The mundanes were on the move, slowly closing in. Many of them, Luke realized, were gripping rocks and large sticks. A few brandished pocket knives.
He thought about snow.
“Fuck the Protocols.” Luke dropped to a defensive crouch, focused all his mana on the agimat in his right hand. “The Auctoritas Magicae can do what they want with me—if they can fucking catch me.” What came next was muttered to himself, like a vow. “I’m getting out of this alive.”
After a beat, Severin closed her eyes. Opened her palms.
Breathed the words of a summons.
There came a sound like a peal of thunder. A blinding light arced forth from the Aether and gathered, sparked around the Martial Magus’s left hand; writhed and swelled, coalescing, unfurling into the shape of Svarog, her famed daemonic greatsword—laser-bright and viciously barbed.
“Back the fuck off,” Luke snarled at the crowd, hoping against hope at least some of them had enough wits left to be scared off by the sight of Severin’s weapon.
No such luck. To the last, they were empty-eyed. Undeterred.
For a moment, stillness weighed on the air. Luke and Severin stood, battle-ready, staring at the mundanes—and the mundanes stared back.
The stasis didn’t last.
A young man in a gray hoodie was first to hurl himself through the door. He clutched a huge rock in both hands and swung it hard toward the top of Luke’s skull.
Luke dodged backward, popped the back of his right hand up in a deflecting move. With a dizzying burst of light, he discharged just enough mana from the agimat in the back of his hand that his attacker’s arm snapped backward, the rock flying from his grip to bounce harmlessly off the wall of the cave.
Luke rebounded with a loose fist and a second, more forceful eruption. His assailant went reeling across the room and slammed into the stone wall, then slumped to the ground.
At her command, Severin’s daemon-sword morphed into a baton. She cracked the mundane on his temple, with just the right amount of force to knock him unconscious.
There was no time to celebrate the victory.
Next came two young women dressed for the club, followed by a middle-aged man in a bathrobe and slippers.
The two women made for Severin, who converted her weapon to a longstaff and swept it, whacking their feet out from under them.
Luke thrust out his hands and sent the man reeling back into the crowd that pressed at his heels, knocking several of them like bowling pins to the ground.
More mind-wiped mundanes swarmed over their fallen comrades, trampling them underfoot. Some part of Luke flinched at the sight and sound of the robed man’s nose shattering under the heel of an Oxford, of one of the young women retching when a larger woman used her gut as a springboard. But his horror was distant. Irrelevant. His mind and body synchronized, one churning machine. Luke was a fighter. He had trained his whole life. Even before there’d been any battles to fight.
He felt the mana coursing through his channels—the heat, the friction—stoked to a frenzy by the undulations of the nexus at his back. A more typical power source would have done him more good; he could have synced his strikes with the rhythm of the pulses given off by the portal. But the pattern of the nexus at Hermit’s Cave wasn’t a pattern at all. It was raw, stuttering static, the rage-scream of some tortured abomination.
…Still a thing he could use.
Luke called on his own inner dissonance, joined it with the cacophony. Brought his hands down, clawing, contorting with energy.
The concussion wall struck his oncoming attackers with furious force, again slamming several of them back into the wall, sending still others reeling into each other. A few fell, dizzy or unconscious.
Among the chaos, Luke glimpsed a boy no older than four outside the cave’s entrance, sitting confused and in tears with a rock in his small fist.
The next instant, a fresh wave of assailants mowed over the child.
Luke turned his focus to his task, thrust the image from his mind.
Against the combined efforts of Luke and Severin, the small army of mundanes didn’t stand a chance. Whoever had sent them, Luke thought, must have been banking that he and/or Severin—whichever of them was the target—wouldn’t violate the Protocols.
It was a stupid assumption.
The Broken wouldn’t make that mistake.
Luke sent attacker after attacker flying with the agimat-enhanced telekinetic force from his hurtling right fist. Severin moved with the precision of the trained soldier she was, her daemon weapon one with her intent, changing length, shape, thickness to suit her needs moment to moment.
It was a rout. All they had to do was outlast the rapidly thinning crowd.
But then, it happened.
Luke saw it from the corner of his eye: Severin spinning balletically, bringing her weapon—currently a longstaff—sharply around and down to crack against the skull of an approaching mundane.
Her target—she seemed to realize too late—was the crying little boy Luke had glimpsed seconds earlier.
Severin went rigid, her stunned eyes fixed to the child as he crumpled, bloody, to the ground.
From behind her, a shaved-bald man’s jackknife drove toward her throat.
“Severin!” Luke bellowed.
Her moon eyes snapped to him the same instant the blade punched beneath her jaw, with an eruption of slick dark red.
“Fucking hell!” Luke roared.
He launched his fist, bashing several more mundanes against the wall.
Luke lost sight of Severin as she fell. As more attackers came pouring into the cave.
He kept his focus, swept every last one of them from his path. Readied himself to face the next wave.
In Luke’s experience, time always crawled by in a fight. Every second seemed to take years. So, while it felt like epochs, he knew it couldn’t have been more than a minute, at most two, before the daemon Svarog—a spinning wheel of every-color light with seventeen serpentine limbs, each of which terminated in a face with three grinning mouths and a dozen eyes—came tearing through the melee with a succession of mangled alien shrieks, wheeling and cavorting and slamming back and forth against the walls and floor and ceiling, manic at having been freed from its enslavement for the first time in decades, till the Aether opened with a thunderous crack and inhaled it in.
It was the only sign Luke needed that its master, Polyxena of the Daemon Blade, was dead.
Luke could feel his mana reserves waning. His body starting to give in to fatigue.
He rallied himself. Lashed out at the next round of attackers. Sent a woman in a business suit spinning into a teen with a septum piercing.
A few of the mundanes he’d taken down earlier were starting to rouse themselves, gearing up for a fresh attack.
Fuck.
Luke marshaled his mana. Dropped a branch-wielding man with an agimat-enhanced blow. Dodged a thrown rock so narrowly it grazed his ear.
There’s a chance I don’t win this…
Luke glimpsed the shadows beyond the cave’s entrance. Bare branches dancing in a deep December draft, on a night too warm for snow.
He recalled flakes like crystalline mandalas, alighting gently on the window-glass before melting away. Infinitesimal disks of intricate form, gifting him with glimpses of faultless beauty before fading to nothing.
He recalled her, rangy and restless. Her heart-shaped face framed by short black hair. Her smile, cockeyed and impish. The crooked tooth he’d always called her “anime fang.”
No. Fucking. Way.
A rage against the darkness rose up within him, matching its fever-pitch with the scream of the nexus at his back. Excitatory gnosis flooded his circuits, filling him with the frenetic hum of arcane energy.
No more mercy.
Luke charged his agimat, lashed out with the fullness of his power. The unlucky mundane who took the brunt of the attack went reeling away with his skull caved in, eyeball bulging. The woman behind him whipped around violently and smashed into the stone wall, leaving a streak of blood behind when she dropped.
By twos, by threes, by fours, Luke mowed down his remaining assailants, with a bright hot fury. Saw in his mind’s eye mandalas, infinite in number, scintillating on a field of black.
For you, I will live to tell the story.
I may have lost Severin, but I’ll find someone else who can help.
For you, Caren, I will stop the Broken, before—
There came a crunch. A shriek of agony he took what felt like years to register as his own.
A strange sensation…a different balance of weight in his shoulder. His right arm hanging strangely.
Luke felt a bland curiosity as he turned his head and examined it—his own limb, at the end of which his agimat was implanted, bent backward at least forty-five degrees at the elbow, blood-soaked, gray bone protruding.
The large mundane man Luke had dropped first out of all of them was up again, standing close behind him, his gray hoodie, his blank-eyed face spattered with Luke’s blood.
Not.
Luke ground his teeth. The mana channels in his arm remained—twisted, but not severed.
…Today.
Luke swung his arm hard from the shoulder, sharply turned his body. Lobbed his lifeless agimat hand toward the man’s head, unleashing a charge.
Pain radiated as the limb struck.
The man’s jaw unhinged as he went reeling.
Luke doubled over, cradling his arm, tears streaming down his face.
There were four mundanes left standing.
Two inside the cave.
Two outside.
Two unarmed.
One with a branch. One with a knife.
…I just have to make a run for it.
Luke sent his dead arm swinging again with a weak strike, his mana now all but drained. Knocked the two women in the cave to the ground.
His path clear now—ran.
The wet chill of the night embraced him. He hugged his arm and barreled past the two mundanes outside, dodging just out of range of the sweep of a knife. Careened toward the cover of trees.
Not fucking today, he thought again, feet pounding earth. Caren—I’m—
A projectile—something heavy—hit him hard from behind.
He stumbled. Caught a root with his foot.
The ground reeled upward.
Without his arms to stop his fall, Luke’s head hit hard.
Nude whirling tree branches webbed the night. Raindrops pelted his face.
The scene blurred.
He couldn’t move.
The mundane woman straddled him. Dragged his head up by the hair.
The knife drove toward his left eye.
In two dim dimensions, another mundane loomed behind the first, thick branch gripped in both hands.
Pain.
Pain and nonsense.
Another blow, this one to the ear.
Static.
Mandalas, melting against the black.
Their bullshit always seems far away when you’re here…
Luke had always told himself he wouldn’t survive this war. And that it didn’t matter if he didn’t, because it was all for her.
Right eye blind now.
Numb.
Vague sensations of impact.
One, after another, after another.
Cruel, that it was only now he understood…
…Some part of him had never let go of the hope that he would make it through. That, after his long fight had ended, he’d go and find her. That she’d still be single somehow. That she’d listen and understand when he finally got his chance to explain.
Her image, fading.
Darkness unending.
Luke grew sick with fear before the infinite.
Caren…
I gave…everything I had…
I failed.
I wish I’d just…told you…
…so you’d be ready…
…to fight…
He clung to the impression of her face, fast retreating into blackness.
I hope you see it coming…
…somehow…
…before it’s too late.
’Cause, Caren…
…it’s coming.
No…
The nexus roared; welcomed him in.
…it’s here.
The darkness at the end of the dream.
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