Chapter 31
“Dusk Generals,” breathed Harald, straightening and gazing at where the large figures were flying across the sky. “Great.”
“I say that discretion is the better part of valor,” panted Vic. “I say—oh, hello. A new level? Charming!”
“Focus, Vic.” Harald flourished Dawnblade nervously and studied the battlefield before them.
Tornados of flame were chasing his companions, even as tranches of the terrain suddenly compacted as the Swarm Knights layered their gravitational powers over each other, effectively forming invisible walls.
“We need to get to Sam. We need to work together.”
“Ah, about that—damn it, Harald!”
Harald took off at a sprint. Form of the Black Throne made it so that he flowed across the landscape, leaping over gullies and sharp outcroppings, moving lithe and fast as a shadow.
Sam stood ahead, blazing Ashwright’s Vow blade in hand, the Wreath burning upon her brow, the Starfire Bastion bright all around her. She’d chosen not to run ahead—kept glancing directions his way—and when he finally reached her, she turned to face the approaching Generals. “Took you long enough!”
“Ran into a fire tornado, what can I say?” Harald licked his lower lip. The air was baking dry and burning hot. “Which way, do you think?”
“Follow.” Sam’s tone was sharp, precise, and brooked no argument. Just as Vic came limping up, she took off at a run.
The Dusk Generals—there were, what, some twelve or fifteen of them?—split overhead, and five dove toward their little group.
Sam raised her fist, the one encased in golden light, and unleashed her power.
A beam of radiant force so bright it looked sourced directly from the sun flashed out to carve the very air in twain.
It blasted the lead General, causing its layered gowns to burst on fire, its great horned helm to fragment, its slate blue and amber wings to ash.
The General tumbled from the sky, leaving a trail of blackened smoke behind it.
That left four more Generals to descend as Swarm Knights flew in mesmerizing patterns overhead.
Harald summoned his Tyrant’s Halo as he felt the Generals’ presence swamp them, and flung a Demonic Edge up at them, the wide arc disappearing in their midst.
The first General threw a punch as if shadow-boxing from some twenty yards above them, and the ground concussed and exploded, a crater four yards wide blowing up where Sam was running.
She manifested her Shield of Valor just in time and, even so, was driven into the earth beneath its gleaming surface like a nail halfway into a plank. A blast of dirt flew out in a corona from around her, and the other three Generals lifted their fists.
“Golem!” shouted Harald as his Servitor came racing up. “Throw me!”
The golem needed no further prompting. It turned, backpedaled, and cupped its hands together.
Time seemed to slow.
Harald sprinted toward it, leaped, placed his boot in its cupped hands, and was then flung skyward by all the golem’s considerable strength. His body sagged as it absorbed the force, then straightened as a spear.
The Generals punched down at him as he flew right toward them and released a Tenebral Surge at the same time.
Screaming skulls of pure shadow blasted upward and outward from Harald, meeting the concussive wave of force that fell upon him like an avalanche.
Both attacks nullified each other in an explosive detonation, the skulls fragmenting, the shimmering air dissipating, and then Harald was flying through the conflagration zone, closer to the Generals, whose great ridged helms proved to be their actual faces, burning eyes widening as Harald went to release a second Surge.
In that moment, the sweet, agonizingly slow last second of ascent, writing flowed across his vision. A message.
A reward.
A new level.
Harald didn’t have to read it. Didn’t have to decipher his new powers.
He knew intimately what he could now do.
His old power returned to him.
Engaging Sovereign Silence so that the Tyrant’s Halo was further augmented, his enemies’ thoughts and reactions slowed, Harald reached for his old favorite, his most devastating power, and triggered Black Halo.
The air around him came alive with thousands of shards of spinning void glass, broken blades, knives and fragments of the sharpest black, and with a hollow cry of victory willed that they consume the world.
Black Halo exploded outward, flashing forth in every direction and swarming over the Dusk Generals, tearing them apart, shattering their helms, their great layered pauldrons, tearing their wings to shreds, cutting their robed bodies into chunks.
For a moment, the blood-red sunset of Level 37 was eclipsed by an expanding circle of all-consuming night.
Harald flew through the last of the Generals, brought his knees to his chest as he hit the apex of his ascent, then dropped to hit the ground, roll, and came up running.
“Come on!” he cried back to Sam and Vic, who were gaping at him.
His aura flooded out before him. The Swarm Knights’ attempts to manipulate the battlefield from on high were nullified now by Tyrant’s Halo and Sovereign Silence that operated under the blessings of Sam’s Hallowed Advance.
They caught up with a bleeding and burned Nessa, who was cradling her right arm to her chest even as Kársek was eyeing the heavens pensively, rune hammer raised.
“They won’t come close enough,” muttered the dwarf. “Cowards.”
“Run!” shouted Harald, even as a flame tornado came curving around to intercept them.
“Harald!” cried Nessa. “What are you—”
Harald put on speed, raced right at the severing column of livid flame, and at the last leaped with all his augmented strength.
He’d learned a trick from his golem, and just as the heat threatened to bake his eyeballs inside his skull, as the roiling wall of fire came flashing forward to consume him, he detonated Black Halo and Tenebral Surge simultaneously.
The tornado blew away before him, dispersing into ruinous fragments through which he flew, his shadow-flesh absorbing the burns, so that he landed, staggered, and ran on.
“Watch out!” shouted Sam from behind.
Catching his balance, Harald saw that the remaining Dusk Generals had risen higher than the Swarm Knights, who were now lining up to dive at them in tight ranks. Blades burning bright, forms glowing with some magic, they dipped and fell into groups of five.
Harald grinned.
At the last, he took a deep breath again and leaped once more to meet them with Black Halo.
The Knights were torn apart even as the beginnings of some crimson glowing attack was shredded apart.
The castle loomed over them now. The others pounded after him, hurling their own attacks skyward, the Knights coming down in great, endless waves, but each time they drew close, Harald flung a wall of spinning void blades at them and destroyed their assaults.
Then, they were racing up the broken slope, following a badly broken path to a great archway that loomed like a skull’s maw before them, a ragged, rusted portcullis forming the teeth.
Inside, into a bailey, a great square that was open to the sky, and in which stood a Dusk General of tremendous size, a veritable giant, looming some ten yards tall and with wings that covered the entire back wall.
No time to think. Their party ran into the bailey just as the General flung a punch at them. Harald released a Tenebral Surge just as Sam invoked the Starfire Bastion, but it was too late.
A wall of force hit them, lifted them off their feet, flung them back so that along with the entire outer wall of the castle, they burst outward, huge blocks of masonry shattering as they were all flung back down the slope to hit and bounce and turn and roll.
Sam’s Warden’s Pulse immediately began to glow over them all as people groaned and picked themselves up out of the wreckage.
Harald shook his head as something gripped him by the arm and hauled him upright. The Gauntlet Golem, one of its arms torn off, its form badly cracked and battered.
The giant Dusk General moved into view, standing at the lip of the broken wall.
Harald grimaced, snatched up the Dawnblade, and used Veil of Shadows to encase himself in living darkness.
Ran out wide, leaping and scrambling over rocks to come in on its flank.
The Dusk General raised an arm, and overhead its lesser minions began to swirl in the air, forming a complex mandala that poured a luminous red light into its fist.
Harald’s body wasn’t quite right—something about his hip was loose and strange, one of his legs kept trying to bend the wrong way at the knee, and blood so dark it was nearly black was seeping from countless wounds—but he ignored it, came in from the side, just as Sam loosed a Light of Censure at the huge General, who lowered his hand to form a great crimson shield of burning fire that stymied the attack.
Movement on the far side. Vic? The Regent was lithely picking a path closer as well.
Harald came in low and fast just as the General’s shield became a blast of fire as thick and terrifying as a tornado, one birthed from its palm and which splashed indiscriminately across the ruins below.
Nessa screamed, then went abruptly silent.
Harald grimaced, came in fast around the final island of rocks, then saw Vic had beaten him to the punch. Wielding The Point, the Regent popped up from behind a giant rock and called out, “Hello? Is this the way to the Kitty Kat Club?”
The Dusk General looked down and to the side just as Vic grinned manically and surged forward with his Subtle Step, repositioning himself and unleashing a Piercing Lance upward at the giant monster.
He had to be buying Harald an opportunity, sacrificing himself to—
The Dusk General reeled backward, not visibly hurt, but the crimson light around its fist abruptly winking out.
Which meant its shield had to be down, too.
Harald ran forward, and the moment he was in range, unleashed Black Halo and a Tenebral Surge.