Chapter 60

Chapter 60: Chapter 60

The black alchemical smoke was thick and acrid, and it stank of sulfur and burning copper. It clung to the cobblestones of the shattered plaza and turned the Festival of Jute into a suffocating nightmare.

I stepped into the fog and left Luckas and Nia behind me. My lungs slowed their intake and filtered out the toxic particles. My right hand closed on the leather-wrapped hilt of my bastard sword. I held back the blue static electricity for now. In the dark, a glowing blade would only draw fire.

Ahead, the mechanical clack-clack-clack of the repeating crossbows echoed through the smoke, followed by the screams of the dying.

The Republic commandos advanced in a wedge, sweeping the plaza with overlapping fields of fire. They were disciplined. They kept their lines tight and mowed down anything that crossed their sights.

From the rear of the plaza came a sudden roar of orange fire.

Luckas Vance had planted himself at the edge of the fissure, directly between the advancing commandos and the choke point where hundreds of civilians were trying to flee down a narrow avenue. His silver longsword was an inferno.

He moved through the high-guard defensive forms he had perfected in the clean courtyards of his estate, only now in mud and blood. The heat of his Ember scorched the air in a ten-foot radius around him. When the iron crossbow bolts flew toward the fleeing crowd they passed through that thermal shield, and the wooden shafts burned to ash while the iron tips melted into glowing droplets of slag before they could reach anyone.

"Keep moving!" Nia’s voice rang out behind him, harsh and commanding. She was dragging a wounded merchant behind a shattered stone pillar and steering the panicked crowd away from the kill box, bringing order to the chaos with the natural authority of a provincial noble.

The Republic captain, a big silhouette in the smoke with a grey iron mask, noticed how sharply their kill rate had fallen.

"Pyromancer at the choke point!" the captain barked, his voice muffled. "Concentrate fire! Break his shield!"

Ten commandos shifted their heavy repeating crossbows and leveled them at Luckas.

They never pulled the triggers.

From the thick shadows over the ruined merchant stalls to the right of the formation, Kaelen struck in silence, without a flicker of Ember. Three matte-black throwing knives came out of the smoke at terrifying speed. They slipped past the heavy grey chest plates and buried themselves to the hilt in the unarmored gaps at the commandos’ throats, just beneath the iron masks.

Three elite soldiers dropped to the cobblestones clutching their throats, their crossbows clattering against the stone.

"Contact right!" a commando yelled, breaking formation and spinning toward the shadows. "We have an assassin in the—"

I hit their left flank like a falling boulder. I came out of the black smoke faster than the eye could follow, all mass and momentum.

The commando on the far left of the wedge had time only to widen his eyes behind his mask before I drove the steel pommel of my bastard sword, the blade still dark, into his faceplate. The iron mask crumpled inward. The force snapped his neck and lifted him off the ground, and he flew into the man beside him.

The formation shattered.

"Vanguard!" someone screamed.

Five commandos spun toward me, their repeating crossbows tracking my movement.

I kept moving. I ducked under the first volley, the bolts clipping the edge of my crimson tunic, and stepped into the middle of their broken formation. I pushed a fraction of my Ember’s heat into the Mystic Runes of the Sky etched into my steel blade, and the dark metal blazed with crackling blue static electricity.

I swept the sword in a horizontal arc at center mass. The electrified steel sheared through their reinforced grey chest plates, and the voltage poured into their bodies and stopped their hearts before the blade had finished cutting through their ribs.

Two men fell, their armor smoking, the air around them sharp with ozone and seared flesh.

"Fall back! Re-form the line!" the Republic captain roared, drawing a serrated trench-sword from his hip.

The remaining twelve commandos were trained veterans, and they kept their heads. They backpedaled through the smoke, trying to open the distance and bring their crossbows back to bear on me.

A freezing pain pulsed in my right arm.

The Rune of Antiquity was reacting to the lethal intent aimed at me. Pale starlight bled through the sleeve of my tunic and lit the black smoke, and my vision filled with glowing, ghostly afterimages. I saw twelve iron bolts tracing converging paths toward my chest and head, and exactly where each one would be a tenth of a second later.

I twisted my torso and stepped into the narrow gaps between the crossing trajectories. Four bolts tore through the fabric of my tunic. Two sparked off my leather shoulder guard. Not one of them pierced my flesh.

I came out of the evasion already moving. My bare left hand closed on the nearest commando’s throat and crushed his windpipe, and I charged the rest of the line with his armored body held up as a shield. More bolts hammered into the dead man in my grip. I closed the gap and shoved the corpse into two commandos, knocking them off balance.

A shadow dropped from the shattered roof of a nearby merchant stall.

Kaelen landed on the shoulders of a Republic soldier. This time he used no knives. He wrapped his legs around the man’s neck, twisted his hips, and snapped his cervical vertebrae with a sickening crunch. Then he rolled off the falling body and vanished into the thick smoke before the remaining soldiers could even aim.

Luckas held the line like an anvil, Kaelen killed from the shadows, and I broke whatever was left.

I stepped over the fallen bodies, my electrified sword flashing blue lightning through the black smoke. The battle algorithms in my head ran flawlessly. Parry a desperate thrust from a trench-sword, sever the man’s arm. Duck a crossbow bolt, drive a boot into a commando’s knee and shatter the joint, finish him with a downward strike to the collarbone.

It was a massacre. The Republic’s elite strike team had come to butcher panicked civilians and overwhelmed city guards, and their plans had no place for a fully evolved Swelled Bud vanguard officer fighting at close quarters in a city.

Within sixty seconds, nineteen commandos lay dead on the cobblestones.

Only the captain remained.

He was backing toward the edge of the plaza, bleeding heavily from a deep gash on his left shoulder where one of Kaelen’s throwing knives had grazed him. His repeating crossbow was empty. He gripped his serrated trench-sword in both hands, his chest heaving behind the iron mask.

The smoke began to thin, driven off by the cold autumn wind from the lake.

Luckas stepped out of the fog on my right, his silver sword still roaring with orange flame, his breathing ragged and his eyes bright with adrenaline. Kaelen appeared on my left, spinning a black throwing knife between his fingers.

The captain looked at the three of us, then at the bodies of his elite team scattered across the shattered plaza. He kept hold of his sword and let out a low, dark laugh that rattled behind the iron mask.

"You think you won, Vanguard?" the captain rasped. His accent was thick and sharp, nothing like the melodic speech of the capital. "You think we blew this square just to kill a few fat merchants?"

I said nothing and took a slow step forward, the blue static hissing on my blade.

"This was a distraction," Kaelen said, his voice flat. "The explosives were meant to draw the city guard away from the central tiers."

The captain pointed his serrated sword at the gleaming spires of the Imperial Academy, high above the city.

"The Empire relies on its monsters," the captain sneered. "We cut the head off the snake tonight. Target Alpha is the foundations of the Vanguard Pits and the Spire of Antiquity."

My blood turned to ice.

If they detonated a cache of alchemical powder beneath the Spire of Antiquity, the stone tower would topple outward into the lower tiers of the Academy, crush the dormitories, and bury hundreds of sleeping first and second-year cadets under thousands of tons of black granite.

"The charges are already set," the captain laughed, raising his sword to his own throat. He was a fanatic, and he meant to die before we could question him. "The Republic endu—"

He never got to finish his patriotic suicide.

I was faster than his arm. I crossed the ten feet between us in a blur and drove the steel pommel of my sword into his right wrist. The bones shattered and the serrated sword dropped to the cobblestones. Before he could scream I grabbed the front of his grey armor, lifted him clear off the ground, and slammed him against the only intact stone pillar left in the plaza. The limestone cracked under the impact.

I pressed my left forearm against his throat and pinned him there.

"Who has the detonators?" I demanded, my voice a low rumble that vibrated through the stone.

The captain gasped for air, his eyes wide at the impossible strength of my grip. He tried to spit at me, but his lungs could barely fill under the pressure of my arm.

"You’re... too late," he choked out, blood leaking from beneath his iron mask. "Thirty minutes. The timers... are alchemical."

I dropped him, and he crumpled at the base of the pillar, unconscious from pain and lack of air.

Luckas ran up beside me, the flames dying on his sword. "Elvit, the Academy. If the Spire falls..."

"I know," I said, my mind running through the tactical variables. I looked down at the unconscious captain, then up at the distant silhouette of the Academy.

Nia jogged over, her dark crimson tunic stained with the blood of the civilians she had helped drag to safety. Almost everyone left alive had cleared the plaza. City guards were finally arriving at the edges of the square, blowing silver whistles and staring in horror at the crater and the slaughtered Republic commandos.

"The civilians are clear," Nia reported, her chest heaving, her eyes wide as she looked at the carnage we had made. "The guard is taking over."

"We need to move," I ordered, driving my bastard sword back into its leather scabbard. "The explosion here was a diversion. The Republic has rigged the foundations beneath the Spire of Antiquity. We have under thirty minutes before the charges blow."

Luckas paled. "Thirty minutes? The Imperial Guard will have the main bridges locked down! They’ll bar the gates to secure the perimeter. We won’t be able to get back inside!"

Kaelen stepped forward, sliding his throwing knives back into his sleeves. His storm-grey eyes met mine.

"The main bridges are locked," Kaelen agreed quietly. "The maintenance aqueducts aren’t. The water feeds straight into the lower cellars where we saw the wagons. It’s a vertical climb, and the currents are brutal."

"Can you navigate it?" I asked him.

Kaelen gave a single short nod. "I know the blind spots."

"Then we climb," I said.

I looked at the three of them. We were students, a month into our time at the Academy, and we were supposed to leave threats like this to the Grand Scholars and the Imperial Vanguard. But the Vanguard was miles away on the borders, and the Scholars were asleep in their towers, oblivious to the gunpowder under their feet.

"If we go back in there," Nia said, her voice trembling a little but her jaw set, "we’re going up against the Republic’s main strike team. They’ll have Ember-users on top of the crossbows."

"Let them," Luckas snarled, tightening his grip on his silver sword. The fierce, protective instincts of a Knight-Mage in training had taken over.

I pulled the collar of my crimson tunic up. My Swelled Bud Ember burned in my chest, a steady furnace that wanted to be let loose. The paranoia I had carried out of the mud had been justified after all. The war had followed me to the capital.

"Keep your blades quiet until we reach the cellars," I ordered, and broke into a dead sprint toward the eastern edge of the tier, leaving the burning plaza behind. "Try to keep up."