Chapter 1103: The Demons’ Blade (II)
The red dot accelerated. It grew brighter.
Sylvie was already moving — down the pole, into the underground boardroom, the words out of her mouth before she fully registered the decision to speak.
“Call Leaf. Now. Tell her to run.”
Ferlin didn’t ask why. He had her face to read. He picked up the receiver and asked only one question: “Run where?”
“Anywhere. Neverwinter, south of the forest — away from the station. As far as she can go.”
Every face in the boardroom turned toward her.
“What have you found?” Edith asked.
“We were all wrong.” Sylvie couldn’t stop glancing southwest, though there was nothing to see from inside. “The demons’ real target is Leaf. Only Leaf. When she concentrates to control the forest she becomes a physical presence — her magic power has a form they can locate. They set the fire to flush her out.” She turned to face the room fully. “They never cared whether we extinguished it or not.”
Edith’s brows knit slowly, with the specific quality of someone who has just found the piece that makes the puzzle ugly. “You can see demons from here?”
“Only because they’re — ” Sylvie’s jaw tightened. “Too powerful.”
“Miss Leaf is powerful too,” Ferlin said, still working the telephone. “If the forest weren’t burning, she could hold off an army of Mad Demons.”
“There’s something else we didn’t anticipate.” Sylvie made a fist at her side. Through the ceiling, through forty meters of earth and timber, she tracked the red dot in her mind as it rose — a provoked serpent uncoiling toward striking distance. “Has it connected yet?”
“No answer.”
Leaf is busy. Leaf is holding the firebreak together. Leaf cannot hear the phone.
“Call the terminus station directly,” Edith ordered Ferlin. “Have the First Army notify her on foot. Tell them to support her when the contact is made.”
While they waited, Sylvie watched the dot in the southwestern sky, a vision no one else in the room could share — the red light cresting the treetops and then plummeting, aimed with the flat certainty of a stone dropped from height.
It’s coming straight down through the canopy.
“It’s breaching the perimeter from above.” The words came out flat. A worse thought arrived behind them, settling with the quiet of a diagnosis. “A Magic Slayer.”
On the cedar’s crown, Leaf exhaled.
It should be enough now.
The firebreak stretched below — raw earth, separated forest, three hundred meters of clear sight where flame couldn’t leap the gap. The trees she’d torn from themselves lay prostrate, and she grieved them in a precise way, quietly, without the luxury of time for full grief. Whatever memories she’d already lost to the north fire she couldn’t recover. She could only hold what remained.
Enough of that. The station still needs help.
She began scanning the canopy for the fastest route down when the whistling reached her.
Not wind. Directional, descending, wrong.
She looked up. The sky was the bruised purple of near-dark, and against it she couldn’t resolve a shape — just a shadow dropping through color, trailing something that wasn’t sound so much as warning.
“Watch out — run!”
She dropped out of the cedar before she recognized the voice. The shadow slammed into the ground where she’d been, and the air around it was different — wrong in a way she felt rather than saw, as though the space had been folded and pressed flat. Leaves and twigs in a three-meter radius simply ceased to exist. Not burning. Gone.
Too quiet for something that landed that hard.
The air rippled around the shadow’s form.
Her magic — the constant current of the Heart of Forest threading through her chest — locked solid. One moment flowing, the next crystalline. And then it shattered, the way a mirror doesn’t crack but detonates, and she was airborne, hurled backward through a wheel of colors, and the ground hit her like a verdict.
She coughed blood onto the dirt and looked up.
The demon standing over her was tall, blue-skinned, sharp-featured — nearly human in its proportions, which made it worse. Its stillness was not the stillness of something at rest. It was the stillness of something that didn’t need to hurry.
The air felt thick. Breathless. Wrong.
Magic Slayer. The words formed without ceremony, accurate as a post-mortem finding.
She tried to summon the forest. Nothing answered.
She tried again. The forest was there — she could feel it, the roots under her feet, the pulse of it — but her reach had been severed at the source. She was herself without the forest, and against this, herself was not very much.
The Magic Slayer extended its clawed hands and stepped toward her.
Leaf closed her eyes.
She did not feel what she expected.
“Clink.”
Metal on something harder than metal. The shock of it moved through the ground before it moved through the air.
She opened her eyes on a blade she recognized at once — the enormous sword, the sun-mark on the flat of it, the woman standing between her and the demon with the particular unhurried posture of someone who has decided that this is the place.
“Ashes.”
“I’m your opponent, monster.” Ashes shifted her grip and stepped back to give herself room. She didn’t look at Leaf. “Are you hurt?”
“I — Ashes, you boarded the Seagull. I watched you — ”
“Original plan.” Still not looking at her. “Something about this fire was off. I stayed.”
So that was who shouted.
Leaf got to her feet while she still could. “This is the Magic Slayer from before — but it’s stronger than that Senior Demon. Much stronger.”
“I’ve noticed,” Ashes said. The sword came up. “I won’t win. But I can buy time before reinforcements arrive.”
The Magic Slayer swept them both with a single disinterested glance. It fixed on Ashes with what looked, for the first time, like mild curiosity.
“Are you — ” Its pronunciation was imperfect, vowels slightly wrong, consonants shaped by a mouth that had learned the language from the outside. “An Extraordinary?”
The silence that followed had weight.
In every previous Battle of Divine Will, in every encounter recorded by the Taquila witches, in every testimony passed down through three hundred years of war — demons and humans had never spoken to each other directly. Not once.
“You speak our language,” Leaf said. She couldn’t help it.
“Learning is the first step of evolution.” The demon’s tone was neither proud nor humble; it was the tone of someone stating a self-evident fact. It spread one hand in a gesture that might have been contemptuous or merely explanatory. “Only your kind would be surprised by our progress. Thousands of things have changed in the past hundreds of years, and you still live in the old way — demons, Extraordinaries, even these titles remain the same.” A pause. “That’s pathetic.”
“What did you just — ” Ashes snarled, stepping forward.
The demon didn’t answer. It opened its other hand and the air moved.
Ashes lunged, swept the massive blade in a wide arc — the God’s Stone of Retaliation at the hilt’s crossguard flared, and the cyclone it touched collapsed into nothing. But the Magic Slayer was gone from where it had been standing, and the wind it had conjured had only partly touched the Stone.
The rest of it was still moving.
Leaf, from behind, had nowhere to go.