Chapter 743: Retreat

Alex sent fire toward a group crossing beneath the upper platform. The flames caught the front attackers and forced the ones behind to climb over them.

Dorian used the delay to bring his separated soldiers together.

Then Thepes struck Alex from the side.

Mingyue intercepted the blade, but the impact still forced her back a step. Alex turned and drove his hammer toward Thepes’s chest.

Thepes blocked with his forearm. Bone cracked, and the arm bent beneath the blow. Then blood rose from the ground to wrap around it.

The bent arm began to straighten.

Alex’s eyes narrowed.

Thepes had been healing throughout their fight, but his broken arm was repairing much faster than his crushed chest had.

More blood crept beneath Thepes’s foot. Alex followed it back to a corpse lying half inside the pit.

The body shriveled as the blood reached Thepes. Its skin tightened over the bones, and the remaining flesh collapsed inward.

Thepes’s forearm straightened completely. Alex reached out with his senses, following the flow into him.

Blood was only part of it. Life force and the power left inside the remains were being drawn along with it. Even the damaged soul fragments he had sensed while searching for survivors were disappearing into the flow.

"He’s feeding," Alex told Mingyue through their bond.

She cut toward Thepes’s neck, forcing him to duck. "From the dead?"

"And what the ritual left behind."

Alex changed the angle of his next strike.

Instead of driving Thepes toward another pile of bodies, he hit from the side and forced him away from the pit. Mingyue kept close, her blades leaving shallow cuts across the arm he raised to block her.

The wounds began closing.

This time, they did not disappear at once.

Thepes stepped back toward the dark blood. A stream rose behind his heel and sank beneath his skin, closing the last of the cuts.

Alex had seen enough.

Thepes could replace the power he spent healing as long as his blood reached those remains. The formation he had destroyed no longer gathered anything for him, but the blood and bodies were still here. He was drawing from them himself.

Thepes looked at Alex’s face and smiled.

"You finally noticed."

Alex sent a line of green fire through the stream behind Thepes, burning the blood before it could reach him.

Thepes’s smile vanished, and he struck at Alex’s raised hand. Mingyue caught the attack on both swords and turned it aside.

Another stream rose from farther along the pit.

Alex burned it too, but the next came from the opposite side.

Each stream was easy enough to burn. Keeping all of them from reaching Thepes would demand attention Alex couldn’t spare while both armies were fighting around them.

Thepes spread his arms. His blood ran beneath the broken chains and into the bodies around the pit. Streams rose back toward him, dark and thick with what they had drawn from the remains. As they reached him, the dent in his chest began to fill out.

Mingyue attacked before he could finish. Her sword drove into his shoulder, and purple ice spread across the wound.

Blood closed around the blade inside the wound.

New blood flowed over the frozen area. The ice cracked as he forced more power against it.

Mingyue pulled her sword free before he could close his hand around the edge.

His shoulder healed as she withdrew. They were spending power to wound him, and the chamber was supplying what he needed to recover.

Alex glanced toward the upper position again. Dorian’s soldiers were holding, but several were fighting with wounds they had not had when they arrived. Selene stayed close to the recovering Sovereigns, preventing the red-eyed bodies from reaching them.

They could not keep doing this while he tested every way to cut Thepes’s supply.

"Can you burn what he’s taking?" Mingyue asked through their bond.

"Part of it."

"All of it?"

Alex looked beyond Thepes.

Remains lay under fallen stone, inside the pit, and around the chamber’s walls. Fire powerful enough to destroy every source would spread through the same ground his own people were standing on.

He would have to get them clear first, with Thepes attacking him every step of the way.

Thepes rushed between them, using a burst of blood to force Alex back while his blade swept toward Mingyue. She stepped through a purple line and came out beside him, but Thepes turned quickly enough to catch her first cut.

Alex struck before he could follow Mingyue’s movement. The hammer hit his back and drove him forward, yet Thepes landed with both feet beneath him this time.

The clumsy corrections from the beginning of the fight were disappearing.

And he could keep drawing power from the remains while he learned to control his body.

They had earned their first advantage through control and experience. If they stayed here until his body caught up with his power, putting him down again would cost much more.

Alex raised his hammer as Thepes came back at him.

Their weapons met. The force shook the broken floor, and more of the pit’s edge collapsed into the blood.

Thepes pushed harder.

Alex gave one step, then turned the hammer and let the enemy’s blade slide away from his chest. Mingyue’s sword cut across Thepes’s side before he could recover his balance.

Blood rose from the floor to close the wound.

Alex didn’t waste another attack proving what he already knew. He drove Thepes back far enough to give himself room and spoke to Vesa.

"We’re moving the fight out of this chamber."

Vesa looked upward, then toward Dorian’s position. "With the army?"

"With everyone who is still alive."

Thepes heard him and laughed.

"You want to run?"

Alex kept his eyes on him.

The surface would put distance between Thepes and the remains. Taking the fight into Edonia was out of the question. Alex would not endanger everyone living there just to get Thepes away from the pit.

Mingyue moved closer to his side. "He has no reason to follow while he can stay beside the pit."

"Then I’ll give him one."

Alex looked toward the opening above the broken platforms. They had come down through the buried city to reach this place. Thepes wanted to prove that the old race and its promised Progenitors were weak.

That pride might pull him away from the power keeping him in the fight.

"Dorian," Alex called. "Be ready to move when Vesa opens the way. Selene keeps the wounded with her."

"Understood, King."

Mingyue lifted her swords and moved toward Thepes’s right, drawing his attention away from the soldiers preparing to withdraw.

Alex raised his hammer. He would not keep spending his own strength while the enemy fed on everything around them.