NOVGO.NET Chapter 87: Dark flames [2]
Chapter 87: Dark flames [2]
Roselle stared. ’Those aren’t ordinary flames. They’re not following any elemental rules I know.’
THUD.
Something enormous hit the snow beside Leon and blew a wall of white powder into the air. He had his fists up before he’d decided to raise them — and then he froze.
The Frost Bear stood beside him, fur dripping cold, breath fogging the air in thick clouds. The Fire Wolf crouched on his other side, white flames running along its spine, a snarl building low in its throat.
Leon stared at both of them.
"...Wait, I know you—"
Glacius drove a paw into the earth—
BOOM.
Ice erupted beneath a dozen vampires simultaneously, locking their legs. Pyrion launched into them before they could process being frozen, one arc of burning white tearing through the trapped line.
Leon’s face broke into the widest, most ridiculous grin despite the blood on it. "HE’S HERE—!"
The sky darkened.
Every surviving person on the field looked up at the same moment.
A silhouette descended through the clouds with wings that blocked the sun. A winged creature covered in gold, its scales shimmering with a radiance that didn’t belong to ordinary firelight. Lightning crawled across its hide in constant arcing patterns. Electricity crackled between its jaws with the specific contained violence of something that has been holding it back and is now done doing that.
The aura rolling off it hit the vampire ranks like a physical wall.
Vampires dropped to their knees without deciding to. Their instincts had made the decision for them.
Leon stared upward, his mouth completely open.
The golden dragon unhinged its jaws.
ZZZZZRAAAK!
The lightning beam swept across the valley floor in one sustained arc. The sound of it erased every other sound on the field. Dozens of vampires were simply gone. Others were thrown hundreds of feet through the air by the shockwave. The snow, the ice, the surface rock — all of it turned to steam in the path of the beam.
The vampire ranks broke.
"RETREAT—"
"WHAT IS THAT THING—"
"GET AWAY FROM IT—"
The dragon threw its head back.
"ROOOOOOAAAR—"
Thunder hit the bedrock of the mountain and came back up through everyone’s feet. Roselle covered her ears, completely stunned.
Nicholas lay in the snow and watched the golden light reflect off everything around him, his exhausted eyes tracking up from the dragon, past the Fire Wolf and the Frost Bear, past the black flames still dancing patterns through the retreating army.
All of them arrived at the exact same instant, right as a blinding flash filled the air.
Something crossed the battlefield at a speed that left no image, just the sense of something having moved. Augustus’s enhanced eyes barely registered it as peripheral blur.
SHING.
One clean metallic sound.
Augustus froze.
He looked down at his right arm.
He was no longer holding Seris by the hair.
His right forearm ended at the elbow.
The wound was already burned shut, with black mana still drifting from the edges where the strike had sliced through.
Blood leaked out slowly, as if the cut had burned itself shut the exact moment it was made.
"...What."
He turned his head.
Several meters away, a figure stood in the snow.
His boots had carved deep smoking trenches into the frozen ground on arrival, the impact of stopping at that speed leaving visible marks. Dark smoke rolled off him in slow continuous waves, not from any fire or spell — just emanating, the way heat comes off something that’s been running very hot for a long time.
His clothes were torn from travel and forest work. He stood stiffly, not out of anger, but because something deep inside him had not yet decided how to react.
His face showed no panic, no fear, and no hint of a plan. There was only a terrifying, suffocating stillness.
The vampires closest to him had taken five steps backward before they realized they were moving. Their instincts had voted without consulting them.
One whispered, voice barely holding "Who... who the hell is that."
"Why does his mana feel like standing at the edge of something."
He didn’t offer them a single word.
His eyes had found Augustus and they had not moved from him.
Not to the retreating army. Not to Nicholas collapsed in the snow a few meters away.
Only Augustus.
Augustus looked at the stump of his arm. Looked back at him.
Several seconds of absolute silence.
Then his lips pulled back and the hysterical smile came out — the same one from the chamber in the dark, the same unhinged quality, but with something new underneath it. Something that might have been the first genuine thing his face had shown all morning.
"So." He let out a soft, short laugh. "You finally showed up. Commoner."
Alden didn’t react at all. His expression remained completely blank.
His eyes dropped down to the snow a few feet from where Augustus was standing.
To Seris.
Silver hair spread around her. Face bruised and pale. Blood on her chin from where the impact had driven it from her lips. One hand lying open in the snow, the fingers that had been reaching for her scythe.
Lying there in the way that people lie there when their body has stopped listening to them.
Something changed on his face. It was not just anger. It was something far worse than anger—something so deep it did not even have a name.
The dark mana that had been rolling off him in slow waves stopped being slow.
BOOOOOOM.
A shockwave exploded from where he stood, blasting away all the snow within fifty meters and revealing the bare ground below. The sudden blast of force was so strong that it knocked the nearby vampires right off their feet.
Nicholas lifted his head from the snow.
He looked at figure standing at the center of the cleared earth, the dark aura around him like a second atmosphere, the kind of weight in the air that makes the lungs work differently.
"A...Alden?"