Chapter 166: Central Sector [3]

"Hmm?"

Zeus tilted his head slowly toward the sound of the roar.

His crimson eyes found Leon just as the colossal multi-layered spell sphere tore through the smoke toward him. Countless interlocking runic matrices rotated violently around each other as they came. It was everything Leon had left. Every drop of high-tier mana he could wring from his core pressed into a single desperate attack.

"LET GO OF MY SISTER!"

The spell ripped through the burning air like a meteor.

Zeus didn’t raise a hand or stepped aside. He simply released his grip on Emilia’s throat and lifted his bare right hand toward the incoming spell.

SNAP.

The entire sphere stopped dead in the air between them.

Leon’s breath caught in his chest. The spell was hovering there.

It got frozen like something had reached into the fabric of the attack and turned it off.

Zeus’s slender fingers curled slowly inward.

CRACK.

The sphere shattered like cheap glass. Thousands of harmless mana particles dissolved outward into the wind and were gone.

Leon couldn’t speak. The color had drained clean out of his face.

’That was one of my top-level spell. He dispersed it like he was brushing dust off a sleeve.’

"Gah!" Emilia crumpled to the dirt coughing hard. Both her hands flew to her bruised neck.

Leon was beside her before he’d decided to move. He dropped to one knee and cupped her face with both hands checking her. "Are you hurt? Did anything break?"

Emilia shook her head. Her eyes were wet. "I’m fine."

Leon looked her over twice more before he was satisfied. Then he stood up and put himself directly between her and Zeus and pointed toward the rear of the sector. "Run to the secondary evacuation line. As far back as you can go."

Emilia grabbed his sleeve. "What about you?"

"I’ll be fine."

"He’s insanely strong! You can’t fight this alone!"

"GO!" The word came out of him with a weight she’d never heard from him before. Something harder and more final than his usual voice. Something that wasn’t asking.

She flinched. Her hands let go of his sleeve. She looked at his back for one long moment. "Please be careful," she whispered. Then as she turned to run she called back over her shoulder. "And Brother! That man uses some kind of blood magic. Watch out for it!"

’Blood magic?’ Leon filed the warning away as he turned his full attention back to Zeus.

The vampire noble hadn’t moved a single step. He stood in the ruins of the burning encampment watching Leon with the mild irritation of someone who had been interrupted while doing something entirely beneath them. Around him the fires burned and soldiers screamed in the distance and he looked at all of it like a man who has accidentally tracked mud into his own estate.

"How dare a filthy weak human interrupt me," Zeus said. His voice was smooth and completely cold.

Leon’s fists closed at his sides. His knuckles went pale.

He ran the calculation fast. He was already burning mana at a rate he couldn’t sustain.

His reserves were depleting. The other Spires were force-marching back from their positions but half an hour was still half an hour. And whatever this man was he had just erased his one of the high-level attack without apparent effort.

’How long can I actually hold him?’ Leon thought. ’A few minutes at best. Maybe less.’

’Maybe if I can just stall him until the others arrive—’

The thought broke apart the moment it fully formed.

Because he recognized it.

The faces hit him in rapid succession behind his eyes. Nicholas stepping in front of things meant for him. Alden diving into a dragon’s jaws in the underground chamber to pull him back from the edge. Legion absorbing direct hits with his own body while Leon scrambled to find his footing. Seris raising blood barriers above his head while devastating magic rained down on both of them.

Every single time something real had stood in front of him there had been someone there to pull him through. Someone stronger. Someone who stepped forward when he couldn’t.

Leon’s hands began to shake.

’What am I doing?’ His breath went uneven. ’I’m doing it again.’

He stared at his own trembling fingers. The voice that came up from somewhere inside him was ugly and honest and he’d been trying not to listen to it for years.

’Running. You’re running. You’re waiting for someone else to save you. Same as always.’

His face twisted.

’I’ve spent my whole life praying for someone else to step in every time something terrifying showed up. Every real wall I’ve hit I’ve stood in front of it and hoped someone stronger would come along.’

He looked out at the burning sector. At the soldiers still fighting. At the wounded being dragged to the rear. At the chaos that was his responsibility to manage and contain.

’And even now after everything after becoming a Spire after everything Alden said to me I’m standing here waiting for him to show up and save me again.’

His jaw locked.

’No.’

The word came up from somewhere below thought. Below calculation and fear and the very logical assessment that he was probably going to lose this badly.

’I promised myself. I promised Alden. I promised Emilia.’

He raised his right hand. His foot slammed down on the blood-soaked earth.

’I am not standing here as the weakest Spire. I am not standing here as the same coward who froze a decade ago. I am Leon Evercrest and I wear this crest for a reason.’

The mana that rose from his core wasn’t clean or controlled. It came up ragged and desperate and golden and real. Light erupted around his body cutting through the crimson fog.

He looked straight into Zeus’s cold eyes.

"I am a Spire of humanity," Leon said. His voice came out steady. "And I’m not moving."

Zeus looked at him. his expression didn’t change. "Where is the Helion Core."

Leon raised both hands and a dozen geometric spell matrices spiraled into existence around him rotating smoothly. "I don’t know where it is. And even if I did—" He met Zeus’s eyes without flinching. "I wouldn’t tell someone like you."

Something shifted in Zeus’s expression. A microscopic narrowing of the pupils.

"How extraordinarily insolent," Zeus said softly.

Then the blood magic started.

Crimson pooled out of the air around Zeus’s shoulders like it was bleeding from the atmosphere itself. One dense sphere appeared. Then another, then three, five. Dozens of shimmering blood-red orbs materialized around his silhouette in slow steady succession until they surrounded him like a constellation of something deeply wrong.

Leon’s instincts screamed.

’So that’s what it is.’

Zeus took one step forward.

BOOM.