CHAPTER 18 #4
Adrian wasn’t about to let that happen. He had to find a way to help, some edge he could push to shift the fight in Bex’s favor.
Gilgamesh was still in his casual blacksmithing clothes, so he couldn’t be taking this battle seriously.
Abusing that overconfidence was probably the winning move, but how?
Gilgamesh was using sorcery with no incantations or pauses, and his one sword was moving faster than both of Bex’s put together.
As more and more of Bex’s blood hit the ground, all Adrian could think was that this whole situation was supremely unfair. Where was Gilgamesh getting all that power from? Was every bit of his body made of quintessence now, or—
A fiery explosion blasted Adrian out of his thoughts.
He wasn’t sure what had caused it, but Bex suddenly had only one sword, and she was using her free arm to pull her burning body as close to Gilgamesh’s as possible.
Adrian could see the king struggling to push her off, but Bex was stuck to him like flaming napalm, and the brighter she burned, the more of Gilgamesh vanished.
Literally vanished. The hands she was holding on to Gilgamesh with must’ve been hot enough to vaporize, because the shadow of his body was disappearing into Bex’s light at an astonishing rate.
His arm turned to ash as Adrian watched, followed by his shoulder and then his torso.
Bex had only been blasting for a few seconds, but at that temperature, a few seconds was all it took to reduce the Eternal King, the slayer of gods, Heaven’s immortal tyrant, to dust.
Bex looked as surprised by that as Adrian.
She was shining too brightly for him to make out her expressions, but the glowing hand she’d used to grab Gilgamesh was fumbling through the suddenly-empty air.
She turned around after that, her flaming head moving in a circle, but other than ashes, the sky was empty.
He really did seem to be gone. Dead! Finished!
Adrian was about to leap out of his hiding place with a whoop of joy when Gilgamesh suddenly reappeared twenty paces in front of him.
It felt like seeing a ghost. He’d watched Gilgamesh’s body turn to ash with his own two eyes, but the Eternal King was suddenly right there, standing next to the destroyed table.
It wasn’t because he’d teleported to safety either.
Adrian had been looking right at him when it happened.
He’d seen the king’s body reform itself from the inside out, starting with his bones before moving on to organs, then muscles, then skin.
By the time he’d capped his miraculous resurrection off with a suit of glittering golden armor, fewer than three seconds had passed.
It’d happened so quickly that part of Adrian was sure his eyes must’ve made a mistake, but the rest of him—the witch who’d been trained to be watchful from birth—knew what he’d seen.
Gilgamesh had just resurrected himself from the dead, and he hadn’t used quintessence to do it.
Adrian had seen his body rebuild itself from the inside out, and his blood had been unmistakably red.
Other than his bones, nothing white had been involved.
There’d been no giant bag of quintessence coins or gallons of liquid magic.
He’d simply reformed himself out of empty air, but… that was impossible.
Adrian dropped his eyes to the ground. He could hear his father saying something cocky, but he didn’t have a spare brain cell left to interpret the words.
Every thought in his head was focused on what he’d just witnessed: the miracle everything he knew about sorcery told him shouldn’t have happened, yet clearly had.
Even his aunt Lydia, the Old Wife of the Bones herself, couldn’t pull off a total resurrection on a vaporized corpse, and while sorcery’s claim to fame was doing the impossible, the sorcerer still needed fuel to do it.
Gilgamesh himself had taught Adrian that, so how had he pulled it off?
Where was he getting that insane amount of magic from if it wasn’t in his blood?
“Adrian?”
The whisper was soft and close, and Adrian looked over with a jump to see Boston crouching on his shoulder.
“If this is about getting to safety, I already know,” Adrian said, heading off the lecture. “But I can’t leave Bex alone to—”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” his familiar assured him. “We both agreed to this fight, which means no running. I only interrupted you because I saw something.”
He pointed his paw at the row of glowing glass-and-gold boxes above them. “You see that prince on the corner?”
“Not really,” Adrian said, craning his head back. “That tank looks empty to me.”
“Precisely,” Boston said with a lash of his tail. “It wasn’t empty when we got here. I didn’t see what happened with everything else that was going on, but I remember distinctly that every tank on this wall was full. Now there’s one vacant right after Gilgamesh—”
“Brought himself back to life,” Adrian finished excitedly, stepping back to get a better look at the giant display case. “That’s how he’s doing it. He must be using the injured princes as replacements!”
“It’s too soon to jump to conclusions,” Boston warned, but his green eyes sparkled with excitement.
“If that were the case, though, it would explain why this wall is here. I thought it was odd that Gilgamesh was storing his injured sons so close to him when he had no problem sending off all the functional ones to die stopping us. If he’s using them to give himself extra lives, though, it all makes sense. ”
“It makes perfect sense,” Adrian agreed, ignoring the odd darkness in the sky as he pressed his face against the glass wall of the closest tank.
Like all the princes he’d seen up here, the man floating inside it was mortally wounded, with stab holes through his stomach, heart, and head.
Now that Adrian knew what he was looking at, he could practically see Drox’s old shaved-down shape in the puncture wounds.
This prince had definitely been killed by one of Bex’s previous incarnations, probably not even that long ago.
But while the lack of scar tissue proved that this prince had died from his wounds, there was no white blood clouding the tank’s beautifully glowing blue water.
If he turned his head sideways and pressed his cheek flat against the freezing cold glass, Adrian could actually see the liquid quintessence shining inside the prince’s severed arteries, and that made him more excited than anything.
“I don’t think they’re just replacements,” he whispered. “All of these princes still have their quintessence blood! That’s how he’s able to—"
“Adrian,” Boston interrupted in a terrified voice, his black ears flat against his skull as he stared at the sky. “Do you see what’s happening above—”
“No, and I’m not going to look,” Adrian interrupted, keeping his eyes firmly on the tank in front of him.
“Bex is strong. I know she can handle whatever Gilgamesh throws, but she can’t win if he’s got a whole wall full of extra lives while she only has one.
It’s our job to level the playing field, and this is how we do that. ”
He smacked his hand against the glass tank.
“The princes aren’t just Gilgamesh’s backups,” he announced, grabbing Boston’s head and forcing him to look. “They’re his fuel tanks. This is how he’s able to cast so much magic despite having no quintessence in his own body. He’s using their bodies and blood instead.”
It all made sense now. Adrian had never seen sorcery on the scale Gilgamesh was throwing around.
He’d assumed that was due to the experience difference between the master who’d invented the system and his students, but it still felt like too much.
It’d taken all the quintessence in Adrian’s body to grow his new tree, but the magic Gilgamesh was doing now—endless teleportation, the complete reconstruction of his body, whatever that giant shadow before had been—was even bigger.
Pulling off that many miracles back-to-back required more quintessence than any single person could hold, but Gilgamesh wasn’t doing it as a single person.
He was fueling his magic using an entire array of princes, and now that Adrian knew that, he knew how to bring him down.
“Cover me,” he told Boston.
“Cover you with what?” the cat cried, digging his claws into Adrian’s coat as the witch dropped flat on the stone. “There’s no forest here!”
“There’s about to be,” Adrian promised as he pressed his entire body into the ground. “Just keep your eyes on the fight and bite me if something’s about to hit us. I’ll do the rest.”
Boston growled deep in his throat. Adrian hoped it was a growl of approval, because he’d already turned his attention inward, leaving the chaos of Heaven’s pinnacle behind to focus everything on his heart, which was still beating far below at the base of his new tree.
Through its deep roots, he could feel the battle raging in the main Blackwood grove.
Not enough to tell how the fight was going, but it made him feel terrible about asking for resources.
He was about to go see if there was an outer grove he could pull from instead when the forest itself forced its way into his mind.
It felt like someone had shoved a handful of roots inside his skull.
The Great Blackwood was famous for showing up where it was least expected, but Adrian had never felt it do anything like this before.
It was almost like someone was using a spell to thrust the forest’s magic directly into his hands.
Not that Adrian was complaining, since that was exactly what he needed, but the timing was too perfect not to be suspicious.