Chapter 101: Final Raid II

When the smoke settled, it was still standing in the middle of the crater.

Its body was punched through from every side, burned down to the bone in places, and the black blood running off it ate into the stone wherever it landed.

"Is it dead?" one of the mages asked.

Nobody answered. They were all watching it without moving, waiting to be sure.

But one of them, the oldest, the most experienced, the one who had seen the most, knew that it didn’t matter whether it was dead or not. They had to make certain.

So he charged alone, both swords out in front of him, without waiting another second.

He crossed the crater at a dead run, leapt, and raised his blades to take the head.

His throat went.

A flying abomination had come down out of the sky and torn it out in passing, without him seeing it, without him feeling it, every bit of his attention fixed on the demon in front of him.

The creature never pulled up. It carried on its line and hit the cobblestones a few paces further on, where it burst apart on the stone.

The veteran’s body came down turning over on itself and came to rest in the crater.

The shouting went up all at once from every side of the square.

The demon smiled with every tooth it had.

Then it bent its knees and lowered itself slowly into the middle of the crater, its head still raised toward them, the smile still there.

The two front wings came down first and crossed over its chest.

The other two followed, passing over its shoulders, and closed over the first pair.

The edges met one by one, drew tight, locked into each other, until there wasn’t the smallest opening left.

The smile was the last thing to go.

And all that remained at the centre of the square was a black shape, sealed, motionless.

Then the square changed.

They came by the hundred.

The flying abominations poured out of every rooftop at once, out of every street, out of the red sky above them, and within moments there was no piece of sky left visible from the square.

The swarm dropped onto the crater and began to circle the cocoon in a tight spiral that rose higher than the façades, so dense that nothing could be seen through it, so loud that nobody could hear anyone shouting from one side of the ring to the other.

The wind they made lifted the dust off the ground and drove it back into everyone’s eyes.

The melee fighters couldn’t get near it anymore. Every time one of them tried to push through, three of them threw themselves at him at once and drove him back.

The archers tried from the rear. The arrows never arrived. The abominations placed themselves in front of them mid-flight, took the shafts in the body and dropped, and two more immediately filled the space left by the one that had just died.

The mages were empty. They had spent everything in the volley and needed time to come back.

Then the swarm parted.

Not everywhere. Only in front of the cocoon, over a few metres, an opening in the spiral that stayed open instead of closing again, as though the abominations had decided to let them see.

And they saw something worse.

The cocoon opened.

Not fully. Only at the head, a gap between two wings, and in that gap the demon’s mouth was open, teeth bared.

An abomination broke off from the spiral and dove into it of its own accord.

CRUNCH

The bones gave way between the jaws.

CRUNCH

The chewing went on, long and methodical, and then came the sound of the swallow.

Another dove in. Then another. Then another after that.

They went one after the next without hesitating, while the rest of the swarm kept circling and shielding the cocoon with their own bodies.

"STOP THEM!" the woman in white shouted. "However you can, stop them!"

They tried.

The tanks pushed into the crater in tight formation, shields raised above their heads, and the abominations broke over them in whole waves. One man was carried off by the shoulders and dropped twenty paces away. Another disappeared under four of them and didn’t get back up.

The swordsmen held the flanks, cutting down everything that came, and more kept coming.

They advanced. Not fast enough.

The cocoon sealed itself.

And the square went on fighting the swarm, in blood and dust, without knowing how much time was left to them.

Then the wings unfolded.

They opened slowly, the front pair first, then the back, and the abominations left the square in one motion, climbing back toward the rooftops.

The demon rose.

There wasn’t a hole left in its body. Not a burn. The skin was smooth all over, and the runes from the bindings had gone with the rest.

It rolled its shoulders.

The woman in white watched it do it, and her voice came out very quietly.

"Regeneration."

The demon smiled.

"You should have killed me when you had the chance."

It charged.

There were no debuffs left. No chains. No runes on its skin, nothing at all to slow it down, nothing left of what thirty people had built.

Nobody on that square saw it leave.

There was a crater, and then there was no crater, and something was arriving on the woman in white, who hadn’t finished closing her hand around her shield’s grip.

She never raised it.

CLANG—

The arm stopped dead two fingers from her face.

An orange glow had come between them, rising from the ground in a column, and at the centre of that light there was a blade, and behind that blade there was a man, and at that man’s back two wings of light had just opened across the entire width of the square.

The stone under his feet had split into a star from the force of the stop.

He didn’t give an inch.

"So you’re back on your feet, little hero."

Paydragon didn’t answer.

He had nothing left to say. He pushed the arm back, pivoted and struck, again, and again, like an animal, without giving a single pace.

The woman in white looked at him for a moment, then raised her flail above her head.

"UNTIL THE MAGES HAVE THEIR MANA BACK, EVERYONE IN BEHIND PAYDRAGON!"

The whole square closed around them.

What followed was the hardest thing any of them had ever held.

Aldric was at the front, and he held. Every time the demon drove him back, he came again. Every time an arm caught him in the side, he landed on his feet and charged again.

The tanks worked around him.

"TAUNT!"

The demon shifted target for an instant, and in that instant Aldric cut it.

"TAUNT!"

Another one. Another blow landed.

It was working. More or less.

Then the demon caught one of them by the top of his shield and threw him over its shoulder.

The man hit the crater and stopped moving.

A swordsman tried to cover his retreat and was cut in half at the waist.

Another went to drag the first one clear and took the demon’s hand through his chest, which drove him into the cobblestones.

The healers ran behind them, from one body to the next, kneeling, laying on hands. Some got up and went back into the line. Some didn’t get up, and they were dragged toward the edge of the square without anyone stopping.

They held.

They held for a long time.

And then the demon stopped.

It stepped back, in the middle of the ring, and looked at all of them.

They were finished. Every one of them. The tanks could barely hold their shields up, Aldric had a knee shaking under him, the healers couldn’t keep pace anymore.

It wasn’t even breathing hard.

"I’ve had a wonderful time, thank you all!"

Its eight eyes left the square and climbed toward a balcony high up on a certain castle, where they rested a moment.

Then they came back down onto the adventurers in front of it.

"But let us be worthy of our roles. It’s time."

It raised a hand and closed it.

A sword of black magic formed above its palm, several paces long, and it lifted it over its head.

It drew everything in.

The air of the entire square was pulled into it, the dust, the smoke, what was left of the flames in the rubble, and it grew longer, and longer, until it rose ten metres above the rooftops.

There wasn’t a sound left on the square.

The adventurers looked up at it, and not one of them moved, because not one of them could do anything against that.

It brought the blade down.

BOOM—

The edge went into the square.

It passed through everything in its path without feeling any of it, and when it reached the ground, the stone opened.

The fissure ran out from the point of impact in every direction at once, crossing the crater, climbing beneath the façades, splitting the cobblestones across the entire width of the square.

Then the ground gave way.

And they fell.