Chapter 108: Trees from the Dark

Kai followed Lucy down the stairwell, and with every step the city beneath the wall looked worse.

The ruin was far deeper at street level. Whole rows of buildings had folded in on themselves, roofs sagging into cellars, doorframes standing alone like teeth in a broken jaw.

Beneath his boots the cobblestones were split in long, jagged seams, some a hand’s width across, some wide enough to swallow a cart wheel.

The Gloom Rats had done this days ago, tunneling up from below and tearing the earth apart as they came, and the scars had never been mended.

Here and there, soldiers stood guard at the mouths of gaping holes in the road, spears leveled into the dark, faces gray with sleeplessness. Nobody laughed.

Nobody spoke above a murmur. The whole district smelled of wet plaster, scorched wood, and the sour, coppery stink of too many wounded in too small a place.

Kai counted the soldiers as he went. Barely forty thousand inside the fortress, by his estimate, and that was being generous.

"Not enough. Not nearly. Even three hundred thousand couldn’t hold this city against what I’ve prepared."

He kept his face smooth, a dean’s face, weary and concerned.

They stopped at the old town square, which had been turned into a refugee post. Hundreds of townsfolk huddled under stretched canvas, wrapped in blankets, clutching bundles, children asleep on their parents’ shoulders with ash still in their hair.

In the middle of it all stood one tent larger than any other, its flap emblazoned with the owl crest of Orvis Academy. Three more deans in the same uniform were inside, directing a scatter of students.

"Dean Stevan, Dean Bennet, Dean Julia. How are the students?"

"Only the third years are holding their nerve," Stevan said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "The second years are still shaken from what happened a few days ago. We can’t force them to fight, Dean Lucy."

"And our potions and elixirs are running thin," Bennet added. "It’s getting dangerous."

"What about outside the walls?" Julia asked. "Is the relief force coming?"

Lucy told them what she had seen from the western rampart. Supreme Commander Flemming’s army had begun to move.

A breath of relief passed through the tent; with that many soldiers arriving, Korven might last a little longer.

It did not last.

"There’s something else," Lucy said quietly. "I saw Gargoyles. Flying this way. If they’re already coming in from the north, the wall there may already be under attack."

Brows furrowed. Jaws tightened. Everyone in that tent knew what a Gargoyle was, and what it could do. It was stronger than any Dusk Feather they had fought, and it was fast.

They argued briefly over what to do. There were roughly fifty students still in the camp. Three deans could not shield fifty children from a swarm. Most of them would not survive it.

"I know," Kai said. "That’s why I gathered you here. I have something to show you."

He stepped forward and drew a single sheet of brown paper from inside his coat, and held it up for the whole tent to see.

A talisman. Dense lines of ink ran across its surface in a ring of interlocking sigils, four of them set at the corners like the points of a compass.

"A charm?" Stevan frowned. "What is it for, Dean Kai?"

"In my homeland, it is called the Zenith Shield."

None of them had heard the name. That was no surprise. Talismans were rare on the continent of Arta, known only to a handful of scholars, and no one in the tent had ever handled one.

Kai explained it plainly. The Zenith Shield worked like a high-grade Relic. Once awakened, its four corner seals would draw on four separate elements, Terra, Anima, Hydros, and Ignis, braiding them into a single field.

That field rose from the talisman, spread over the sky, and closed like a lid. A dome would cover Korven. Kai spoke as if he had seen it done before. He said that even a late-stage Dark Beast would have trouble breaking it.

Lucy took the paper in her hands and turned it slowly. She could feel the weight of it. There was real power sleeping in the ink, deep and layered, nothing like a street charm. It was every bit as strong as a top-tier Relic.

"This is formidable. If Dean Kai had it all along, it could have held back the last wave. Why bring it out only now?"

She glanced at him sidelong. He met the look with an expression of calm helplessness.

"The problem," Kai said, "is that we’re missing an element. The seals need Terra, and none of us here carry it. We’ll need a student who does."

"Marcus," Stevan said at once. "The second son of House Austur. His Core is already at Tier 6, and among all the students with a Terra affinity, he’s the strongest. A genius of the Seven Pillars should be able to handle this."

"But a single element won’t be enough," Kai added. "The shield feeds on mana. The harder the mana flows into the seals, the stronger the dome. We’ll need the other students to channel into it. Those who passed the Academy’s entrance have plenty to give, don’t they?"

"You mean to use every student’s mana?" Julia said. "Dean Kai, they could be drained. They’d be too weak to stand."

"And if we leave them to face the Dark Beasts instead?" Kai asked gently. "Is that safer, Dean Julia? Is that safer, Dean Lucy?"

No one had an answer. It was a hard truth, and a quiet one. Even the strongest student in that tent could not have defeated the weakest Dark Beast outside. Better to spend their mana on a barrier, with no beasts in reach, than to spend their lives on a battlefield.

Behind every pair of eyes in the tent stood the same ghost: Patricia, lost already. None of them could bear to lose another.

Lucy looked at Kai for a long moment. Then she nodded.

The students were gathered, and the preparations began. The four elements were assigned, Marcus placed at the Terra seal, and a circle of young hands linked to the paper’s corners. None of them knew what they were actually joining.

What no one in the tent understood was this. Once the Zenith Shield awakened, it would bind every person connected to it and draw out their mana, steadily, without mercy, until nothing remained. There was no way to let go. The students would be emptied and left helpless, easy to carry off.

And there was one thing more. The moment the talisman’s light rose over the city, the Dark Beasts waiting at the western edge would be roused.

"Everything is in place," Kai thought, and the corner of his mouth curved, thin and satisfied, as the last student took his place.

Less than three kilometers from the city, Lucian rode in the thunder of the army.

The land they crossed was quieter than he had expected. No Dark Beasts in sight. No Gloom Rat tunnels yawning across the road, even though Flemming’s own report had placed them right about here.

Beside the vanguard, Flemming scanned the plain without blinking, hunting for anything out of place, any detail that would turn into a trap an hour too late. He found nothing.

"Then why is my heart pounding like this? There’s nothing here."

He told the commanders to stay sharp anyway.

Behind Jeanne, Lucian happened to glance back over his shoulder.

Far across the plain, at the very edge of the western treeline, a few trees were tipping. Swaying. Falling. They did not fall the way trees fall in wind. They fell the way trees fall when something is walking through them.

He turned his whole head, narrowing his eyes. More trees were going down now, one after another, and a rising crowd of black shapes was wheeling over the canopy.

Crows. No, not wheeling. Dropping. Falling out of the sky one by one, as if something had reached up and plucked them from the air.

Beneath the rumble of hooves, faint and unmistakable, came the sound of footsteps. Heavy. Many. Unhurried.

"Wait. What’s happening back there?"

He said it under his breath. Almost no one around him noticed. They were all facing forward, trusting that the rear was safe.

But what Lucian saw was clearly the work of something terrible, and at his side Sonata began to tremble so violently that the sheath rattled against his leg.

? [HARMONY]

? [OMNI MAP ACTIVATED]

A faint, resonant hum filled his skull, as though a great bell had been struck underwater.

The air in front of his eyes shivered, and a pale map unfolded across his vision, the Omni Map he had received from the Codex, laid out over the land they were crossing. Blue points marked the humans, a river of them streaming toward Korven.

Then his eyes widened.

On the western side, a mass of black points had broken from the forest. Dozens, hundreds, more than he could count, pouring out of the treeline and onto the plain.

The Dark Beasts Captain Ulrich had reported. They were moving fast, faster than any horse in the army, and they were closing on Flemming’s column from behind.

"Dark Beasts!"

He shouted it at the top of his lungs, twisting in the saddle to face forward.

"Dark Beasts from the west! They’re coming for us!"