Chapter 753: Dark Red

Alex noticed it a moment later.

It was foul enough to reach them through the smoke of the battle. He had smelled blood and burned flesh throughout the city. This was different, and it was becoming stronger.

Thepes’s head turned toward the smell as well.

Mingyue struck before he could turn fully toward the source. Her blades drove him away from Alex’s side, giving Alex a brief view of the service yard.

A small barrier stood between damaged warehouses.

Green smoke rolled inside it. More leaked above the surrounding walls and spread along the ground outside. A dark red shape moved at the center whenever the smoke thinned.

Alex could feel the power gathering there.

It was not part of the ruined pit they had left behind.

"Vesa, did that form during the fight?"

"No. Someone prepared it."

Vesa hovered above the street below, her small pink body well clear of the first green trails. Her four wings carried her backward as two of Dorian’s soldiers withdrew, keeping a group of red-eyed attackers in front of them.

One of the attackers ran toward the yard.

Vesa raised a small hand toward the soldiers. They stopped following the body and began moving back.

"I told them to let it go," she said through her connection with Alex. "I want to see what the smoke does before anyone enters."

The red-eyed body vanished into the green haze.

The smoke hid what happened to it. Alex watched for the red eyes to appear again, but Thepes’s next attack forced him to turn away.

Alex drove the blade aside and looked down again. An Imperial cultivator had followed to the mouth of the yard. He stopped outside the green haze, then sent a blade of qi after the moving shape inside.

The blade passed through the barrier and struck the red flesh.

For a brief moment, the smoke glowed around the impact. The blade disappeared into the organ, and the swollen veins brightened.

The cultivator raised his weapon again.

"Stop feeding it!" Vesa called, waving sharply at him.

He looked in her direction. One of the red-eyed vampires struck from his other side, and he had to turn to defend himself.

"The flesh took his attack," Vesa told Alex. "Don’t send more power into it."

Vesa directed the nearest allied soldiers back toward Dorian, away from the Imperial cultivator and his attacker.

"Dorian needs room to move the left side back," she told Alex. "Keep Thepes away from the adjoining avenue while he does it."

Dorian shifted part of his force toward the gap left by the retreating soldiers. Selene brought the wounded behind that movement while the Imperial cultivators pressed them from the neighboring street.

Leaving the smoke alone was already costing them ground.

Alex watched the organ’s glow settle. The attack had added power to it. Destroying the barrier with whatever force he could spare might simply give the thing more to use, and he didn’t yet know what would happen if the flesh inside broke open.

He looked for the lines of the formation instead.

They spread across the service yard and curved upward around the flesh at its center. Power moved through those lines toward the organ, then pressed outward with each slow movement of the swollen veins.

The formation was feeding power into the organ. The barrier wasn’t merely containing it.

Alex tightened his grip on the hammer. After the city’s ritual, the last thing he wanted to find was another sacrifice formation.

He still didn’t know who had placed this one or what had supplied it. The battlefield contained more blood and damaged formations than he could examine while holding Thepes off.

"Can you separate it?" he asked.

"I need to know what remains inside first," Vesa said. "The power isn’t familiar in the way an ordinary vampire formation would be."

Thepes came at him again.

Alex’s hammer met the strike, and the impact turned his attention back to the immediate fight. He could not tear apart an unknown formation with his people beside it and hope that solved the problem.

Mingyue stepped through a purple line and appeared at Thepes’s flank. She cut him away from the yard, keeping the three of them above the streets rather than letting him descend into the smoke.

"There’s something behind it," she told Alex. ℯℯ𝘭.

"I can feel it."

The pressure had changed. At first, Alex had taken it for the accumulated power inside the organ. Now he could sense another presence approaching, far larger than the thing within the small barrier.

His attention moved from the yard to the space above the city.

The Imperial ships were still firing. Their weapons crossed the sky in different directions, forcing Alex, Mingyue, and Thepes to move between them while the ground forces fought below.

Then one of the vessels changed position without turning.

Alex watched it closely.

Its thrusters were still pushing it along the same course, but its bow shifted sideways relative to the ship beside it. The two hulls came dangerously close.

The nearer vessel corrected its course and moved clear. A moment later, the gap narrowed again.

"Mingyue."

"I saw it."

Her swords stayed raised, but her attention had sharpened toward the same part of the sky.

A pale line appeared between the ships.

Alex might have missed the thin strand against the smoke if he hadn’t already been watching that space. The line passed beneath one hull and continued into the space beyond the other.

The memory of Karthos Reach came back at once.

The light bodies that recovered every time they were struck. The impossible distances. The web that had connected worlds and trapped the living beings inside them.

He tightened his grip. Last time, the first visible strand had been only a fraction of the web. He wasn’t making that mistake again.

"Vesa, pull back from that yard."

"I recognize it too, King."

She moved away at once and sent the nearest soldiers back toward Dorian. Her gaze stayed on the organ while she withdrew.

Alex still didn’t know what the flesh had been before it was put into the formation. But the power he sensed from it, together with the strand above the ships, was becoming horribly familiar.

Thepes looked up, his blood weapons loosening for a moment as he stared past the warships. Alex raised his hammer but stayed beside Mingyue. More pale threads were becoming visible behind Thepes.

Mingyue’s eyes narrowed.

"Karthos Reach," she said.

Alex nodded.

They had escaped that system while Lolth held the black-armored representative. That had given them an opening. It had not made the Spider Progenitor their ally.

She had consumed the living beings caught in her web.

Alex looked down at his soldiers and the wounded among them. There were civilians out there too, beyond the streets occupied by the three armies.

The Imperial vessel nearest the pale strand fired at it.

Light crossed the space where the thread had been. The shot continued past the second ship and disappeared above the city.

The strand remained.

Alex followed it upward, toward the pressure gathering beyond the fleet.

"Lolth," he said.