Chapter 158 Apex of Three

The three shapes on the landing were not going to wait for introductions.

Jace saw the first attack three seconds before it landed, and that was the only reason nobody died. He shouted. The party scattered. The staircase to Floor 3 vanished in a shriek of iron, and a hammer the size of a city block came down through the place where the party had been standing.

[FLOOR 2 EXIT: THE WARDENS OF THE STAIR]

[WARDENS: 3]

[LEVEL: 999 EACH]

[ALL SKILLS ACTIVE]

[SIX SEALED COMBAT SKILLS: REMAIN SEALED]

[HEALTH: 135/520. CHARGE: 121/220. CORRUPTION: 91%]

"Told you," said the window, in the back of Jace's head, very softly. "Don't fight them one at a time."

The first Warden stood in the smoke. It was a knight made of black iron plate, twelve feet tall, with no face and a mace the length of a bridge. Its footsteps cracked the glass. The second stood at its shoulder, thin as a reed, veiled in grey silk, and the moment it appeared every sound in the hall died. The third hung in the air above them both, a storm in the shape of a woman, hair of lightning, eyes of thunderheads.

[WARDEN OF IRON]

[WARDEN OF SILENCE]

[WARDEN OF STORM]

"Phases," said Penelope, scribbling. "They are a three-stage lock. One at a time, in order, each one stronger than the last. And if we leave any alive when the next wakes, they combine."

"Of course they combine," said Caleb. "Everything in this tower combines."

"Teams," said Jace. "Alexander, take Iron. Scarlett and Selene, Silence. Penelope with me. Everybody else, support and stay alive."

"Why do you always say stay alive like it's a suggestion?" the lightning girl said.

"Because you keep treating it like one."

The Warden of Iron raised its mace.

Alexander walked toward it. He walked slowly, because he could. His gold aura swelled around his shoulders until the hall seemed to lean toward him, and the Ninth Edict crown flared above his head.

"Falling Verdict," he said. "Ninth Edict. Judgment Without Appeal."

The mace came down. Alexander caught it on the flat of his sword.

The impact cut a trench through the glass floor a mile long. The shield man dropped to one knee behind him and raised ten plates, and the twin-hammer woman raised both hammers, and together the three of them stood against a blow that should have flattened a mountain. Alexander's arms shook. His boots dug furrows in the stone. But the mace did not move.

"I have been thinking," Alexander said, through gold-stained teeth, "about what it means to be a judge."

The Warden pushed down. The hall groaned.

"And I have decided," he said, "that I am a very bad one."

He turned his wrist. The Warden's mace slid sideways along his blade, and the iron knight, overbalanced, stumbled one step forward.

The hammer woman was waiting.

"Meteor Hymn," she said, quietly. "Second Verse."

Both hammers came down on the Warden's helm. The blow rang like a cathedral bell struck by the moon. The iron plate cracked. The cracks ran down its body in a web, light shining out of them, and the Warden of Iron broke into two hundred pieces and fell across the glass in a clatter.

[WARDEN OF IRON: DEFEATED]

[HEALTH: 135 -> 121]

A shard of the dead knight's mace flew back past Jace's head and clipped his shoulder. He had seen it coming. He had not been able to move in time. The precision penalty was still dragging his body.

"Phase two!" Penelope shouted. "It is going to wake!"

The Warden of Silence did not move at all.

It simply lifted one grey sleeve, and the sound went out of the world.

Jace's own heartbeat vanished first. Then the hum of the Shelter. Then every voice in the party. He saw Scarlett's mouth open to shout, and nothing came out. He saw the lightning girl's chain whip through the air without a single note. He looked at Penelope, who was writing a name on her ledger, and the ink on the page went blank as fast as she wrote it.

[SILENCE FIELD: ACTIVE]

A source aside for this duplicate: it was copied from the author's publication without approval, and the chapter at that page supports them.

[NAMES, COMMANDS, AND SKILL NAMES: SUPPRESSED]

Jace understood at once. A Silence that could take names could take Overwrite Pulse. It could take the Gravity Chain. It could take Falling Verdict, and Ember Rend, and every move they had ever spoken aloud.

Then Selene Hart lifted her noon-sun sword and said nothing at all.

She did not need a name. The sun came off the blade in a ring of light, a slow, hot bell with no sound inside it, and the grey silk caught fire. The Warden swayed. Scarlett was beside her already, blade drawn, white flame roaring from her shoulders, and the two of them moved together without speech, like two halves of a single blade.

Ember Rend. Noon. Ember Rend. Noon.

The flames crossed in an X, and the veil came away, and underneath it there was nothing at all.

[WARDEN OF SILENCE: DEFEATED]

The sound of the world rushed back in like a flood.

"Unfair!" Caleb was shouting. "That was incredibly unfair! I had a joke ready!"

"What was the joke?" said Emma.

"It was about silence! I had a really good one!"

[WARDEN OF SILENCE: RELIC DROPPED]

[HUSHBELL RELIC: ACQUIRED]

Jace caught it out of the air, a small silver bell with no clapper. It rang once against his palm, with no sound, and the Railheart Relic in his pack began to hum in answer.

"Phase three," said Penelope, and her voice shook. "Jace, the Storm is awake."

The Warden of Storm descended.

Its hair spread across the sky in a thousand live wires. Thunder rolled out of its mouth. Every pane of mirror left in the hall lit white as it passed, and the hair of everyone in the party stood on end.

"Skybreaker Chain," cried the lightning girl, and threw her chain.

It went up in a long blue spiral and wrapped the Warden's throat, and the Warden took the end of the chain in both hands and pulled. The lightning girl flew. She hit the roof of the hall and went through it, and a second later her chain came back down empty.

"No," Jace said.

"I'm alive!" her voice said, from somewhere very far up. "I just need a minute!"

The Warden of Storm turned its head slowly toward Jace.

It opened its hands.

The sky of the hall tore open and a column of lightning came down, a mile wide, a hundred thousand bolts braided into one. It did not hit the party. It hit the floor, and the floor became a sheet of white fire racing outward in every direction at once.

The window flashed in Jace's skull. Three seconds. He saw the wave of light, saw the exact crack in the glass where it would split, saw the hole in the pattern where one person could stand.

"Penelope!" he shouted. "Left two steps, now!"

She went left. The wave went around her. Hazel's voice came through the Shelter. "Jace, that's the Warden's whole body. It's all in the one strike. It can't dodge."

"Then neither can I."

He stepped into the wave.

[GRAVITY CHAIN: ACTIVATED]

[CHARGE: 121 -> 116]

The chain caught the lightning column and held it, bent it, folded it back on itself like a river bent into a loop. The Warden's own strike turned around in the air and went straight back up its arm. The Warden screamed, and for the first time in the whole fight, a sound came out of it that was almost a word.

"Remember your name," Jace said.

[OVERWRITE PULSE: STANDARD]

[TARGET: WARDEN OF STORM]

[CHARGE: 116 -> 111]

The pulse went through the storm like a needle. The Warden's hair went dark. Its eyes cleared. For one second Jace looked into the face of a woman who had been a girl before the tower took her, and who had never once been asked to be anything else.

"Thank you," she said.

She dissolved into rain.

[WARDEN OF STORM: DEFEATED]

[STORMCROWN RELIC: ACQUIRED]

[HEALTH: 121 -> 108]

The hall was quiet. For about four heartbeats.

Then every piece of iron on the floor lifted off the glass, every shred of grey silk drifted up, every drop of rain turned and flew together. The three Wardens had not died. They had split. They were fusing.

[WARNING: APEX OF THREE FORMING]

[THE WARDENS OF THE STAIR: COMBINING]

"Oh no," said Caleb. "Oh, I hate this part."

The Apex stood up in the center of the hall. It was iron below, silence in the middle, and storm above. It was forty stories tall, and its shadow covered the party like a lid. When it spoke, the voice was three voices at once, rolling like a landslide.

"You will not climb," it said.

"I am extremely going to climb," said Jace.

"Then break."

The Apex swung its fist, and the window gave Jace three seconds of perfect clarity. He saw every path of the blow. He saw every hole. And he saw, for the first time, what the echo had meant when he said to look at where it was about to be, not where it was.

"Everybody," he said. "Give me three seconds."

"You've got them," said Scarlett.

"Give me three seconds of everything you have."

They did.

Alexander's cut. Scarlett's flame. Selene's noon. The hammer woman's Meteor Hymn. The shield man's ten plates. The tamer's Frost King. The knight's Sunfall Lance. The lightning girl, back from the sky, with her chain trailing smoke. Penelope's spear. Theodore's marrow rite. Emma's note. Caleb's boundary. Every one of them struck the Apex in the same three seconds, and in those three seconds Jace read the Apex's movement ahead of itself and wove them all into one.

"Glitch Weave," he said.

[GLITCH WEAVE: ACTIVATED]

[PREDICTION RANGE: 3 SECONDS]

[ALL PARTY ATTACKS: LINKED THROUGH USER]

Every strike bent. Every strike curved in the air and found the same seam, a hairline crack in the Apex's chest where iron met silence met storm. Every attack entered it in the same instant.

The Apex stopped.

Then a light came out of the crack, and out of its eyes, and out of its mouth, and the whole forty-story body came apart in a column of light that rose through the roof of the hall and kept rising through the floors above, through the tower, and out into the open sky above Manhattan.

[APEX OF THREE: DEFEATED]

[FLOOR 2: CLEARED]

The Railheart Relic, the Hushbell Relic, and the Stormcrown Relic rose out of Jace's pack into the air in front of him, spinning, three small lights that turned into one.

[THREE RELICS DETECTED]

[FUSION AVAILABLE: WORLDRUNNER GEAR]

He reached up and took the gear out of the air. It settled on his shoulders as a cloak of silver and blue and iron, light as breath, and wrapped around his body in a flow of ordered lines.

[WORLDRUNNER GEAR: FUSED]

[UNLOCK: WORLDRUNNER GEAR]

[MAXIMUM HEALTH: 520 -> 700]

[MAXIMUM CHARGE: 220 -> 360]

[HEALTH RESTORED: +381]

[CHARGE RESTORED: +74]

[PRECISION PENALTY: CLEARED]

[HEALTH: 108 -> 489]

[CHARGE: 111 -> 185]

[CORRUPTION: 91%]

Jace stood in the middle of a hall that no longer had a ceiling and felt power run down his arms like a river. He took a deep breath. It went all the way to the bottom of his lungs for the first time in days.

"Okay," he said. "That's new."

Above the open roof, the sky over Manhattan was changing.

The clouds were turning gold. The gold ran outward in rings. Across the whole city, from the docks to the northern bridges, every window began to glow. A voice rolled out of the heavens, vast and amused, the voice of a thing that had waited a very long time to be entertained.

"THE KILL HAS BEEN WITNESSED," said the Tower. "THE NAME OF THE CLIMBER HAS BEEN BROADCAST."

"Oh no," said Penelope.

"JACE," said the voice. "GLITCH KING."

And around the base of the Higher Rook Tower, stone began to rise out of the streets of Manhattan, ring after ring, seat after seat, until a colosseum stood around the whole city.

Health: 489/700.

Charge: 185/360.