“Aaaah—!”
“The captain’s dead—!”
Someone screamed, and fear surged like a tsunami, swallowing the Bloodhand Gang whole. Their backbone snapped; the one rope binding them frayed to nothing. The rout fell like a landslide. The flank was lost.
They stampeded toward the main field, trying to raise a last wall. Then they froze, minds blank as winter fields.
A wailing roar—then a doomsday mushroom cloud climbed the sky again. Smaller, weaker, yet the blast flipped tight ranks like reeds in a gale. A yawning breach gaped open. The Dusk Legion and Kuso poured through like floodwater, turning that gap into a killing maw, an end of days.
High on the castle, Andrew watched, vertigo spiraling like black birds. No one had pictured an ending like this.
He’d pictured Medith using tricks to crack the gate. He’d pictured her scaling the wall, bleeding hard, and falling neatly into his net.
He hadn’t pictured her hitting head-on. He hadn’t pictured her breaking them.
It was the one loss he couldn’t stomach. They had the edge in force, in ground, in drilled men. Every advantage gleamed in their hands.
Medith erased it all with two Magic Breakers, like ink on water.
“My lord! We’ve lost…” His confidant looked down at the end-of-world field and almost sobbed.
“No! We haven’t! Tell them to form a line! Counterattack with numbers!
We have iron behemoths, tens of thousands of elites, three thousand from the Iron Cavalry Legion!
Stores of grain and crossbow bolts by the mountain! Countless champions of the Empire!
Our commander trained at the Imperial Preceptor Academy! We can’t lose!
We won’t—ever!” Andrew raved, kicking fine wine and hot dishes into the air like autumn leaves.
The confidant winced. “My lord… Knight-Commander Keynes… fell in battle…”
Andrew looked down. A tall, straight man with a scarlet whip at his hip hung skewered. A green-haired girl had pierced his heart and raised him high like a banner. Black suns and red lions with rabbits in their jaws sprouted across the camps like a forest of spears.
Of nearly thirty thousand elites, less than half remained. They’d thrown down their weapons and knelt, their shadows long as dusk.
“I didn’t order a surrender! Who did that? Who dared—” Andrew seized his confidant and flung him out from the high-boned castle.
He ignored the soul-tearing scream below. He braced both palms on the open skylight. Despair and fear pooled like cold ink across his face.
After a long beat—clank… clank… Armor footsteps scraped the corridor, a chill wind with iron teeth. Andrew was barely past thirty, stubble shadowing his jaw. Terror hollowed his eyes. He backed and backed, pressing the wall, not daring a breath.
Clank. The sound stopped. It waited, dead and patient, outside the iron door.
Andrew held his breath; his heart stalled like a snared bird. Then a thundercrack split the air. The iron door took a hit like a siege ram. It tore from the stone, hurtled into the skylight, smashed rock like brittle ice, and vanished outside. Only after several breaths did the crash come up from the depths.
Andrew’s knees shook; Death whooshed past his cheek like winter wind. Before relief could bloom, a pale jade hand clamped his throat. He rose off the floor, pinned to the wall, helpless as a moth.
Medith’s face was cut from ice, her emerald eyes fire-hot. That gaze would be his life’s worst nightmare.
No one spoke. They climbed in quiet to the tower top. They snapped the black-lion-with-man banner and hurled it down. A black sun of the Dusk Legion climbed the staff like nightfall.
Sais looked drained, face white as paper, but unhurt. She pointed at two well-dressed beauties curled in a corner. “Medith, what about them?”
“My lord… spare us… we… we know nothing…” The two wept, tear-streaked like flowers in rain, shaking like sieves.
Medith held the ashen-faced Andrew, never looking back. “We came for vengeance, not slaughter. Give them enough coin and two bodyguards. Send them to a nearby village to live in peace.”
“Understood.” Sais nodded. The two women kowtowed again and again, sobbing their thanks.
