Chapter 74
The rain had turned into a storm, lashing against Serguei's skin and blurring his vision.
He stood at the forest's edge, where the trees gave way to barren, open ground.
In one hand, he gripped the Fury of the Fallen, the long sword that had been his companion in the Night Squadron.
It was forged from iron—the only metal impossible to manipulate.
His gaze was fixed on a point about a kilometer ahead, where the gray outer wall trembled and shook, controlled by an extraordinarily powerful gift. Sections gave way, and concrete blocks tumbled down, making the trees shudder when they crashed to the ground.
The psychic never thought he'd live to see this, but here he was, witnessing the fall of one of the three walls. The ruin of an entire city hung in the balance, depending on how long he could keep his heart beating.
On his way here, he'd considered stopping the attack before the barrier collapsed, but the damage was already too great to ignore.
Besides, fighting a psychic from a distance was about as effective as swinging a sword at the wind.
So he chose to prepare for what lay behind the walls.
He took a deep breath, centered himself, and dove into his reservoir of power.
Another resounding impact shook the beams, and this time the entire structure gave way, plunging downward all at once.
Through the dust—swallowed by the rain—and the accumulated rubble, Serguei spotted a massive hole in the city's defense, large enough for ten people to walk through side by side.
He swallowed hard as the metal foundation groaned, splitting open like the gates of hell and shoving aside the shattered remains of the wall to create a passage for the beings outside.
For a moment, everything fell silent and still as he stared at the gaping breach.
Soon, the first beast set foot on Interian soil.
It was black as an eclipse and reeked of filthy sewers.
Its eyes swept the surroundings, searching for movement.
Behind it came all the others, pouring from the black hole as if spat out by darkness itself.
Their numbers swelled, and by the time they stopped coming, the psychic had counted roughly two thousand.
They growled, eyes locked on him, clearly eager to attack but still awaiting an order.
The psychic could read the simple command embedded in their minds: kill the girl in the cabin and feed on any living being they found in the outer area.
Whoever commanded them had starved them, so today's feast would taste all the sweeter.
Atop the wall, something caught his attention.
From where he stood, the image wasn't clear, but he didn't need to see to know what it was.
He felt the rot and despair in his mind and bones.
She steadied herself on a section of the barrier that remained intact.
Serguei noticed the belt around her waist. Six metal chains hung from it, probably titanium or aluminum.
The chains undulated around her like extensions of her own body.
The psychic took in her form, her clothes, her hair.
It was all as he remembered: every curve and angle, even the mole above her upper lip. It hurt to look.
She assessed him in turn, so regal and cold she might have been an ice statue silhouetted against the lightning on the horizon. They locked eyes in an unfriendly greeting as the carniceals spread across the territory, moving to surround the psychic.
Standing in the rain and mud, Serguei finally understood the queen's plan.
For the last six months, he'd wondered why the Drutes forces had retreated into the gorge, allowing the Interian army to spread deeper and deeper into the forests.
Here was the answer: the queen had been preparing her trap, positioning countless people around Drutes, setting up a spectacular feast for her minions.
And Elitium had walked right into it, because now it was losing half its squadrons.
Serguei gathered a portion of his gift and sent a message across the entire continent, transmitting it to all the psychics strategically positioned to receive such warnings, alerting the nations about the carniceals.
It was too late for Interion, but the other cities still had a chance to avoid losses.
When he'd done all he could, he faced the army of beasts and realized just how alone and outmatched he was.
About five hundred meters behind him stood a cabin where his children fought against an evil as great as this one.
He knew he couldn't fail—couldn't bear to add another failure to his already enormous list. Serguei had understood, since the day he found that creature in the tunnels, that this moment would come.
That was why he'd sat in that damned chair all these years, put up with the idiotic king and his petty orders: to train Zion, prepare him for an evil even greater than his own father, and leave him in the safest place on the continent, as far as possible from the city of the descendants.
Because Serguei knew—had always known—that this thing would come to fulfill what it had promised in the tunnels and in Kyller's memories.
And he didn't want the opening front of this battle to be the city of Insaad.
He wouldn't allow more descendant blood to be spilled when the monster from the tunnels followed Zion toward his people.
That was why he hadn't left the boy there, not with an attack so imminent.
So he'd brought him to Interion, where he could keep him safe and wait for the queen to take the bait.
The psychic had been preparing for this day; he just never imagined the trigger would be Kyller, not Zion.
The queen must have sensed his determination, because from where she stood, she raised her hand. Then her lips moved in a simple command.
“Kill him.”
It was like a dam breaking. All at once, the carniceals surged toward him.
Serguei regarded them like a complex puzzle, calculating what this would cost him.
He drove the tip of his sword into the mud.
A blade would be worthless against that army.
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, finishing the task of gathering all the power he'd managed to tap in the last few minutes.
The beasts ran. Golden power bathed the world in overwhelming chaos.
Lightning slashed through the heavy darkness, and Serguei dove deeper and deeper into himself, branching his gift in all directions, letting his mind stretch into the cold night.
“Closer,” he whispered to himself as the beasts approached, devouring the muddy ground between them.
Their heavy paws shook the earth, creating a war song that could be heard throughout the city.
The psychic remembered that sensation: expanding outward, touching each soul in his path, feeling the mind of every living being within reach, grasping mental threads as if they were marionettes.
Just a few more meters. It was glorious and terrifying all at once.
Exactly how he'd describe his existence.
When the beasts were five meters away, closing in around him in a circle, Serguei opened his eyes.
Gray storms danced in his irises as he raised his hands and grasped an invisible connection.
He could see it clearly—that larger thread linking one person to all those creatures.
He seized it with his mind and watched the queen shudder, as if the psychic had grabbed hold of something inside her.
Then, as if snapping an energy cable, Serguei pulled at the power, lowering his hands and severing the mental connection the woman had with the beasts.
In that same instant, his power crashed down on the carniceals like a network of complex threads in what he called the “mental loom,” seizing control of that sea of consciousness.
The title of Jupiter's greatest psychic didn't come from cheap tricks and petty illusions, but from this ability to dominate entire masses.
“Stop.” He commanded when the first carniceal opened its mouth, inches from his neck. His voice, amplified by the power in his veins, rumbled through the storm like a thousand drums.
Immediately, the beasts obeyed, as if they'd all been switched off at once.
Serguei's breath came fast, the creature's rotten breath hot against his face.
He felt the queen battering against his mind, clawing at his mental shield.
He swatted her away like a fly. They were too far apart to cause each other any real damage.
Serguei closed his eyes before that dark army, fortifying the connection. Elitium's decree echoed in his mind: you can never again take the life of a fae, human, or gorgon, under penalty of death by blood pact. But those creatures... they didn't count.
He opened his eyes, feeling all those filthy minds trapped within his own consciousness.
The weight of the corrupted energy nearly made him stagger, but he silenced them.
Instead of focusing on the minds, he focused on his gift, which had finally found a loophole.
It was like being sober after years of drunkenness.
Serguei felt whole. Free. He forced his mind into each twisted consciousness, and when two hundred years of docility met two thousand potential murderers of his children, the psychic drew on the power in his veins—a storm accumulated over decades. And whispered:
“Destroy yourselves.”
The first carniceals turned on each other. Then the world erupted in ashes.
Δ
“Twenty more men incoming!” Nayra's voice rang out as she ran through the hospital with more admission papers, pushing every gurney she could toward the entrance. Ambrose hurried after her.
“Sort them by color: green for the lightly wounded, red for urgent cases, and black for those who are nearly gone.”
“Yes, sir.”