Chapter 586: Alone Again

The roar shattered what was left of the rocks around us.

Then the weight came down. Something I couldn’t see slammed onto the crushed volcanic gravel of the shelf and pressed the air flat. The Primordial Pressure Wave hit us like a wall. It forced the freezing chasm draft down into the rock, and for a moment there was nothing left to breathe.

The basalt under my boots began to crack. Hairline fractures ran out across the ledge in every direction, and the stone shrieked as it went, a high and continuous sound, buckling under the weight of the beast’s evolution. Grit jumped against my ankles.

The stench of charred dragon meat and hot copper flooded my throat.

Devant walked casually through the spreading shockwave, his thin boots stepping lightly over the fissures in the basalt. If the pressure touched him at all, it didn’t show. He held his dented tin cup level in his left hand, and not a single drop of water went over the rim.

He stopped near the edge of the crushed shelf, looked the mutating beast over with mild interest, and read it out like a label:

"It is shedding its constraints. Becoming a new Tier. Which means it must be level 9 at least... and this obscenity... Profane Tier?’

’Level 9 Profane trying to break into Primordial. Wonderful. Excellent news.’

The dragon had already finished mutilating itself. Where Maggie’s holy flame had burned its lower chest, it had torn the unmaking flesh away, and now the raw red meat underneath was gone too. A new layer of scales had grown in its place. The brittle charcoal armor from before was nowhere on it. This was obsidian, dense and polished, and it drank what little light the Precipice had.

And it was getting faster. The air grew heavier and started to hum, a deep vibration that settled in my back teeth and stayed there.

The swarm of thorn-spawn surging across the basalt caught the wave of dark power. Their red eyes flared all at once. Their charcoal scales thickened while I watched, spreading over the raw crimson meat, and then they launched themselves at our broken line.

Light held his ground.

His burned black arm hung dead against his ribs, and his eyes were cold and flat. He gripped his longsword in his right hand and waited for the same weakness he had been exploiting all fight. A wolf-sized spawn leaped for his throat. Light stepped forward and flicked his wrist, guiding the steel along the beast’s natural grain.

The blade hit the spawn’s shoulder.

It didn’t slide. The grain was gone.

The beast’s bones had hardened in an instant, adapting to the cuts that came before. The steel snapped with a sharp crack and burst into a dozen silver fragments that bit uselessly into the stone.

The recoil threw Light off his feet. He crashed hard into the chasm wall, his head snapped back against the basalt, and he slumped into the grey dirt without making a sound. The hilt was still in his fist.

The spawn surged right past his body.

I pushed my focus through Tactical Omniscience and watched the crystalline board in my mind recalculate the angles. The kill paths shifted. Glowing red vectors multiplied across the shelf as the situation got worse, and I fed a hundred and fifty units of spirit essence into my core.

[Heretical Pursuit]

A streak of white-and-black fire shot from my left hand. It slammed into the lead spawn and chained through the pack, turning five of the beasts into screaming torches. But five was nothing against a swarm that size. The rest ran straight over the burning ones.

Meanwhile, Ilse was backing toward the cliff face with her eyes on the ground. Her clothes were scorched to rags and her skin was blistered, and the Drakonir fire around her knuckles had faded to a dying ember.

Her lips kept moving around the count:

"Thirty-two paces."

But there was no thirty-third pace. The stone beneath her heel cracked open.

A dozen dark spines erupted from the rock directly under her boots and swelled into a wave of raw crimson meat and white fangs. The thorn-spawn crashed over her in a dark tide. They buried her under a writhing pile of charcoal scales, and the ember at her knuckles went out of sight with the rest of her.

For a moment, the shelf belonged entirely to the monsters.

Then the main body of the Dragon of Thorns moved.

It ignored the spawn. It ignored Light, and it ignored Ilse. All three of its colossal heads snapped around together, the two on the long, thorny necks and the smaller one protruding from its chest. Every one of them pointed at the only thing on the shelf that had actually hurt it.

Maggie stayed where she was.

She kept her hands down and her silver chain coiled around her forearm, and her veil snapped in the violent draft. Nothing about her was in a hurry.

The titan didn’t bother with its teeth. The three heads simply swung forward like sky-splitting battering rams. They crossed the distance in a blur and slammed straight into her small frame.

The impact sounded like a cathedral collapsing.

Maggie was launched clean off the shelf. She shot backward into the dark void of the Precipice, skipped off a lower crag, and hurtled straight out over the bottomless expanse. She became a tiny white spark, shrinking into the black.

’She’s hundreds of kilometers out.’

I threw my left hand forward and sent my chains whipping out over the edge.

The iron links shot into the dark and stretched as far as my core would push them. They hit nothing but empty air. She was already gone, swallowed by the distance.

’Recall. Come on, work!’

I reached inward, grabbed the tether to the Soul Sanctum, and ripped it hard to force her back. I fed essence into the pull.

Inside my core, the heavy doors of the Sanctum shuddered. The rusted hinges were still repairing themselves after the damage of the Infinity Overdrive. They ground together with a long screech, and then they stopped.

[Recall Failed: Threshold Channel Repair Incomplete]

The tether snapped back and left my well vibrating with empty, painful feedback.

I was completely alone... again.

The remaining thorn-spawn had cleared back to the edges of the rock, giving the titan the space it demanded. The Dragon of Thorns drew its three heads back from the ledge. Its violet-grey wings beat slowly, and it turned its many red eyes down toward me.

I stood in the center of the crushed basalt with Wren in my right hand, and the freezing draft bit through the dark ink lines on my skin.

I glanced toward the perimeter.

Devant was standing on the tip of a jagged thorn quill that had erupted near the outer drop. Naturally, he was untouched. His dented cup was still full, and his hands were relaxed at his sides.

He looked down at me with a pleasant smile that had nothing behind it:

"I do not yet know what you are worth."

The beast shifted. The pale wings folded slightly, and all three fang-lined split jaws descended out of the dark. Their shadow slid over the broken stone and over me.

I exhaled and let my sword arm drop a fraction of an inch.

’Ah, damn...’