Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (12)

[You’ll see,] it said. [And you can call me Dross.]

She and Dross walked up and out from the engine room, but she froze when she entered the hall of the main complex. The guard’s body remained lying exactly where she’d seen it before.

“I thought that was a dream.”

[That dream was a mirror of reality, and a subtle trap. An elaborate boundary field. I almost want to stay trapped myself, to wander its dark halls and admire its intricate folds.] Dross sighed. [But I suppose there’s a battle going on.]

Only as they grew closer to the edge of the building did she feel the distant rumbles in the earth and hear metallic thunder. There was a battle.

She hurried out—past Terkell’s office, which was unharmed and unlit—and flung open the outer door.

At first, she thought the night sky was covered by clouds. The sun had long set, so the sky was dim. But the light was still paler than it should be, and it twisted and flickered unnaturally.

As though the sky had turned a faint, misty white.

In the faint, white light, Kerani saw her fellow employees. They hadn’t gone home as they were supposed to; in fact, it looked like they had been trapped as soon as they’d left the building. Some had dropped their belongings to the grass to stare up at the sky.

Now, they all stared upward…and contributed to the battle.

Striker techniques flew from all over the city, madra flying from spirit-tanks everywhere. The people were eerily synchronized, launching their attacks as though controlled by one mind.

Which was the case, she knew. They were puppets of the Silent King. White rings burned hot behind their heads, visible now to the naked eye.

Everyone she could see looked to the sky with expressions of rage, where they fired upon the same target.

A ball of dark fire that blazed like a black sun.

Thousands of techniques, from all over the city, crashed into that ball with no apparent effect. Behind the fireball stretched a line of cloudships, winged sacred beasts, and other flying vehicles.

She realized quickly that the dark fire was protecting that train of flying traffic. Lances of burning black madra struck out and pierced techniques aimed at the cloudships.

And not everyone was as weak as Terkell. Three figures did battle with the black fireball in the sky, each covered by the image of their Remnant: an eagle of lightning, a shivering blue angular creature made of crystal, and something like a steel fusion of a crab and a praying mantis.

The three Chief Guardians of Dreadnought City. Archlords with such advanced Remnants that they looked fully physical.

Each of them had a white ring behind their head.

“What is this?” She couldn’t think of any question that better expressed the heavy dread in her gut.

[I suspect you know, but the reality is too grim to fully accept.] With one arm, Dross pointed to the dark star. [I’m with him.]

The angular crystal warrior conjured a storm of blades that shredded the tops of nearby buildings. Glass and steel plummeted to the streets below.

Aura of fire and destruction appeared in a swirl of black and red, and the debris was erased. Whoever this dark fire artist was, they were trying to restrict damage to the city.

The blue blades crashed into the ball of fire and vanished, but lightning fell and a spear of silver light struck at the same time.

The fire transformed instantly. It flashed to blue-white light, and all the hostile techniques vanished. Kerani could just barely make out a dot at the center of the light. A person.

“Is that a Monarch?” she asked.

[That’s the Sage of Twin Stars,] Dross said. [And here’s your ride.]

A bathtub-sized wooden boat on the back of a cloud drifted down to her. Hesitantly, she climbed aboard. “How…how many are left?”

[There are more,] Dross whispered. [Many more.]

He did something, used some kind of technique, though Kerani could barely understand the intricacies of his madra. All over the city, she saw dark orbs outlined by purple light: more spirits like Dross.

Then again, they didn’t feel like copies. They felt like exactly the same spirit.

[We will take you to Emriss Silentborn before the Dreadgod arrives.]

Kerani looked to the humans who moved like puppets. “It’s not here?”

Dross giggled softly as Kerani was taken away by the ship. [Not yet.]





Yerin appeared in a flash of white light on the back of a ship floating on the sea.

Well, half a ship.

After she’d arrived in the labyrinth at the bottom of the Trackless Sea, she’d felt a beacon calling for help and had moved for it. She guessed at some point that beacon had been sailing across the ocean, but now the ship had been torn to pieces. Yerin stood on a floating chunk of wood.

Which was probably the safest place to be, at the moment.

Storm clouds covered the sky, but the lightning cracked red. Crimson stripes were painted across the clouds as aura from the Bleeding Phoenix stained the world. Yerin’s head pounded at the feel of its spirit in the air; if she relaxed her concentration, she thought she might hear the Phoenix’s distant song. She preferred the headache.

The Dreadgod wasn’t close enough to fight, but close enough to be a disaster. There was an island nearby, which held a decent-sized town in the shadow of a mountain. The town blazed with madra of a dozen different aspects as sacred artists and constructs strained themselves to the breaking point to resist the army in front of them.