Chapter 1104: The Demons’ Blade (III)
Leaf’s scream came from behind her.
Ashes pivoted. The cyclone had not died — it had divided, the God’s Stone catching one half, the other half unimpeded, and it had found Leaf and was carrying her upward through the canopy. At the same moment the Magic Slayer materialized directly behind Ashes, its arm already in motion.
The Stone didn’t stop it. How —
No time. She drove the blade at its neck.
One hand came up and stopped her. Not deflected — stopped, the way you stop a child’s arm. In the brief contact she saw the blue light pulsing along the demon’s forearm, under the skin, steady as a heartbeat.
It didn’t acknowledge her after that. It sent another tendril of wind after Leaf.
It’s only interested in Leaf.
Ashes followed at a dead run. The Magic Slayer maintained distance without apparent effort — not running, not flying, simply not where she was when she arrived. When she got close it redirected her strikes with the minimum necessary force, its attention never fully on her, the way a person swats at a fly without interrupting a conversation. Meanwhile Leaf struggled to concentrate, to reach the forest, to do anything — and each attempt the demon dissolved with a casual wave, pinning her ability under that same steady suppression.
Ashes could feel her palms beginning to sweat.
Faster. I need to be faster.
Two years of Taquila training had changed her in ways she’d only partially mapped. Her magic had grown denser, had begun doing things she hadn’t consciously asked of it — filling the spaces between muscle and bone, replacing whatever ordinary tissue had been there before. Sometimes, walking a corridor at night, she had the impression that she was not quite touching the floor. That the floor was a formality.
But this demon was demonstrating the gap between impressive and sufficient.
The fourth time it extended the distance to twenty meters, Ashes stopped trying to close it by running. She stopped trying to move faster in the way she normally moved. Instead she went still for one complete breath — the battle around her still happening, Leaf still drifting upward, the demon still poised — and looked inward.
The Holy Duel with Lorgar had shown her this: the technique the wolf-girl used to isolate and concentrate power in specific limbs, transforming each one independently. Lorgar had seemed to think it was native to her ability, something lupine and particular. But Ashes had noticed the underlying principle. Directing everything — not some, everything — to one place.
She bent her knees. She looked at the largest tree within reach.
The Magic Slayer brushed aside a vine Leaf had managed to conjure and reached for her.
Ashes kicked.
The tree didn’t so much break as cease to be in that location. The crack of it was still arriving in her ears when she was already moving — not running, something else, the world having gone briefly wrong around her in a way that felt, from the inside, like finally being the right speed for the first time. She could see the bark still peeling away from the impact point in slow ribbons.
She struck the Magic Slayer.
For the first time, it flew.
It cleared four meters of air, caught itself before landing, came down in a controlled double roll and rose with its brows raised. Interest. Not surprise — interest, the expression of someone who has found a more complex problem than expected.
Ashes caught Leaf with her free arm and put her body between the demon and the witch. Her sword arm was trembling. She didn’t let it show.
“FIRE!”
The forest erupted.
God’s Punishment Witches came out of the undergrowth from three directions at once — they’d been moving while Ashes bought the time, getting into position, and now grapeshot guns thundered and the air between the trees was full of shot, and the demon was moving again, not fleeing exactly but contracting, blurring from trunk to trunk, the blue light flickering as it absorbed and deflected what it could.
Bark exploded in clouds. Shot gouged the earth. Through the noise, somewhere south, the measured tramp of infantry — the First Army, surrounding the perimeter.
The demon held position for a moment that felt longer than it was. It looked at Ashes — the specific look of someone filing information away.
Then it uncoiled, a pulse of magic power visible even in the near-dark, and the trees swallowed it going up and the sky received it and it was gone.
“Damn it.” Elena, leading the God’s Punishment Witches, crouched down in front of Ashes and ran a quick professional eye over her. “I’m Elena. You all right?”
“Fine.” Ashes was already looking at Leaf — half-conscious, skin grey as ash, a thread of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. She wiped it with the edge of her sleeve. “She needs Nana.”
“Miss Nana and Miss Nightfall are already on their way,” Elena said. “You held it off long enough.”
Not long enough to hurt it. Ashes didn’t say this. She pressed two fingers to Leaf’s wrist and counted the pulse: present, thin, too fast. The forest around them was very quiet now, the way forests went quiet after a large thing had passed through.
The Upgraded descended without ceremony, and a junior guard met him on the ground with a Red Mist canister already extended.
Ursrook snatched it before the guard finished the sentence, inhaled deeply, and held the breath for three full seconds before releasing it.
“A new one,” he said, handing back the empty.
The guard complied in silence, fitting the replacement into the socket at the base of Ursrook’s spine. The external tank was a concession to the distance — air this far from the Birth Tower was manageable, barely, but combat at full capacity in such thin conditions would have cost more than the operation warranted.
“Your trip, sir — ”
“Had a small complication. I anticipated it.” Ursrook surveyed the dark tree line, his expression arranged in its habitual neutrality. “That is men’s territory. If I couldn’t manage the resistance it presented, I would have cause to question Kabradhabi’s loyalty.”
“That wasn’t your real power,” the guard said, with the hot loyalty of someone who has rehearsed the statement. “The air tank constrained you. Near the Birth Tower, those creatures would be nothing.”
Ursrook let this sit for a moment without endorsing it.
Summoning magic power degraded a Senior Demon’s reserve. A certain floor had to be maintained for the return flight to Taquila — the arithmetic was simple, unromantic, and it had correctly predicted his performance tonight. He had gone in with a calibrated hammer, not a weapon at full weight.
“This was reconnaissance with applied pressure,” he said. “Next time I’ll select terrain that suits us. A place more favorable for a final accounting.” He looked south, into the darkness beyond the burning. “A place for their perpetual rest.”
“If the Sky Lord would simply provide more support — ”
“Risk.” Ursrook said the word as though trying it for flavor. “You say ‘risk’ as though I would rather have sent a subordinate and read a report.” He reached into his armor and withdrew a steel bead, deformed into an irregular oval — a bullet, compressed rather than penetrated by the magic barrier he’d held. He turned it in his fingers. “The awakened females are static. No progress in a hundred years. But the males — the ones who were supposed to have no magic — are different now. Something has changed.” The bead caught a sliver of moonlight. “I find that worth seeing personally.”
The guard said nothing. His expression said what the guard code of conduct prevented him from voicing.
Ursrook pocketed the bead. “The Sky Lord has his own considerations. Our frustration serves nothing. The goal is a higher realm — that is why we fight, not for territory, not for the red mist, not for revenge.” He rose, slowly, into the air. “We’ve set the hook. The fish will come to us.”
He turned in the direction of the Taquila ruins, and the night closed over him like water.
Behind him, the junior guard bent to retrieve what Ursrook had designated the “tombstone” — whatever trophy or instrument the Upgraded considered worth carrying back across five hundred kilometers of hostile land — and began the long trek home.