Chapter 30 #3
That’s when the Swarm Knights began to dive bomb them. They’d furl their wings and just drop into a near vertical dive, a slender blade of gray slashing out before them.
The first came as a complete surprise, silent and incredibly fast. Vic and Harald were saved by his spider Servitor, which launched itself with predatory hunger to intercept the Knight, catching it in its black pedipalps and knocking it off its path.
The spider landed, spun the five-foot tall Knight about to bite it again and again, and then Harald and Vic were past.
Starfire Bastion yet burned overhead. Harald watched the skies.
When the next Knight dove, he hit it with a Demonic Edge, hoping that would be enough, but while the arc of black fire carved a mortal wound into the ivory armor, it didn’t kill the foe—the beetle warrior came in with blinding speed only for Vic to thrust Harald aside, sidestep and skewer the flying monster with impossible adroitness, The Point extending into a lance to skewer the monster through the head.
Vic sagged, the pull of the ground still too terrible for his Strength, but Harald slid back in, placed his friend’s arm over his shoulders, and they took off once more.
His spider leaped and attacked again and again, but half the foes it sought to capture were illusions. Then a fire tornado came roaring through like a great burning finger carving a furrow in the rocks, and caught the spider just as it landed, pulling it around and sucking it into its vortex.
Harald felt the second it was snuffed out.
That’s when two Swarm Knights dove at them, coming in from either side. Harald and Vic shoved apart, only for Vic to let out a wailing cry as the gravitational pull on him disappeared, leaving him victim to the tornado’s inhaling grasp.
Harald abandoned his defense to dive and catch hold of Vic’s arm as the Rapier Regent’s feet were lifted off the ground toward the heart of the tornado. The curving column of living fire spun ever closer, sucking at Vic, whose eyes were bulging in horror.
That’s when the two Swarm Knights hit.
The flew past Harald on both sides, gray blades blurring, and he felt twin cuts slash open his body. Form of the Black Throne blunted the attacks, so that instead of cutting him in twain, they merely carved inch deep furrows across his body.
Which immediately lit up with Sam’s healing Warden’s Pulse.
“Don’t let go!” screamed Vic, releasing The Point so he could clutch at Harald’s wrist. The tornado was rushing in ever closer, the heat baking Harald’s eyes dry, and that’s when the Swarm Knights high overhead reversed their power.
Instead of sucking him down, the gravitational pull of the ground reversed, making him impossibly light.
Harald felt his feet lift off the ground as both of them rose toward the infernal vortex.
“No!” screamed Vic. “Let me go!”
Harald flailed, but he fought Vic, refusing to let the tornado claim him.
The fiery column bent over them both, filling the sky, causing Harald’s shadowed flesh to grow heated even as Vic’s tunic combusted and his skin began to turn an angry red—and that’s when a gigantic stone hand clasped Harald by the ankle and yanked him back.
The Gauntlet Golem.
It hurled Harald and Vic away like a rope, both of them curving around and then flying in the opposite direction.
Harald hit the rocky floor, rolled, came to a stop and rose to his elbows in time to see the golem gaze up at the towering column. It was four times wider than the golem, ten times taller, its roar world-consuming, its heat absolute.
The golem’s shoulders shook slightly, for all the world as if it were chuckling. It crouched, summoned both blades of white fire, and then stomped.
A plinth of stone beneath its very feet erupted upward, launching the golem straight up and into the tornado.
“No!” screamed Harald, scrambling to his feet.
He caught glimpses of the golem swirling within the tornado, blades outstretched so that they threshed the tornado’s innards.
Eyes wide, knowing he had to move, that the golem would die at any moment, Harald resisted Vic’s tugs to watch—and then the tornado imploded, the fabric of its crimson surface shredding like old cloth, the flames whoomphing upward in disappearing fragments so that the golem dropped back down to the ground, its stone form blackened, blazing blades still in each fist, to fall to one knee.
Vic stopped tugging on Harald’s shoulder.
The golem rose, allowed one blade to disappear, and then, very deliberately, dusted some cinders off one of its broad shoulders.
“That golem of yours is the best,” said Vic. “The style. The attitude. I want to be his friend.”
“Watch out!” screamed Sam from up ahead, and the violence and cacophony of the battle came rushing back.
Sam was perhaps halfway across the valley, her clothing scorched, her fist burning within the center of a golden sphere Harald had never seen before, and she was pointing at the castle.
The castle from which Swarm Knights were still flying forth, but whose numbers had now been joined by much larger figures.
Figures whose dread form could only belong to the Dusk Generals.