Chapter 127: The Keeper

Chapter 127: Chapter 127: The Keeper

On the tenth day, an hour before sunset, Helena’s turn reached ninety-five percent, and the Glass Field began to move.

Donald was standing at the edge of the outer chalk band when it started. At first it was only a sound, a low grinding that came up through the soles of his boots, and then the black glass around the ring began to crack in long straight lines, as if something underneath was pushing up through it from below.

"Helena," he said.

"I know." She didn’t open her eyes. Her hands were still flat on the glass, and her face was gray with exhaustion. "The anchor knows it’s being taken. It’s calling its Keeper. I can’t stop, Donald. If I lift my hands now, all ten days are gone."

"Then don’t lift them."

The Field split open forty meters from the ring, and the Keeper climbed out.

It was made of the Field itself. Black glass poured up out of the crack and stood up on two thick legs, and kept rising until it was taller than the Wall, a rough giant with no face and long arms that ended in jagged blades of glass. Where the setting sun hit it, it threw red light across the whole Field.

Donald let Valuation Eye run over it.

[Target: Keeper of the Genesis Anchor]

[Rank: S-Rank. Level: 94.]

[Body: Abyssal glass. Repairs itself while in contact with the Field.]

[Core: Moves freely through the body.]

[Objective: Destroy the turning ring.]

"It heals from the ground," he said into his earpiece. "As long as its feet are on the glass, we can’t keep it broken. We need to get it off the Field."

"How do you lift something that size?" Sylvia asked.

"All of us at once," Donald said.

---

The Vanguard Barracks came first.

Evelyn had ordered all four hundred and twelve of them onto the Wall at noon, and now they came down onto the Field in their companies. Smaller shapes had begun to climb out of the cracks around the Keeper’s feet, glass hounds and glass men no bigger than a person. The Vanguard met them in long lines with shields and spears and fire, and held them back from the chalk.

The Keeper ignored them. It took one long step toward the ring and swung its right arm down at Helena’s back.

Damian caught it.

He came up out of the Keeper’s own shadow, which the low sun had stretched across half the Field, and every thread of Parasitic Snare he had poured out of both hands at once. Black lines wrapped the descending arm at the elbow and the wrist and pulled tight, and for one second the giant blade stopped three meters above Helena’s head. Then the threads began to snap, one after another, and Damian went down on one knee with blood coming out of his nose.

It was enough time for Evelyn.

She hit the Keeper’s arm from above with Starfall in both hands, and the blade went through the glass at the elbow in a burst of white light. The forearm fell and smashed on the Field in a hundred pieces, and Helena’s shoulders jerked as the noise went over her, but her hands didn’t move.

The pieces of the arm began sliding back toward the Keeper’s feet across the glass. Before Evelyn had landed, the stump was already growing a new one.

"Sylvia," Donald said. "Its left foot."

Sylvia had been waiting for that. She went into the long shadow of the Wall, came up out of the shadow under the Keeper’s left heel, and opened her storage underneath it.

It was the largest thing she had ever tried to take. Her face went white with the strain. The black glass under the Keeper’s heel simply vanished into her shadow in a single solid block, two meters deep, and the giant’s left foot dropped into the hole with nothing under it.

The Keeper lurched sideways and caught itself on its new right arm, and for the first time it made a sound, a long, high grinding scream that shook the glass under their feet.

"Nyx," Donald said.

The cat dropped out of the red sky onto the Keeper’s shoulder and dug in her claws. Through the Phantasmal Siphon she pulled at its strength, and Donald felt the stolen power come pouring down the bond into his own arms until his hands shook with it.

Then he turned to Evelyn, who had landed beside him, and held out his hand.

She took it without asking why.

The Synergy hit them both at once. The heat ran up his arm and through his chest, and everything he had tripled in a single breath. The Keeper’s movements slowed in front of his eyes, and the noise of the battle went quiet and distant. Compound Interest settled over the two of them on top of it, and Donald could feel how strong Evelyn was beside him, and how much stronger she was because he was there.

"When I hit it," he said, "go with it. All the way up."

Evelyn’s fingers tightened on his. "Understood."

He let go of her hand and ran. The boost would only last a few seconds once they broke contact, so he had to spend it fast.

Bull Rush carried him across the Field faster than he had ever moved, straight at the Keeper’s left leg, which was still trapped in Sylvia’s hole up to the knee. He went in low, under the swing of its right blade, and as he reached the leg he fired the Pile Bunker upward into the glass with every point of the Synergy behind it.

The piston struck the Keeper’s knee and kept going. The force of it went up through the giant’s body and lifted it, and the trapped leg tore up out of the hole, and for one second the whole Keeper was off the ground, tipping backward, with nothing under its feet but air.

Evelyn went with it, exactly as he had asked.

Celestial Ascent took her up under the falling giant, and she drove her shoulder into its back and kept rising. The Keeper went up with her. It was ten meters off the Field, then twenty, then thirty, kicking and screaming, too far from the glass now to draw anything from it.

Donald raised his tablet and called the one weapon in Genesis City that could hit something that size in the air.

The Archangel Array had been quiet in orbit since the night of Azgalor’s war. It woke now. A single spear of white light came down out of the evening sky, as thick as the Keeper’s body, and Evelyn let go and dived away from it a half second before it struck.

The Keeper burst apart in the air.

Its pieces came down across the Field in thousands of black shards, and when they landed, none of them moved toward each other. Without its core, there was nothing left to pull them together.

[Target Defeated: Keeper of the Genesis Anchor (Level 94).]

[EXP Gained: 128,000.]

[Level Up! Level 28 → 30.]

[Free Points: +6.]

---

At the center of the ring, Helena’s lips stopped moving.

The glass under her hands lit up from below, gold, the same deep gold as the column of light in the oath room in Hanseong. The light spread outward through the three bands of chalk until the whole ring was burning gold, and then it sank down into the Field and was gone.

[Genesis Anchor Turn: Complete.]

[Genesis City Anchor: Held by The Investor.]

[Anchors held outright: 2 (Genesis, Hanseong). Aldmere Council Ward: 2 of 7 locks.]

Helena lifted her hands from the glass for the first time in ten days and fell forward.

Damian caught her before she hit the ground. He was still bleeding from the nose, and his knees weren’t steady, but he held her up and didn’t let go. She leaned against his chest for a moment with her eyes closed, and didn’t seem to mind.

Then she looked past him at Donald and held out her right hand.

"You wanted to shake it," she said hoarsely. "Go on."

He knew now that it wouldn’t prove anything. He shook it anyway.

Helena held on to his hand a moment longer than she needed to.

"There’s something you should know," she said quietly. "When the anchor turned, I saw the whole seal from the inside, all at once, every line of it. Someone had worked into it long before Paimon put his lien on it. They’d built a door into the seal, a small one, so that anyone who knew it was there could open it from outside. I closed it as I finished, with the last of what I had." Her grip tightened. "I knew that work the moment I saw it. They were my own formulas, from the research that was stolen from me years ago."

"Who stole it?" Donald asked.

"I never knew. Not until today." Helena looked up at him, and her tired eyes had gone very hard. "Whoever built that door signed it, the way Enchanters sign their best work, in a corner where no one is meant to look."

"What was the name?"

"Julian Vane," she said.

Then her eyes closed, and she was asleep in Damian’s arms before Donald could say anything at all.