Chapter 171: Leon vs 10 S-ranks

Gravity, fire, ice, lightning, shadow, steel and stone arrived in the same instant, and every one of them landed on the dome.

Then the Aegis sent them back immediately.

The attacks rushed back to the S-ranks, blasting them away, until they crashed through the walls.

The noise was too large to be heard. It was a pressure that crushed the air out of every chest in the room, and when the sound finally came, it came as a single enormous crack, like the sky being split down the middle.

The great glass dome overhead burst outward in a sheet.

A hundred panes broke at once, but the pieces could not leave, because Sorin Kade’s seal still held the room shut, and so they hung in the air for one long moment in a glittering cloud. ℴ𝒗ⅇ𝑙.

Then they fell like rain. The white stone floor tore up in plates as big as carriages and flew in every direction.

Half of the pillars snapped at the base and toppled. The two halves of the great table were thrown apart like dry leaves, and one of them struck the wall and stuck there, with its edge sunk into the marble.

The black iron doors bulged inward on their hinges and held, and a long crack ran from them up the wall and out across what was left of the ceiling.

A breath ago, the room had been a place of ceremony. Now it was a bowl of rubble with ten people standing in it, and the room had been destroyed so quickly that most of them were still trying to understand what had happened.

Seraphine Voss had thrown the largest of the strikes, a spear of red fire that had left her hands with all of her strength behind it, and now it came home to her.

The wall of flame that rolled over the Red Empress was ten times what she had sent.

She had time to cross her arms in front of her face, and then it lifted her off the floor and carried her backward through two pillars.

She slammed into the far wall and slid down it with her coat on fire and her red hair burned short on one side. She lay in the ash and did not get up.

Ilsa’s wave of frost had been the second largest.

It returned in a white crust that raced across the floor and up her boots and her knees and her waist, and then over her arms and her shoulders in a shell of crystal as thick as a tree trunk.

She had time to look at it with something like disbelief. It closed over her chin and her lips, and she stood frozen against a pillar with her eyes wide open and her long braid sticking out stiffly to one side.

Maelis had been laughing when he threw his bolt, and he was still laughing when it came back.

A column of blue light as thick as a tree struck him in the chest. Every hair on his body stood straight up, and his eyes turned white, and for one long moment he stood perfectly still and glowed like a lantern.

Then he said a very small and very polite "Oh," and he fell over like a cut tree and lay twitching on the broken floor with smoke rising from his collar.

The others were still on their feet, and he looked at them through the settling dust to see why.

Vesper had understood first. She had melted into the shadow of a pillar a heartbeat before her black blade came home, and the stone where she had stood was a smoking pit ten feet across.

Now she stepped out of the dark with her coat torn and her face as white as paper.

"How powerful..." Haldor muttered, slowly rising from the rubble. "So disrespectful, sending out attacks back to us like that. Have you no respect for your elders?!"

"Haldor," Garrick said through his teeth, "this is not the time for respect."

"I am only noting it." ℯ

Sorin Kade and Lysandra Thorne had struck in a different way, and nothing of theirs had returned to them.

Sorin’s cut in the air had slid down the dome from top to bottom, and a pale light had spread out from the shield and closed the seam before it could widen.

"That should have opened," he murmured to nobody in particular.

Lysandra had reached for Leon’s mind with a hand that nobody could see, and the hand had found a door and knocked, and no one had answered. She stood swaying behind her veil with a puzzled tilt to her head.

Garrick was the last of them, and he was one of those who suffered the most damage.

The old man had put the whole weight of the world on the dome, and the world had been put back on him ten times over.

But he was the Heavy Crown, and weight was the one thing that he understood better than anyone alive.

At the last instant, he had wrenched the black cane sideways, and the weight went down through the floor beneath his boots instead of through his bones.

The floor sank into a crater around him. The cane split from head to ferrule. A thin line of blood ran from his nose, and he knelt in the middle of the crater on one knee, breathing hard.

He did not fall.

The green dome lowered and folded back into the shield on Leon’s arm.

He stood in a bowl of broken white stone with his left arm raised and his right hand in his pocket, and his jacket had not been singed.

"Everything that touches this comes back to its owner at ten times the strength," he said. His voice was calm. "You have seen it now. I would stop."

Nobody answered. Across the chamber, a single piece of glass fell from the ruined ceiling and rang on the floor.

"Ten times," Garrick said at last. He pushed himself up from the crater with what was left of his cane, and he wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.