With peace returned to the world, Benjamin finally stood up and looked around. The show had been entirely for Lord Jarris’s benefit, and now that the man was retreating toward the World Island as quickly as his rifts and his ships allowed, Benjamin’s ruse had faded.

Not that it was ever really his, of course. Even if he’d had years to paint the picture for such a detailed illusion spell, he never would have been able to convince the man so perfectly. That level of talent lay solely in the hands of a Rahkshasa. That was the only reason that he let her run free, of course.

Benjamin could have done this same plan without her complete cooperation. He could have come here with her, stolen the same passwords, and then killed Lord Jarris, followed by Ethan and the demoness. Such an ending would have been immensely satisfying. It would have also been richly rewarding. If he’d done it that way, though then he would have never…

Benjamin’s thoughts trailed off as he noticed something. The battle was over, and the Rhulvinarian troops had been put to sleep just as they had in the past. He’d managed to save tens of thousands of lives with only the simulacrum of a fight, but not all of the FaeFae had retreated as they should have, and even now, they were slaughtering the defenseless men and women lying on the ground.

He cursed himself for his laxness, even as he opened the rift to allow him to move hundreds of yards to where the centaurs were engaging in their cowardly blood sport. “Enough!” he yelled as he stepped through the fire, and it disappeared behind him. “We have won the day and stopped the burning. Do not taint this victory by killing innocents! We must—”

Benjamin stopped speaking long enough to cast arcane armor as he saw one of the horsemen raise his bow and level it at him. “You have done us a good turn here, manthing, but we have our orders. Now move aside.”

“Your orders were to help me defeat the Rhulvin, and they are defeated. I can promise you that!” he said. Using a lesser illusion to bathe the battlefield around him in light. He was disgusted by what he saw. There were countless dead around him, and though most of them probably died in the heat of unavoidable combat, many of them had been struck down after he’d made them helpless, and he gritted his teeth in anger at that revelation.

“Those were not our orders,” the centaur laughed. “We were sent to ensure that none save the guests of the Thrones survived and that our land was finally cleansed of this terrible darkness. So take your boon and flee the field in recognition for a job well done!”

“But—” Benjamin yelled, feeling the anger building inside him.

The FaeFae had turned on him. It was not unexpected, but it was much sooner than he and Matt had thought it would be. Matt had rightly assumed that the FaeFae would turn on them once they’d pushed the Rhulvin all the way to the Inner Sea. Benjamin had largely agreed, but they’d both been wrong. Apparently, pushing them out of the Sea of Grass had been enough.

“There are no buts,” the centaur announced as more of his comrades drew their weapons or turned their bows toward him. “Flee the field or become another casualty. Those are your only options.”

Benjamin pointed skyward and, using a modified version of arcane shot that he’d labeled signal flare, and then he fired two green bolts of light high into the sky. “The first one means we were successful, and the war is won,” Benjamin said, “The second one means we have been betrayed.”

The centaur bared his bloody, sharpened teeth as soon as he figured out what that meant, and he let loose of his arrow. He wasn’t the only one, either. Four arrows streaked toward him, with the power to pierce steel and concrete. Just before they reached him, though, they stopped and shattered in a burst of splinters and, only created shockwaves on the invisible barrier that surrounded him.

Six months ago Benjamin would have been impaled and bleeding out just like Miku’s illusion had showed him. He wasn’t the same person he was back then, though. He could cast his spells at full strength now, instead of relying on a trickle of power and a clever plan.

He’d never unleashed that power before, until now. The last thing he wanted to do was fight the FaeFae; they’d done plenty of killing and dying right beside him all this time, but at least for now, their association was at an end.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Benjamin opened up on the nearest group, casting prismatic songbirds at level 8 and unleashing a wave of prismatic glass that left behind only piles of disfigured corpses and a bloody mist. Then he whirled around, and seeing how close the first centaur was to riding him down with a heavy lance, he summoned a storm of bones from the beyond to deflect any other attacks that might come from unexpected quarters. It deflected what might have been a fatal blow and then proceeded to transform into an ever-shifting bony giant as it did battle with the eight-foot-tall horse warrior.

“Spare the humans, kill the Fae,” Benjamin commanded as he looked around the battlefield for the next danger.

It was a target rich environment, for both sides, for better or worse. Now that he’d started fighting, his opponents had stopped slaughter the sleeping warriors scattered across the ground and began moving toward him in mass. Pitted against him, he could see hard baked clay men, faeries, elves, dryads, wolven, and any number of beast men.

This was just one part of the front, though, he thought to himself. It's a bloodbath elsewhere, too. It has to be.

He ignored that, though, and prepared to reap a bloody whirlwind. Benjamin cast chain lighting at level 9, arcing across the battlefield in blue-white as it jumped from opponent to opponent until it was out of sight. Even that wasn’t enough to stop them from coming.

When the faeries came at him like a storm of vicious fireflies, he dropped them all to the ground with a wide area of affect version of blood burn that affected dozens of them at once. By the time the spell ran its course in a minute or two, they’d be nothing by dried husks with diaphanous wings, but in doing so, they would help to fuel the violence that he was about to unleash.

The dryads received a firestorm before they ever reached him. The wolven were heartier, and no matter how many times he dropped them, they scrambled to their feet again. Finally, he had to detonate his bony guardian to impale the pack that had changed to within mere feet of him with enough projectiles to make him stay down. That was okay. With the storm of bones gone, he was free to summon a new demon to serve him, and that time, he chose a Moray Dragon.

It glittered darkly as it swam into existence and annihilated the massed group of elven archers with a terrific blast of voidfire. After that, he finally had time to catch his breath. “Charge down the front line, spare the humans, and kill the fae that do not flee before you,” he commanded his terrifying creature. It took off in the night just as he heard the sound of his own soldiers finally marching toward him.

That wasn’t what he was paying attention to, though. There, across the battlefield, not so far from where he’d just incinerated the elves that had been trying to turn him into a pincushion, he saw a single silhouette. He almost blasted it out of existence on principle before the realization that it was his aging Dahlia stayed his hand.

“I don’t want to fight you!” he yelled as he saw her drawing back a great bow. “Not you, not ever!”

She had a sad smile on her face, and he saw her mouth move, but however she responded before she unleashed her arrow, it was lost in the noise. He refreshed his arcane armor before the projectile reached him, but it was the wrong move.

Her arrow shattered on his shield, but it seemed that she knew it would, because in doing so, it broke into hundreds of smaller shards, and every living person that was hit by that thorny shrapnel began to twitch and spasm as those awful little seeds grew roots and sprouted violent red flowers from them. It was only then he realized what she’d said.

They must die so that you can live.

So she’d planned this from the start, he realized, and it broke his heart. A few man things were okay, but hundreds or thousands, well, they would need to be culled. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Not even for her.

Benjamin cast frontline which he hoped was just powerful enough to keep those awful seeds from infecting anyone else. It was a spell he’d built for his focus, but he didn’t need that anymore. Not really. That had only ever been a wheelchair, and now he could walk again.

He still couldn’t strike at Dahlia, though. Even when she launched arrows at him again and again. Instead, he gave her exactly what she was trying to give him. Each time she loosed one of her terrible arrows, he cast bombard in return, targeting everywhere around her. It wasn’t quite as powerful without actual arrows to transform, but it was still enough to turn everywhere around the hillside she stood on into a crater-strewn wasteland.

If neither of them was willing to kill the other, then he would see whose heart was harder, and who could tolerate more death. The Thrones were rather fond of talking about how death was a part of life, but he’d seen how they were loath to throw the lives of their servants away, and in this case, they quickly lost their taste for blood and sounded the retreat, drifting back into the grass and disappearing from view.

As soon as the Arboreal Throne had escaped, he burned the tree she’d been standing near to ash so she could not return and make this any more complicated for him. Then, he went to find Matt and see how they’d fared.