“You don’t have to come. This is a bad idea.”
“Not hearing you put forth any better ideas,” Irulon said, voice a bit terse as they walked over the top of the swamp. She had made a bridge from shifting shards of fractal glass, taking them right over the top of the knee-deep water. It was a strange spell. It looked like they should have fallen right through it. Or perhaps it looked like their ankles should have been flayed to bits. Yet it was solid enough that even Izsha, walking behind Alyssa and Irulon, got to keep its feet dry and intact.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Alyssa shot back, voice barely above a whisper.
Walking over the swamp was a nerve-wracking affair. The Astral Authority were still all over the place. So far, they were ignoring everyone on the fractal bridge, but if that suddenly changed, Alyssa wasn’t sure how much she could actually do about it. She had a few Fractal spells from Irulon’s tome that might come in handy, but there were a lot of the stupid things hovering about.
Demons were another concern. So far, Alyssa had only seen one infected since leaving the city walls. The Astral Authority had swiftly dispatched it without anyone else needing to do something. So at least they were good for that. But an infected could still pop out and get a hit in before any of the Astral Authority did something if they didn’t keep their guard up. And if an infected got close, they would have to worry about collateral damage. The Astral Authority were probably not going to attack them directly, but they probably wouldn’t care too much if a Diligence’s beam or an Equanimity’s… bulk happened to clip one of them.
“I wouldn’t even be going if you weren’t because I’m not sure we can do anything about either being. One is taller than a mountain—”
“Last time it was only taller than a building.”
“Whatever. It like… shifts between dimensions or something so whatever I perceived its height to be probably doesn’t matter.”
“Shifts between dimensions? Now I’m all the more intrigued.”
“The other one is a being that might or might not be on par with Tenebrael. So you better have a good plan and some amazing spells that I’ve never seen before.”
“No real plan at the moment except for what I’ve already outlined to you. Distract either one of them long enough that the other will achieve victory. The details can come later on after I’ve had a chance to observe them for a few moments.”
“Which is exactly why the rest of you don’t need to come,” Alyssa said, looking over her shoulder.
Brakkt had stayed back at the wall, both to act as a liaison between any Messages that Irulon or Alyssa might send as well as to try to keep order among the soldiers. But practically everyone else had come. Irulon was present, obviously. Izsha and Musca both came as well, though Izsha wasn’t looking too enthused with the prospect. They were walking alone with no riders. Soon, perhaps, but for the moment, Alyssa and Irulon had both been worried that riding out at top speed might aggravate the Astral Authority. Hence their rather sedate pace during this past twenty minutes of walking.
Fela prowled ahead, trying to give everyone a heads up on any approaching infected. She sniffed the air constantly, but apparently the air was a bit saturated with the smell of demons. It might end up being that she served as an early warning sign in other ways. Luckily, and really the only reason Alyssa was not arguing against her being a good dozen yards ahead of the group, Fela was strong. Empirical evidence showed that she could take a hit from an infected. Especially if they were more of a lower-level infected. Someone on par with the Taker might pose problems.
Had he died again to the Astral Authority? Was he out there, lying in wait?
Probably not. If he was alive, he was probably fighting.
Kasita walked along between Izsha and Musca. She hadn’t said much so far. Being one of the few who had actually seen the Justice, she had to be just as worried as Alyssa was. If she was, it wasn’t showing on her face much at all.
Catal was the final member of their group. Apparently, he moonlighted as some kind of monster researcher for the guild. He wanted a closer look at just what kind of a force the Astral Authority could bring to bear and just what it took to bring them down.
Alyssa wasn’t sure if he believed her claims of the Justice being the size of dragons, but he was going to see it for himself soon enough.
Catching his gaze, he shrugged. “I’m not planning on fighting if I can help it. I trust that these things are dangerous at least. But someone qualified needs to give a real report on them. Still, don’t worry about me. This isn’t my first foray into danger. I have ways of protecting myself.”
“From what is effectively a building falling on top of you? A very sharp building in a roughly sword shape?”
“Well… no. Not exactly.”
“Or hordes of infected that will probably defend their leader the moment we try to intervene?”
“I have some experience in handling those affected by the plague.”
“The Taker is back. Fully sane and probably as strong as Fela over there. Maybe stronger. Might be hard to kill too. Brakkt was unable to take his head off and that was before getting a new demonic body. All the infected might be like that.”
“Alyssa. If it comes down to it, you and I both have several copies of Fractal Lock. We have, through previous experiences, proved that angelic beings are unable to harm those affected by Fractal Lock. These lesser angels should have a harder time. It’s my fall back plan should things go drastically wrong.”
Pressing her lips together, Alyssa nodded slowly. That could work. Though she wasn’t sure that angels couldn’t harm people in stasis. Rather, it seemed a lot more likely that Adrael simply hadn’t had the opportunity to undo the effect. But the theory was sound, at least for the Astral Authority. As long as nobody was using Tenebrael’s power, the Astral Authority would probably immediately ignore anyone in stasis. And they might not be able to take people out of stasis either.
The true demon might be a bit more of a problem. She could probably take people out of stasis if she tried hard enough. The Cardinal Virtue of Justice would probably keep her busy enough that she wouldn’t be able to do anything. Besides that, the true demon was almost certainly under similar rules as to what kept the angels from directly harming mortals.
Her henchmen didn’t suffer under the same rules, but they weren’t likely to breach Fractal Lock anyway…
Though if everyone wound up inside Fractal Lock, the infected could just stand by and wait for it to wear off.
“I don’t suppose you have an Accelero card handy?”
“Actually, yes. And I have you to thank for it. Father never let me into his temporal noteroom. And ever since my… companion came to live with me, he took care to keep the cards out of my direct line of sight as well. Showing Accelero to you was a bit of a slip-up on his part. I don’t think he even conceived of the possibility that you had something like a camera. Though really, he should have considered that you might have perfect memory.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“You can’t just use Retrograde Cognition to catch a glimpse of spells he uses?”
“And wind up disowned? No thanks. I don’t much care for being a princess, but I do enjoy the opportunities and resources my status affords me.”
“But the Pharaoh slipping up and showing off a spell is fine?”
“His fault, not mine. He should have been more careful.” From a pocket that was nowhere near the tome chained to her hip, Irulon produced a single spell card. “I only have two. It is quite time consuming to create.”
“You could say that again,” Alyssa said, offering a sympathetic nod of her head as she took the card. Her own experience trying to create that card had been… exhausting to say the least. So many cards had been scrapped because of minor mistakes or tiny angles. It had actually made her wonder if it wasn’t possible to create some kind of stencil or stamp, but both would probably be too imprecise with the current technology of this world. At least for something as complex as Rank Six Time magic spells. They didn’t have any laser cutters after all. She was a little more surprised that there weren’t stencils for things like Flame and Light.
“Shall we ride it out from here? The Astral Authority seem to be ignoring us.”
“True.” Six miles away, assuming that Alyssa’s calculation had been accurate, would be a long while before they managed to catch up to anything if they had to go on foot. The draken could slim that time down to only a few minutes.
Alyssa rested a hand on Izsha’s side. “You sure you want to come? I’m not going to let what happened last time happen again… but…”
The draken gently nudged its nose against Alyssa’s hand. It wasn’t running away, so Alyssa took that as a reassurance. Swinging a leg up and over the saddle, she settled into position with a glance to Kasita. The mimic accepted an offered hand, disappearing halfway through being pulled up onto Izsha’s back. Alyssa slid a large coin into her pocket as she looked over to Catal.
“We didn’t plan well for this, I suppose.” He had no horse and no draken. Fela didn’t either, but Fela was a hellhound. Six miles at a mild jog wouldn’t even be a sweat. “Izsha can likely carry you.”
Izsha shot a quick glance at Catal before flicking an eye toward Alyssa. He was a larger man with a bit of size to his armor, so Alyssa could see why Izsha might not be too happy. Still, there wasn’t much other option aside from leaving him behind and alone.
“It’ll be fine,” Alyssa said, mostly to Izsha. “We don’t need to rush. In fact, slower might be better.”
Alyssa offered him a hand, one which he took after eying Izsha almost as much as it was eying him. He settled into the saddle just behind Alyssa. The saddle was Dasca’s saddle this time—Irulon sat in Musca’s usual saddle—which was a bit larger and had needed some good harness work to get it steady. Thanks to its extra size, he wasn’t completely crowding Alyssa out. Just mostly.
With Fela still in the lead, though at a much closer distance, Izsha and Musca picked up the pace. Alyssa spent the first few minutes watching all visible members of the Astral Authority. Just in case. A few paces forward, Irulon was doing the same thing.
One of the closer Kindnesses turned to watch them, but neither it nor any of the others did anything else.
Anything to their little party, anyway. One Patience dashed overhead through the trees, skewering an infected that had already been on its spear against a large stone boulder.
No infected bothered them either, Alyssa noted as they continued on. They were too busy being torn apart by the Astral Authority. Back at Owlcroft after the first Patiences came through their golden portals, the infected had put up a decent fight. Not just the Taker-level ones either. Larger groups of the weaker infected had been surprisingly efficient in turning the tables on anything that got too close.
Alyssa couldn’t be certain how fast they were traveling. It was far slower than draken could go and a good deal slower than their standard trotting speed. Still, Alyssa would have expected that a half-hour of running through the forest would have revealed something. Some sign of the Justice. It was the size of a building. And while she couldn’t see buildings in a neighboring city from a forest thirty minutes away, most buildings on Earth didn’t fly. Or move. Or get into slugfests with supernatural monsters.
The only evidence that there was something around were the trees. The further they went, the more the trees looked broken. Branches were snapped and the bark had been torn clean off the far sides. Leaves coated the ground, torn to shreds for the most part.
It could have been the regular infected and Astral Authority destroying trees in their fights, but there were too many. The effect was too consistent.
And the further they went, the destruction got more and more intense.
“There.” Irulon’s voice was soft, quiet, and tense.
Even still, Alyssa heard her clearly over the sporadic crashes and shouts of dying infected in the background of the forest.
Musca had already shifted direction to go in line with Irulon’s pointing arm. Izsha didn’t waste any time in following after. A quick whistle was enough to get Fela to notice their changed course. A burst of speed had the hellhound moving along right beside Alyssa.
Their new course opened into a clearing after several minutes of movement.
An unnatural clearing. The trees didn’t just thin out to an open area of land. They had been uprooted and thrown to the side, creating an almost log-cabin wall around the entire place. Dirt and rock had been torn up like the world’s largest rototiller had passed through.
It reminded Alyssa of the aftermath of an Annihilator spell. The only thing that was missing was the molten terrain.
Though even that was present at the very center, bubbling up around the Justice itself.
It was kneeling down, bent over completely while grasping its sword. Its pose certainly explained why she hadn’t been able to see it over the tops of the trees further out. But she couldn’t quite figure out what it was doing. At first, Alyssa thought it was injured. Perhaps even dead. It wasn’t moving much at all. The tip of its sword was in the deepest recesses of the crater. Both its hands were clutching the hilt, though somehow it still managed to hold its massive set of scales. The hand that held the scales was illusory, shifting in and out of Alyssa’s sight with subtle movements in the thing’s body.
Looking closer, amid the molten rock at the tip of the Justice’s sword, Alyssa figured out exactly what it was doing.
The true demon’s scythe poked out of the ground just to the side of the sword, casting a dark shadow over its otherwise gleaming silver blade. A hand clutched the scythe’s haft.
Binoculars out, Alyssa spotted it. The true demon, pinned underneath the blade of the Justice. Not skewered, just pinned. The true demon was fighting back as hard as she could, pushing against the blade with all her strength. Alyssa wasn’t sure that the demon was going to get out of this one alive. It wasn’t cutting through the gloves on the true demon’s hands, but the demon was out of options. If it moved even one of its hands, it would likely get killed.
There were no other demonic entities in the area either. No one to come to its rescue. The Astral Authority were swarming around, keeping any that might try to intervene away.
They still ignored the mortals in their midst.
“Might not have to do anything after all,” Alyssa whispered to Irulon as she handed over the binoculars. “I don’t know if you can see it, but—”
“That’s the true demon?”
“You can see it.” That made some mild amount of sense. Trik and the other members of the plague containment team had seen brief flashes of the true demon when it had been fighting with that Patience in Lyria. Any time the two had connected, the demon had been visible.
“Tenebrael help us all… That’s a true demon?”
Alyssa briefly glanced over her shoulder, not wanting to take her eyes off the crater for any length of time, to find Catal staring with his mouth agape and his eyes wide.
“No,” she said as quick as she realized what he was staring at. “That is the Cardinal Virtue of Justice. One of the Astral Authority. The thing that you came here to sketch out.”
“H-How are we to fight something like that? A dragon takes thousands of men and hundreds of highly ranked arcanists just to stand a chance. That is…”
“We’re not going to fight it,” Irulon said, still looking through the binoculars. “We’re here to fight the thing under its sword.”
“The thing holding up its sword,” Alyssa said, feeling a need to point out just how screwed they were.
“Indeed.” Irulon’s hand brushed over the top of the tome. Two cards appeared between her fingers, held out toward the center of the crater. “Unfortunately, assuming my estimations are true, that true demon might actually win despite its position. You might not be able to tell, but I can see it slowly getting ready to throw the Justice off it.”
“You have a plan?” Alyssa said, eying the cards.
“I doubt this will kill it, but it might weaken it. Split Reality.”
The card shifted into a crystal clear shard of glass before launching out from Irulon’s outstretched hand. It flew straight down to where the two beings were connected. The princess was still using the binoculars. Even still, Alyssa could see the two burning red embers of the true demon’s eyes flash a little brighter as she turned her head.
With a second shift of her head, the black leather of her mask connected with the spell.
For a moment, Alyssa thought it was going to end there. Perhaps suicide at a mortal’s hands was preferable to being killed by the Astral Authority. Either because of pride or because mortals wouldn’t be able to kill the demon permanently while the Justice could.
But Alyssa quickly realized that the demon was not splitting apart as everything else struck by that particular spell ended up doing. Rather, it was her outfit that was falling to pieces. The leather bindings and the mask that she had repeatedly tried to get Alyssa to remove.
It was all coming off.
And, even from the distance, Alyssa could see the true demon’s mouth twist into a grin.