“Gratitude,” he said humbly. “May we know your name, honored expert?”
“Lindon says my name was Ekeri.” The dragon Ekeri flicked her tail. “Now, open the door so I can finish doing him a favor. He will owe me.”
Jaran hurried to open the door, hoping that Lindon knew what he was doing and had bound this spirit to help them. Remnants were notoriously unreliable.
Ekeri was outside in a golden flash, and then her armor opened up. Each plate seemed to melt, until she had more launcher constructs strapped to her body than even Seisha did.
“This is my territory now,” Ekeri announced, in a haughty voice that Jaran imagined must come from royalty. “Get off my land.”
Lights of every color streaked away from her, and she herself breathed liquid gold.
Jaran slowly shut the door.
Seisha slid a hand around his waist. “You’ll have to get used to these things sooner or later.”
“No,” Jaran grumbled.
Then he tossed his useless spear into the corner.
17
Malice filled the air with razor-sharp fragments of shadow that would slice the soul. She multiplied one arrow into a thousand, activated Striker constructs that landed in a bare fragment of a second, and struck where her target was destined to move.
Every time, the Silent King slipped aside.
He was an infuriating opponent. With every movement, she felt like he was laughing at her. This Dreadgod had always reminded her of Reigan Shen for more reasons than just the obvious; maybe white cats were all this arrogant. She should outlaw white cats in her territory.
But her boiling frustration was only occupying a remote layer of her attention. Her focus was on the battle, and with every passing second, it required more and more of her mind.
She was losing.
Fighting the King before had been like trying to catch a ghost, but fighting him now was like facing four Monarchs at once. There was too much to keep up with.
The King’s army launched a steady barrage of techniques, each empowered with enough will that they might potentially scratch her. Collectively, they were like a Herald, in that they could technically harm her but were still far beneath her level.
But no Herald followed a thousand different Paths, and no Herald could so easily shove aside her techniques. No Herald could fight her and threaten her children at the same time. And no Herald grew stronger with every passing moment as more pieces of itself showed up on the battlefield.
Meanwhile, the Silent King could crush every one of her workings and match her own techniques with its own. When she rained blades of shadow, the Dreadgod unraveled them to essence. When she pierced his illusions with an arrow, he warped space to move them aside or dissolved and re-formed his own physical body.
Through it all, a constant pressure sat on her mind. Her will was perfect and inviolable, but as she poured herself into the battle, the Silent King’s mental grip around her never loosened.
Eventually, that pressure would find a breaking point. Even diamonds broke.
She was relieved when she felt the dream script activate around Moongrave behind her, so she could divert some of her attention away from defending the city.
There was only one path to victory for her here. She had to hold on until other Monarch forces arrived.
But that was a challenging task for her even with Herald and Sage support. Without such support, and with the rift into the void pouring out reinforcements for the Silent King, she was dancing a razor’s edge between life and death.
When she felt a new presence flying toward her, she scanned it in a split-second to be sure it wasn’t one of the King’s servants.
When she realized who it was, she was irritated anew.
Dark clouds of fire and destruction gathered over the Silent King’s army. The legion devoted some of its unified collective will to breaking the Ruler technique, but that meant it had less to stop the newcomer from physically flying in on his Thousand-Mile Cloud.
A few hundred techniques still streaked by him, but he knelt on the cloud, face locked in concentration, one hand gripping a mass of cloud while the other flexed and rolled with a Dreadgod’s hunger.
Lindon was coming to fight beside Malice because he had both the reckless confidence of youth and the power of a Sage. It was a suicidal combination, but she couldn’t protect him. Or slap him down for his insolence.
She almost slipped him a mental message and commanded him to go back…but a distant shadow of Fate flickered through her mind and stopped her.
Malice hadn’t been able to monitor the rest of the battle as closely as she liked, but only three had effortlessly resisted the Dreadgod’s mind-control technique. She had the willpower and spiritual resistance of a Monarch, Charity specialized in mental Enforcer techniques…and then there was Lindon.