Chapter 31 — When the Sky Fell
Ironwyrm's chest plates closed with a heavy metallic snap, and for several seconds the great dragon simply hovered there, enormous wings beating unevenly against the distorted air. The fires that had burned between the seams of his armour had dimmed from white-orange to a tired red, while the Linker in Haruto's hand flashed warnings almost as quickly as he could read them. Speed enhancement, defence, focus, recovery—he had poured everything he could through their bond, but temporary evolution did not grant endless strength. Ironwyrm had already unleashed enough fire to reduce mountains to vapour, scattered nuclear-class missiles across the battlefield, and forced his huge body through manoeuvres that would have exhausted something half his size. Now every movement came a fraction slower than the last. Haruto felt it through the Linker before Ryu said anything. They might have one serious attack left. Perhaps two if they were very lucky, and Haruto had learned enough about luck in this world not to build plans around it.
Caelan appeared beside Ironwyrm in a streak of pale motion, the Azure armor fitted perfectly around his newly evolved Adult body and his lance held low at his side. "One more," he said, studying Eidon rather than Ryu. "Save enough strength to get Haruto away afterward."
Ironwyrm's breathing came like a furnace bellows. "What are you planning?"
"Something he'll find insulting."
Haruto managed a grin. "That usually works."
Across the battlefield, Dark Network Eidon hovered above his grotesque sphere of fused machinery, one surviving lens of his glasses reflecting the fires below. Black cables curled around him by the hundreds now, some trailing into the broken earth while others floated behind him like the tails of an enormous mechanical beast. They were the real problem. Caelan had watched them erase Ironwyrm's missiles, consume flame and remove pieces of stone so completely that nothing remained to fall. Getting close to Eidon while those things surrounded him would have been less a combat strategy than a particularly elaborate form of suicide.
Eidon raised his microphone. "Oh, don't tell me the dragon's getting tired! We were finally reaching the good part!"
Caelan ignored him. His Eyes of Fate moved through the battlefield instead, following dozens of possible attacks and the responses they would provoke. The black cables were saturated with the same impossible force that had emerged from beyond the Wall, but not uniformly. Their moving ends carried the greatest concentration, wrapped in the erasing darkness like poisoned spearheads. Farther back, where the cables emerged from the fused machinery beneath Eidon, the Null-like energy thinned around the structures that actually controlled them.
Dangerous still.
But not untouchable from a distance.
Caelan's gaze sharpened.
"There."
Wind gathered beside him, compressing into a bright, screaming knot several hundred metres to Eidon's left. It was deliberately obvious. Eidon noticed at once.
"Oh, please."
Half a dozen cables snapped toward it.
At the same instant, Ironwyrm opened his jaws.
The remaining light inside his throat flared.
A final torrent of Dragon Breath erupted across the sky, a river of flame broad enough to cover Eidon from above and force dozens more cables upward to intercept it. Black strands plunged into the fire, carving empty channels through the inferno as they erased whatever they touched.
That was what Caelan had been waiting for.
He vanished.
Stellar Movement carried him beneath Eidon before the monkey could turn his head. Caelan never approached within reach of the cable tips. Instead his lance swept through the air, and a dozen compressed crescents of wind shot outward toward the exposed control lengths closer to the mechanical sphere.
The first cut severed one.
The second missed when darkness rolled over the target.
The third split two cables where their protective coating had stretched thin.
Caelan moved again before the surviving strands could strike back.
Eidon jerked around.
"What are you doing?!"
Caelan appeared on the opposite side and sent another series of cuts through the exposed cable bodies.
Three more fell.
Eidon screamed.
"STOP THAT!"
Caelan's mouth twitched. "No."
The battlefield became a blur. Eidon lashed out with dark cables and fired dense black spheres from openings among them, but Caelan's Eyes of Fate showed him the attacks before they arrived. He did not block them. He did not test whether the Azure armor could resist the darkness. He simply was not there when they reached him. A black sphere crossed the place his head had occupied and erased the top of a dune half a kilometre away. Another passed beneath his arm. A third disappeared into empty sky while Caelan emerged above Eidon and sent another wind edge into the machinery below.
One cable fell.
Then another.
Then five together.
Eidon's amusement vanished.
The attack pattern surrounding him weakened visibly as severed black cords dropped across the sand, their darkness fading once separated from the strange sphere fused to his body. Ironwyrm remained far outside their reach, using short bursts of flame whenever Eidon tried to concentrate too many strands on Caelan at once. Frostfang added volleys of ice from beside the barrier, Tesla's electrical blasts came from another angle, and Emberwing hurled waves of fire high enough to force Eidon to keep watching the sky. Nobody approached him. Nobody gave the black cables a body to erase.
For once, the children had found a strategy built around respecting the danger instead of trying to overpower it.
Eidon hated it.
Eidon's amusement vanished.
"Enough!"
His distorted voice thundered across the desert, and the surviving black cables snapped back around the grotesque mechanical sphere fused beneath him. He raised one hand, microphone clutched in the other, and darkness gathered over his palm. It grew quickly—not the impossible void left behind by Cipheron's pyramid, but Eidon's own power compressed into a monstrous sphere of black energy. Lightning-like veins crawled across its surface as it swelled larger and larger, until its shadow stretched across the children below.
"You wanted the finale?" Eidon screamed, cape whipping behind him. "THEN HERE IT IS!"
The dark sphere fell.
Caelan's Eyes of Fate opened.
Dozens of futures unfolded at once.
Ironwyrm attacked it.
Failure.
Caelan struck it.
Failure.
They scattered.
Too slow.
They defended.
The defence broke.
He searched farther, forcing his sight through possibility after possibility, but every route that remained on this battlefield ended beneath Eidon's overwhelming power.
"Haruto!" Caelan shouted.
Ironwyrm was already turning.
The exhausted dragon opened his remaining missile ports while Caelan raised his lance. Nuclear warheads and a compressed storm of wind struck the descending mass together.
The black energy swallowed the assault.
It slowed for less than a heartbeat.
Then continued downward.
Ironwyrm's wings faltered.
Light burst around his immense form, and the temporary Elite evolution finally collapsed. Silver armour, massive wings and mechanical weapons dissolved into golden radiance as Ironwyrm reverted to Ryu, leaving Haruto falling through the air with his exhausted partner clutched against his chest.
Caelan's wind caught them.
Below, Luminel moved.
The tiny fairy shot in front of the bunker and drove his spear into the earth. His barrier erupted upward in a vast golden dome just as Eidon's attack crashed down.
The desert shook.
The dome buckled.
Luminel screamed with effort as the darkness pressed against the barrier, cracks spreading through the golden surface almost immediately.
"RUN!" he shouted.
Nobody argued.
Renji activated his Linker and Alex evolved into Frostfang, lowering his enormous body so Haruto could climb onto his back with Ryu. Yuto and Michael followed. Misaki, Shun, Airi and Daichi fled with the others while Stormmane reluctantly moved with them, one arm missing and blood darkening his fur.
Caelan remained.
Luminel glanced sideways through the strain.
"What are you doing?"
Caelan did not answer immediately.
He wasn't looking at Eidon.
He was looking beyond him.
Far across the ruined desert, where Cipheron's pyramid had once stood, the black hole still hung above the devastation.
It had grown.
Sand, stone, broken machinery and drifting Aetherkin essence spiralled toward it in long streams. The horizon bent around its edges. Nothing that entered returned.
That was not Eidon's attack.
That was the thing Cipheron had unleashed.
And, somehow, Path Maker was pointing directly at it.
Caelan frowned.
"That makes absolutely no sense."
Luminel grunted under the pressure of the barrier. "I would appreciate your philosophical crisis occurring somewhere safer!"
Caelan ignored him.
Path Maker remained active.
He asked for the path to defeating Eidon.
Nothing.
He asked for a path to stopping the dark sphere.
Nothing.
A path where everyone remained here and survived?
Nothing.
Then he changed the question.
A path where we survive this.
One appeared.
Thin.
Absurd.
Terrifying.
It led directly toward the black hole.
Caelan stared at it.
"Of course it does."
Another crack spread through Luminel's barrier.
"Caelan!"
"I found a way."
Luminel looked relieved for approximately half a second.
Then he noticed where Caelan was looking.
"No."
"Apparently yes."
"That is a hole in reality eating the desert!"
"I noticed."
"Your plan is to go toward it?"
"My plan is whatever Path Maker says has a future attached to it."
The barrier cracked again.
Caelan's Eyes of Fate followed the route.
There was no guarantee of what happened afterward. Even his precognition became indistinct once the black hole was involved.
But every path away from it ended.
Only one continued.
Straight through.
Eidon laughed overhead as his dark sphere pushed deeper into Luminel's failing barrier.
"You can't run forever!"
Caelan looked up.
Golden light flashed from his free hand.
Chains of Fate erupted into the sky.
They wrapped around Dark Network Eidon's torso and mechanical mass before he could react, binding his future movement for precious seconds.
"What is THIS?!" Eidon screamed, jerking against them.
"An interruption."
Caelan turned away from him.
He did not attempt to kill Eidon.
Path Maker had already told him there was no path to that victory.
Instead, Stellar Movement activated.
The desert vanished beneath Caelan's feet.
He crossed kilometres in bursts of impossible speed, following the single surviving route only he could see. The black hole swelled ahead of him with every movement, its pull becoming strong enough to drag boulders from the earth and tear old metal from beneath the sand.
His Azure armor remained around him.
His lance remained in his hand.
Caelan did not waste time wondering whether either would survive contact.
The armor and lance belonged to the Azure Knight's legend and were monstrously durable; nothing short of beings approaching the realms of the Sages should have been able to casually destroy them. If there was one object he trusted enough to drive into something impossible, it was the weapon in his hand.
The pull seized him.
Caelan stopped resisting.
Wind wrapped around his body.
Not to escape.
To accelerate.
He became a streak of silver and blue racing toward the black hole.
Behind him Luminel finally understood.
"EVERYONE DOWN!"
Caelan tightened both hands around the lance.
His Eyes of Fate could no longer see clearly.
Path Maker could.
One line.
One target.
One chance.
He lowered the lance.
Light formed around him—first a thin radiance, then dozens of beams converging from the sky, pouring into the weapon until the Azure lance shone like a fallen star. Wind followed, spiralling around its shaft in a screaming vortex, while ki flooded through Caelan's arms and shoulders.
The black hole filled his vision.
There was no surface to strike.
No flesh.
No armour.
No sensible target.
Path Maker showed him one anyway.
A point.
Caelan aimed.
He did not slash.
He did not throw the weapon.
He charged.
"Found you."
Stellar Movement.
Caelan crossed the final distance.
The Azure lance struck first.
He drove it directly into the point Path Maker had chosen.
For one instant, nothing happened.
Then the black hole convulsed.
Caelan pushed harder.
Wind exploded down the length of the lance. Pillars of light descended from the darkened heavens and converged upon the same impossible point. The black hole distorted around the weapon, its perfect darkness rippling as if something that had never expected resistance had suddenly been stabbed.
Caelan roared and drove the lance deeper.
The world went silent.
Behind him, Eidon stopped laughing.
Luminel looked up.
The children, still fleeing across the dunes, turned despite every command not to.
The black hole contracted.
Once.
Then expanded.
The darkness swept outward faster than sound.
It crossed the ruins of Cipheron's pyramid.
It swallowed the battlefield.
Eidon vanished.
Luminel vanished.
The bunker disappeared.
The children and their partners were consumed next.
Finally the darkness closed around Caelan, still gripping his lance with both hands at the centre of it all.
There was no explosion.
No scream.
No impact.
One moment the desert existed.
The next—
there was nothing.