Chapter 189: The Circle Froze

That was the voice of a man who had spent years imagining who his child might have become, and yet had never once managed to picture this, knowing just what pain he would have had to endure.

Behind him, a cluster of civilians had stopped on the road, craning their necks over his shoulder.

A mother with twins was staring with her mouth open.

Next to her, an old man had dropped his stick.

"Don’t look..."

Hakim advised without turning.

"Keep walking, your Sultan has it under control."

They went on.

As did he.

Those words were more for him than them, after all.

Meanwhile, the second wave came down from the ships.

Thousands of drop-pods split from the black hulls overhead and fell in long burning threads, each one trailing blue fire, and they struck the plain in a ring around him.

Soldiers in pale armor poured out of them already running, tens of thousands in a few breaths, and they closed on him from every direction at once.

He turned slowly in the middle of them.

This was a trap.

They baited him in with nobodies, then sprang soldiers made with stronger stuff.

It was a good trap.

They had planned it well.

An Angel could cut through a line, but a circle was another thing.

A circle closed on a man from every side with no direction left to run.

Malik saw the glint of a hundred thousand spearheads.

He saw banners snapping, and war-beasts straining at their chains, and the pale glow of Angels’ blessing moving in the ranks.

There was a calm smile on his face still.

He lifted Spine Splitter above his head.

"Scorpion’s Sting."

The fire on his blade went black.

It was a hungry flame, and a silent one.

It did not light the air around it.

Rather, it drank it.

Malik swung the sword down in a full circle at the height of a man’s chest, and the black came off the edge in a ring, rolling outward in every direction at once, a spreading wave of dark that took everything it touched.

The first ranks stopped... being.

Armor, flesh, weapon, and shadow went into the ring and did not come out.

It crossed the plain at the speed of a galloping horse.

His was a wall of devouring black, a hundred feet high.

Where it passed, the ground was swept clean to bare rock.

Whole formations went into it still standing.

The war-beasts lunged against their chains and vanished mid-roar.

A mile out, the ring broke across the line of drop-pods and swallowed them too, wreckage and crews alike.

The blue fire guttered and went out.

He stood in the middle of a perfect circle of nothing, two miles wide, with the black fading from his blade.

Hundreds of thousands dead.

Malik breathed in.

He felt the hollow beneath his ribs.

Indeed, what he did wasn’t so casual as he made it out to be.

But of course, he wasn’t going to let it show.

’Not yet.’

He needed all the Fear Points he could get.

After all, his every attack was the result of a Soul Glyph, and those only kept getting more and more expensive.

By the time the Suns would have been at noon, he had stopped thinking in individuals.

He fought in sweeps now, in lines, arcs, and fields, one great motion after another with no pause between.

Each swing took a regiment.

A wall of wind, a ring of black fire, a seam in the earth, a column of gold that fell from his palm onto a column of marching men and left a column of ash.

He moved up and down the length of the road in a blur of fire, and wherever he passed, the Order’s ranks came apart.

A feather the length of a man’s arm went into his ribs, cold as a winter well, and he tore it out and threw it back.

The near-Angel who had loosed it fell out of the sky with his own plume through his throat.

The roads behind him were empty of enemies for the first time since shadow crossed the Suns, and in the long corridor of rope beyond it, the columns of the living moved a little faster.

That was the only measure that mattered.

It was a ridiculous number.

A million Souls.

But reality didn’t care for disbelief.

The plain in front of Malik showed that.

A vast gray land of broken armor drifted with ash.

These, despite their strength and number, were only cannon fodder.

Soldiers meant to exhaust Malik in preparation for those that really mattered.

For the army that had come to bury the South stood at its far edge in long rows, waiting.

And in that wait, he began to read them.

They had never seen anything like what he did.

He could feel that through the Rukh, doubt moving through their ranks.

Thanks to that doubt, Malik had a moment to himself.

Looking back, he stepped to the other side of the battlefield, closer to the circles where stragglers ended up.

Hakim met him at the edge of the field.

Malik looked at his father, expecting a comment.

Some dry remark, complaint, or grumble about how a man ought to leave a few for the people behind him.

Yet his father stood with his burned sleeves hanging at his sides, saying nothing at all.

He only looked at his son, from the crown of his head to his scorched boots, as if committing him to memory.

"You are bleeding, son."

Hakim said at last.

"It is minor."

"There is a shard of metal in your side."

Malik glanced down.

The remnants of a spear stuck out between his ribs.

’Hm.’

He pulled it free without ceremony and let it fall.

It sizzled in the dust.

"That was no issue."

Hakim let out a long breath, and something that was nearly a laugh came out with it.

"You called me old."

Malik tilted his head.

"Are you not?"

"I am a perfectly respectable age. And you are..."

He shook his head.

"I do not have a word. I have searched for it for the last hour. There is not one."

Malik did not answer.

He looked across the field.

Beyond the edge of the town, the black ceiling of ships hung low in the west, and beneath it, in the gray distance, the main fleet was moving.

It was only the first.

He had cut a hole in an army the size of a country, and the country had barely noticed.

"You defend these circles no matter what."

"Son..."

"Please."

It was an odd word for him.

"They need you."

It stopped his father cold.

"The children first, you said it yourself. I will hold the middle."

Hakim looked at him for a long moment.

Eventually, he nodded and turned.

Fire rose around his hands again, and he went back to the road.

Malik watched him go.

He raised Spine Splitter, black fire guttering faintly along its edge, and turned to face the ridge.

It was a long way to the horizon.

He took the first step.

Only to pause.

Behind him...

’Damnation.’

The circle froze.