“Leon Raime!” Sunlit roared, an infuriatingly smug smile of triumph on his punchable face. “You had your chance to come with me willingly! Now I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you surrender yourself to me at once!”

Leon resisted the urge to growl in anger. He could feel the power of the Great Black Dragon surging through him, his anger fueling it like nothing else could. There were few things he wanted to do more than launch himself out of the crashed ark and slam his fist into the arrogant Emperor, showing him first-hand the power Leon had struggled to unlock.

But that urge was resisted. He knew that would lead to nothing good. Fighting a tenth-tier mage in single combat was a fool’s errand, and besides, he still had other options. And after glancing over his shoulder at his people, he knew that he had other obligations; he couldn’t just throw caution to the wind and act without thought. Most of his people knew how to fight, sure, but there were also those on the ark who couldn’t, such as the adjutants brought by his Tribal allies, and more importantly to Leon, Elise.

‘No, I can’t just charge out there…’ Leon bitterly thought.

[Is the light shield still operational?] Leon asked the captain.

As soon as he asked, he saw with his magic senses the ark’s captain fiddle around with an enchantment console that looked only partially functioning, but a moment later, a white sphere of power sprang into existence around the ark as it lay on the ground.

“We don’t have much power left!” the captain shouted, Leon able to hear him thanks to his projected magic senses.

[We’ll take all the time we can get,] Leon replied. [Let’s see if we can get the Lances back up and running.]

The captain nodded and got to work getting what remained of the small crew moving again.

Turning back to his people, Leon evaluated what he had.

Of his Tribal allies, he had a group of adjutants who weren’t combat capable, meaning he could only really rely on Sar and Exallos.

Of his retainers, all were up and ready, with only Elise and Helen not combat-ready at the levels this would demand.

He also had half a dozen Tempest Knights and a dozen of Cassandra’s personal guards.

“All right,” he said as the Sunlit Emperor’s forces began surrounding their crashed ark, “let’s get organized! We’re not surrendering!”

“Fuck right, we’re not!” Alcander roared, with Alix and the Tempest Knights shouting their support.

“We’d be executed anyway,” Exallos said with a deadly glare. While those with him and Sar weren’t warriors, Leon wondered if he was giving their combat capabilities enough credit as they visibly steeled themselves and made their willingness to fight clear. “We’ll fight to the end.”

“The Ancestral Harts are no strangers to war,” Sar added. “We have long defended ourselves from… aggression.” He gave Cassandra’s guards a sideways look but said no more.

Leon smiled bitterly, then likewise looked at Cassandra’s guards, led by Evgenia, the woman who’d led Cassandra’s guard detail for as long as Leon had known the Princess. “Keep your charge in the ark, until such a time as the captain declares it to be unsafe.”

“Woah, fuck that!” Cassandra shouted. “If there’s fighting to be done, then I’ll be there doing it!”

Her declaration was met with a chorus of approval from most of the ark’s passengers, but Leon sighed and moved over to her. “Cassie,” he whispered. “I don’t want to risk my family. Stay here. I’m sure it’s not going to be all that peaceful in here, either.”

As he spoke, Leon gave her a stern look, and silently added, [I need someone to stay with Elise and the others who aren’t going to be fighting. I want that to be you.]

Cassandra scowled quite deeply, her face contorting with displeasure and duty both.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Evgenia laid a hand on Cassandra’s shoulders, and the Princess said with a strained voice, “… Fine…”

Leon gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, then whispered to Elise, “Stay with Cassie. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this.”

Elise still shook with fear, but she put on a determined look and nodded. She took a place next to Cassandra, whose expression softened as she took Elise’s hand from Leon.

Leon, his fears for his wives as assuaged as they could be, then looked to his retainers, including Valeria, Maia, and Anzu, and saw grim, violent determination.

[Don’t even think of asking us to stay behind,] Maia growled into his mind.

“What she said,” Valeria added.

“I’ll think what I want!” Leon responded with faux outrage, eliciting a couple chuckles from those who weren’t incredibly tense. “I just… won’t say it, then.” He smiled at them as he moved on, spurring Cassandra into giving a squawk of outrage, though nothing more.

“I’m going to head out there to fight once the shield falls!” Leon declared to the ark as a whole. “Anyone who doesn’t wish to join me, feel free to stay inside!”

He received a tsunami of cries of support from just about everyone, but it was the remaining people that he paid the most attention to: Nestor and his researchers from Heaven’s Eye. These were the people he considered too so valuable that he refused to leave without them, and while he didn’t want them fighting if they didn’t want to, he was also keenly aware of Sunlit’s arks surrounding his crashed ark and spilling their contents of Sunlit soldiers into the air.

“I can fight,” Nestor said with the disinterest of a man who saw this conflict as beneath him. His cat, on the other hand, was agitated enough that those next to Nestor looked a little nervous that the thing was going to bite their hands.

“As can I,” Valentina said.

Their words of support weren’t widely echoed among the researchers, so Leon simply said, “Stay in the ark. Don’t risk yourselves.”

“I can fight,” Nestor repeated even as the other researchers nodded in relieved acknowledgment.

“How?” Leon asked.

“Runes,” Nestor said.

Leon stared at the dead man for a long moment, then simply said, “Fine.”

With that, he glanced into the ark’s bridge where only the captain remained, keeping an eye on the various control consoles as the rest of the ark’s relatively small crew raced around trying to put out fires and keep the ark’s systems online for just a few more minutes.

[How much longer do we have?] Leon asked the captain.

“Hard to say with the damage we’ve taken! Thirty minutes is the most optimistic!” the captain shouted back.

[And the Lances?]

The captain hesitated a moment, then said, “We have two remaining Lances, but we can’t fire with the shield up!”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Leon momentarily turned his attention outward, evaluating the situation again. Sunlit remained hovering over the crashed ark, the remaining combat arks had surrounded them, and the transport arks were a bit further away, though most of their contents had already been disgorged and were moving to surround his ark from the ground and sky.

[If we can, aim at the two remaining wars. The stealth arks if that’s not viable. Then the transport arks. In that order.]

“Understood!” the captain called out.

With that, Leon turned back to his people. “I’m going out there to buy us some time. All of you, be ready to charge when the shield falls.”

After getting everyone’s acknowledgment, Leon opened one of the ark’s emergency exits and slid outside, immediately drawing the attention of nearly all the Sunlit warriors surrounding him. They numbered in the thousands, but Leon reserved his attention for only the strongest.

He was dismayed to see that Sunlit hadn’t come alone; four ninth-tier mages had accompanied him, leaving his side with a firm advantage in magic power as well as just about everything else.

But Leon glanced southward, noting that the Jaguar’s arks were speeding even faster, burning power at unsustainable rates to close distance as quickly as possible. They were still far enough away that no one seemed to have noticed them yet, thankfully, but it would still take at least an hour for them to reach Leon’s ark, assuming they didn’t encounter any similar obstacles…

Leon took to the skies, flying close to the translucent barrier of white light projected only about twenty feet off the surface of the ark, and waited. Sure enough, a moment later, Sunlit himself drifted downward, confidence oozing out of him as thickly as his tenth-tier aura.

“Leon, Leon, Leon,” Sunlit condescendingly said as he drew close enough for comfortable speech, “why’d you have to go and run away? You’ve forced my hand…”

“Leaving the city is hardly justification for something like this,” Leon testily replied.

“I disagree,” Sunlit smoothly replied. “I called to have you arrested, only to see you fleeing in a Sky Devil ark, of all things! And to see it escorted by Ilian arks! Well, I was shocked, I tell you! Shocked!”

Leon cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t sound that shocked.”

“I… suspected there was some dirty dealing going on behind my back,” Sunlit admitted with the ease of a man who believed himself in full control of the situation. “Old Keeper was being cagey about something, and I knew that this alliance you have with the Lord Cocksucker and Grand Whore had to have been built on something… Leveraging your bloodline was the obvious explanation. And then we had your mysterious absence from Occulara at the same time that the Sky Devils on the Sword started acting out of character! And then! Those two declared support for peace with the Sky Devils! Well, it doesn’t take a genius to connect these dots, does it? You’ve hardly been subtle…”

Leon lightly frowned a moment, then shrugged. “I was made King of the Ten Tribes. The ‘Sky Devils’ are now my subjects, and I’ve been working to bring peace between them and the Empires. Starting, naturally, with those I have personal connections with.”

“Foolish,” Sunlit growled. “Should just have the lot of them killed. Honestly, the arrogance of claiming any kind of descent…”

Leon cocked his eyebrow again, wondering if the Sunlit Emperor was about to reveal his genealogical claim, but Sunlit went quiet for a moment, his eyes staring southward at something in the far distance.

Leon, fearing that his reinforcements had finally attracted some attention, hurriedly asked, “I thought you were staying in Occulara. How did you get this far south so quickly?”

Sunlit’s eyes flitted back to Leon immediately as his smug smile grew even wider. “You lack subtlety, young Leon. A strange-looking ark being escorted by half a dozen Ilian arks is attention-grabbing, no matter how careful you are. It was easy enough for me to find out what was going on, and then to follow in an ark of my own. Those cucks in Ilion couldn’t find their own cocks in a brightly-lit room, let alone an Emperor of my capabilities if he wants to hide.”

Sunlit’s smile thinned as he glared at Leon like a cornered rat. “Now, Leon. Do the wise thing and surrender. I don’t want to kill you today, nor do I want anyone in that ark dead, personally. You and your people will be treated well, you have my word on that. You will all be my valued guests in Thunderhaven.”

“And if I don’t surrender?” Leon asked.

“You will all die here. You can’t win this, you have to see that. You’re vastly outnumbered and you can’t hope to match my strength. Give up.”

Leon grinned and silently chuckled, the conversation stoking his wrath to no end. Just listening to Sunlit speak, as useful as it was for him to keep it going, was fraying both his nerves and his patience. Familiar heat had flooded into his arms and raced into his fingers, and he felt that it was only his armor that hid the traces of the Great Black Dragon’s power from leaking out further.

“It’s not in my family’s nature to give up,” Leon pointedly stated with a vicious grin. “I don’t know what you have planned for me in Thunderhaven, but I can guarantee that it won’t be good.”

Sunlit’s grin turned slyer. “Our family’s nature, Leon,” he said, taking the bait. “We are distant kin, you and I. There were remnants of the Thunderbird Clan in my Empire, hiding in small enclaves and trying not to draw any attention. But my grandfather hunted them all down and subjugated them to the Sunlit Empire. But the last, and largest, of these remnant Clans, had a Princess, and my grandfather took her as a concubine upon finishing his work. From her came my father, given to my mother after she reached the tenth-tier.”

Leon made a disgusted face for a moment. “They weren’t… you know?”

Sunlit snarled. “No, they weren’t siblings you dickrider! My mother was only a distant relation, separated by many generations!”

Leon made a show of wiping his brow in relief.

Sunlit scoffed and continued as if Leon hadn’t gone on that tangent, though his tone was noticeably more strained. “I but want to protect you, Leon. That ought to be my job, as your superior in age and power, no?”

“We are not related,” Leon declared, his patience running critically low. “Whatever claims you want to make of your lineage, you do not have the power of the Thunderbird.”

Sunlit’s face immediately turned ugly and wrathful, but Leon pressed on.

“You are unrelated to the Thunderbird Clan. Any promise you make predicated on us being so related is untrustworthy, and so I shall not trust it. In fact, I’ll not trust you at all, and simply tell you that if you want to bring me back to Thunderhaven, it will be as a cold corpse in so many pieces that it can fit into a small box.”

“That can be arranged,” Sunlit angrily growled.

“Perhaps,” Leon replied. “For now, I’d rather leave you with some fighting words.” Leon began drifting back to the emergency hatch on the ark. “Unfortunately, none are coming, so I’ll just tell you to get fucked.” He made a rude gesture as he reached the hatch, but he paused there for a moment as he reached within with his magic.

Darkness touched the minds of all within, and Leon whispered his commands. The captain began pressing runic circles on the control console and his people within the ark began moving toward the various exits.

At the same time, the Sunlit Emperor glared down at Leon, then rose a few dozen feet into the sky, and held up his hand. Great arcs of lightning surrounded him, gathering into a golden bolt of such tremendous power that Leon could feel the static causing his finer hair to stand on end. But he wasn’t worried about that alone; he’d faced far deadlier lightning before.

Before Sunlit could launch his attack, Leon’s ark’s light shield dropped, and the ark’s remaining two intact and unobstructed Lances fired their molten payloads so quickly that the hovering arks could barely react. One stealth ark was hit, the Tribal Lance’s payload punching through its hull with ease and causing it to explode right there. The other shot hit one of the war arks, and like the stealth ark, its outer hull didn’t stand a chance. It didn’t explode, but it immediately began listing in the air, fire blazing within.

Leon didn’t pay either much mind. Instead, he donned his helmet, drew his family’s blade, and called upon as much power as he could muster. Heat suffused his being as black fire spilled out from every joint in the armor covering his sword arm. Leon saw for a moment the Sunlit’s Emperor’s wrathful face warping with shock, and then Leon was upon him.

Leon lunged forward, his sword blazing with black fire, but the Sunlit Emperor managed to just barely block the blade. A few licks of black fire still caught him, though, and Leon heard him scream in surprise as the fire danced across his unprotected face.

Sunlit hurled himself backward as he brought down his prepared lightning directly on Leon. Leon braced and called upon the strength of his tau pearl to defend himself. A smaller shield of white light sprang into place around Leon just in time to block Sunlit’s attack, but Leon was still smashed backward, making a dent in his ark’s outer plating, and winding him for a moment.

Sunlit reeled but recovered before Leon did. Leon was unable to assess any damage done to Sunlit as the Emperor had called upon an ostentatious golden helmet, obscuring his face, but it seemed insignificant as the Emperor bore down upon Leon, another tremendous bolt of lightning already forming in one hand as a sword roughly matching Leon’s in size and style appeared in the other.

Sunlit charged with a guttural roar, and Leon forced himself up and dodged by the skin of his teeth. He was vaguely aware that his people were spilling out into the sky and firing off their magic, but Sunlit demanded his attention, so he gave it.

Black fire poured out of his body, keeping Sunlit barely at bay, but Sunlit responded with waves of lightning that washed over Leon, who only barely withstood the blow thanks to the strength of his armor and the support of the tau pearl. They flew higher into the sky, their clashing auras causing storm clouds to spontaneously form in the sky. However, Leon was unable to completely seize control of these clouds, and golden lightning bolts began raining down upon him.

He dodged another blow from Sunlit, who seemed driven into mindless fury, and used their momentary proximity to rake his blade across Sunlit’s stomach. Black fire burned away the golden outer layer of the armor the man was wearing, and Sunlit screamed in pain again. He brought his blade down upon Leon, who lifted his to try to deflect or block at the least. But when their blades met, Sunlit’s power won out, and Leon was sent flying up into the clouds, away from the battle that now raged around his crashed ark.