CHAPTER 9 #3
Lys’s answer to that was to toss a fir cone over his head.
The prince didn’t even notice it flying by, but he heard when it bounced off the branch behind him.
His head snapped toward the sound at once, which meant he was looking the wrong direction when Lys swung up from the branch beneath him to drag their new claws across the prince’s unguarded wings.
They didn’t manage to slice them to ribbons, alas, but the prince still bellowed in pain.
By the time he whirled around, however, Lys was already gone, swooping off on silent wings to a completely different branch several feet above him.
They were about to drop down for another swipe they hoped would do some real damage when the prince suddenly pressed his white dagger to his lips.
“Reveal your desires, enemy of the Divine King.”
The whispered words were barely louder than the noise of the tree itself, but the moment they left the prince’s lips, Lys’s entire body started glowing red.
This sent them into a panic for a second, because the prince’s words hadn’t sounded like sorcery.
The recitation wasn’t long enough, and the prince had been speaking English, not ancient Sumerian.
Lys was starting to worry they were facing another Leander-style genius caster when the prince lowered his twitching dagger to his side, and they finally realized what had happened.
This man was the Prince of Lust. That meant his sword had once belonged to the Queen of Lust, Lys’s native ruler.
Not that Lys had ever met their monarch or knew what her sword did, but they did know how lust-demon magic worked.
Changing shape was only the trappings. What actually made a lust demon a lust demon was the ability to know instinctively what others desired.
Lys did it all the time when they picked their targets, but they’d never had that same power directed back at them.
Now, though, their intense desire to destroy this prince and everything he stood for was shining through their camouflaged skin like a beacon, lighting them up for the entire world to see as the prince spun around.
“Got you,” he said, flashing Lys a grin as he hurled his white dagger at their head.
Dodging wasn’t nearly as easy this time.
It was only because Lys’s new hook-claws were already dug deep into the tree bark that they managed to fling their body out of the way in time.
They’d just finished catching their balance when the Blade of Gilgamesh flipped in midair and flew at Lys again.
No matter what direction they dodged, the white blade flew after them like a hornet, so Lys leaped off the tree entirely to go for the only cover they knew would stop it.
They jumped onto the prince’s back.
The bastard had been gleefully watching the chase from a safe distance.
He was so engrossed in Lys’s imminent death that he didn’t even notice they were headed straight at him until Lys grabbed him by the wings.
Since the prince was still flying, this meant both he and Lys went tumbling toward the ground.
Lys was ready to ride him all the way to the crunch at the bottom, but the prince grabbed a branch at the last second, almost ripping it off the tree with his weight before the supple greenwood finally stopped his fall.
“You’ll pay for that,” he snarled, calling the flying dagger back to his hand so he could stab it over his shoulder at the demon who was still clinging to his back.
“That’s what they all say,” Lys taunted, shifting their body around the prince’s strikes as they readied their own sin-iron dagger.
Not to stab him in the back. They’d already learned the hard way with Leander that the sin-iron blade was too short and the prince’s armor too thick for that attack to work.
Lys needed an easier target, so they stole a move from the war demons and went for the wings instead, slamming the edge of their black knife into the tough cord of bones and sinew that connected the prince’s left wing to his back.
Even with sin iron, it was hell to cut through.
Given how many times Lys’s own wings had been injured, they’d assumed it’d be easy, but cutting through the prince’s wing was like trying to saw through a steel cable.
Maybe that toughness was why his wingbeats had seemed so stiff, but Lys was committed to the attack.
Now that their skin looked like it’d been irradiated, hiding was off the table.
It was offense or death, so Lys went after the prince’s wing like a mad badger, stabbing and tearing with their short knife until, all of a sudden, the prince’s entire wing joint came off in their hand with an extremely satisfying pop.
His scream was even sweeter. The Prince of Lust bellowed in pain and fury as he let go of the branch he’d caught to drop them both to the ground.
He was already angling to land on top, but Lys changed their body again as they fell, sliding around the prince’s torso like a snake before leaping off him entirely to fly back up into the air.
They almost didn’t make it. The reason Lys didn’t change their body this drastically all the time was because it was exhausting.
The entire fight couldn’t have lasted more than three minutes, but they were already so tired they could barely get their wings open in time to check their fall.
The energy from the witch’s tonic was long gone, leaving them coasting on pure adrenaline as they flapped back over to grab the tree trunk.
But while it sounded like the prince had hit the ground nice and hard, Lys didn’t even have to look down to know he was still alive.
He was already kicking back to his feet in the bloody moss when they finally turned around.
The prince regrew the wing Lys had ripped off a few seconds later, pushing it out of his back with the carelessness of a shapeshifter who didn’t have to pay for his changes.
The price had already been covered for him by the white quintessence dripping down his golden armor.
He could clearly do this all day, but Lys was already running close to empty, which meant it was time to make a choice.
Keeping their claws locked into the tree, Lys returned to their original shape and reached up to tap the comm in their ear.
No one had said anything over the radio since Adrian had asked for help, but the thunder was still booming from the palace, so the fight there couldn’t be finished yet.
If Lys called for backup now, they’d undermine Bex’s assault.
If they kept fighting the prince like this, though, they’d lose the war of attrition.
Escaping was also a no-go with their body still glowing bright red from the Blade of Lust’s power.
Even if they’d been invisible, though, Lys wasn’t about to leave this bastard alone to finish carving his spell into Adrian’s tree.
Those roots were the key to saving the people Bex spent all her lives fighting for.
The people Lys had fought for for the last two hundred years.
That decided it. If this battle was their last, Lys was determined to go down swinging.
It was the same thing they’d sworn to the first Bex after she slaughtered their warlock in front of them.
Everything Lys had done since—their devotion to their queen, the countless minions of Gilgamesh they’d slaughtered, the slaves they’d freed—it had all been for this moment.
This was the eve of the victory demonkind had been fighting fifty centuries to reach, and there was no way in all the sunken Hells that Lys was going to let a puny little backlines saboteur of a prince take it away from them.
The resolve had barely crystallized in their head when Lys launched off the tree like a spear.
They folded their wings as they fell, ignoring the pain in their shoulder as they dove past the prince to land hard in the moss behind him.
They kicked up the moment they hit, throwing wet moss and mud into the prince’s eyes to hide their arm as it swept around to stab the full four inches of the sin-iron dagger straight into the joint of the prince’s armored knee.
It was the same hit Lys had taught Bex to use on war demons.
It didn’t work quite as well on a son of Gilgamesh, but they still got the prince to stumble.
The moment he did, Lys shot back to their feet and used their now superior height to reach over the prince’s shoulder and slice through the leather strap that held his helmet in place.
They snatched the golden protection off his head next, flinging the helmet off to the side as they dropped low to dodge the counter.
The blow came in like a freight train. The prince’s dagger flew over Lys’s head close enough to cut the tips off their rounded horns.
The flash of pain that followed darkened Lys’s vision, reminding them that going toe-to-toe against a prince was exactly the sort of stupid, suicidal behavior they’d always warned Bex to avoid.
There was no getting out now, though, so instead, Lys went all-in, twisting their body into shapes even lust demons weren’t meant to take to make sure they always stayed one step ahead.
When the prince came in for a grab, Lys changed the structure of their shoulder to allow their arm to swing past its natural rotation and twist him off.
When he swung at their head, Lys collapsed all the space in their spine, shrinking their height by a foot so that his dagger flew harmlessly over their head.
They reinforced their rib cage with bone plating, doubled the size of their lungs to process more air, even turned their normally prehensile tail into a bony needle so they could stab it between the scales of the prince’s armor.