Chapter 314: Annihilation
Garcia had never faced an Extraordinary before.
The weapon in Zero’s hand was an ordinary one-handed sword — the kind you could buy at any market town — but every blow it delivered landed with the weight of a two-handed blade, something in the movement behind it compressing force into the arc in a way that had nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with a principle Garcia didn’t have a name for. Two exchanges and she could no longer lift the arm she’d been blocking with. The third blow came from below, connecting with her chin, and she was reset before she landed.
She stopped trying to block.
On restoration she summoned a ballista directly in front of her body — not iron spears but sealed clay jars of black water, multiple chambers, fired simultaneously. Zero’s instinct was to cut them rather than dodge, which was correct if the jars had contained what they appeared to contain, and incorrect given that they did not. The shards sprayed. The fire crystals concealed inside came into contact with the air and caught, and for a moment the space between them was a column of burning that nothing should have survived.
Zero was already moving. She moved the way the Extraordinary apparently moved — not faster than the eye, exactly, but faster than the mind’s tracking, the body registering the position-change before the judgment caught up. Garcia could not rotate the ballista quickly enough. She tried a different approach: stone walls embedded with spears rising from the garden’s perimeter to funnel the Purified into a narrower and narrower corridor; the flower pots around the pond converted to sealed chambers of snow powder, the lids ready to blow; hidden pits in the grass, the mouths concealed beneath a thin layer of consciousness-conjured sod.
She killed Zero twice this way. Three times.
After the third restoration Garcia became aware of her own breathing — heavier than it should have been, the kind of heaviness that arrived in the chest rather than the lungs. Sweat on her forehead. The edges of her vision slightly blurred when she turned her head too quickly, the world catching up to itself in a way that felt like something being subtracted.
“Well done,” Zero said.
She was standing across the remains of the garden, having let Garcia’s weakened state pass without pressing it. Her tone was the tone of a teacher at a recital — acknowledging something genuine.
“That’s considerably more than I anticipated. But there’s something I didn’t mention before: manipulating existing objects in this world — altering what is already here — costs significantly more than creating new things from thought. About as much as a death, actually. By now you should be feeling the difference.” She looked at Garcia with something that might, in another context, have been respect. “After your next death, the sleep may become permanent.”
“Better than getting my neck taken,” Garcia said. Her voice was steadier than her legs. “But you made sounds when you burned, Zero. I don’t think you can hold on much longer than I can, either.”
Zero was quiet for a moment.
“The Church has supported my development from the beginning,” she said. “Knowledge, combat training, judges who entered the Battlefield of Souls willingly — they knew what it meant, and they accepted it, and before they were absorbed they transmitted everything: their accumulated skill, their experience, their understanding of close-quarter fighting at the edge of endurance. I have been refined by death for the length of a career.”
She paused. Garcia said nothing. She needed the seconds.
“I once absorbed an Extraordinary. That was the closest I came to losing a Battle of Souls. I had to use one of the Devil’s weapons to prevail, and even then it required everything I had. In the two hundred years since — I can’t count the number. But I carry all of them: their pain and their happiness and their grief and their moments of joy. Every death they experienced became part of my own experience. Including death itself.” She let a beat pass. “If you need a number for how many deaths I can endure — hundreds, I think. Perhaps more.”
“Then I’ll need to verify it,” Garcia said. She was not looking at Zero; she was looking at the garden.
She isn’t bluffing. The economy with which she’d moved through the personal guards at the pier — that had been skill at a level that didn’t develop in an ordinary span of years. Two hundred years of accumulated Battles of Souls. And she couldn’t be touched in the way that Zero had touched her, not by anything Garcia could imagine creating here, because she had said: Things you cannot understand, you also cannot create.
What can I create that can kill something I’ve never encountered?
“The Battle of Souls is not a contest of imagination,” Zero said. Her voice was quiet. She had apparently seen the thinking happen. “You cannot give yourself invulnerability without any basis for conceiving it. You cannot summon weapons from legend that you have no understanding of. Your world and your experience are the boundaries of your power here.”
“Then I’ll cover the entire garden with snow powder,” Garcia said. “Dense enough that you can’t move without triggering it. Even if I die, I’ll drag you down with me.”
Zero looked at her with eyes that had taken on something that was not quite pity — something more like the expression of a person watching a demonstration they have seen many times before, which still carries a particular weight each time.
“Even if killing me were pointless,” Zero said, “let me show you what the Church has access to.”
A light appeared behind her — red, deepening quickly, condensing itself into shape. The war chariot that materialized against the back wall of the garden was enormous in the way that things in the World of Consciousness could be enormous: larger than the space, larger than anything Garcia had encountered in any battlefield she’d actually fought on. Its dimensions pressed against the garden walls and the walls gave. Two heavy spears pointed forward from its upper frame, and Garcia recognized their profile from a report one of the Wolf King’s personal guards had delivered. A weapon never seen before. The ballista that destroyed our defenses. Range and power at unprecedented levels.
The war chariot fired.
The spear broke through everything she’d built — the stone walls, the powder arrays, the pit-traps, the layered defenses she’d assembled through three rounds of costly manipulation — broke through them as if they were the concept of resistance rather than the thing itself, and took her with it. She had a moment of flight, the garden inverted below her, and then she saw her own organs tracing her trajectory in the air behind her, and then she didn’t see anything.
On restoration she rose to her feet already pulling the snow powder from the ground—
Another spear. Then another. The interval between them did not allow for preparation. She could feel herself diminishing between each return — the heaviness not lifting but deepening, the consciousness thinning at its edges, the garden beginning to crack at the horizon, lightning in a sky that should have been cloudless, the flower pond breaking apart at its base and the surrounding walls coming with it.
“A strong will only delays the end,” Zero said. “It doesn’t change it. Close your eyes. You’ve held on longer than almost anyone.”
The world broke.
“Is it finished?” Isabella asked. The field outside Wolfsheart was quiet around them. “You’ve been in your own face again for a while, but you haven’t spoken. I started to think you actually failed.”
“There was something interesting in her memory.” Zero opened her eyes. Her expression was different from before — not in any feature Isabella could have named, something only in the quality behind it. “Her way of thinking. It made me think.”
“Hm. You found her alchemical powder formula, I assume.”
“Yes. The composition is simple — components available in any workshop.”
“Then let’s return to the Holy City. We’ve completed what His Holiness O’Brian asked.” Isabella looked back toward the city walls. The battle would persist for another three or four days — the remnants of the Wolf King’s garrison still had numbers, and numbers required time to exhaust. But without leadership, without the witch who had been guiding the militia’s approach to the God’s Punishment Army, they were not a threat. Only a duration. “Come. We’re done here.”
“Let’s go,” Zero said.
“Wait—”
Zero stopped. “What is it?”
Was it an illusion? Nothing in her appearance had changed. Same face, same posture, same pale-fire eyes. And yet Isabella studied her for a moment with the specific attention she brought to things that bothered her, trying to locate what she was seeing.
She shook her head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
She had spent too long on this battlefield. That was all. She was imagining things.