Chapter 175: One Minute

The light was faster this time.

There was no buildup, just the same absolute brightness erupting from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Raziel barely had time to register the sensation of his ship’s hull groaning under some pressure he couldn’t identify before the two remaining markers on his array blinked out.

Both at once.

Raziel stood alone.

Now, they were the last ship.

The last signal.

Eight Angels, dead in under a minute, and he hadn’t even managed to land a single strike against the man responsible.

"Angel Sir... what do we do?"

Raziel didn’t answer right away.

He stared out at the Sultan, still hovering in that same patient stillness, sword catching the light of a sky slowly returning to its normal color now that the white fire had faded once more.

Three hundred years of service.

Three hundred years of believing, fundamentally, in the righteousness of the Order’s cause.

Corruption spread through weakness, through men who clung to power regardless of the cost, through rulers who burned everything around them in pursuit of their own survival.

He’d believed that about this Sultan too.

He wasn’t sure anymore.

"Evacuate the crew."

Raziel finally spoke.

"Escape pods, now."

"What about you, sir?"

He didn’t answer that question either.

The crew scrambled into motion around him, the ship’s remaining systems groaning as escape pods detached one after another, carrying his people away from a battle he already understood, with absolute certainty, that he wasn’t going to survive.

Raziel stayed at the command deck.

Someone needed to buy them time.

Someone needed to make sure the Order learned, eventually, exactly what had happened here today, even if that knowledge arrived only through the absence of nine ships that never returned.

He activated his Rukh, feeling centuries of accumulated strength gather beneath his skin, and pushed the ship forward, straight towards the floating figure in the slowly calming sky.

"I know what you think you’re doing."

He called out, his voice carrying across the distance through his ship’s external array.

"I know you believe you’re protecting something. But Corruption doesn’t care about intentions. It spreads regardless. And men like you, men who gather this much power and call it righteous, you become exactly the threat you claim to be fighting against."

The Sultan watched him approach.

He said nothing.

"We came here to stop a great evil. I believed that. I still believe that."

"Is that what they told you?"

The Sultan’s voice reached him clearly, almost gentle, carrying none of the malice Raziel had expected from a man who’d just killed eight of his comrades without visible effort.

"They didn’t have to tell me."

Raziel said.

"I’ve seen what Corruption does... how it enthralls and empowers. I’ve buried soldiers who died fighting it. You don’t get to stand there and pretend you’re any different."

The Sultan raised his sword.

Raziel pushed every remaining drop of Rukh into his final charge, his ship’s hull groaning under the strain, every weapon system he had left firing simultaneously towards the figure ahead.

White fire met him before any of it landed.

There was no pain, not really, not in any way Raziel had time to properly register.

The sensation of his ship, his body, his three hundred years of service and conviction and certainty, all of it simply ceased to exist in the span of a single, silent heartbeat.

He died still believing he’d been right to come.

Or so it first appeared.

Raziel’s ship broke apart around him mid-charge, but he didn’t stop.

He’d expected to simply end there, in the same instant way the other eight had.

Instead, he found himself still conscious, still falling through open air, his body wreathed in scorched fragments of hull plating and his own blood.

Somehow, the white fire hadn’t fully swallowed him.

It had only clipped him.

Raziel blinked through the pain, disoriented, and realized with a jolt that the Sultan’s flame hadn’t burned nearly as bright that time.

The edges of it had flickered, like a candle guttering low on wax.

’His fire is weaker.’

He didn’t know why, nor did he care, in the moment, what the reason might be.

He only knew that for the first time since this massacre began, he was still breathing.

Raziel caught himself with a burst of Rukh, steadying his fall, blade still gripped tight in one hand despite the ruin of his ship scattering around him in burning pieces.

The Sultan floated closer.

His expression hadn’t changed, still calm, but Raziel noticed, now that he was close enough to actually study the man properly, a faint sheen of sweat along his brow.

A slight tremor in the hand holding his cane.

’He’s tiring.’

It wasn’t much.

A fraction of weakness in a man who’d just erased eight Angels in under a minute.

But it was something, and three hundred years of combat experience told Raziel that something was worth exploiting.

He lunged.

Spine Splitter met him halfway, and their blades clashed with a shriek of metal and Rukh, sparks scattering across the sky like dying stars.

Raziel pushed everything he had into the strike, every last drop of strength his centuries of service had earned him.

The Sultan held the block.

Barely.

Raziel felt it in the resistance, the way the man’s arm trembled slightly under the pressure, the way his stance shifted a half-inch backward to absorb the impact rather than simply shrugging it off.

"You’re slowing down, Sultan."

The Sultan’s golden eyes flicked towards him.

"I am."

What met his words was plain acknowledgment, delivered with the same infuriating calm he’d carried through this entire one-sided slaughter.

Raziel pressed the advantage, disengaging and immediately swinging again, aiming for the opening he’d spotted in the Sultan’s guard.

The blade connected this time, carving a shallow line across the man’s forearm before he managed to twist away.

Blood welled along the cut.

Real blood.

This man was not some unknowable, untouchable force of nature.

He got an actual wound on an actual body, proof that whatever had just killed eight of his comrades was still, somehow, mortal.

’There’s a limit to it.’

Hope, thin and desperate, flared in Raziel’s chest.

The Sultan’s cane came up fast, faster than Raziel expected from a weapon that looked like nothing more than an old man’s walking stick, and cracked against his ribs hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

Raziel staggered back, wheezing.

The fire flared again around the Sultan’s blade, but it came slower this time, the white light stuttering slightly before it fully caught, a flame reluctant to relight itself after burning too hot for too long.

’Whatever he’s using, it’s running out.’

Raziel didn’t know how much time had actually passed since the battle began.

It felt like hours, stretched thin by adrenaline and terror and the sheer disbelief of watching his entire formation erased in moments.

But some distant, clinical part of his mind, the part that had survived too many wars to count by paying attention to details that mattered, insisted the whole engagement had only now reached a minute.

Whatever power the Sultan was drawing on, it clearly had limits.

A cost that was only now beginning to show.

Raziel surged forward one more time, pouring every remaining drop of strength into a single, desperate strike aimed at the Sultan’s exposed side.

The fire caught him before the blade could land.

It was weaker than before.

Thinner... yes, much thinner.

Raziel felt it close around him, searing through armor and flesh, and in the half-second before everything went white again, he understood, with absolute and devastating clarity, that even a weakened version of this man’s power was still more than enough to kill him.

He died mid-swing, his blade never completing its arc.

The white fire faded a moment later, sputtering out entirely, leaving Malik alone in a sky gone suddenly, completely quiet.

He lowered his sword, breathing hard, sweat dripping down his jaw despite the cold at this altitude.

’That’s the last of it.’

The minute had run its course.