Chapter 53: As Many Deaths as It Takes (1)
Lazaüs raised a finger toward me.
I saw it coming — that same sphere of black mana that had killed Isaiah, condensed in an instant, shooting straight at my chest. I didn’t have time to move. Barely time to understand.
Then a black mass threw itself in the way.
Isaiah. He’d hurled himself in front of me, his great shield raised, and the sphere smashed against it in a blast that drove him back several meters, his heels carving two furrows in the earth. The black light died out.
And my blood froze.
No. No, not this, not him again—
"Don’t... don’t make that face..."
His voice, slow, halting as ever, reached me through the smoke.
He was standing. Alive. His shield was smoking, half melted, but it still held, and he turned a strangely calm eye toward me.
"On my turn now... to show you... why Florenzia... sent me."
He hadn’t worn himself down against the tide. He’d listened, and it had just saved his life — saved a loop, even.
He planted his shield in the ground, gripped his sword in both hands, and a dark aura rose along the blade.
A shaft of darkness burst from his sword and shot toward Lazaüs.
The demon swept it aside with the back of his hand, but a multiplied arrow was already coming down on him from the ramparts — Adam, his great bow drawn, a smile on his lips.
"Hey, monster!" he called. "You ignored us a little too long!"
And everything went off at once.
Lazaüs spread his arms, and the sky answered him.
Black mana burst from his back in a crown of spikes, dozens of them, that froze for a second above him before raining down over the whole square at once. It wasn’t a spell anymore — it was a downpour. I rolled, Isaiah raised his shield over his head, Adam threw himself behind a battlement, and where the spikes struck the ground they exploded into geysers of darkness that tore up the stone.
Alice shouted something, and a dome of lightning opened above us, catching the spikes in midair, each one bursting against the barrier in a spray of white. The dome held. Barely. I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, both hands raised, her whole body straining to keep the thing up while the black mana hammered on it.
Alice, once again, was the pillar, the center of everything — the real hero in every situation, contrary to what she said and thought of herself.
"Isaiah!" I shouted. "Open me a path!"
He understood instantly. He charged, shield forward, straight into the rain of spikes, taking what should have killed him, and split the curtain of darkness the way a prow splits a wave. I pressed into his back, into the wake he carved, and we advanced together toward the demon.
Adam covered our flank — volley after volley, his arrows forcing Lazaüs to parry on one side while we rushed the other. And Seorin surged up on my left, a blade of wind extending her katanas, cutting two spikes that were diving at us and opening one more corridor.
Now!
We reached him all four at once.
Isaiah brought his sword down from above, Lazaüs parried it with an arm of darkness — and in the same instant, Adam’s arrow struck his flank, Seorin’s katanas opened his back, and I dove under his guard, Naia and Laia each biting into a thigh. Four blows, four points at once. He couldn’t parry everything. His black blood sprayed everywhere, and for the first time, I saw him take a step back.
We touched him. We really touched him—
Then he roared, and it was as if the night itself were screaming.
A wave of black mana exploded from his body in every direction, blasting all four of us backward at once. I crashed to the ground, rolled, got up — and when I looked for Lazaüs, he was gone.
He was above us.
His hands came together, and the black mana condensed into a sphere that grew, and grew, swallowing the light around it, until it was bigger than he was, a black moon suspended in the red sky.
If it touches us, we’re all dead.
"ALICE!"
She didn’t ask me to explain. She raised both hands, and all her mana surged at once — the torrent I’d seen swirling around her with the Eye poured into a single barrier, a wall of lightning arched above us, as tall as a house.
Lazaüs released his black moon.
It came down on the barrier with a crash that emptied my lungs. Alice’s wall bent, cracked, the black energy sliding over the lightning in a cascade, searching for the flaw — and Alice screamed, her knees buckling, her whole body braced under the weight of the thing. I thought it was going to give. That it was going to swallow us all.
It held.
Barely, in a final flash that swept the square, the black moon dissipated against Alice’s barrier. Silence fell for a second.
And I saw Alice waver.
She gave everything in that. Even she has limits — while it recharges, she spent too much at once.
She caught herself, straightened up, her lightning already starting to run around her hands again — but slower. A breath slower. For the first time since this fight began, I’d seen Alice reach the end of something.
And Lazaüs looked barely dented.
We went back in anyway. We had no choice.
Isaiah in front, me in his shadow, Adam covering, Seorin on the flanks, Alice holding us all up by a thread — we launched the assault again, over and over, tearing each opening loose as a group of four, paying for every cut on the demon with a cut on one of us. We held our own against him. We pushed him. But we weren’t breaking through fast enough, and every exchange cost us more than it cost him.
The fight dragged on. An eternity of iron and darkness, of dodges and counters, of blood and lightning, where each of us tore one more second loose in turn.
But that pace was going to kill us. And Isaiah gave out first.
His knee buckled mid-charge. His guard grew slower, by a breath, then by two, and a blade he’d have stopped with his eyes closed opened his shoulder. He spat, and the blood that hit the ground was dark, thick, mixed with something that shouldn’t have been there.
Damn it... damn it! He’s already at his limit!
We were all at the end. Seorin was panting, her katanas trembling at the end of her arms. Adam had slowed, his arrows further apart. Even Alice had that veil of fatigue I’d never seen on her. There was only me left truly standing — Apotheosis, which kept me from feeling the exhaustion that should have crushed me long ago.
And he felt it too.
He swept down on Isaiah, who raised his shield a beat too late, and knocked his guard aside with a backhand. Then his gaze found me, and his black arm came down at me.
Too fast. Too close.
The blow hit me full on, tore me off the ground, and the wall caught me in a crash of stone, the breath driven from my lungs, a white pain scything through my back—
Then Alice’s warmth closed over me, stitching back what had just given way, setting me on my feet before I’d even finished sliding down the wall.
"Thank you, Alice!" I shouted, springing back up, already searching for Lazaüs.
He floated above Isaiah, half stunned, on his knees, unable to rise in time. And he was already raising his arm.
A beam of black mana condensed in the hollow of his hand, aimed straight at Isaiah.
Time seemed to slow.
No.
Not this. Not this scene, not again, not him, not after everything we’ve done, not after everything we crossed to get here — I refuse, do you hear me, I REFUSE—
"ISAIAH!"
I threw myself forward. But I was too far, Worldflow itself wouldn’t carry me in time, and I knew it, and I screamed anyway.
The beam fired.
And Seorin threw herself onto Isaiah.
She hit him with all her weight, wrenching him out of the trajectory — and the beam took her, full in the side.
It passed through her.
It cut her in two.
The shaft of darkness split her at the waist, clean, without resistance, and the upper half of her body separated from the lower in a spray of blood that leapt high and fell back in a rain over Alice’s white flowers — drowning the petals in red as far as the eye could see, snuffing out all that white beneath a scarlet downpour. Her two katanas slipped from her hands, rang against the stone. Her face stayed frozen in an expression I didn’t have time to read, her two halves tipping slowly, each to its own side, toward the earth.
And she fell.