Chapter 108: Island Battle (3/3)

Billy hung in the sky, hull still smoking from the Ironmaw Battleship. Sonic stood on the terrace, crackling and impatient.

Winsmoke had both barrels of his kitchen aimed down at them. Kroth’s war engine was rolling into position on the beach.

And Solveig was already lifting the sword again, burning brighter, faster now than when the fight had started.

Serai counted all of it in about two seconds.

There was no rift she could open fast enough for both of them. There was no wall left to put between herself and that blade.

"Kaevan." Her voice did not shake. "We die here."

Kaevan looked at the burning water where his ship used to be. Then he looked at the wall he had come to break, which was still standing.

Then he looked at Solveig, who was not slowing down.

He did not answer her. He did not need to.

Solveig swung.

The blade came down through the space where two players had been standing and split the causeway open to the waterline.

It hit nothing at all.

---

The silence afterward was strange.

Solveig stood in a cloud of stone dust with his sword buried in the ground. There was nobody in front of him.

No bodies. No wreckage. No mark on the stone where the two of them had been.

They had not run. Sonic had been watching, and Sonic was fast enough to catch anything that moved. Nothing had moved.

They were simply not there anymore.

Then the panels came.

```

[ Kaevan Dross has surrendered. Player removed from the match. ]

[ Serai Vokh has surrendered. Player removed from the match. ]

[ Aegis Isle holds. Hostile force eliminated. ]

```

Billy read it twice before he believed it.

’They said the word.’ Something cold and impressed moved through him. ’Both of them, at the same time, without saying a thing out loud.’

That was how surrender worked in this game. There was no ceremony to it and no warning.

A player thought it or spoke it, and the system took them out on the spot. No goodbye. No last words. No chance to change their mind.

It also took everything with them. Their island. Their units. Every point they had earned across the whole match.

Kaevan Dross had taken nine islands to get where he was standing. He had thrown all nine of them away rather than let that sword finish falling.

"He gave up the entire match," Sonic said quietly. "Both of them did. Just to not die on our rock."

"Yeah." Billy looked at the empty causeway. "That is how close Solveig was."

A second panel opened over the first.

```

[ Victory credited to territory owners. ]

[ Leon Flanke: +1 Elimination ]

[ Ruby Starviel: +1 Elimination ]

```

Sonic read that one twice as well.

"They were not even on the island," he said. "The boss and Alice both got credit for a fight they did not see."

"They earned it before the ship ever showed up." Billy turned back toward the island. "Every wall those two broke themselves on, the boss built."

---

The island went quiet.

Billy came back down to the wall in his humanoid form. His void blades were gone.

He walked to the spot where Terry had rooted himself and stopped there.

There was a crater in the stone now. Metal lay scattered across forty meters of terrace, and some of it was still glowing.

Sonic landed beside him and did not say anything.

Then Billy crouched down and picked up a piece of shoulder plating with both hands.

"Help me," he said.

They all helped.

Sonic swept the lower terrace and brought up every piece that had been thrown over the edge.

Winsmoke used Complete Breakdown on the whole slope. He scanned each scrap of metal and sorted the pieces that were actually Terry from the pieces that were not.

Kroth carried the heavy plating up in both arms. Vulkarn sent Ore Grubs down the cliff face, and they came back with fragments nobody else could have reached.

Xairon moved through the wreckage last, chaotic energy sliding between shapes, and found the small things everyone had missed.

Nobody gave any orders. They just worked.

It took a long time. When they finished, the pile on the plaza stone was much smaller than Terry had been.

Billy found the core last. It was buried under a slab of the same wall Terry had died protecting.

It was cracked most of the way through and badly burned. It was also still faintly warm, and the light inside it was still moving.

"He is not all the way gone." Billy’s voice came out rough. "Look at it. It is still going."

Verdant Bloom Thessaris came forward through the group.

The walking garden knelt beside the pile. Its bark-plated hands opened a hollow in its chest, and the space inside was full of slow green light.

"Give him to me," Thessaris said.

Billy handed the core over with both hands. He did it carefully, the way a person carries something that is still alive.

Thessaris set it into the green light. Then it began gathering the pieces one at a time and storing them beside the core in careful order.

Plating with plating. Frame with frame. Nothing thrown in loose.

"Can you fix him?" Sonic asked.

"Not alone," Thessaris said. "Not today, and maybe not soon. His core is holding, but only barely."

Its hands kept moving while it spoke.

"I can keep it holding. I can keep every piece of him in one place and in one condition. When the lord returns, he will have something to work with."

"And if the lord cannot fix him either?" Winsmoke asked quietly.

Thessaris did not stop working.

"Then the lord will make that choice with all of Terry in front of him," it said. "Not with Terry scattered across a hillside."

That answer seemed to settle something in all of them.

---

They stood there a while after Thessaris closed its chest.

"Two," Billy said eventually. "Two players. That is all it was."

"Two players and two hundred and twelve units," Sonic offered.

"The units did not kill anybody who mattered." Billy shook his head. "The units died on the wall the way they were supposed to. It was the two of them."

He looked at the four empty spaces in the island’s defensive network. Kaldris. Idrell. Verrick. Terry.

’Three Mythics and Terry,’ he thought. ’Between two people.’

"We won," he said out loud. "Five Mythic-pluses and ten Mythics behind turrets and walls. We had every bit of the boss’s paranoia built into this rock. We won."

He turned around to face the rest of them.

"And they still took four of us. Two people did that."

Sonic looked out at the burning water where the Ironmaw Battleship had gone down.

"They are gone for good," he said. "Out of the match. We will never see those two again."

"I know." Billy’s grin came back, and there was nothing warm in it at all. "That is not the part that bothers me."

He turned back toward the plaza, where Thessaris stood holding what was left of Terry inside its chest.

"There are two hundred and twenty-seven players still in this game," Billy said. "Those two were only the ones who found us first."

Sonic went quiet.

"When the boss gets back, I am telling him exactly what two people managed to do here." Billy started walking. "Because the next pair that comes might be better."