Chapter 35 #2
I summoned the shadows from the corners of the vast room, dragging them into a swirling vortex in the centre of the lobby. I fed it my anger, my fear for Selene, my hatred for this place.
I released it.
The blast tore through the central installation, buckling the spinning silver rings and shearing them apart. Twisted metal sprayed across the atrium as the shockwave blew out the reception windows, sending thousands of glass shards raining against the marble floor.
That got their attention.
The lights in the lobby sputtered and died, replaced instantly by emergency crimson strobes. The regular lifts locked down with audible clunks.
“That should do it,” Goran grunted, blocking a strike from a stun-baton with his forearm and backhanding the attacker into unconsciousness.
Magic charged the atmosphere. The central lift bank chimed, and the gilded doors slid open.
Varessia Quinn stepped out. She wore an expression of icy annoyance, like a CEO interrupted during a merger. Her pristine white suit glowed against the red emergency lighting.
Six guards flanked her—Umbrakynn elites. They towered over the rank and file, their eyes swimming with a milky, augmented haze and their tactical armour crackling with active shielding.
Varessia surveyed the wreckage of her lobby—the shattered glass, the groaning guards, the three of us standing in a pool of shadows.
Her eyes locked on me. A faint, cold smile touched her lips.
“Riven,” she projected, her voice amplified to cut through the noise. “The staged arrest was a clever ruse. But killing my retrieval team? That was simply expensive.”
She descended the mezzanine stairs, her guards moving in a fluid phalanx around her.
“And you brought accomplices to share the bill. How thoughtful.”
I moved forward, letting the shadows coil around my shoulders like a cloak. My hands were empty of steel, but my fingers were wreathed in dark smoke.
“Stand aside, Varessia,” I said, my voice low and final.
“You always were a bad investment,” she replied, stopping ten yards away. The augmented guards spread out, weapons raised. “Liquidate them. I have a schedule to keep.”
She flicked her wrist.
Ice—sharp and jagged—erupted from the marble floor, forming a barricade behind us, cutting off the exit.
We were locked in.
“Goran. Dane,” I murmured, not taking my eyes off her. “Centre.”
We formed a triangle. Back to back.
The Anvil was set. Now we just had to survive the strike.
Frost crept across the atrium as Varessia flicked her fingers. At the signal, the six augmented guards rushed forward—a wall of tactical armour and chemically induced rage.
“Now,” I said.
Beside me, the air warped.
Dane surrendered to the change, his body twisting with the wet tear of reinforced canvas and webbing. He burst through his tactical gear in a spray of tatters, landing as a midnight-black wolf with amber eyes.
Beside him, Goran shrugged off his trench coat, letting it pool safely on the marble. Then he expanded. The transformation was a violent, primal event that cracked the stone floor. He rose as a massive beast—twice Dane’s size—his rough coat encased in a thick shield that hummed with power.
He roared, a sound that shook the window frames, and a translucent barrier of old magic snapped into place around him and Dane.
“Kill them,” Varessia commanded.
The guards opened fire. Kinetic blasts and suppression rounds hammered into Goran’s magical shield, rippling across the surface like rain on water.
Goran lunged. He hit the line of guards like a battering ram. Two men were thrown into the air, their armour crumpling like tin foil under the impact of his shoulder.
Dane was a blur of black motion in his wake. He went low, aiming for the gaps in the armour—knees, throats, groins. He was faster than the eye could track, a shadow with teeth.
I locked my eyes on Varessia.
She stood on the stairs, watching the carnage with a faint sneer. She raised a hand, and whips of inky darkness materialised around her. They lashed out, snapping the air around them, leaving trails of falling frost.
I stood my ground. I threw up a wall of my own Shadow, dense and hungry. Her freezing darkness collided into mine, the impact sounding like a cracking glacier.
“Is that it?” I called out, stepping through the falling mist of shattered magic.
Varessia’s voice cut through the ruin, smooth and perfectly level. “I am barely trying, Riven.”
Two guards broke away from the pack, charging me. They moved with that jerky, augmented speed, batons crackling with electricity.
I sidestepped the first swing, grabbing the guard’s wrist. I clamped down, letting the Shadow invade him. Dark smoke poured from my grip, sinking into his skin.
He screamed as the cold seized his nerves. I spun him, using his body as a shield against the second guard’s strike.
The baton hit his armour with a crack of discharged energy.
I shoved the first guard back, creating space, and swept my hand upward. A tendril of solid darkness lashed out from the floor, snagging the second guard’s ankle and jerking him off balance.
I shoved him hard, sending him stumbling backward—straight into the path of the black wolf.
Dane had just dropped his own opponent. He turned, seeing the threat stumbling towards him. Instinct took over. He launched himself upward, jaws snapping shut on the exposed throat above the gorget.
The bite was brutal, efficient, and final. The guard went down in a spray of crimson, and the wolf stood over him, chest heaving, amber eyes wild with adrenaline.
I turned back to the centre. Goran was fighting two at once.
He took a punishing blow to the flank from a shock-baton, the smell of singed fur filling the air, but he didn’t even flinch.
He snapped his jaws, crushing a guard’s arm, then swiped with a paw that tore through ballistic armour like paper.
The lobby was a slaughterhouse of noise—alarms blaring, wolves snarling, the wet thud of bodies hitting stone.
The numbers were dropping. Four down.
“Useless,” Varessia hissed.
She descended the stairs, abandoning her perch. The air around her darkened, draining the colour and heat from the air. She summoned a void so cold it made the marble floor crack with thermal shock.
She swept her hands out. A tide of total darkness rolled across the floor.
Goran roared, throwing up a golden barrier to protect Dane, but the impact slid him backward, his claws gouging deep furrows in the marble as frost raced up his fur.
I planted myself in front of the wave. I slashed my hand downward, cleaving the onslaught in two.
Varessia stopped ten feet away. Her pristine white suit was untouched, but her eyes were wild, violet light bleeding from the pupils.
“This effort is statistically insignificant,” she stated, her voice distorted by the supercooled air. “You are a write-off, Riven. A liability I should have liquidated years ago.”
“I’m the one still standing,” I said, walking towards her to force her focus.
She laughed—a sharp, mirthless sound. “And yet, your formation is incomplete. Where is the girl? Did you leave the most valuable piece on the board unguarded?”
I stiffened.
A sudden spike of genuine alarm pierced the battle haze. We hadn’t been clever enough. The plan relied on Varessia’s arrogance blinding her, on the assumption that she would focus solely on the violence in front of her. She was auditing the scene. She had anticipated the flank.
She smiled, cruel, relishing the jolt of panic she must have seen in my eyes.
“Is she fast enough? My containment team is already sweeping the upper levels. When they secure the asset… I instructed them to prolong the process. I want her screams to reach you down here.”
Red rage flooded my vision, obliterating all tactical thought. It was purely primal.
The shadows obeyed my fury. Overhead lights shattered, plunging the lobby into gloom. The darkness swelled, thickening into a rising tide.
“You won’t touch her,” I snarled.
I lashed out with a whip of solidified shadow, aiming for her throat.
She stood there, unmoved. She didn’t laugh this time. She watched the lethal arc of darkness come for her, and with a lazy flick of her wrist, she unravelled it into harmless mist.
“There it is,” she said softly, her eyes gleaming with grim satisfaction. “The pulse I haven’t felt in twenty years.”
She took a slow, deliberate step down the stairs.
“After the lab explosion, you came back to us… muted. Empty. All I could feel were sparks of anger, burying the real power deep where we couldn’t touch it.”
I gathered the darkness again, but she held up a hand, her voice laced with vindication.
“I told Korenth,” she said. “I told him you were lying to us. He called it trauma. I called it strategy.”
She gestured to the ruins of the lobby, her expression twisting into a sneer.
“That is why you were barred from the new facility, Riven. Why we buried the Calysteri experiments. I couldn’t risk you sabotaging the work again. I was right to prevent a second collapse.”
She shook her head, looking at me with genuine disappointment.
“You played the loyal dog so well. What a waste. If you had just embraced what you are, you could have sat on the throne beside us. You could have been a god, Riven. Instead, you chose to hide in the kennel.”
“I chose not to be a monster,” I spat, bracing my feet.
“And look where that morality got you,” she sneered. “I taught you how to weave darkness, Riven.”
She twisted her wrist.
A spike of black ice slammed into my chest. The blinding pain knocked me backward, sending me skidding across the marble as I gasped for air.
“Did you really think you could use my own lessons against me?” she asked, walking towards me. The shadows in the room bent to her will. They curled around her legs like loyal dogs.
I scrambled to my feet, but she was already there. She threw a wall of force that pinned me against the cracked pillar.
I was outmatched. She was centuries old, and her command of the dark was total.
But I wasn’t just Shadow anymore.
Heat flared in my chest—the scar over my heart burning like a coal. The tether stretched up the spine of the building, connecting me to the golden fire climbing the shaft.
Trust the bond.
I reached for the Light.
I seized on the tether, dragging the dormant golden energy out of my marrow. It felt like swallowing the sun. It seared my veins, foreign and exhilarating.
Varessia raised her hand to finish me. A blade of ice formed in her palm.
“Goodbye, pet.”
I thrust my hand forward.
“No,” I rasped.
I seized the tether, drawing on the wildfire climbing the shaft above.
The air ignited. A blinding, searing lance of pure Gold erupted from my palm.
Varessia’s mask of boredom shattered. Her eyes went wide, the gold reflection burning in her retinas. She had fortified her soul against the dark, but the dawn burned straight through her guard.
The beam of Light smashed through her shadow shields like paper. It hit her square in the chest.
She screamed—a sound of pure agony as the Light cauterised her darkness. She was thrown backward, crashing against the marble pillar. Her white suit scorched black, her skin smoking.
She slid to the floor, gasping, her eyes wide with shock. “How?” she wheezed, clutching her chest. “You are… Dark-born.”
I stepped over her. The golden light faded from my hands, replaced by the icy familiarity of my magic.
“I evolved,” I said.
I didn’t hesitate. I wrapped a tendril of shadow around her neck and twisted.
CRUNCH.
Varessia went limp. The unnatural cold in the room vanished instantly.
I let her drop. She hit the floor in a heap of white silk and broken pride.