Chapter 386: Clash of Power

Chapter 386: Chapter 386: Clash of Power

Eclipse Sovereign lifted two fingers.

That was the whole signal, and the ring of cultists answered it by the dozen. They poured across the arena floor in a black tide, and the air tore open with the sound of a hundred techniques firing at once.

Damon didn’t wait for them to reach him.

He let the Incubus Aura loose.

It rolled out from his body in a slow, golden wave, and the nearest cultists faltered as it washed over them. Their eyes went glassy, and a lean man with a bone staff stopped dead in the middle of his charge.

The man beside him was wearing a ring that glowed with stolen qi. The lean man stared at it like a starving dog stares at meat.

"That’s mine," he muttered, and then he drove the staff through his neighbor’s ribs.

"What are you doing?" someone screamed. "Hold the line!"

Nobody held anything. The aura had found what each of them wanted most and pushed it until they couldn’t think around it, and greed was the one thing every Eclipse cultist carried in the same amount.

Damon walked through the chaos with the Chaos Devourer resting on his shoulder.

His golden irises shifted, the patterns inside them turning like slow gears, and every cultist in the arena lit up in his sight. He saw the cracked meridians, the weak knots, and the places where stolen power sat badly in borrowed bodies.

A woman in a hooded cloak broke from the pack and hurled a spear of eclipse light at his chest. Damon tilted his head and the spear passed through the space where his throat had been.

"Third rib on your left side," he told her. "It’s the only thing holding your core together."

Her face went white.

He flicked the sword, and a thin rift opened under her feet and swallowed the cracked rib and everything attached to it. She fell without a sound.

Two more came from behind, silent and fast, with curved knives dripping black. Damon didn’t turn.

He reached back and caught the first wrist, and Incubus Touch flooded up the man’s arm in one hard rush. The cultist’s knees buckled and his mouth fell open, and he dropped to the floor in a sleep so deep it looked like death.

The second man hesitated.

"Go on," Damon said. "I’m waiting."

The man ran.

On the far side of the stage, Lumina stood behind Ariel’s shoulder and watched him work.

She had seen Damon fight before. She had watched him wipe Kai Reventon out of existence the day before, and she had told herself it was the strength she admired.

This was different, because this time the fighting was for her.

Every cultist who reached for the stage was reaching past him, toward the gold in her hair and the blood in her veins. Damon stood in the way of all of them and moved like he’d done this a thousand times, calm and unhurried, while a man twice his age begged him for mercy.

Her fingers tightened on the Radiant Dawn Sword until the leather creaked.

Ten years, she thought. Ten years of hiding behind a ponytail and a lie, and now I’m hiding behind him.

"Lumina." Ariel’s hand closed around her wrist. "Stay close. He asked us to."

"I know what he asked."

"Then why are you shaking?"

Lumina looked down at her own hand.

It was glowing.

A faint gold light was leaking out between her knuckles, thin as thread, and it brightened every time a cultist screamed her name.

Above the arena, King Aurelius planted his heel on the stone and the whole platform answered.

"Solaris!" His voice rolled out through the colosseum like a bell, and golden light burst around him in a ring. "Whoever stands in my house and calls himself my guest, hear me. Anyone who raises a hand against this arena raises it against the throne!"

The sect leaders moved.

Lysara of the Glacial Palace stepped off her platform and froze a flank of cultists to the floor in a single breath. The White Tiger elders went beast and crashed into the second wave. Prince Alex Solaris and Crown Prince Caelum took the king’s left and right, and the royal guards locked shields in a bright wall behind them.

Even Grand Marshal Vane’s pressure shifted, falling on the cultists like a mountain.

"Form on the King!" a Royal Academy captain roared. "Form on the King!"

The arena shook.

A column of eclipse fire detonated near the east wall and blew a crater in the stands, and the screams of the fleeing crowd went up with the smoke. A lightning spear punched through the barrier and hammered into the floor ten steps from Lumina, and the shockwave shoved Ariel into her.

Neko hissed from Ariel’s arms, fur on end.

Mio was already firing, arrow after arrow vanishing into the dark and reappearing in a cultist’s throat. Mia flickered between the shadows of fallen pillars and left bodies behind her without any noise.

Seraphina’s wind tore a hole through the second ring, and Flare walked into the gap with the Inferno Phoenix Blade burning white.

And in the center of it all, Damon was still moving toward Eclipse Sovereign.

A hundred pairs of eyes were on the stage, and every one of them was looking at Lumina.

She felt them like fingers on her skin.

Princess, some of them were thinking. Key. Prize.

And under that, from the stands, from the royal box where her mother had gone rigid, from the soldiers who had spent ten years searching for her, the same word, softer.

Alive.

Lumina’s breath caught.

She had spent her whole life learning how to be unseen. She knew how to stand still, and how to let a room slide past her and never ask for anything.

But the light kept climbing her arm, warm and steady and entirely hers.

I am Lumina Solaris, she thought. I am the thing they came for. If I stay behind a wall, then all they came for is a woman who needs saving.

On the floor below, a Solaris guard went down with a hole in his armor, and the cultist above him raised his blade for the kill.

Lumina pulled her wrist out of Ariel’s grip.

"I’m sorry," she said quietly. "I have to."

She lifted the Radiant Dawn Sword, and gold fire bloomed from the blade and ran up her arm into her hair, and every shadow in her corner of the arena burned away.