Chapter 52: The Lance That Tore the Red Sky
[ Mission: Rewrite the tragic history of the fall of Akhartenzia, and the death of one of the great heroes. ]
[ Loop completed: 12 ]
We were all back on the square, the seven of us gathered, and for the first time in a long while, I felt ready.
Two and a half loops training in the warehouse — two, to be honest, the third having mostly gone into scaling the lance up — and here we were. We’d done what was needed for the spell to hold, and we’d agreed on how to use it when the moment came.
"So this is the one, finally?" Evelyn asked.
"Yeah. This should be the one."
"We’ve relied on you a great deal for this trial." Yanshu lowered his upper body in a brief bow. "I’ll return the favor on the next one. Thank you."
I stepped over and clapped his shoulder.
"You’ll thank me when we’ve pulled it off, man."
"I won’t fail to."
And on those words, we went off once more to wake Adam.
This time, he came to convinced he was in truth a demon who’d taken human form, doomed to betray his own against his will, and asked us with the utmost seriousness whether one of us would kindly keep him chained until the end of the battle, just to be safe. It took explaining that a demon probably wouldn’t have that kind of scruple, which he pondered for a long moment before concluding "fair enough" and heading off toward the north with his sprightly stride.
We followed him to the front, where Isaiah was waiting.
Adam introduced us, explaining that we’d pulled him out of his illusion, and I took over.
"We know about the real plan. The kingdom sent us as reinforcements — we’re a party of adventurers." I held out my hand to shake his.
Last time, at those words, he’d drawn his sword to test us. This time, it was far worse — or far better, depending on how you looked at it.
I didn’t even have time to see the motion. A pressure came down on the three of us all at once, like an invisible wall, and I felt instinct scream at me to move before I’d even understood why. Naia left its sheath as I pivoted; to my left, Seorin’s wind was already rising into a rampart; to my right, a dozen lightning primers crackled around Alice’s hands. Three answers, in a single breath, before any of us could think.
And Isaiah hadn’t moved an inch. His hand still rested on the guard of his sword, barely grazing it, as if he’d only lifted a weight to see whether we’d feel it.
We’d felt it.
He released the pressure, and a thin smile crossed his face.
"I see... so the kingdom didn’t abandon Akhartenzia after all. Only... for the diversion..."
We explained the rest. That a high demon by the name of Lazaüs would come. That the giant too, one of his creations. He asked where we had all this from; we answered, from the kingdom.
A good excuse that worked for everything, it seemed. Am I not a genius?
Beside me, Alice turned her head toward me and gave a little shake of the head, as if to say don’t even think about it.
... Can she actually read minds now?
Once I’d accepted that I was nothing next to Alice’s genius, I picked the conversation back up where I’d left it. I told Isaiah that above all we mustn’t wear ourselves out against the wave, and to stay alert at every moment for what would follow. Then I told him we held a trump card, something we’d play when we had to — and that with it, we’d win.
He nodded, and we took our positions.
The wave came, as always.
We took it without forcing, this time. No more of that slaughtering frenzy where we’d empty ourselves for the sheer pleasure of cutting into the flood — we’d learned Isaiah’s lesson, the one that had killed him. We held the line sparingly, each of us pacing our blows, letting the soldiers take their share instead of doing everything for them. Isaiah at the foot of the wall, Alice spreading her healing and her bolts without ever draining herself, me flowing through the current with Naia and Laia without spending a single motion too many.
And Seorin held back.
It was deliberate. She barely struck, conserving everything she could — her physical strength, her mana, her focus — everything she’d have to give a little later. Because what awaited her would be easy in no way at all, and she had neither an ultimate skill like me, nor that cheat of a reserve that was Alice. She had only herself, and whatever she managed to keep in reserve until the decisive moment.
So she kept it. And she waited.
The hours passed like that, in a quiet, measured slaughter, without anyone wearing themselves out. The wave rose, broke against us, ebbed, rose again — and the wall held, the soldiers held, we all held, without forcing, keeping an eye on the horizon.
Then the ground began to tremble.
BOOM.
A first blow, dull, distant, that set the stone vibrating beneath our feet.
BOOM.
A second, closer, hard enough to shake the dust from the battlements.
BOOM.
And it rose above the horizon, enormous, a mountain of flesh and seams that crushed the plain with every step, its silhouette cut against the red sky. Each stride heaved the earth and drowned the din of the battle for an instant, until there was nothing left to hear but that immense hammering drawing closer.
The giant.
The moment it appeared, I shouted.
"This is it!"
The three of us fell back to the rear, away from the melee, to the spot we’d scouted in advance — clear, with a straight line to the giant. Ahead of us, Isaiah and Adam took over on the colossus, one planting his shield in the ground to absorb its steps, the other riddling its mass with multiplied arrows, while the soldiers closed ranks to hold the wave without us.
We had our window. All that was left was to seize it at the right instant.
I raised my hands, and I called the water.
Not a sphere. A mass. Tons of it at once, torn from the Arsenal, condensed before me into a column of water as tall as a tower, so heavy the air itself seemed to bend around it. Seorin took her place at my side, both katanas raised, and the wind rose howling, coiling around the column, compressing it, drawing it into a tapered point that trembled with the pressure held inside.
"Kuro." Her voice was low, tight with effort, but perfectly calm. "Whatever happens after, don’t stop."
I knew what she meant. If the plasma wasn’t enough, it would be her turn to play, alone, against him. And she was asking me not to hesitate at that moment. Not to turn around.
"Hold on to the end," was all I said. "That’s all I’m asking."
The giant kept advancing.
"Not yet..." I murmured, my eye fixed on it, the lance of water trembling under my hands. "Not yet..."
They had to be lined up. The giant and him. A single line, a single trajectory, to take them both.
The colossus raised its foot over the wall, ready to crush it as it did every loop.
"Not yet..."
And Lazaüs appeared.
He rose into the red sky, above the giant, exactly where I’d been waiting for him, a finger already lifted toward the breach. Aligned. Both in the same axis, the giant in front, the demon behind.
Everything we’d endured — the twelve loops, the deaths, the despair, the endless training in that warehouse — all of it had led to this one second.
"NOW!"
Alice discharged.
Everything she had, all at once, into the heart of the confined column of water. Not a bolt — a deluge, a dozen, a hundred discharges stacked one on another in a fraction of a second, her reserve refilling in a loop and emptying again at once, over and over, the temperature climbing beyond anything we’d reached in the hangar. The water screamed, tore apart, ceased to be water.
And the lance ignited.
A shaft of blue-white light burst into the sky, so intense the whole world seemed to blur away around it. The entire plain lit up in a blinding white, brighter than the sun, throwing every shadow, every silhouette, every face into stark, cutting relief. The demons stopped dead. The soldiers looked up. The din of the battle fell silent, for the space of a heartbeat, as if everything alive on that field held its breath before this thing that should not have existed.
Even Lazaüs, up there, paused.
Then the lance flew.
It split the air with a tearing shriek, a comet of plasma spinning on itself, Seorin’s wind propelling it straight at its target — and it struck the giant.
It didn’t pierce it. It passed through it. The entire upper half of its body vaporized on contact, melted, erased in an incandescent breath, without its regeneration having the slightest chance to bite on a wound like that. There was no injury to close. There was no torso left at all.
The colossus toppled backward, what remained of it crashing down onto the plain in a titanic din, crushing whole swaths of the wave beneath its dead mass, shaking the battlefield from end to end.
A roar rose from the ramparts. The soldiers were shouting, brandishing their weapons — the giant, the invincible giant, the one that had ground them down loop after loop, had just fallen in a single blow.
But that wasn’t what mattered.
What I was watching was the rest. Because the lance hadn’t stopped at the giant. It had continued on its course, through what had been the colossus, straight toward the red sky.
Straight toward Lazaüs.
And there, for the first time since we’d known him, I saw something cross his face. Not fear — he was incapable of it, I think. But surprise. The kind of stupor of a being who hadn’t expected, really hadn’t, to be threatened by insects like us.
His hands rose, and a mass of black mana exploded in front of him, dense, swirling, a wall of darkness thrown up in haste between him and the lance. The plasma slammed into it head-on.
And the two forces clashed.
The shaft of white light bit into the darkness, pushed, bored, while the black mana growled and recoiled under the impact. A spray of sparks and dark shards burst from the point of contact, lighting the sky with a clash of white and black, the lance gaining ground inch by inch, Lazaüs’s spell slowly giving under the pressure, receding, cracking.
"Go..." I clenched my fists, my whole body straining toward that point of light. "Go, through him, through—!"
Beside me, Seorin was still holding, teeth gritted, blood running from her nose, her arms trembling under the effort of keeping that thing coherent across all that distance. For a moment, just one, I thought she’d make it. That the lance would pass. That we’d kill him too, here, now, and be done with it.
Then she let go.
She had nothing left — her wind had carried and propelled that mass from the start, and holding it against a resistance like that had finally wrung out the last drop of what she’d kept in reserve. She collapsed to her knees, and the shell of wind came apart with her.
And without its sheath to contain it, the plasma scattered all at once, in a final blinding flash that swept across the sky before going out.
Silence fell over the plain.
Up there, Lazaüs still floated, his barrier of darkness torn to shreds around him, his breathing ragged, a wisp of black mana still escaping his fingers. Exhausted. Pushed to his limit for the first time.
But unharmed. Not a scratch.
Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his gaze toward us.
And what I read in his eyes had nothing left of the stupor from before.
The black aura began to well up from him, first a thread, then a flood, then a torrent — a tide of darkness that overflowed his body and poured across the whole plain, so thick it snuffed out the red light of the sky around him. The pressure came down on the battlefield like a slab of lead. The nearest soldiers dropped to their knees, choking. The demons themselves drew back.
And me, despite Apotheosis, despite everything I’d faced, I felt my legs buckle under that weight, my breath lock in my chest, something primal deep inside me screaming to run.
He’d ignored us, until then. Treated us like a detail, like extras in a story that wasn’t ours.
Not anymore.
For the first time, Lazaüs was truly looking at us. And all his rage, all that bottomless power we’d only grazed, was now turned toward us.