Chapter 109: A Final Gambit

We almost made it.

The walls of the cavern inched closer and closer, but that only meant Arthal’s men were ramping up their efforts. The soldiers came at me in groups, but they were well oiled and nothing I did pushed them to panic. They’d get in, slow me down, exhaust my shadows, maybe get a hit or two in, then get out.

The real problem were the shieldbearers. While a number of them carried kite shields that caused no end of trouble for an offensive attacker like me, there were a few that wielded tall, thick tower shields that had some kind of enchantment capable of resisting Ash’s magic. The first time I ran into one I was forced to use another spitter sphere to get past him. Rolling it under his shield while I attacked from above and setting his ass on fire—literally—was the only reason I managed to avoid getting pinned down.

I wrapped my injured side in shadows to try and compensate for my injury, but it was still slowing me down. Every movement, every breath, hurt like a motherfucker. But as the edge of the cavern drew nearer, my worries only grew.

I hadn’t had a Beast come at me in a while now, which could only be a bad thing.

My worries proved to be founded almost immediately. I hit the last of the buildings, dropping spitter spheres of all kinds to try and slow my pursuers down. Using my shadow-wrapped arm I’d downed enough potions that I was starting to feel the burnout, which meant I didn’t have much longer before I was shit out of luck.

I ran as fast as I could towards the nearest opening in the wall, sending up a prayer to anyone listening that it wasn’t a dead end. I dumped the last of my mana into shadows that immediately got to work fending off the crossbow bolts and spells being fired at my back.

It was just as the end was in sight that they came. Maleks swooped down from above, landing between me and the exit to the cavern. I barely even slowed down, hurtling into them with the Jailer’s Blade and Ash’s shadows.

I knew my enemy had reached their final gambit when the Beasts engaged me fully. The Maleks both lunged at me with tooth, fang, and tail, halting my run. Out of my peripheral I saw Ashai loping towards us at breakneck speed with Arthal’s troops following at a slower pace.

The Maleks had shifted their strategy completely in the opposite direction. Where before they’d fought only defensively, now they fought with no regard for their own well being at all. They hardly even flinched when I landed deep, fatal blows. The Jailer’s Blade cut deep and Ash’s shadows tore at their vital spots. They got in more than a few licks before I dispatched them, but they did their job.

Before I could take a step past the Malek’s corpses, the Ashai were on me. There were five of them, and they moved in unison to surround me before they all lunged in. I opened my connection to Ash and her shadows surged, but two of the Ashai practically dove into them and took the brunt of the attack. My next strike with the Blade bit deep into another of the Ashai. Deep enough to do some serious damage to the Beast.

And that’s where everything went wrong.

Rather than recoiling from the strike or trying to attack me, the Ashai wrapped its lower limbs around the blade and roared in my face. Angry red runes lit up across its flesh, glowing brighter and brighter by the second. I tried to pull the blade away, but the Ashai held on tight. A quick glance around told me all the other Ashai were glowing with the same runes.

Zaren, NO! Ash screamed.

Then the world went white.

For a moment I was weightless. There was no sound. No feeling. Nothing. Then I was slamming into the ground and the world returned with a vengeance. The cavern melted into swirling color and dancing spots while the silence gave way to a ringing that drowned out everything else. I tried to move, but my entire body was screaming with pain and confusion. I couldn’t remember how to inflate my lungs, much less get to my feet.

The ringing was starting to fade. Everything was starting to fade. Whatever had just happened, I was pretty sure it had reduced my health to zero.

I was dying.

A groan slipped past my lips when arms hauled me to my knees. Someone pressed a hand to my chest and I felt healing magic seeping into my broken, battered body. Whoever it was healed me enough to repair my nerve endings but not enough to stop the waves of pain that were making me swim in and out of consciousness.

I heard Ash’s voice in my head, but it sounded like it was coming from the other end of a tunnel. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, only that she was scared. For her and for me. My vision finally started to return, and when I looked past the two soldiers currently holding me up I saw six craters in the ground maybe twenty or thirty feet away.

The insane bastard had blown up six Ashai just to take me out, and that was after all the other guards and Beasts I’d killed or injured. Just how far was he willing to go to stop me? More importantly, why was I still alive?

I figured I was about to find out when Arthal stepped past the line of soldiers. He strode up to me with his hands clasped behind his back. I wanted to try and strike out at him, but it was then I realized the Jailer’s Blade was no longer in my hands. I guess getting blown up after losing most of the functionality in my left arm was a decent enough excuse to lose my grip, but I still couldn’t help but be furious with myself.

Arthal’s lips moved, but my hearing was still pretty far behind my sight in terms of recovery. Reading his lips I thought I caught the words “potion burnout” and “no mana” come from him, which made sense. What I sincerely hoped he didn’t know was that I still had enough Soul Essence for one last move.

He jerked his head towards me and I felt hands cover either of my ears. More healing magic passed into me. Just enough to get my hearing back. The healer stepped away and I looked up at Arthal. “Is this the part where you monologue?” I croaked.

He chuckled. “You always were a willful one.” He stepped to the side as a man walked up and held something out to him. It took a second for my blurry vision to make out the Jailer’s Blade in the hands of a man as tall as Safina, only he had the same coloring as Noelle. Arthal smiled wide. Greed glowed in his eyes as he stroked a thumb down the flat of the blade.

Ash’s shadows clung to the giant, but he seemed relatively unaffected by her magic. Arthal stepped away from it with visible difficulty and turned back to me. “I suppose I have to fill the time somehow, so a little monologuing wouldn’t be amiss. I can’t kill you just yet, after all.”

“And why might that be?”

Something flickered behind his eyes. Displeasure bordering on anger. “For now let’s just say you’re not allowed to die until you’ve answered a specific question.” Then he looked around at all the soldiers surrounding us with their weapons ready. “I must say, I’m impressed. I certainly didn’t think you’d get this far. Sacrificing so many of my pets was unfortunate, but well worth it, I think.”

“A lot of sacrificing for little old me,” I pointed out.

He hummed. “What? You prefer I send incrementally stronger agents after you? Give you a chance to increase your level bit by bit until you stand a chance of actually stopping me? No, much better to let you run amok. To let you think you’re winning battle after battle when all you’re accomplishing is undoing my work far too late to matter, all the while I’m building up the resources needed to put you down like I should have done a long, long time ago.”

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. “Didn’t realize I’d made such an impression.”

“Oh, I understood the moment I heard news of your return and I started parsing through each and every bit of information about your actions during the war.” He started pacing back and forth. “Every tactic. Every decision. Every one of Zagrith’s soldiers and generals you dismantled. All of it pointed towards one simple truth.” He came to a stop in front of me. “There is no such thing as ‘too much’ when it comes to taking the infamous Godslayer off the board.”

Who the hell referred to Grimsbane as ‘Zagrith?’ “I’m flattered.”

“You should be. Just as I should thank you for bringing the Jailer’s Blade directly to me.” He reached out with his other arm—the one that Noelle had lopped off. Up close I could see it had the same coloring as Noelle and the giant holding the sword currently. Light blue markings went from his knuckles up his arm until they disappeared under his sleeve.

He grabbed the blade and lifted it with a feral smile. Ash’s shadows tried to attack him, but he barely even flinched this time. “I should also thank that little Malachai of yours. All these years and I thought it was your Primal class that allowed you to wield it, but I was wrong. That you would turn out to be of Zaverrian descent was a twist I never would have seen coming.”

He gave it a few swipes and the shadows started to shift until they were the color of blood. “Like the new arm? I should thank subject Seventeen for that, as well. Amazing what you can do with a little divine bond magic, isn’t it? That upstart Allura has no idea the depth of her own domain. Luckily, I do.”

Well, that answered that question. Too bad there was a pretty good chance I wasn’t going to be able to pass along that tidbit of information with the way things were going. I met his gaze with all the strength I could muster. “You hurt someone I care about, and I’m going to make sure you pay for it.”

There was a beat of silence, then he laughed. Hard. “Oh, but that’s true many times over though, isn’t it, Subject Thirteen?”

My blood ran cold. I felt like my heart had simply stopped beating in my chest. I looked at Arthal. Really looked at him. Not his appearance, but the way he moved. The way he walked. The way he talked. The inflection of his voice. The look in his eye. The way he seemed to be ahead of us every step of the way. Like he knew me.

Because he had.

Arthal’s smile widened. “It certainly took you long enough to piece it together, Thirteen. I wasn’t exactly subtle. Not as subtle as I normally would have been, at least. I’ve always been aware of my own pride, but using an anagram was a bit much, even for me.”

If his goons hadn’t been holding me up I’d have collapsed on the spot. It had literally been staring me in the face all along.

Kevran Arthal.

Valethar Karn.

“I killed you,” I managed to grunt through clenched teeth.

“You did,” he acknowledged. “I’ll be the first to admit you caught me by surprise. If you’d killed me with the Jailer’s Blade, this would have all come to an end. Even with a death god on a leash, reincarnation does, in fact, require my soul to not have been devoured.”

But I hadn’t killed him with the blade. I’d choked the life out of him with my bare hands. “All of it. The experiments. You were trying to pick out your own classes.”

“Right again,” he said, tapping his temple. “Shadowborn and Sanguithurge. A powerful combination indeed. It’s ironic, really. You killing me unleashed Grimsbane to the fullest. Without me to yank on his leash, he nearly ruined everything. Then you went and set things up perfectly for me to put my plan in motion. You stopped Grimsbane and drew my master’s attention to this realm in one fell swoop, then you even took yourself off the board for me. Hats off to you, Thirteen.”

I pulled against the two men holding me with a roar, but unless I wanted to commit the last of my Essence my body was too damaged to break free. “I’ll fucking kill you. And this time, you’ll stay dead.”

“Enough,” The soldiers parted to let Lilith, followed by what had to be the biggest Rathum I’d ever seen, walk into the circle. “Quit playing with your food, Arthal.”

He rolled his eyes. “I had to fill the time for you to get here somehow, didn’t I? Was I just supposed to stand here and stare menacingly?”

Lilith mumbled something under her breath as the giant Rathum stalked over towards us. This time the soldiers did shy away from his presence. I felt ripples of fear from nearly all of them. It was easily twice the size of the one we’d fought on our way to Amesseria. It was even bigger than the one we’d killed during the final battle with Grimsbane.

The Rathum really sealed the deal. There was no getting out of this one. I wasn’t even sure if I could take it on with full health, mana, and Essence, let alone after I’d been beaten, stabbed, sliced, and blown up.

It took a long breath in through its snout, then a rumbling started in its chest. It stepped away and Lilith took its place standing over me. There was a sadness in her eyes as she looked down at me. “I did tell you I’d have an offer for you when next we met, Zaren Nocht.”

“Is this the join or die speech, then?” I asked her. “I think I’d rather skip that.”

“Not an option, unfortunately. We have our orders.” She put a hand on her rapier’s hilt. “Do you have any idea what you are?”

“In pain?”

“A cosmic anomaly,” she corrected.

“Not the first time I’ve heard that.”

“A mortal with the blood of more than one plane,” Arthal said, digging the tip of the Jailer’s Blade into the ground. “Did you never wonder why you were able to kill Chosen with no repercussions? The truth behind why no god would go near you?”

Lilith shot him a glare. “You were born with a sliver of Zaverrian descent in you. A distant descendant of the last of the survivors that fled the plane before our master destroyed it. Every time you wielded the Jailer’s Blade it burned a little more of Kasidiel out of you until there was barely enough left to tie you to this plane. Your body is of this world, but your soul is beholden to a pantheon that no longer exists.”

“Like you?” I guessed.

She grimaced. “Like all of us. We,” she pointed to herself and Arthal, “are the children of the planes that stood up to our master and were wiped out for it. We’re the perfect tools. There are no gods left with dominion over our souls to keep in check, and that makes us valuable enough to keep around.”

“I really feel like you’re skipping over the planar genocide bit,” I pointed out.

Lilith’s gaze snapped to mine. “There is no stopping him. Entire planes have tried and failed, and you think you and yours stand a chance?” She shook her head. “He will get what he wants. You can either be a part of his army—commit your soul to him—or you can be obliterated.”

“So, what? If I join, is he going to let Kasidiel survive?”

“For a time,” Arthal said offhandedly. “Long enough for you and those you care about to live out a natural life. Then he’ll come to collect.”

“And screw everyone else, right?”

Arthal shrugged like he hadn’t a care in the world. “They’ll all die anyways. Think of it this way, for an eternity of servitude you’ll be buying the denizens of this backwater shit hole a lifetime.”

“And then I’ll have to do the same to other planes.” It was more a statement than anything else.

Lilith nodded solemnly. “Yes.”

I tore my gaze away from Arthal and looked her in the eye. “Do you wish you’d have died with your plane rather than serving him?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. I reached into my Essence pool and summoned two tendrils beneath my clothes. It was the only way I was going to be able to move and do what I needed to do. I had to grit my teeth to keep my face from showing the pain I felt as I pulled from my own soul rather than the extra pool created by my Links, but it wasn’t going to matter for much longer.

“I appreciate the offer, but I think I’m going to have to refuse. I’m done being someone else’s weapon.”Lilith inclined her head. I thought I saw a glint of approval in her gaze, but I could have been imagining things. “I can’t say I’m sorry to hear that. I think, in the long run, you’d have proven to be more trouble than you’re worth.”

I laughed without a drop of humor. “Not the first time I’ve heard that, either.”

Then I was moving.

My shadows knocked the men holding me away, then hurled me at Arthal. At Karn. I pulled two short blades out of my storage and summoned an empowered shadow copy. Karn’s eyes glowered with anticipation, like this was exactly what he’d been hoping I do. I figured it probably was.

He swung the Blade, but I blocked it with my copy. It seemed they had the same kind of resistance to the Blade’s magic as the Eldritch Beasts did. Just like with the Ashai, the Blade bit into my shadow copy and held. I ducked around it and slammed both my blades into Karn’s side, then kicked him hard enough that he lost his grip on the Blade.

I left the swords in Karn and grabbed the Jailer’s Blade. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. The moment my hands wrapped around the hilt I felt Ash’s connection slam back into me.

Zaren! Watch out for the—

Karn screamed as massive claws swiped through him to block the Jailer’s Blade, then the giant Rathum was knocking me to the ground. I slammed face first into the ground and the Blade went flying once more as something in my arm snapped. I fought it with everything I had left in me, but the Rathum held me down with near-contemptuous ease. It rumbled again. It took me a moment to realize the sound it was making was laughter.

A rumbling voice that sounded like a shifting mountain rolled through the space, shaking me down to my bones. “This makes a third time the whelp has gotten the best of you, Valethar. I must say, I am amused.”

If I wasn’t in so much pain and anguish over failing to kill Karn, I might have been shocked that the Rathum was currently talking.

“You fucking cut me in half, you mongrel!” Karn howled.

The Rathum rumbled again. “Quit your whining and sew yourself together. It’s a shame you poisoned him against us before we could discover him. He would have been a useful asset.”

I let my head rest against the stone while Karn apparently reattached his body. I felt waves of divinity, which meant he was using more of Allura’s essence. “This won’t end here, you know,” I called, putting my final gambit into play. “They brought me back once, they’ll do it again.”

“Weren’t you listening, you daft boy?” Karn snarled, dragging his legs towards him. “You need a soul to be resurrected.” He poured glowing, golden liquid over the cut and the two parts of his body sealed together.

Actually, I had been listening. So when he finally managed to stand and scooped up the Jailer’s Blade, I had to make sure to hide my relief. Long claws wrapped around my torso and hauled me up until I was once again on my knees.

“This one speaks the truth,” the Rathum said. “So long as his soul is in play, our plans are at risk. Kill him and be done with it.”

Karn looked down at me and lifted the Blade. “With pleasure.”

I met his gaze, and something in his eyes flickered. An uncertainty. He knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t ever going to just lie down and die, but he was too slow.

They’d forgotten about my shadow copy.

A normal cast of [Echoes of Darkness] would have fallen apart from the damage done to it, but not an empowered one. As Karn lifted the blade, it lunged from behind. It plunged one of its own shadowy swords through Karn’s chest and snatched the Jailer’s Blade from Karn’s hand.

The Rathum let me go and shot forward, placing its massive body between my shadow copy and Karn’s gasping body, but Karn wasn’t my target. Not any longer. There was no getting past the Rathum. If it was stronger than the one the Seven and I had killed, then I could train for months, maybe even years, and not be able to take it on without a small army at my back. No, while the Rathum protected Karn, my shadow turned and thrust the blade…

Right through me.

With proper medical attention the part of my side it plunged through wouldn’t have been fatal, but I doubted anyone was going to try to patch me up. Especially not when I felt the pull of the Blade on my sword and surrendered to it.

The Rathum roared and the cavern melted away, along with all my aches and pains. When I opened my ‘eyes’ I found myself in that endless space inside the Blade. Inside, Ash waited for me.

She had more substance than before. Her figure was clearly feminine, and she had hair now. It was long, flowing like she was underwater. When she turned towards me, her face was featureless. “I’m sorry, Zaren.”

I nodded. “We gave it our best shot. We didn’t give up, not until the end.”

“No,” she agreed, “we didn’t. You are… I’m glad you were the one to take up my sword all those years ago. I never said it, but thank you for not taking [Cursed Existence]. Having a companion for the first time in millennia has been the best stretch of my miserable existence.”

“It’s not over yet,” I told her.

Her head raised. “You’re dying, and there’s nothing I can do to save you. You don’t have enough soul left for me to destroy and remake your body.”

“That’s your domain, right? Destruction and recreation. Souls. It’s what this god needs, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She turned away. “After destroying his own plane, he’s forced to use the souls of other planes to do his bidding. He can’t destroy everything in his path because he needs mortals to affect the worlds he subjugates. If he had my power, he could truly create his own world. He’d have no reason to leave anything standing.”

“Was this a part of the plan, then?” I asked.

“I think so,” she admitted. “With your soul trapped alongside mine, there’s a way to deny him the part of my magic he craves. Mutual destruction. We have until he arrives to figure it out. Then, when the god comes for me, there’ll be something we can do to hurt him. Slow him down. It’ll cost us our existences, but it’s better than becoming a part of him.”

“I see. That sounds like a pretty shit plan if you ask me,” I pointed out.

She walked towards me and pressed her hand to where my cheek would have been. “Maybe. My sister came up with it a long, long time ago. She had the power to see the future. A domain as rare as mine. I remember that now. She said that this was the only way.”

“I always hated being a pawn.”

She may not have had a face, but I could hear the tears in her voice. “I’m so sorry.”

“Fuck that.”

Ash flinched. “What?”

I shrugged. “If your sister knew the future, then she knew sitting around and waiting to die isn’t something I’m too keen on doing. I’ve been told I have ‘issues with authority.’”

“Zaren…”

“You heard everything they said?”

“I did, but—”

“Be sure to pass it along, then. And tell Serena that this wasn’t her fault. It’s nobody’s fault but Karn’s.”

“I’m trapped here, same as you,” she argued. “I can’t connect to Noelle over this great a distance.”

“You won’t need to.” I stepped away from her. Towards whatever array of ancient spells formed the prison that was the Blade. “I don’t blame you either.”

“Wait, what are you—”

I reached out with my soul, and the Blade reached back. “Thank you, Ash. For everything. Take care of them, will you? Consider it my final request.”

She reached for me, but the Jailer’s Blade was already tearing into my soul. I closed my eyes and collected every scrap of Soul Essence I had left.

And then, with it, I cast [Sever].