neverwinter has had such quiet Months of Demons.” Lightning let herself sound analytical, though what she felt was closer to the vertigo of a puzzle suddenly solving. “But it’s strange — the old Taquila witches said demonic beasts follow the relics of gods. The demons wouldn’t bring their relics out to this wasteland. Which means the beasts gathered here for a different reason entirely.” She glanced at the space beside her. “I wish Sylvie had come. She could have gathered so much more.”

Maggie tilted her head sideways. “Are you still going to surprise them?”

“Of course.” No hesitation. “We’re nearly to the Taquila ruins and the Devilbeasts haven’t come to stop us — they’re occupied. This is exactly the kind of opportunity His Majesty would want documented.”

Both the demons and the demonic beasts were enemies of humanity. The more they ground each other down in this fight, the less pressure the First Army would face in the spring expedition.

Lightning assessed her reserves. At supersonic speed she could sustain roughly three to four minutes. She would save half for emergencies — mandatory, non-negotiable. That left two minutes over the target. She had to be precise about her route.

Her gaze settled on the nearest skeleton monster.

Its deformed structure, seen from altitude, resembled a broken bench — flat black stones arranged in the rough shape of a frame, components of something that had once had a purpose it no longer served. The platforms between its limbs looked like runway sections. Ideal for a close pass.

Her ability’s test results had established one clear principle: the lower the pass, the greater the impact. If she came in tight against the monster’s underside, the Mad Demons clinging to its abdomen would take the full force. His Majesty had explained the physics — body mass and velocity combined determined what happened when she broke the sound barrier near a surface. He had used the example of Maggie, hypothetically, doing this at Neverwinter’s scale.

Lightning had not required a second explanation.

She would not destroy the demons in one pass. She did not need to. She needed only to pin the skeleton monsters — to make them too disrupted to hold their position. Without them anchoring the front line, the beastwave would push harder against the demons’ rear. Even a few minutes of disorder would serve the First Army’s purposes in spring.

And if the plan failed, she would be at supersonic speed and gone before anything could track her.

She pressed Maggie’s head down against her chest and banked toward the nearest skeleton monster.

She had, in the last second before committing, completely forgotten what Roland had said.

No one can grasp sound by the tail.

The distance collapsed. She crossed over the battlefield and the world below went briefly still — from her perspective, anyway — and then the impact waves hit. Two waves, front and rear, detonating on each other just above the skeleton monster’s platform. The snow around it converted instantly to white mist. The Mad Demons hanging from its abdomen screamed — she could see their mouths open, could not hear the sound, was already past them and angling toward the second target.

Third target. Fourth.

At the fifth — a flat platform between the limbs, clear ground where she expected only air — she saw something that should not have been there.

A figure.

It had not been there when she had chosen her approach vector. It simply appeared, the way a wrong answer materializes in the margin of a calculation you were sure was correct.

She was still miles from it when the recognition arrived: a demon. Blue-skinned, human-shaped except for the proportions, face that would have been handsome on another creature. Golden eyes like something dredged up from the deep ocean floor.

It was looking at her.

They were only looking at each other and Lightning felt the world shift. The sensation was purely physical — her fingers stopped responding to what she wanted them to do, her velocity became something that was happening to her rather than something she controlled. She was a small animal caught between two perfectly still eyes, being drawn toward a center of gravity she had not known existed.

Run.

The word formed in her head with the clarity of a bell struck once.

Now.

Her body did not respond.

She watched the demon raise its right arm in her direction.

Then something drove a nail into her chest.

Pain detonated across her ribcage — sharp, localized, undeniable. Maggie. The pigeon had driven her beak in hard enough to pierce fabric and skin.

The world snapped back.

Lightning wrenched her body upward, burned every unit of magic power she had held in reserve, and ran for Neverwinter at a speed she had never reached before and would not be able to measure until later, when her hands had finally stopped shaking.

She did not look back.

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