Chapter 1164: A Destiny without a Choice
She couldn’t beat him anymore.
She’d known it after the third exchange, when Ursrook’s new arm deflected the giant sword at an angle she hadn’t anticipated and the force went through her guard and into her shoulder. She’d adjusted. She’d recovered. She’d continued.
But she’d known.
The problem was arithmetic. Ursrook had absorbed his junior guard’s Magic Stone during the thirty seconds she’d spent not being able to summon the gold a second time. The absorption had completed before she could interrupt it. His new arm was an old Senior Demon’s arm, carrying that demon’s force and technique and whatever else transferred through a Magic Stone at the moment of integration. He was moving faster than he had been. His strikes were heavier. He wasn’t at a new ceiling yet — he was still learning the new body’s geometry — but he was learning fast.
She was moving more slowly than she had been. The power rebound was doing its work.
One option, she thought. One thing that changes this.
She needed time to summon the gold again. Not much time — a few seconds of stillness and focus, enough to pull from the surrounding magic without the disruption of active combat. But Ursrook wasn’t going to give her stillness. He’d seen what happened when she had stillness. He’d built his current approach around preventing exactly that.
So she had to make the stillness herself.
She ran through the logic. It was not complicated logic, and it arrived at a conclusion she didn’t like, and she accepted the conclusion.
She missed on purpose.
The swing came in wide, obviously wide — the angle she’d established over the previous two minutes of combat as her default recovery position, the move Ursrook had learned to read as Ashes retreating to reset. He’d seen it five times. He knew what came after it: a half-step backward, the sword coming up, her creating space between them.
Instead she stepped forward.
His claws came through her right chest and emerged at her elbow.
She locked her arms around him before either of them had fully processed what had happened, and she said, very quietly: “I’ve got you.”
Ursrook understood immediately.
He understood because he had done something similar once, in an engagement three hundred years ago that had been the closest he’d come to dying before today. He had trapped a powerful opponent by allowing a lesser injury and closing the distance before the opponent could capitalize. It was a technique that required accepting the pain of the lesser injury as real, not performing it, because any hesitation gave the opponent time to adjust.
She had not hesitated.
He tried to generate the anti-magic field. It was the correct response: suppress her ability, free himself from the hold before she could summon the gold.
The field began to form.
Above them, the dark clouds that had been building for an hour and a half began to rotate.
He had not paid attention to the clouds, because he had been managing the combat. He noted, now, that they had been rotating for some time. Not quickly. Gradually, the way a storm organized itself when drawn to a specific point of discharge.
The Sigil of God’s Will worked by creating a channel to a source of power external to the witch — something in the environment, something ambient, something that responded to an aligned intention. He’d never seen a witch create that channel without the Sigil. He’d heard reports from the first Battle of Divine Will but had assessed them as exaggerated.
He was revising that assessment.
If the sword struck him, he would die.
He understood this clearly, the way he understood any calculation that had resolved completely. The power she was drawing from the storm above them was not her own. It was the storm’s. She was a channel rather than a source, which meant the limitation was not her magic capacity but how much the storm could deliver through her before the channel collapsed.
His anti-magic field would intercept some of it. But the field was weaker now — damaged in the first strike, rebuilt with fewer resources than it had started with. And she had him locked.
He reached into the burning of his new arm and pulled every unit of power he had toward the shield.
The clouds above them began to spin faster.
In the Dream World, the rain was frozen in midair.
Lan stood at the window with the sound of something that wasn’t quite thunder reaching her from a direction that shouldn’t have had a direction, and she listened to it resolve, and she understood what it was.
She said nothing. There was no one to say it to.
She closed the window.
Lightning was above the canopy when the second bolt came down.
She’d returned to get Maggie, to help with the retreat, to do whatever the next thing was that needed doing — and then the clearing below her lit gold and white at the same time, a color that wasn’t a color, and the shockwave went through the trees and through her body and she grabbed a branch and held on.
When she could see again, the clearing was different.
The trees within thirty meters of the epicenter were gone. Not fallen. Gone — reduced to char and scattered wood and a few vertical stumps from which wisps of smoke spiraled. The ground was scorched in a perfect circle. The Mad Demons that had been advancing through the western approach were either dead or no longer advancing.
Two figures were in the center of the circle.
Ashes was standing.
Ursrook was not.
He was on his knees — or what served as knees in his current configuration — with the black light around him flickering, failing, eating itself. The new arm hung at the wrong angle. The shield was gone. He was breathing, but the breathing was labored in a way that Senior Demon breathing was not supposed to be.
Ashes lowered the sword.
She said nothing to him.
She stood in the rain that had begun falling as the storm discharged and looked at him for a moment, and then she looked at the clearing around her — at what was left of the Mad Demon force, at the two Senior Demon bodies on the ground, at the small charred radius that had been the battlefield — and her legs went out from under her.
She caught herself on the sword before she hit the ground.
Lightning came down out of the canopy fast. She landed three meters away, and Ashes’s head came up immediately.
“Get everyone out,” Ashes said. Her voice was not the same as it usually was. Too even. The quality of a person speaking from a very carefully maintained position. “Away from here. As far away as you can get.”
“Ashes—”
“I’m losing control of it.” The golden light at her hands was flickering, irregular, surging in pulses she clearly wasn’t directing. “If you’re close when it—” A pause. “Just go. Take them and go. I’ll manage this.”
Lightning looked at her.
She wanted to argue. She had a very good argument, which was that she was not going to leave, that you did not leave people who had just done what Ashes had just done, that this was not the kind of thing you walked away from. She had the argument fully formed.
She looked at Ashes’s hands. At the gold that was not responding to Ashes anymore.
She went to Maggie.
“Everyone on. Now.” She helped Zoe lift Andrea, then Margie, then positioned herself where she could direct. “Maggie, southwest. Away from the ruin.”
“Awh,” Maggie said, and started moving.
Lightning looked back once, from the edge of the tree line.
Ashes was still in the center of the circle, upright, with the sword driven into the ground for balance. The rain fell on her. The gold flickered at her hands and her shoulders and the crown of her head, irregular, building.
She’s a Transcendent, Lightning thought. She just fought a Senior Demon through two upgrades and she’s still standing.
Hold on, she thought, at Ashes, at the storm, at whatever was accumulating above the clearing. Just hold on.
She turned and followed Maggie into the forest.
Behind her, the thunder built.