Chapter 136: A Pocket Army Opens (1)
The old man's body began to change.
Iron scales pushed up through his skin — dark, overlapping plates that spread across his frail frame like a sickness curing itself into armor.
They climbed his forearms first, then sheeted up over his shoulders, layered down his sunken chest, crawled across the backs of his knotted hands, until the harmless stooped grandfather was clad head to foot in living metal that flexed and slid with every small motion.
The hum in the air deepened into a grinding, tooth-rattling roar, and the snow on the flagstones nearest him hissed and melted from the heat the transformation threw off.
Then he moved, and frail stopped being a word that had ever applied to him.
His first strike caught Hrazfel square in the giant's chest before the dwarf had even finished bringing his hammer around — and four full meters of storm-blue muscle simply left, blasted backward across the courtyard, through a standing wall, and out of sight in a thunderous spray of broken stone and snow.
Ebony didn't even have time to track where he'd landed, because the old man's second strike was already scything toward her head.
She threw herself flat sideways, and the iron fist passed close enough to part her hair, close enough that the displaced air staggered her like a shove.
"(Fast. Far too fast for a thing that shuffled out of that door. The shuffle was the lie. This — this is what he actually is.)"
She caught her footing on a loose flagstone, planted hard, and answered before he could reset — driving in low under his guard, flaring the green fire across her knuckles for a single hard instant as her fist found his side.
The fire bit deep. It seared a fist-sized patch of iron scales black and dead on contact, and the concentrated force behind the punch actually shoved the old man back — his heels carving two long furrows into the stone, a skidding trench that marked, plain as a signature, exactly how far the blow had moved something that had thrown a giant through a wall a heartbeat earlier.
The old man stopped. He looked down at the ruined scales smoking on his ribs, turning slightly to examine the damage with an almost scholarly curiosity. Then, without a word, he punched back.
Ebony met it head-on. Fist to fist — his living iron against her fire-wreathed knuckle — and the collision of the two opposing magics detonated between them, a crack of force that blew them both apart.
They skidded backward across the courtyard in opposite directions, stone splintering beneath their heels, until each of them slammed to a halt against the rubble.
"Impressive," the old man said, rolling his scaled shoulder with a sound like a portcullis settling. He studied her across the broken ground with something caught between respect and appetite.
"Genuinely impressive. I haven't been made to try in a very, very long time. You've remarkable courage, child — for someone so small, and so thoroughly doomed—"
"You hit like a grandma," Ebony said, shaking out her stinging hand, keeping her face bored on pure willpower.
"No, really. My mother hit harder than that, and she was a lightweight who cried at soup commercials."
The scaled face twitched — just once, at the corner — and that was how she knew the jab had landed somewhere real.
They came at each other again. But this time Ebony didn't trade blows.
As the iron fist came scything in she read its line and slipped it, letting it pass over her shoulder, and poured every scrap of focus she had into the counter forming in her cocked arm.
"(One pulse. Not the flicker I've been rationing all fight — a detonation. Everything, into a single point, for a single microsecond.
All of it. Every lesson the mana-sickness ever beat into me, every hour I spent learning to crush my fire down small and sharp — spent at once, right here.)"
She drove her fist into his chest and triggered the purification fire for the briefest fraction of a heartbeat — but at a density she had never once achieved before, her entire well of control compressed into a single, screaming green spark at the point of contact.
It exploded.
A blast of green fire bloomed outward from her knuckle with a concussive whump that she felt in her own ribs, and the old man was hurled clean off his feet — thrown meters through the air, limbs flailing — and his iron transformation came apart as he flew.
The dark scales blew off his body like leaves in a gale, the living armor shattering and scattering across the courtyard, until what crashed and tumbled to a stop on the far flagstones was only the frail, exposed old body underneath, naked of its metal.
The watching monks went rigid. Even Hrazfel — just now dragging his battered giant form back through the hole he'd been punched out of, snow caked across his shoulders — stopped dead to stare.
Whatever any of them had braced for, it had not been the small foreign girl blowing the iron skin off their commander with a single punch.
The old man forced himself up onto one arm, and when his face came back into the light it was no longer mocking.
The amusement was gone, scoured off, replaced by the flat focused fury of something that had decided to stop playing.
"I won't make that mistake twice." His voice had dropped all its grandfatherly softness.
"I invoke — Cursed Fist of the Hundred Frozen Peaks—" Frost exploded outward from where he knelt, racing across the stone in white fractal veins, the temperature plunging hard enough that Ebony's breath tore out of her in a visible cloud. "... Roa—"
He never reached the last word.
Ebony was already moving — had started the instant his mouth opened, betting everything on the gap before an incantation closes.
She crossed the frozen distance faster than she'd moved in the entire fight, boots skidding on the new ice, and her fist cracked into the underside of his jaw mid-syllable, snapping his head back and strangling the spell in his throat.
And at the exact same instant, from the opposite side, Hrazfel arrived.
The dwarf had circled wide while the old man's attention was fixed on Ebony, and now the thunder-hammer came whistling down in a flat, brutal, full-strength arc into the back of the old man's legs.
The two blows landed together — Ebony's fist driving up through the jaw, Hrazfel's hammer crashing through the knees — fire from above and thunder from below, struck at the same breath with a combined, perfectly-timed force so total that the frail body between them simply could not hold together.
It came apart. Severed clean through at the waist, the two halves dropping to the frost-rimed flagstones with a wet, final sound.
Then silence.
For a full minute nobody in the courtyard moved or so much as breathed. The wind hissed thin across the snow and the broken stone.
Ebony stood over the body with her fist still smoking faint green, chest heaving, every muscle screaming — and she did not relax, not for a second, because some cold instinct at the base of her skull was absolutely certain the fight wasn't over.
The instinct was right.
A presence pressed down into the courtyard — sudden and vast, settling over everything at once like the moment before a storm breaks — and a calm, unhurried voice spoke from the black mouth of the lower door.
"Good," it said. "I knew the two of you wouldn't disappoint me."
From among the cowering, child-bodied monks, an old man stepped forward.
The same old man. The same sunken face, the same frail frame they had just split in two on the stones not thirty seconds ago — except this one wore a long, sweeping white beard the corpse had not, and carried himself with an even deeper stillness.
He took in the wrecked courtyard, the two smoking unconscious twins, the halves of his counterpart cooling on the flagstones, all of it, with no more than mild, patient interest.
"I would dearly have liked to test the both of you at my leisure," he said, almost wistful.
"Properly. Without the rush. It has been such a long, dull age since anything walked up this mountain worth the trouble of standing." Then his gaze drifted down to the corpse at Ebony's feet, and something glacial moved behind his eyes.
"But you see — that idiot currently staining my flagstones happened to be my brother. So." He spread his thin, spotted hands in a small gesture of regret. "Regrettably, the two of you will simply have to die now."
Ebony's blood ran cold, but her mind was already racing ahead of the fear.
"(Not the same man. A twin — like the iron-armed pair on the terrace. Brothers, mirror techniques. And that means this one has been standing in that doorway the entire time, watching.)"
The realization landed like a stone. "(He saw the concentrated burst. He saw exactly how I crossed the gap to interrupt the chant. He saw the combination strike with Hrazfel, the timing, all of it. Every single card I just played to kill his brother, he watched me play.)"
She'd beaten the first old man because he'd underestimated her. This one would not hand her that gift. "(I can't trick him. I can't surprise something that's already seen the trick. So I don't waste a breath trying.)"
Her hand went to her belt and closed around the small pale skull the king of the dead had pressed into her palm a world away, in a hall of mirrors under a red sky.
"(He gave me a pocket army. He told me to crack it open for the strong ones — to save it for the moment a clever play wouldn't be enough.)"
She looked at the bearded old monster shuffling unhurriedly toward her across the frost, at the raw terror still rolling off him in waves thick enough to pin fifty hardened monsters against the walls.
"(Well, old man. You're the strongest thing in this whole building, and you've got me dead to rights. So here it is.)"
She lifted the Fae King's skull high where everyone in the courtyard could see it, met the bearded man's eyes, and crushed it in one closing fist.
"Torment them."
{{Dark Magic × Armament: Army of the Damned Fae}}