Chapter 164: An Impossible Impasse

Vexena stomps back over to where Syraleth still writhes weakly against magical chains, her jaw twisting with deep, unpleasant thoughts.

She faces the the Baroness, who immediately stops writhing as the Demon Queen snarls at her before turning to face the gathered team, eyes set hard, every trace of the doting mother from minutes ago scoured completely from her expression.

"I’ve been manipulated!" she says, flat and bitter, each word seeming to cost her as soon as it leaves her mouth.

"What do you mean, Mother?" Veena asks, worried, the expression on her mother’s face flooding her own with concern.

"All of this," Vexena gestures around her, " The Prince, the hunt, all of today. A distraction planted by her." she points to Syraleth in ground, whose split lip cracks into a pleasantly proud smile. "Everything was part of a plan to pull me and my army away from my fortress. Away from my source of power. And now I’m stuck here. No portal, no shortcuts. I’ll have to march my entire force back through a continent that hates me, and across an uncrossable sea, just to get back home."

Maribelle steps up beside her, wiping blood from a shallow cut above her brow, eyes still hard and alert despite everything the night has already put her through. "What exactly is happening?"

"She was after my core-crystal," Vexena says, gesturing vaguely toward her own chest, toward something buried far deeper than flesh. "The source of my power, hidden deep in my fortress. If she gets her hands on it, siphons it into herself, she becomes unstoppable. A threat none of us could hope to put down."

"Then kill her. Right now. While she’s down and can’t stop you." Marrible urges.

"If I do, her people could destroy my core before we can reach it," Vexena says, voice tight with the effort of staying calm, "If that happens, I die too. My life and that crystal have been bound together since the day I claimed my throne. So we’re at an impasse, Maribelle. Kill her, and I die with her. Let her live, and she’ll worm her way to victory one way or another."

Maribelle’s jaw works, clearly hunting for a third option that doesn’t exist.

"There must be some other way," Veena mutters, "Some way to stop her. Or get back home."

"If there is, we’ll find it." Eris assures her.

"Until then," Vexena groans, the very thought burning behind her eyes. "We’re stuck here."

She reaches down and hauls Syraleth up by the collar with one fist before tearing the binding off her mouth with a sharp, impatient rip, mud and blood dripping freely from the Baroness’s ruined face.

"You cannot possibly believe you’ll get away with this." Vexena says, shaking Syraleth slightly out of pure anger.

Syraleth just chuckles in response, her voice wet and rasping, blood bubbling faintly at the corners of her mouth with every breath.

"That’s exactly what I intend to do, your grace. I may not get the Prince today." she says as her eyes slide past Vexena, toward him, hungry even now, even broken, even chained and captured. "But I will get him. And so, so much more still." A slow, bloody smile spreading across her ruined face, teeth stained dark, eyes wild with ambition. "By the time I’m finished, we’ll be ruling all of Elthrea together, him and I. And it will be glorious."

Vexena’s grip tightens around her throat, knuckles white, murder plain on her face.

"You won’t survive the wee—"

Her threat is cut short by sudden screaming that erupts from the distant edge of the ranked soldiers. Faint at first, then rising fast, spreading through the lines of soldiers like wildfire catching dry grass. One voice becoming a dozen, becoming a hundred. Unrelenting panic rippling outward through hundreds of disciplined, battle-hardened demon-kin who have clearly never once, in their long unlives, sounded quite this frightened.

Every head turns response, eyes trying to find the source of the commotion.

Until a golden, glowing blade tears out of the crowd of soldiers in a blinding streak of pure light, severed limbs and butchered bodies dropping in its wake, as it tears through Vexena’s legions, humming with a sound like struck crystal, buzzing past the entire team so fast nobody has time to so much as flinch.

It buzzes past close enough that Sera feels the heat of it against her chest as it flies clean between Vexena and Syraleth, trailing a faint golden afterimage through the smoky air, before dissolving into absolutely nothing a heartbeat later, as if it had never existed at all.

Vexena watched the afterglow fade, staring, eyes wide, completely speechless.

A brilliant explosion of light followed. It bursts out from somewhere deep within the army’s ranks, bright enough to throw every face on the field into stark, momentary silhouette, sending whole legions of soldiers scattering and running in every direction at once, weapons abandoned, formation forgotten in the aftermath of what looked like a smiting from a god.

Then a wall of solid shadow erupts straight up out of the ground a heartbeat later, rising fast, spreading across the ground spilt oil, splitting a clean, violent path through the panicked crowd before rising in thundering wall, tossing armored bodies aside like discarded dolls, tumbling and rolling across the scorched earth in every direction.

The screaming redoubles, drawing closer now, and somewhere within the chaos, hoofbeats begin to rise above it all. Steady, patient, impossibly calm against the surrounding panic, growing louder and more manic with every passing second.

Veena, Vuvi, Sera and Pip all turn to each other with growing concern spreading on their faces.

"This is really not where I saw myself ending up today." Sera mutters, sword trembling in her grip.

"Meh." Vuvi sputters, struggling to load her Boombuster before Pip gently helps her. "I’ve had worse."

"How could anything possibly be worse than this!?" Veena chuckles half-heartedly, clutching her ribs.

"We’re about to find out." Maribelle says from behind them, lifting her sword.

The whole battlefield turns as one toward the sound, weapons raised on pure instinct, bracing for whatever’s about to walk toward them as a rising wall of shadow tears out of the ground, swallowing the land whole.