37. Chapter 37 #2
Umbra answered first—a low, tectonic rumble that shook the stone beneath our boots and vibrated straight up our spines.
Beside him, Caden’s Mirror-Fire’s obsidian scales rippled like black water, a lightless shimmer that ended when she threw her head back and vented a column of silver-white fire.
The flame seared the air clean, a ferocious declaration of war that struck over the battlefield.
It was the only consensus we needed.
The dragons lunged forward, their wings snapping tight against the wind as they took the edges. We moved with them, a single, lethal unit cutting into the fray.
Caden didn't look back. He gripped his hilt, his eyes fixed on the center of the storm.
“Let’s go kill a King.”
My Fury answered him before I did.
Caden hit the battlefield first. I released my Fury and let it pour ahead of him, golden light skimming low over the churned earth.
The void soldiers caught in it solidified for a heartbeat.
That was all he needed.
He was the Hunter again—not the King’s machine, but something sharper.
Embodied. His blades moved in clean, merciless lines.
A head hit the dirt still blinking. An arm spun away at the shoulder.
A body folded at the waist before the blood had time to follow.
He carved through them without pause, without breath, leaving a brutal trail of meat and armor in his wake.
His own Vow had him now, running hot beneath his skin, and the battlefield bent around it. He may still have the same horrifying absence of wasted motion as The Hunter—but it belonged to him now. Not emptiness. Not obedience.
Choice.
Every strike was chosen.
Every body he dropped was a step cut clean toward the King.
“Left!” Eryndor barked.
I pivoted on instinct. A void soldier flashed solid at my shoulder for half a heartbeat—long enough.
Dawnrender opened its throat as I turned, and Voidbringer snapped out on the backswing, splitting the mouth of the one behind it.
As I rose out of the turn, my elbow blade ripped across its cheekbone.
Fury ran bright through the steel. Golden light webbed over the first soldier’s chest, and it came apart before the blood could finish leaving the cut.
Eryndor was already past me. Level. Exact.
His blade slid up beneath a second soldier’s guard and punched clean through the sternum.
He wrenched it free, turned with the motion, and opened another across the ribs before it could reach Caden’s blind side.
No wasted force. No wasted rage. Just ruthless economy.
Ahead of us, Caden tore through another knot of soldiers. One lunged. He caught the male by the face and drove him backward so hard the impact folded two more bodies beneath him. A blade came for his ribs. His Mirror-Fire hit first.
She came in from the right like a nightmare loosed.
Obsidian claws tore through one soldier’s back and skewered him into the ravaged terrain.
Her jaws closed around another before he could turn, crushing armor and bone in one violent snap.
Then silver-white fire erupted from her throat in a wild, ravaging burst, swallowing the void soldiers pressing in from the flank.
For one blinding second her scales caught the battlefield and threw it back exposed and true.
Soldiers recoiled from their own reflections—some dropping weapons, some turning on each other.
A void dragon faltered mid-dive, as if the black mirror had named something it couldn't survive knowing.
Umbra took the left.
She did not descend so much as slam herself into the war.
Teeth. Fire. Fury made flesh. Her roar rolled over the field, and Dragonborn warriors near us rallied at the sound, surging into the openings she carved.
Between Umbra’s red-gold devastation and Caden’s Mirror-Fire’s cold annihilation, our flanks held for three precious seconds.
Three seconds was an eternity with Caden in motion.
He was already twenty paces ahead.
I sprinted to close the gap, boots slipping in blood-soaked mire. A void soldier broke toward me from the side, blade raised, reality flickering around its limbs.
Eryndor killed it before I could. He didn't look—didn't have to.
He'd known where I was the whole time, the way he always knew, the way he'd been tracking me through every second of this since we crossed the line.
He stepped in, opened its throat, kept moving.
His shoulder caught mine hard enough to keep me upright.
“Eyes forward.”
“I am looking forward.”
“You were about to die sideways.”
I grinned and then a void soldier lunged into my periphery.
I sank low and spun through him, hips snapping the turn, every blade strapped to my body carving one unbroken arc.
My elbow slashed across his throat. My knee tore through his thigh as his legs went out from under him.
On the way back up, the blade along my shoulder clipped his jaw hard enough to whip his head sideways.
By the time the turn finished, he was already coming apart.
He hit the ground in pieces, and I was moving before the last of him landed, Dawnrender slick in my hand.
“That’s my girl,” Eryndor beamed, while cutting someone's throat.
I snickered and would have answered, but ahead of us Caden hit the next line.
This time he drew two blades. The effect was immediate and obscene.
He moved through them like a promise finally kept—steel flashing, bodies dropping in pieces too fast for my eyes to hold. A void soldier tried to rematerialize behind him. Caden punched a blade backward through its heart, and kept walking as it fell away into smoke.
“The center’s breaking!” I shouted.
It was true. Not the whole line, not yet—but where Caden passed, the void ranks split around him in visible ruptures.
The King’s soldiers didn’t flee. They couldn’t.
But they hesitated in the smallest ways.
A fraction too slow. A gap where no gap should be.
As if his Vow to keep me alive was already carving space through the army trying to stop us.
That was all we needed.
We claimed the opening and didn't let up.
Caden carved the path, and we widened it behind him—me wielding Fury and steel, Eryndor with that cold, ruthless precision that turned every overreach into a corpse.
Umbra and the Mirror-Fire held the flanks in fire and ruin.
Ground vanished beneath us in hard, stolen increments. Twenty paces. Then more.
The King grew larger as I approached.
He stood at the center of his forces like a monument. Tall. Still. Watching me come with the patient interest of a predator observing something small and stupid wandering into its territory.
He smiled. Of course he did.
Behind me, the battle still raged. I could hear it—the dying, the erasure, the sound of a war we were losing by the minute.
Umbra roared to my left. Silver-white fire tore across the right flank.
Steel rang behind me in Eryndor’s rhythm—strike, turn, kill.
Even if this worked, the King would be dead and his army would still be standing.
The void dragons would still be erasing riders from the sky.
Thousands of void soldiers would still be dismantling everything we had left.
We'd kill the King and watch everyone we loved die anyway.
I looked at him. He looked at me.
Fifteen steps.
A soldier broke from the line ahead. I palmed a throwing knife from my belt and put it through his eye without slowing my stride. He dropped. I stepped over him.
The King’s smile widened.
Behind me, Eryndor was a fault line held in place by sheer will.
Every instinct in him was screaming to put his body between me and the King—and he was refusing each one, one at a time.
I could feel him the way you feel a storm that hasn’t decided yet—the pressure of it, the weight, the focused restraint of a male holding himself back one heartbeat at a time.
I didn’t look back. Looking back would have broken him.
Ten.
Somewhere behind me, Caden hit another line. I heard the bodies fall more than I saw them.
I could see the King’s eyes now. Grey like Eryndor's but colder. Empty. Eyes that no longer recognized people as people—only resources to be used or obstacles to be removed.
Seven.
The void energy around him thickened. I could feel it on my skin—that wrongness, that absence, the air warping as reality bent toward him.
Five.
I stopped. Close enough that his shadow fell across my face.
"Daughter of the Red Wolf." The King's voice was silk and poison. "You've saved me the trouble of hunting you down."
He raised his hand. Void energy gathered in his palm, darkness thickening between his fingers. The same power that had erased mountains. Erased soldiers. Erased everything it touched.
I glanced at Caden. He met my gaze and shook his head. Not yet. Of course. The King would never trust surrender. He’d want to break something first. Alright then, let’s dance, old man.
His eyes sparkled with malice.
"Your mother ran," he said. "At the end. Did you know that? The great Red Wolf. She ran like a frightened animal."
My fangs descended and I let my Fury run wild. I was going to enjoy this while I could. “Liar,” I hissed. I snapped a star from my vambrace and sent it straight at his face.
He lifted an arm to block it.
That was the mistake. I was already moving.
I dropped low and turned hard, hips driving the rotation, one hand skimming the dirt for balance as I scythed around his front leg. The blade strapped to the back of my heel kissed the tendon above his ankle and sliced clean through.
My braid whipped with the rotation, the razors woven through it opening a thin red line across his thigh on the pass.
For one beautiful second, the King folded.
His weight buckled, the leg giving under him as blood sheeted down into his boot.
I came up out of the spin grinning and thrust Dawnrender up under his jaw.