Chapter 119: Intense Battle

Alice had the shot.

Nine hundred and forty stacks. A fatal point on Idresh Kaan’s throat that Arrow Intent had been reading for the last thirty seconds. Homing sat ready behind it.

She drew, and Nyriel screamed.

It was not a sound. The constellation above the spires simply went from steady white to hard red all at once, and every unit on the island felt it.

```

[ Warning: Additional hostile signatures. ]

[ Bearing: east-southeast. ]

[ Vessels: 7 ]

[ Hostile units: 900+ ]

[ Player signatures: 4 ]

```

Alice’s draw did not waver, but her stomach dropped straight through the spire floor.

"Logan."

"I see it." His voice came back through the comm sigil, rough with blood. "How many?"

"Four more players. Seven more ships." She made herself say the rest. "Nine hundred more units."

The horizon east of the island had stopped being a horizon. It was hulls now, seven of them, spread in a wide arc and already inside turret range.

They had come from the opposite bearing to the first three. They had been sitting out there the whole time, past the edge of the long scan, waiting.

’Idresh.’ Logan’s understanding came down the comm line a second later, flat and cold. ’He held them back until we committed.’

---

Rakhan Vurel was laughing again, and this time it carried without amplification.

"You remember what I said!" He pulled the Courser up above the terrace and spread both arms wide. "I said I would be moving before you saw me!"

Logan hauled himself up out of the crater with one arm that worked.

"You also said you brought me nothing to cut."

"I brought you four more players!" Rakhan was genuinely delighted.

Idresh’s voice came next, quieter, from the deck of the lead ship.

"None of these four expect to win this match," he said. "Neither do we. Not anymore. The first two on the leaderboard, we will pull that, but we can’t lose without beating you two."

Logan felt the shape of it arrive before the words did.

"We offered them the only thing that still matters to a player who knows they are not going to be champion," Idresh went on. "Score."

"We help them clear Warlords. We help them finish challenges and dungeons they cannot finish alone. Every one of those pays Tier Points, and Tier Points survive elimination."

"Who knows? We might even win." Rakhan grinned.

’Nothing complicated about it.’ Logan looked at the seven hulls coming in from the east. ’They want us eliminated. Every player in this match wants the same two things, and this is both of them at once.’

Score, and being the last ones standing.

It was, he had to admit, a very good deal for everybody except him and Alice.

Six players putting two at the top of the board out of the game was worth more than anything else on the water.

Whatever was left on the island afterward was just what you picked up on the way out.

```

[ Vassk Orrun ]

[ Class: Bonecrush Siege Warden (Legendary) ]

[ Talent: Gravebound Endurance (Epic) ]

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[ Nyxara Vell ]

[ Class: Duskfang Bladesman (Epic) ]

[ Talent: Silent Passage (Rare) ]

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[ Torme Halbrecht ]

[ Class: Sunder Artillery Adept (Legendary) ]

[ Talent: Ranging Sight (Epic) ]

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[ Sikra Thall ]

[ Class: Hollow Oracle Sovereign (Mythic) ]

[ Talent: Preordained Sight (Mythic) ]

```

"Nyriel." Logan spat blood onto the broken terrace. "Stats on all four."

The constellation shifted and fed him numbers.

Three of them came back about where he expected. High, dangerous, nothing he had not fought already.

The fourth one came back low.

’Lower than mine.’ He read it twice to be sure. ’Lower than Alice. That woman is sitting on a ship two kilometers out with worse numbers than half the units on this island.’

He looked east at the ship that had not fired a shot.

"Wonderful," he said.

---

The second wave hit the island in three places at once, and that was the part that actually mattered.

They did not mass. Vassk went at the northern wall with three hundred units.

Nyxara’s two hundred came up the western cliffs where there was no gate at all. Torme’s ships stood off at four kilometers and dropped shells on the southern terraces from outside turret range.

Sikra Thall’s ships did not do anything. They just sat there.

Aegis Isle had seventeen Mythic-plus combat units, and within a minute it needed all seventeen in different places.

Billy took six north and hit Vassk’s line head-on. It was still not enough to break it, because Vassk Orrun did not go down and did not stop and did not appear to feel anything.

```

[ Gravebound Endurance ]

```

Solveig took five west. Nyxara’s units were not the problem there. Nyxara was.

She came through six Mythic-plus units without any of them registering her passage, and she opened the throat of a production unit behind them before anybody understood she had moved.

```

[ Silent Passage ]

```

Terry took the gate with four and simply refused to let anything through it, which worked, because that had always worked.

The last two went south with Winsmoke to deal with shells falling out of a sky nobody could reach.

’Every single one.’ Logan counted it off as he watched. ’Seventeen Mythic-plus, and every one of them is committed.’

That was the entire point of nine hundred units.

They were here to make sure nobody on it was free to help two people standing on a broken terrace.

---

"Logan." Alice’s voice was very calm, which was how he knew how bad it was. "The island is going to hold."

"I know."

"It is going to hold, and it is going to be busy holding for a long time." She paused. "Nobody is coming to help us."

"I know that too."

Logan got his feet properly under him and looked up at Rakhan Vurel, who had stopped laughing and started circling again.

```

[ HP: 41% ]

[ Reaper’s Stride: 0 stacks. ]

```

’Zero.’ He had lost every stack when he went through the floor. ’I am starting this fight over from nothing, with one arm, against a man who never stops moving.’

He rolled the dead shoulder once. It came back about halfway.

"Alice."

"Here."

"Take Idresh." Logan drew Grimlord’s Blade left-handed. "I will take his brother."

"That is a terrible split. He counters me specifically."

"No." Logan started walking up the broken terrace. "He countered you six minutes ago. Then he spent six minutes doing it nine hundred and forty times."

There was a pause on the line.

"Oh," Alice said. "Oh, that is right."

---

She did not shoot at Idresh’s throat.

That had been the plan, and it was a bad plan, because Weight of Ages would take the arrow out of the sky the way it had taken nine hundred before it.

’He is not stopping them,’ she thought. ’He is making them heavy. Heavy things fall. That is all he is doing.’

Which meant he was not defeating the arrow. He was changing its flight path.

And correcting a flight path was the single thing Homing existed to do.

Alice drew with nine hundred and forty stacks of Cadence, and the Skyrend Sinew Bowstring scaled off every one of them, and Tempest Cadence poured nine hundred and forty extra Attack into her hands.

She did not aim at Idresh. She aimed forty meters above him.

’Go up. Let him make you heavy. Then come down on him with all of it.’

She released.

```

[ Starflow Arts: Death Star ]

[ Arrow Intent: Homing ]

```

Idresh saw the arrow going high and did exactly what he had done nine hundred times.

```

[ Weight of Ages ]

```

The arrow went heavy at the top of its arc, and it fell.

It fell the way a mountain would fall.

All that borrowed weight. Nine hundred and forty stacks on top of it. A Mythic bowstring scaling off her Attack Speed on top of that.

And Homing, dragging the whole descending mass back onto the exact fatal point she had picked out before she ever drew.

Idresh had made the arrow into a siege weapon, and then he had stood underneath it.

He got a barrier up. It was a good barrier and he had every stack he had left inside it.

```

[ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

[ Damage dealt: 388,200. ]

```

The barrier did not break. It went through the deck with him still behind it.

The lead ship came apart around the impact, folded in the middle, and started going down by the bow.

Idresh Kaan crawled out of the wreckage on three limbs and did not get up after that.

---

Rakhan felt it happen.

Logan watched him feel it. The Courser pulled up hard, and Rakhan’s head snapped around toward the sinking ship, and for one full second he was not fighting anybody.

’There.’

Reaper’s Stride had one stack. That was all Logan needed, because he was not going anywhere far.

He blinked up onto the terrace wall and opened Sword Intent, and he did not look for the momentum this time.

Rakhan had been right about that. There was nothing to cut. Dozens of tiny threads, each one born and dead inside a second, and none of them held long enough to matter.

So Logan looked at what had not changed all fight.

The Skyhoof Tempest Courser had no wings. It had never had wings. It ran on nothing, and it had been running on nothing since the shelf, and something had to be making that true.

There it was. A single thick cord running from the horse down into the world itself.

Not to Rakhan. To the sky.

’You brought me nothing to cut,’ Logan thought. ’You are still riding something that is tied to something.’

```

[ Broken Chain ]

```

He cut the Courser off the sky.

The horse did not die and it did not vanish. It simply stopped being held up, and it went down out of the air like any animal that had run off the edge of a cliff.

Rakhan came off it at forty meters.

He was a Sky Marshal, so he caught himself. Of course he caught himself. But catching himself took both hands and all of his attention, and he did it hanging in open air with no momentum and no mount and no brother.

Logan was already moving when he landed.

---

It was not much of a fight after that.

Rakhan Vurel was fast and he was skilled and his lance work was better than Logan’s had any right to survive.

But he had spent the whole battle building nothing on purpose, and now he needed something, and there was nothing there.

Logan took a lance thrust through the side of his coat and let it happen, because the Skyrend Emberglass Coat ate most of it and because taking it put him inside the reach of an eleven foot weapon.

```

[ Grimspire Lance ]

```

He did not extend it. He shortened it instead, and drove the hilt into Rakhan’s ribs, and heard something give.

Rakhan went backward into the broken terrace wall. Logan followed him.

The lance came up one more time and Logan cut it in half at the grip.

Then Grimlord’s Blade was under Rakhan Vurel’s chin and everything stopped.

```

[ Rakhan Vurel: 9% HP ]

```

Logan was breathing hard. His shoulder had stopped answering again somewhere in the last exchange.

Behind them, the island was still shaking. Vassk was still standing. Nyxara was still killing production units nobody could catch. Torme’s shells were still falling.

Sikra Thall’s ships still had not moved.

"Say it," Logan said.

Rakhan looked up at the blade and did not say anything at all.

"He will not."

The voice came from below, and it was wrecked, and it took Logan a second to place it.

Idresh Kaan had dragged himself off the sinking ship and up onto the rocks. He was holding his side together with one arm. His hammer was somewhere at the bottom of the sea.

He was not looking at Logan. He was looking at his brother.

"He will not say it," Idresh said. "He has never said it in his life. He will let you take his head off and call it a good trade."

"Idresh." Rakhan’s voice came out thin. "Do not."

"I did the arithmetic on the shelf and you hated it." Idresh coughed and something came up that he did not comment on. "I am doing it again."

Logan did not move the blade.

Alice landed on the terrace behind him with an arrow already nocked, and she did not say anything either, because she had understood what was happening about two seconds before Logan did.

Idresh Kaan looked up at the sky over Aegis Isle, where seven ships were still burning down a defense that was going to outlast them.

Then he looked back at his brother.

"We promised four people a whole match of help," he said. "For this."

And he made his choice.