“TRITON!!!”
That voice sent shivers down Haydar’s spine, and he felt it rumble in his chest. It was so loud that he wouldn’t have been surprised if the entire Nexus heard it.
Lightning flashed outside of his ark, black and dreadful, with such a terrible aura that Haydar knew being struck by it would ruin the human form. As it peeled away from its source and struck nearby arks, those arks almost immediately detonated, taking their entire crews with them. One particular ark, a carrier, he saw disintegrate completely by a single bolt that pierced it from stem to stern. Strategos Numerian had commanded it, and the entire fleet assigned to defend the portal, and in but a moment, he was gone. Enormous bird-shaped wisps of black lightning surged out from the portal, too, crashing into arks and tearing them apart with beak and talon.
‘This is it,’ Haydar thought, momentarily transfixed by the sheer violent strength of his enemy. ‘The very beast-in-human-skin that the Great Lord warned of. He will bring ruin to humanity if left unchecked. He must be stopped!’
Haydar swiftly took command within the minute of Numerian’s death. He was the oldest mage among the remaining defenders, though he hadn’t achieved Apotheosis yet. He was a veteran of the Iokanth Wars, had personally led the Scouring of Magnibren, and brought the light of Khosrow’s Law to more than a thousand planes. He couldn’t match this new creature sword-to-sword, but he was confident that he could put him down.
Suppressing his instinctive terror—something he had no small amount of experience in—he directed the remaining arks close to the portal to turn and face the enemy. Haydar needed time, and every second counted. Those lives would be spent buying him those needed seconds.
Some of the arks obeyed, but others didn’t. Not all were as firm in their devotion to the Great Lord as they should be. Haydar silently vowed to show them the Bay of Bones or the site of the Battle of Broken Blades if they survived this trial. As wise as the Great Lord’s words were, Haydar knew that reading of the dangers that those with Inherited Bloodlines posed to humanity could only go so far with some people, and that there was no true substitute for seeing with one’s own eyes those dangers manifested.
Those arks that remained close to the nightmare that had come barreling through the portal, Haydar sent a rapid series of orders. The arks of the fleet—now his—responded sluggishly on the whole. Several hundred of the great machines of war, veterans of hundreds of campaigns, all moving like sloths under the pressure of one man…
Arks exploded as they ponderously slid into place, sacrificed to give the remaining arks time. Thousands died as black bolts, talons, and beaks stripped away armor, broke through wards, and rendered all it touched into ash. Haydar grimaced, his heart fluttering with undeniable fear, as their new foe shot into a light cruiser with nothing but his sword, and seconds later, the cruiser exploded. For a single foolish moment, he hoped that spelled the end of his foe.
And then another black bolt shot from the blaze, struck a destroyer, and turned it to molten slag.
But arks were sliding into place, and activating certain enchantments that Haydar had used in the past. Runes began appearing in the air as the enchantment grew larger, stronger, and more directed.
‘We’ll make it,’ Haydar thought triumphantly. More than fifty arks had been destroyed in a tenth as many minutes, but that blood had not been spilled in vain; a web of power was forming, surrounding the portal and everything close to it. This web would be strong enough to hold a fleet of comparable size—or, Haydar knew, a mage of comparable power to such a fleet.
He’d first used this enchantment on Thorondown, where an eleventh-tier Emperor had attempted to escape his plane, which Haydar had set aflame. Though stronger than Haydar, he’d still been caught in this same enchantment and eventually torn and butchered like the animal he was. Though the newcomer was stronger than that eleventh-tier mage had been, this enchantment had also seen decades of refinement. Haydar knew that it would work.
But then his enemy swung his blade and a dozen black bolts arced from the shining metal, striking half as many arks further away, and Haydar stared in disbelief as the enchantment, still building in power, suddenly unraveled.
‘He’s not a mindless beast…’ Haydar realized, the realization settled within him like a chill within an ill mortal.
He rushed to adapt the enchantment, to try and constrain the nightmare’s movements and make him easy pickings for the fleet, but again, the master of black lightning simply turned from slaughtering the paltry few who yet stood against him beneath the portal and struck several outlying arks. With such precise holes punched into the enchantment, its magic fizzled, and the nightmare continued as normal, unfettered by any such enchantment.
Haydar whispered a curse as the man finally finished obliterating the arks around him and turned his eyes upon Haydar’s carrier. Red-gold malevolence burned in the nightmare’s eyes, and Haydar thought he saw a flash of something darker, red-orange, for just a moment. Then the nightmare appeared in front of his ark so quickly that no one was able to respond, leaving the black birds to handle the remaining arks beneath the portal.
A sword slammed into the prow of the ark, and black lightning rippled along the entire exterior, peeling away armor and hull plating and into the ark’s structure. Several fighters managed to peel out of the hangars, but then the ark shook. The lights flickered and died, leaving the entire ark in darkness—though the life support and propulsion systems' agonized end was likely the greater concern for most.
However, the nightmare wasn’t finished, and cleaved into the carrier. Haydar could only stare in terror as the nightmare burned his way closer, the ark’s defenses, both physical and magical, rendered moot before this terrible power. His legs were weak, and his pride was great; Haydar couldn’t bring himself to push himself off the command chair to run and try to save himself. He remained where he was as the rest of his bridge crew started freaking out.
And then, with scorching heat, screeching metal, and screaming men and women, the nightmare broke his way onto the bridge. Haydar himself barely had the time to summon his magic before a black bolt struck him in the head, and he knew no more of the mortal world…
---
Triton stared as the fleet he’d left to defend the portal was ruthlessly crushed. There was nothing he, or anyone else save for the Great Lord himself, could do to stop Leon Raime. His power was prodigious, almost as much as his brutality, and Leon’s opponents were only men. Proud and stalwart men, but they could not hope to match an heir of the Thunderbird’s power.
Triton scowled, recognizing the dilemma before him. The fleet around the portal was lost; there wasn’t much he could do about that now. But after that… after that, Leon Raime would come here and likely do much the same to his besieging forces as he was doing now: feasting upon the blood of his men and the metal of his arks.
If Triton did nothing, then he would effectively be waiting for Leon Raime to come and kill him, as seemed to be his goal—there was no way in the light of the Great Lord that he was going to face Leon Raime in single combat, as the beast seemed to want. Triton had watched Leon trounce—eventually—Bennu, and Triton knew that he was no Bennu. For all his feelings toward those with Inherited Bloodlines, he still recognized power.
But what Triton could do was rather simple: he could attack Leon Raime, or he could fly away from Artorion and regroup with other fleets that were on their way to him. But given the defenses surrounding Artorion and the southern regions, flying to the west of Artorion was either not possible or would bring him closer than he was comfortable with to Leon Raime.
As he pondered his options, he felt the attention of not just his bridge crew but almost everyone in his whole fleet. Leon Raime’s roar was loud enough to wake the dead, and it was as direct a challenge as could be made. But accepting that challenge and attacking Leon Raime was foolhardy at best, suicidal at worst. He beat Bennu, and if Leon was here, then he almost certainly beat Antipatra. And the power he was using… Triton had the misfortune of stumbling upon an Aesii once, and that black lightning gave him the same deathly feeling as those cursed places…
But if he didn’t fight Leon, then he’d lose prestige and respect, which might lead to insubordination and rebellion…
Triton’s eyes flickered across a nearby map of this region of the Far West. Leon Raime’s fleet was now pouring through the portal, and Triton thought it prudent to estimate it as being at least on par with his own—he had little faith in Antipatra to have inflicted severe casualties upon him, if he was still here and in such apparent battle condition. But Triton still had two thousand more arks in the north, and three thousand in the west, with even more on the way. If he could hook around the valley and rendezvous with those fleets, then dealing with Leon Raime would be much easier—he’d nearly outnumber him two-to-one…
‘But then he’d link up with those arks in the north…’ Triton thought, frowning deeply as he stared more intently at the map. ‘And those arks still in the city…’
As another crack of thunder rocked his vessel, Triton came to a decision. He had not ascended to the thirteenth-tier by being indecisive, and he was no stranger to war.
“Move north,” Triton commanded. “The entire fleet.”
His officers jumped into motion, but his ark’s executive officer quietly asked him, “And the siege?”
“We will return to it once the greater battle is over,” Triton stated. “We launched this venture to kill Leon Raime and stamp his Kingdom into dust. In that order. Leon Raime is right there, not in his city, so we will leave his city to kill him.”
His ark’s second-in-command bowed and asked no more questions, for which Triton was grateful. His statement flew in the face of his true intentions, after all…
---
Wrath, wild and unrestrained, fueled his every swing. His muscles burned and his skin felt like it had been lit aflame, but his death lightning flowed like water. Sweet, chilling rain fell from the overcast sky, but not a drop touched him. Instead, it evaporated from the heat of his magic before it came close. The hurricane winds were more accommodating in that regard, but Leon cut through those winds with ease, hardly even realizing that they were there.
All he had attention for were the smooth, fish-like arks before him. Frustrations both old and new boiled within him—he’d lost so much to Ocean Lords, but he was not going to lose any more.
The air seemed to burn around him from his wrathful zeal and determination. Black lightning flickered around him, drinking in all the surrounding light, while with bolt and blade, he cut through the enemy arks as easily as he could cut blades of grass. These people had harmed his mother. He didn’t know the details, only that she’d ‘lost’ to Triton, but that was enough. If she were dead…
Lightning thrummed through him, and his nostrils were filled with the metallic stench of ozone. His eyes barely registered anything around him; the magic emanating from his body was too dense for him to require physical sight. He just moved, and everything before him ceased to be.
He didn’t know how long he had been at it. He was aware that his people had streamed through the portal after him and participated in destroying Triton’s forces on guard, and he had the mental wherewithal not to harm them, but aside from that, he paid them little mind. All that he could feel was wrath.
Only wrath, at least, until he could sense no more enemies around him. His eyes scanned his surroundings, but all he saw were burning wrecks below him, and his own people around him—all giving him a wide berth, but around him nonetheless. In fact, he could see them assembling into battle formation facing south.
He turned his eyes southward and nearly redoubled his wrath. Triton’s fleet had broken the siege around Artorion, but instead of trying to rescue their arks guarding the portal, they’d taken advantage of Leon and his armada’s distraction to squeeze through the gap between Artorion and the Lion’s Portal and fan out over the western mountains.
‘He’s running…’ Leon realized. His eyes narrowed, his vision turning redder. ‘If he thinks he can run after what he’s done…’
He launched himself after Triton’s forces, but along with greater clarity of thought and purpose came greater ability to feel pain and fatigue—and he felt so much of both that he barely flew a hundred feet before nearly falling out of the sky. Black lightning, death lightning, wasn’t that compatible with him, a resident of the land of the living. It rebelled against him, even with the Iron Needle lending him its power, and his body had been complaining for a while, though he was only now becoming cognizant of that.
A quick scan of his body beneath his armor revealed a patchwork of burns and bleeding cracks in his skin, with even his muscles and bones bearing marks. Both of his arms from the elbow down had gone completely black from lightning burns, and every move caused the hardened skin to crack and bleed even more.
Worse than that was his fatigue. He could barely hold himself in the air now that he’d taken a moment to breathe and let his adrenaline die down. He’d overexerted himself, and his body now rebelled against him, demanding that he rest and recover rather than pursue a fleet more than ten times larger than the one he’d just cut through.
His vision momentarily darkened, as if red lenses had been placed over his eyes, as if something in his blood were tempting him to keep going and use the Eye of Calamity. In his current condition, however, he wondered if that wouldn’t kill him outright alongside Triton, or whoever he managed to catch in that deadly power.
Reluctantly, his muscles relaxed, and he pulled Iron Pride back into his soul realm. He gave Triton’s retreating fleet a long, baleful look before turning and flying toward Storm Herald. He moved slowly, however, flying as an injured man might limp. He did his best to project strength, not wanting Triton to get any ideas of striking him while he was weak, and fortunately, his Paladins soon appeared at his side.
“Your Majesty!” Zhang called out, his White Knight reaching him first. “Do you need any assistance?”
“We’re with you, whatever you decide!” Daryun, his Black Knight, added, reaching him second.
“No…” Leon whispered, his voice hoarse. “Just… Artorion…”
Zhang and Daryun exchanged a knowing look as Leon’s other Paladins joined them. Leon didn’t say another word, but they joined their power and half-carried him to Storm Herald.
The moment the hangar doors shut behind them, warding away all prying eyes, Leon nearly collapsed. Graniton was there, however, the giant easily catching him in Aurichalcum arms. Leon almost told it off, not wanting to look weak in front of his people, but he supposed those on Storm Herald were his most loyal…
His protests died in his throat, but he forced himself to remain conscious—at least until Maia arrived, his river nymph wife taking him under her power. Only then did he finally close his eyes. He was tired, and after using so much death lightning, his body needed at least a full day to heal.
But as he slipped into unconsciousness, he couldn’t help but wonder if Triton would take advantage of his absence. A single day could pass in the blink of an eye, or it could be an eternity and a half. But not even that thought could keep him going, and soon, he was claimed by darkness.
He could only hope that his Kingdom remained when he opened his eyes…
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