Dragon eyes.
Black dragons flew out of the room, one after another, until there were about fifteen of them. Even together, the pressure of their spirits didn’t add up to one Helethshan, which was a relief. Though they were black dragons, even Orthos would be nervous if they found themselves at the mercy of ten Archlords.
Half of the group felt roughly as strong as Orthos himself, and the other half must have been Golds. Those looked smaller and younger than the others, and several of them shied away from the powerful human. The older ones glowered but said nothing, sensing Ziel’s spirit.
Helethshan skimmed the explanation by saying that Shatterspine Castle had been moved far away by the Rune Queen, but that she was now dead, and it was up to them to retrieve the prince’s Remnant. It would be their weapon to conquer this new world.
The dragons reacted differently—some cheered, while others appeared paralyzed by shock. Ziel had surrounded his limbs and weapons with emerald scripts, and his eyes were locked onto Helethshan.
“That wasn’t the right room,” Ziel said.
The Archlord dragon slid down through the air to face the human. “Did you intend to leave my family in torment?”
“I know an ambush when I see one,” Ziel said. He looked around the dragons that swirled around the ceiling. “Orthos, we’re leaving.”
Orthos’ head ached. How could he explain to Ziel that this wasn’t an ambush? If the situations were reversed, Orthos would have assumed he was under attack as well. But dragons didn’t use such underhanded tactics.
The point was even harder to make when one of the younger dragons breathed dark fire onto Ziel from behind.
Ziel effortlessly shattered the Striker technique with one hand, but Orthos didn’t like the atmosphere. Especially when Helethshan chuckled along.
Orthos glared at the young dragon. “Hatchling! Apologize!”
“For what?” Helethshan asked. “The human wasn’t harmed.”
“Manners must have changed over the centuries. Is that how noble black dragons treat their guests?”
It was an Archlord staring him down, but Orthos didn’t back up. He was right.
Red light rippled between Helethshan’s scales. “He’s not a guest. He’s a servant.”
“All the more, then. Do you prove your strength by tormenting servants?”
Another of the young dragons spewed breath at Ziel, who readied his shield and hammer. “If one more Gold attacks me,” the human said, “I’m going to hit back.”
Helethshan leaned closer to Orthos. “I find your attitude disrespectful, turtle.” Idly, the Archlord flicked his tail to strike Orthos in the shell.
Nothing had hit Orthos that hard since the Wandering Titan.
Orthos crashed into the wall, and the world spun around him.
Ziel had kept his spiritual perception extended since the moment they’d stepped into Shatterspine Castle. He was not only searching for hidden tricks and traps, but for script-circles left behind by the Monarch Emala.
When he did find those scripts, he scanned them thoroughly. Advanced scripting was less about remembering sequences and more about feeling patterns of energy to understand their interactions, and there were intricate twists and turns he couldn’t decipher in these runes. An invisible power.
Sage’s authority. Pieces of the Grand Oath Array. Ordinary scripts couldn’t manipulate time.
As he pieced more patterns together and sensed more scripts, he began to feel that invisible energy around him. Some of the more stable runes he stole, storing them in his void key. He was getting a sense for how the Array must have worked, but not the right sense.
It was as if he’d blinded himself and was trying to identify an object by touch alone. No matter how much he felt it, it would never quite be the same as seeing it.
When he faced down the crowd of black dragons, he certainly had his spiritual sense open. He felt the authority of the Rune Queen as a distant background, almost a humming noise, but it was nothing close enough to impact their battle.
When Orthos stood up for him, Ziel appreciated it, even if he didn’t think the gesture would do any good. The dragons were just being cruel for the sake of it, which had been Ziel’s experience with most dragons he’d met. They wouldn’t go too far, given that Ziel might be able to fight all of them at once.
But seeing Orthos defend him made him almost nostalgic. He remembered being that man, the one who stood in front of others. A guardian.
When he thought that, he almost thought the background noise grew louder. He strained his spiritual perception, trying to feel the subtle difference.