Chapter 174: Turned into stone

The dead boy on the floor looked at his own hands, and they were gray stone, and then he was a statue, and then the statue was dust. A long, shrill shriek came from somewhere outside the world.

Leon opened his eyes.

He was standing in the bowl of broken floor, with a hundred folds of the room pressing in around the green shield and the black hands lying in puddles around his feet.

Ten paces away, Lysandra Thorne was clutching her face with both hands. Her veil had fallen. Blood ran from her nose, and her white eyes were rolling back in her skull.

"It... it broke," she gasped. "He broke it. He saw through me in two breaths."

"Hold!" Garrick shouted. "Hold, all of you! He is trapped!"

"Trapped," Leon repeated. He looked down at the ink on his boots, and then up at the folded room. "That is a good word for it."

He raised his right foot, and golden wings unfolded at his ankles.

There was no sound, and there was no flash. One moment Leon was standing at the center of a collapsing box of stacked rooms, and the next the box was empty.

A hundred folds of space slammed together on a dozen square meters of bare glass, and the floor of the chamber vanished in an explosion of dust and stone.

"Where is he?" Vesper screamed.

"Behind you," said Leon.

She spun, and he was there. He was standing in the middle of the air, crouched on a fold of the room, with the wings at his ankles beating slowly. He tapped her lightly on the forehead with one finger.

The golden light that rolled off him was so bright that every shadow in the chamber died at once.

Vesper Nox opened her mouth. Her shadow was gone. The black tide that had covered the floor and walls had vanished as if it had never been, and the woman who had commanded it was left standing in the glare with nothing to hide in.

She tried to melt into the floor, but there was no shade to melt into. She tried again.

"That is the problem with shadows," Leon said. "They need something to stand behind."

He flicked his finger, and she folded like a puppet with its strings cut.

"Four," he said.

Sorin Kade was already moving.

The thin man stepped sideways through a seam in the air and appeared at the far side of the chamber, thirty paces from where he had stood.

A second step took him to the ceiling. A third put him behind the cage of vines. He was good, and he was fast, and every step cost him less than a blink.

From the corner of the room, he threw out both hands, and a dozen glittering seams opened in the air around the boy.

"Cut him!" he shouted. "Cut him in pieces!"

The seams closed on nothing.

Leon had not stayed where he had been. He was crossing the chamber in a series of golden flashes, one after another, each leaving a faint afterimage that hung in the air for half a second.

Every seam Sorin opened, he was already gone. Every place Sorin stepped to, he arrived one heartbeat later.

One of the seams swept across his back as he went by. It was a blade of folded air, sharp enough to cut through steel, and it touched the pale light around his shoulders and came apart like paper in water.

"You can fold space," Leon said, directly behind the man’s ear. "But still, you’re too weak to stand against me."

Sorin froze.

"That is the difference between us."

A hand landed on the back of his neck. It was not a hard blow. It was a very quiet one, like a father steering a child through a doorway, and Sorin

Kade’s eyes rolled up in his head. He slid to the floor in a tangle of gray coat and did not move again.

"Five," Leon said.

"You," Lysandra Thorne whispered.

She had stumbled back against the wall. Her white eyes were wide, and she raised a trembling hand, and the air in front of her began to ripple again.

She was trying to start another illusion. Something huge was forming behind her, a shape with too many arms and a face that kept changing.

Leon looked at her, and Medusa looked through him.

"Do not," he said gently.

The gaze of the Gorgon touched her.

She went rigid from head to toe, her body rapidly turning into stone, starting from her chest until it spread to every part of her.

Her hand remained stuck out in front of her, her mouth fixed half open around a word she would never finish, and the wild shape behind her flickered and went out.

She simply remained frozen, like a stone statue.

The other S-ranks were shocked, staring at the stone figure of their colleagues in terror.

They had no idea what just happened, and had never seen a talent that could turn one into stone.

"What the hell is he... what are we even fighting against?" Bram, one of the S-ranks mumbled in terror.

He subconsciously stumbled back as he stared at Leon, unable to find a way they could actually win.

Even though they had the strength of numbers on their side, they were clearly the losing team, and Leon doesn’t seem to be taking this seriously yet.

Bram did not move at once.

He stood at the edge of the ruined floor, with the green hood thrown back from his thin white hair, and he looked at the six bodies that lay around the chamber as if he were counting the rings in a felled tree. His staff was a length of twisted wood, dark and knotted, with a single green leaf at the top.

"You... Leon Allistar." he said at last, his voice a dry and hoarse.

"Hmm, you still there waiting for an opening?" Leon asked, scoffing.

"Yes." The old man smiled faintly. "But I will tell you honestly, boy, that I do not think there is an opening. I think there is only a wall, and I have been standing in front of it for several minutes, trying to decide whether to be brave or sensible."

"And what have you decided?"

"That I have never been very sensible."

"Bram," Garrick said sharply from his crater. "Nothing that touches the shield."

"I heard you, Garrick. I will do my best." Bram glanced over his shoulder with a rueful look. "But I have a forest, and you know bushes are quite stubborn."