Chapter 578 You Took Too Long

The dragon backed out of the crack, and I followed it.

I didn’t walk. I pushed. The black-and-white fire went out ahead of me, and the rock in front of it didn’t melt, it broke, and the dragon’s own heat couldn’t get through it. We came out of the cliff together onto what was left of the ledge, into the open dark, and the dragon spread its wings to get away from me.

"Kneel."

Voice of Authority went out of me, and this time the word had weight.

The dragon’s front legs buckled. Its chest hit the stone hard enough to crack it. It screamed, and fought it, and dragged one leg back under itself, claws scraping long white lines into the ledge, so I said it again.

"KNEEL."

It knelt.

Somewhere far above us, the two giants tearing at each other in the dark sky went quiet for a moment.

I didn’t care. I was already counting.

’One minute. That’s what Overdrive gave me last time, before my body broke.’

It had been a lot longer than a minute already. The Dark Essence was holding it together, the way the system said it would, but I could feel the price building anyway. My hands were shaking. The ink lines in my skin had crept past my wrists and were spreading up my forearms. Something behind my eyes had started to hurt in a way I didn’t like at all.

I wasn’t going to win this by killing a dragon.

I was going to win it by opening a door.

So I did the thing I had come down into the dark to learn how to do. I held both floods at once, the Spirit River and the rust, and I turned my attention inward, toward the place where my Soul Sanctum should have been.

For weeks there had been nothing there. Just a wall with no handle.

This time, with the rust in my hands, I could see it.

It was a door. My door. The same heavy doors that had always opened onto the Nave, except they were black with rust from top to bottom, the hinges gone solid and the seams sealed shut. And the rust on them was the same rust running through my hands.

Rust knows rust.

I didn’t try to open it.

I punched it.

Everything I had, both floods at once, went into the centre of those doors. And they broke.

Not open. Broke. The rust shattered like old glass, the doors came off their hinges and fell inward, and the light of the Nave came pouring out through the hole.

And the Precipice shook.

It started under my feet and went out in every direction. The cliffs around us split from top to bottom. Stones the size of houses came down out of the dark and burst apart on the ledges below. The mountain peaks that made the sky over us groaned and shifted, and dust poured down from them in long grey curtains. Above us, the two giants broke apart and scattered.

And from somewhere far, far below, deeper than anything I had ever touched with Death Sense, something turned over.

Just once.

Then the panels came.

[Soul Sanctum: Access Restored]

[Warning: Structural damage detected in the Soul Sanctum]

[The Soul Sanctum is repairing itself]

[Your Summon, the Tyrant Empress, has had her Fortitude increased by 1.0]

[Fortitude: 8.7 → 9.7]

[Hidden Attribute unlocked: Legion’s Echo]

[Hidden Attribute unlocked: Throne of Corpses]

[Your Summon, the Pyre Saint, has had her Fortitude increased by 1.0]

[Fortitude: 7.2 → 8.2]

[Your Summon, Celestine the Radiant, has had her Fortitude increased by 1.0]

[Fortitude: 8.0 → 9.0]

[Hidden Attribute unlocked: Voice of God]

[Your Summon, White Feather, has had her Fortitude increased]

[Fortitude: Unavailable → 8.3]

[Your Summon, Brunhilde, has had her Fortitude increased by 1.0]

[Fortitude: 8.4 → 9.4]

[Hidden Attribute unlocked: Chooser of the Slain]

I didn’t read them. Not properly. Later I would read them sitting on a rock, and spend a very long time on each line.

Right then, I could only feel them.

All five of them, on the other side of the broken doors, in the Nave. Maggie, cold and furious. White Feather, calling my name the way she always did, Lord Cade, Lord Cade. Celestine. Brunhilde, who had spent weeks in a dark I made, and who didn’t say anything at all, but was there.

I could only afford one. My body was already coming apart.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to choose.

She came through on her own.

The air beside me split open with crimson light, and Kassie stepped out of it in full armour, the obsidian-and-crimson greatsword already in her hand.

She didn’t look at me.

She looked at the melted rock at the edge of the ledge, where Bren had been standing. She looked at Ilse lying at the mouth of the crack, smoke still lifting off her. She looked at Light’s burned arm. Then she looked at the ink lines crawling across my skin, and at the dragon kneeling in front of me.

Her helmet sealed over her face.

Then she was gone.

I never saw her move. I saw the dragon’s head come off.

It went up into the air, turning over, and the body under it was still kneeling when Kassie landed on its back and drove the greatsword down through it into the stone. The whole ledge split in two.

The young ones had come back. Twelve of them, maybe more, drawn out by the noise and circling on the cliffs around us.

They should have stayed gone.

She went through them the way she had cut that Ifrit in half before it finished landing, the way she had taken the head off the Church’s white serpent in the eye of the storm. One stroke each. Sometimes one stroke for two. She came down on one from above and split it lengthwise. She caught another by the tail as it tried to take off and swung it into the cliff wall so hard that the wall came down on top of it. The molten rock they spat at her ran off her armour in bright orange streaks, and she didn’t even slow down.

I had watched Kassie fight a lot of things.

I had never watched her fight angry.

It took less than two minutes. When it was over, the cliffs were quiet, and every dragon that had been on them was lying in pieces on the stone.

Kassie stood in the middle of all of it and planted her sword.

[Throne of Corpses]

Crimson light came up out of the ground.

It poured into the dead dragons, into the torn scales and the broken wings and the severed head of the big one, and the bodies began to move. They dragged themselves together. The pieces found each other. One by one, the dragons stood up.

Their eyes were crimson now. Their scales had gone dark red, like old blood. And they stood in ranks.

Rows of them, silent, all along the broken cliff. The big one stood at the front with its head back on its shoulders and a crimson seam around its neck where Kassie had cut it.

Soldiers.

’...Holy shit.’

That was the last thing I thought before my legs went.

The Overdrive ran out all at once. The flood inside me dropped away, and what was left was my body, and my body was in pieces. The ink lines in my skin burned like hot wire. Blood ran out of my nose and into my mouth. I hit the stone on my back and couldn’t feel my hands.

’Ah, damn... it’s that part again.’

Kassie was standing over me.

I didn’t see her cross the ledge. She was just there, the helmet gone from her face, looking down at me the way she had inside the Demonic Spirit, when she called me a monster.

She looked at me for a long time.

Really looked at me.

"You got stronger."

I couldn’t move much, but I could smile.

"Yeah."

She punched me in the chest.

Not hard. Not even close to hard, for her. Just hard enough to remind me she was there.

"You took too long."

’...Yeah. I did.’

Then she knelt, got one arm under my shoulders, and held me up off the stone. She didn’t say anything else, and neither did I.

Behind her, at the far end of the ledge, someone was walking toward us through the ranks of crimson dragons.

He didn’t hurry. He never hurries. His purple scarf was filthy, his tin cup was in one hand, and he looked up at the silent red dragons on either side of him with mild interest, like a man walking through a museum.

Devant.

Kassie’s head came up.

She laid me down on the stone very gently. Then she stood, pulled her greatsword out of the ground, and turned it toward the boy.

Devant stopped a few paces away. He looked at the sword. Then he looked past it, at me, and smiled the same pleasant smile he had worn at the lake.

"Oh. You opened it."