Chapter 62

Chapter 62: Chapter 62

I pressed my boots against the damp stone of the maintenance shaft and gripped the underside of the iron grate. I looked down at Luckas and Kaelen. In the dim, flickering light that filtered down from the cellar, their faces were set hard, with every trace of aristocratic pretense gone. They were ready.

"Three," I whispered, just loud enough to carry over the rush of the water below us.

Luckas’s eyes ignited with a simmering orange glow. The air in the shaft heated at once, and the damp turned to suffocating steam.

"Two."

Kaelen drew two fresh throwing knives. His storm-grey eyes were fixed on the narrow gaps in the iron bars above, already mapping the lines of flight to the nearest Republic sentries.

"One. Execute."

I drove my shoulders upward with the full density of my Swelled Bud muscle. The grate burst out of its stone frame, flew ten feet into the air and crashed onto the cellar floor.

Luckas shot through the opening like a mortar shell and landed in the middle of the vaulted cellar. He drew his silver longsword and let his Ember out at full strength, and a roaring pillar of orange fire burst from his body and lit the cavernous room like a small sun.

"Republic bastards!" Luckas roared, his voice echoing off the limestone arches. "Face the Vanguard!"

The distraction worked.

All thirty commandos, who had been patrolling around the central pillar, flinched at the flash of heat. They held their positions for one second, and then their training took over. They recognized a concentrated magical threat, and the whole formation swung away from the bomb.

"Pyromancer!" a commando shouted, raising his repeating crossbow. "Concentrate fire!"

A hail of iron bolts converged on Luckas.

He held his ground. He dropped into the stance of the Rising Sun form, and his silver blade became a blurring shield of superheated plasma. The bolts never reached him. The wooden shafts burned to ash in mid-air, and the iron tips melted into glowing slag that spattered harmlessly across the cobblestones.

While the commandos poured their fire into the roaring inferno of the noble heir, Kaelen slipped out of the grate in silence, his Ember banked. The shadows between the towering stacks of oak wine barrels swallowed him at once.

Within three seconds the rear of the Republic formation began to collapse. Kaelen was a ghost. One commando raised his crossbow and dropped to his knees with a black throwing knife buried in the unarmored joint of his neck. Another turned to check his flank, and a shadow dropped from the top of a wine rack, looped a garrote wire around his throat and dragged him silently into the dark.

The commandos were caught between an anvil of fire and an assassin they couldn’t see.

I stayed out of the main fight. I was the hammer, and I had only one nail to strike.

I vaulted out of the shaft and hit the stone floor at a dead sprint, ignoring the firefight. I channeled the freezing astral power of the Rune of Antiquity and flooded my right eye with pale starlight. The cellar became a crisp, glowing topographic overlay. I saw the crossing lines of crossbow fire and the thermal blooms of Luckas’s flames. I wove between the towering stacks of black-powder barrels and ran straight for the central pillar.

The Saboteur saw me coming.

He stood beside the alchemical timer, the purple acid still dripping toward the white powder. He kept his head. He pulled a pneumatic pistol from his belt, its brass barrel glowing a sickly green, raised it and fired.

A pressurized jet of corrosive alchemical acid shot across the cellar at my chest, fast enough to hit a galloping horse.

My precognition flared a fraction of a second before he pulled the trigger, and the glowing astral lines in my vision traced the exact path of the fluid. I kept my speed, dropped my center of gravity, and slid across the slick cobblestones on my leather knee pads, passing beneath the stream of acid.

The acid sailed over my head and splashed against a stone archway behind me, and the limestone dissolved in a hissing cloud of toxic steam.

I used the momentum of the slide to come up onto my feet, drawing my runic bastard sword from my back in one smooth motion. I pushed Ember into the steel, and the blade screamed with blue static electricity.

The Saboteur saw that his weapon was too slow. He dropped the pistol and reached for a glass vial on his bandolier, a manual detonator. He meant to skip the timer and blow the cellar himself.

He never touched it.

I crossed the last fifteen feet in a surge of speed and swung the bastard sword in a diagonal arc. The electrified steel cleaved through the chemically hardened leather of his coat and sheared his right arm off cleanly just below the elbow.

The Saboteur screamed, the sound muffled behind his brass respirator, and staggered backward.

I gave the cut no thought. I stepped into his guard, took hold of the brass filters of his mask with my left hand, and drove the steel pommel of my sword into the center of his faceplate. The brass crumpled. The blow knocked him unconscious, and he collapsed against the stone floor.

I turned my back on him at once.

The fight in the cellar was still going. I could hear the roar of Luckas’s fire and the frantic shouts of the Republic commandos. But my whole world had narrowed to the glass cylinder strapped to the central pillar.

The alchemical timer.

I stared at the glowing purple acid. The top chamber was empty. The last drop had already come free of the glass nozzle and was falling, in agonizing slow motion, toward the tray of volatile white powder directly beneath it.

I had one second before the Imperial Academy ceased to exist.

I stayed calm. My Swelled Bud physiology slowed my perception of time as adrenaline surged to its peak. I couldn’t smash the glass, because the acid would scatter and ignite the powder anyway. I couldn’t move the whole stack of barrels.

I dropped my bastard sword, and it clattered on the stone.

I ripped the Veriti combat knife from my thigh sheath with my right hand. With a vanguard veteran’s precision I thrust the dark steel blade, flat side up, into the narrow gap between the falling drop of acid and the white powder. The eight-inch blade was a shield.

The drop of purple acid hit the flat of the blade.

The reaction was instant and violent. The acid hissed and ate into the high-carbon steel, and a plume of toxic white smoke burst from the metal, searing my face and stinging my eyes. The heat burned through my leather gauntlet and blistered the skin of my palm.

I held my arm rigidly still, every muscle in my shoulder and wrist locked, so that not one droplet of acid could splash off the edges of the blade onto the powder below.

The acid dissolved the center of the blade and bit deep into the thick steel. Before it could burn all the way through and reach the powder, I snatched the smoking, ruined knife away from the timer and threw it across the cellar.

The knife clattered against the far wall and lay there hissing as it melted into a puddle of useless slag.

The powder in the tray stayed pure white. The timer had failed, its primary connection severed.

The bomb was dead.

I let out a slow, ragged breath and looked down at my right hand. The gauntlet was charred, and the skin beneath was blistered and raw from the heat of the reaction. The pain felt distant, and my military training let me file it away.

I picked up my bastard sword, the blue static sparking back to life, and turned to face the rest of the cellar.

I didn’t need to join the fight.

The Republic commandos were broken. Of the original thirty, only eight were still standing. Their formation was shattered, their morale gone, and the survivors were bleeding, exhausted and terrified.

Luckas stood in the middle of the room, his midnight-blue doublet scorched and torn, his silver sword still burning as he held the front line with unyielding defiance. From the shadows, Kaelen stood atop a pile of shattered wine barrels with two black throwing knives resting loosely in his hands, and the threat of unseen death hung over every survivor.

Before the last eight commandos could decide whether to fight or surrender, the main oak doors of the lower cellar blew inward.

Someone had simply hit them with raw, overwhelming Ember. The iron-banded doors tore off their hinges and burst into splinters.

Through the dust and the settling smoke, the true power of the Crown Jewel arrived at last.

Two dozen armored knights of the Imperial Guard poured into the cellar with their halberds leveled, moving with the synchronized precision of the Emperor’s elite. Three Grand Scholars of the Academy flanked them, dark robes billowing, their hands glowing with complex, destructive Ember arrays.

Headmaster Corvus led them.

The Shoot Elongation powerhouse stepped into the cellar, and his aura came down on the room like an avalanche. The eight surviving commandos never tried to raise their weapons. The pressure of his presence forced them to their knees and pinned them to the cobblestones. The Imperial Guard moved in at once, stripped them of their crossbows and bound their wrists in iron chains.

Corvus ignored the prisoners. His pale eyes swept over the carnage. He looked at the twenty-two dead commandos on the floor, at Kaelen perched in the shadows like a gargoyle, and at Luckas, whose sword finally went out, leaving him panting in the dark.

Then the Headmaster walked slowly across the cellar and stopped in front of the central pillar.

He looked at the unconscious Saboteur, bleeding out on the stone with one arm gone. He looked at the stacks of black powder packed against the foundation. Last, he looked at the broken alchemical timer and the puddle of steel that had been my combat knife, lying against the far wall.

He did the math. The answer was chilling: the Imperial Academy had come within a second of annihilation.

Corvus turned his head and looked at me. His eyes dropped to my right hand, to the charred gauntlet and the blistered, acid-burned skin, then came back up to my face, reading the cold pragmatism in my eyes.

"The Vanguard," Corvus murmured. The usual suffocating intensity had left his voice, and what replaced it was real respect. "Commander Erula warned me in her letters. She said you were a natural disaster. It seems she lacked the vocabulary to describe you properly, Elvit."

"They used the festival as a diversion, Headmaster," I reported flatly, sliding my bastard sword back into the scabbard on my back. "The charges were designed to drop the Spire of Antiquity onto the first-year dormitories."

"I see that," Corvus said, nodding slowly. He looked around the cellar again, taking in the tactical efficiency of the slaughter. "Three first-year cadets. You broke an elite Republic infiltration unit, bypassed their vanguard, and manually defused a volatile alchemical payload."

A new figure came through the shattered cellar doors, pushing past the Imperial Guards.

Nia ran into the room, her dark crimson tunic soaked through from the freezing water of the aqueduct. She had disobeyed my last order. Instead of running to the gates, she had found the nearest patrol of Imperial Guards and dragged them down to the cellars herself.

She saw Luckas covered in soot, Kaelen dropping down from the wine racks, and me standing over the bomb. She let out a long, shuddering breath of relief, ran over and threw her arms around my neck in a tight, desperate hug.

I stiffened for a moment, my feral combat instincts still humming in my veins, and then slowly raised my uninjured left arm and hugged her back.

"I told you to run to the gates," I murmured.

"I brought the gates to you," Nia shot back. She pulled away and glared at me with tear-filled eyes, though a fierce, proud smile was breaking across her face.

Headmaster Corvus watched all this with his hands clasped behind his back. The pressure of his aura lifted, and the cellar felt strangely empty.

"The rankings are designed to measure raw potential, Lieutenant Elvit," Corvus said. His voice carried clearly across the silent cellar, and every Imperial Guard and Grand Scholar heard his decree. "Tonight, you and your squad have shown that your potential is surpassed only by your lethal execution. Your Rank Three position is absolute. Let any student who wishes to challenge you remember this night."

The Headmaster turned on his heel, his dark robes sweeping the cobblestones. "Secure the perimeter!" he barked at the Imperial Guard. "Clear this powder! I want this entire citadel locked down within the hour!"

As the cellar filled with organized military activity, I looked at my friends.

Luckas walked over, wiping a streak of black soot from his forehead. He looked exhausted and bruised and thoroughly exhilarated. Kaelen fell into step beside him, as silent and unreadable as ever, though he gave me a small, rare nod of mutual respect. Nia stood at my side with her chin held high, fiercely loyal in the way of the provinces.

We had come to the Imperial Academy to learn the theory of magic and master our biology. As I stood in the damp, blood-soaked cellar with the smell of ozone and gunpowder in the air, I realized something that mattered more.

I no longer had to fight this war alone. The mud of the 7th Legion had forged me into a weapon, but the Crown Jewel had given me an army.