The World of Otome Game
is a Second Chance for Broken Swords
Story Starts
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Chapter 11.6 -
The Offrey
Gambit
"I am the bone of my sword."
The words left Leon's lips and his body answered. Twenty-seven magic circuits ignited in sequence down his spine, each one a bar of heated iron laid against nerve, and the night air around his falling body began to shimmer with displaced prana.
Below him, half a kilometre down and to port, a white light bloomed against the underside of a pirate corvette.
"BERSERKER!"
Olivia's voice rang across the command channel, bright and delighted, and from the mass of woven white thread assembling itself around her came a sound—a muted, warbling scream, like a giant trying to bellow through a wet blanket. The construct heaved itself into shape as the sound played on: five metres of pale cord and knotted sinew, hunched, its arms too long and its shoulders too wide, its unblinking eyes the only feature in the weave, clinging to the corvette's keel like a barnacle from a fever dream.
The scream cut off. Started again. Cut off. It sounded, Leon thought as he fell, like a kettle being strangled.
Olivia had been developing the vocal track for a month.
He remembered the conversation with unfortunate clarity. They'd been at dinner on the island—the whole household, Angelica pouring wine, Erica passing bread—when Olivia had announced her latest project between mouthfuls. Angelica had set down the bottle and asked, quite reasonably, what practical purpose a working vocal track could possibly serve on a construct that already tore power armour apart with its bare hands—a construct that was, by design and by nature, silent.
Olivia had blinked at her. Tilted her head. Smiled with the guileless warmth of a spring morning.
"It'll sow fear in all our enemies."
The table had gone quiet. Erica had stopped chewing. Durga had looked at Meltryllis, and Meltryllis had looked at Sella, and Sella had looked at the ceiling. Then everyone, in unison and entirely without meaning to, had shivered.
The corvette's crew, to their credit, had already reached the same conclusion the dinner table had. Leon watched three escape skiffs punch away from the vessel's flanks before Berserker had even finished forming.
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On the Partner's portside deck, Chris Fia Arclight heard the muffled scream carry across two kilometres of open sky and felt every hair on his arms stand up.
He had never fought the construct. That was the thing. At Folkvangr he had been on the other side of the fight, dealing with Angelica and her flaming gunblades, and the white giant had never once come for him. He had only been adjacent to it—had only heard it move, felt the ground shudder, watched Agravain and Gawain vanish inside a blur of thread—and adjacent, Chris had decided, was already more than any reasonable swordsman should have to endure.
"You've gone pale," Brad observed from the rail beside him, not looking up from the targeting array of his drones.
"I have not."
"You have. Odysseus, hasn't he gone pale?"
Beside Chris, the lean grey shape of his guardian spirit gave the scream below a long, professional look and said nothing, which Chris felt was answer enough from a spirit whose entire legend was built on knowing when not to fight something—at least that's what their family has gleaned from ancient texts.
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Leon shook his head at the channel chatter and returned to the work.
"Steel is my body, fire is my blood."
Hrunting formed in his grip mid-fall—black blade, red core, the hound-sword drinking prana the moment it existed. Familiar weight. Familiar hunger.
Too familiar, perhaps.
He'd leant on the same handful of techniques since Folkvangr, he reflected, and since the descent through the cosmic dungeon before that—though when he tried to recall whether he'd actually loosed Hrunting at Folkvangr, all his memory offered was the rain of steel, thousands of blades falling at once, and the general impression of a very long day. The point stood either way. Devastatingly effective, yes. But he had barely explored the arsenal recorded within his soul. Everything he used—every trick, every pairing, every sequence—was inherited, devised by Counter Guardian EMIYA across centuries of battlefields Leon had never stood on and hoped never to. He tweaked things. He was about to tweak one now, in fact—a trick he'd used in the cosmic dungeon, and possibly at Folkvangr; that skirmish had been publicised across half of Holfort, so whether the pirates had drilled for it was anyone's guess. It hardly mattered. Tweaking a dead man's homework wasn't the same as doing his own.
'Later,' Leon promised himself, the way he'd promised himself for months. 'When there's time. Catalogue the vault properly. Find something worth saving for a rainy day.'
There was never time.
A shadow swelled at the edge of his vision—a cruiser, three hundred metres of scarred timber and iron plate, engines flared white, charging directly at his falling position with the evident intention of either shooting him or simply occupying the air he intended to pass through.
Leon ignored it.
He could afford to, because the Partner had already noticed.
The flagship came around in a turn that no vessel of her tonnage had any right to execute, drives howling, and drove straight at the oncoming cruiser. At the last possible moment—far past the last sensible moment—Luxion banked her, rolling the titanic hull so that her armoured flank swept along the cruiser's broadside like a hand wiped across a table.
The grinding shriek of contact carried even through Leon's helmet. So did the other thing.
A dozen or so pirates had, over the previous few minutes, managed to sink grappling lines into the Partner's hull and were in the process of hauling themselves up her flank, cutlasses in teeth, dreaming no doubt of a year of free drinks. These gentlemen now found themselves precisely between the Partner's hull and the cruiser's broadside at the moment the two surfaces met.
Leon winced.
The result was instantaneous, comprehensive, and distributed across roughly forty metres of the cruiser's bridge glazing in a pattern that suggested someone had loaded a catapult with jam. One unfortunate soul left a nearly complete silhouette—arms out, legs splayed, a perfect pressed flower of a man—dead centre of the cruiser's forward viewing pane, directly in the helmsman's line of sight.
The cruiser's helm, understandably, went hard over. The vessel wallowed out of formation, guns silent, and Leon could picture the scene on her bridge without effort: an entire watch crew staring at their former colleagues, now redistributed across the glass in a medium no amount of scrubbing was ever going to fully address, each man privately recalculating his career prospects.
'They're going to need a very long dry-docking,' Leon thought. 'And possibly a priest.'
"Luxion."
"Master?"
"The grappling lines. You saw them."
"I see everything, Master."
"You could have shaken them off first."
"I could have," Luxion agreed. The tone said the option had been weighed, catalogued, and filed under unnecessary. "The cumulative structural damage to the pane will render the cruiser's bridge crew combat-ineffective for the remainder of the engagement. Efficiency, Master."
"That's not—" Leon pinched off the sentence. "Never mind."
It didn't help matters that a white-and-turquoise streak was already arcing towards the crippled cruiser, and that the streak was giggling on an open channel. Olivia hit the vessel's weather deck boots-first in a bloom of turquoise light, two Dēgen floating above her, a wedge of Stork Ritter constructs unfolding behind her like paper birds shaken out of a book, and the grin she wore was visible, Leon suspected, from the ground.
The cruiser's surviving crew, having in the space of one minute witnessed their comrades applied to their windows like decorative paste and now finding a laughing woman and a flock of white knights on their deck, began abandoning ship with an enthusiasm that bordered on athletic.
Leon sighed and keyed the fleet channel.
"Reminder to all units—and to certain warships," he said, "hulls and floating stones intact wherever possible. Every hull we keep is one I don't have to buy, and every floating stone is a watchtower or a gun platform on the Rachelle border. Break the crews' will, not the timber."
"An accountant's way of waging war, Master," Luxion said.
"A poor viscount's way of waging war. Now hush. I'm working."
"YOU ARE NOT POOR!"
"I did donate a lot of my winnings to the court's coffers."
"YOU ARE NOT POOR!"
The earnest, exasperated objections of Chris and Brad came through the comms in unintended unison.
"Oh—does your group need a loan? I provide good rates," was Olivia's contribution.
Leon could hear the feral grin behind every word of it.
"Clear the comms!"
"YOU ARE NOT POOR!"
Olivia pressed on regardless. "—and if you return to good standing after a year of continued payments, we can waive the penalties and carry on at the previously discussed rate—"
"Clear the comms," Leon repeated, half-heartedly this time; the point was already lost.
He traced Herakles's sword—sending brief thanks to whichever deity handled such things that Olivia had never put in a request for one—and dropped on a frigate this time. One stroke cleaved the bridge from the hull. Through the parting seam he glimpsed the bridge crew scrambling clear of their stations, desperate and undignified and alive, and then he let go of the weapon and kicked away. The frigate hung dead in the sky behind him: floating, intact, and thoroughly decapitated.
He let the stone sword dissolve into motes of light and took up Hrunting again in his right hand.
"I have created over a thousand blades."
The aria settled into his bones and the sky at Leon's back filled with steel.
Not falling steel—not this time; that was the old homework. These blades hung in a vast vertical lattice behind him, a wall of swords three hundred metres across, every edge angled forward, and as each one crystallised into being Leon bound its flight vector to the black sword in his hand. A thousand hounds leashed to one collar. Wherever Hrunting went, the wall would follow, parallel and pitiless.
He picked his target with care: a light galley at the far boundary of the swarm, quick and low-slung, the kind of vessel that would be first to run and first to carry word. Draake's fleet was a cone with its wide mouth pointed up at where the Partner had been. Leon's shot would enter through the side of the cone and exit through the far side, and everything on that chord was about to have a memorable evening.
He drew back his arm. Hrunting drank one final surge of prana and its red core lit like a furnace door swinging open.
"Hound of the Red Plains—Hrunting!"
The sword left his hand as a streak of red light, a comet's tail scored flat across the sky. Behind it, silent and absolute, a wall of a thousand blades swept forward in perfect parallel—a moving cliff face of steel, edge-on, crossing the pirate formation in a single unbroken pass.
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Aboard the Carrion Crown, the comms bank went from noisy to hysterical in the space of a breath.
"Captain! Cap'n Draake! It's—sir, it's a wall! A wall of steel—we drilled for it raining down on us, sir, nobody said anything about sideways—"
Aldric Draake spun the wheel with both hands and felt his flagship answer, her deck heeling under his boots, and through the sweep of her bridge windows he watched the red streak carve across his fleet with a thousand pale glints riding its wake. Ships in its path simply stopped being ships. A brig lost her entire top deck in one pass, masts and rigging and rail shorn away in a single clean plane, leaving her crew standing on an open raft blinking up at the stars. A gun-sloop took the wall through her broadside and came apart into her component planks with an air of mild surprise.
And Aldric Draake, gods forgive him, laughed.
It wasn't a happy laugh. But a man who'd spent forty years in the sky learnt to laugh at the weather, and this—this was weather.
"Belay the wailing!" he roared into the fleet channel, and his voice went out to nine hundred hulls. "It comes from one side, you chum-brained gale-lickers, which means it's got a side! All wings—shields to whatever cheek she's showing you! Armour your exposed flank and let the rest of the sky mind itself!"
The formation shuddered and began, raggedly, to comply. Shield lattices flared along a hundred broadsides, angling to face the oncoming wall. Some held. Some didn't. The wall of blades passed through the fleet's western third and out the far side, and the light galley Leon had marked ceased to exist along with everything unlucky enough to share its chord.
"Power armours!" Aldric bellowed. "Out of your kennels and into the black, all of you—earn your shares! Cruisers of the First Wing, form on the Crown and keep station off my quarter! This ain't the first wall the Blackfleet's ever had to climb—"
The night to starboard moved.
That was the only warning any of them got. One moment there was cloud and darkness and the strobing chaos of the battle; the next, the Partner was simply there, surfacing out of the murk like something rising under a swimmer's legs, and Aldric understood in one cold heartbeat that everything she had done for the past minute—the drifting, the idle turns, the apparent distraction—had been theatre for exactly this.
"EVASIVE!" he howled. "Hard down, hard down, all hands brace—"
The Partner did not ram the Carrion Crown. She had never intended to. She swept past the flagship close enough that Aldric could have spat on her hull, and instead drove her armoured shoulder through the two cruisers that had been dutifully forming on his quarter, exactly as ordered—the Widow's Tithe and the Salt Gallows, four hundred good men and eighty guns between them—while her forward batteries spoke ahead of her and her side batteries spoke abeam, short precise sentences of fire that walked across every hull within two kilometres.
The Widow's Tithe broke in half. The Salt Gallows fared worse: the impact sheared her hull clean off her floating stone, and Aldric watched, gripping his wheel, as the stone bobbed serenely upward, suddenly unburdened, while everything that had been attached to it dropped away into the dark below like a coat slipping off a hook. Power armour signatures sparked from her tumbling decks—a dozen, two dozen, men getting to suits in time and clawing back into the sky.
Not everyone was lucky. Aldric didn't watch the rest of it fall.
"Vess," he said, quietly, off the fleet channel. "Count."
"Nine hundred and forty, Captain." Vess's voice had a tremor in it. "Nine thirty-eight. Nine thirty-one."
"Stop counting."
Nine hundred hulls. Still nine hundred hulls against one ship and a handful of fliers. Aldric had taken merchantmen with worse odds than the ones his enemy was facing; numbers were numbers, and numbers won wars. He told himself this twice.
He had not been prepared for the ease of it. That was the thing gnawing under his ribs. Not the losses—losses were the trade—but the manner of them. The Partner wasn't fighting his fleet. She was grazing on it.
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At the far edge of the half-kilometre bubble the Partner had carved for herself—the surrounding fleet giving the seemingly bloodthirsty vessel all the room she demanded—Brad Fou Fields had stopped keeping score somewhere around his fortieth downed boarding craft, chiefly because Chris had started keeping score, and there were limits to how much of Chris a man could encourage.
"Fifty-two," Chris announced, landing on the back of a cruiser, having just opened three power armours down the seam like pea pods. His blade—he'd gone back to a blade after Folkvangr, the shoulder foci relegated to point defence only—flicked clean. "You?"
"I don't count," Brad said. Above him, his drones wove a lattice of fire that swatted a boarding skiff out of the air, then a second, then a grappling charge that had been arcing towards the deck. His guardian spirit stood at his shoulder, broad and calm, golden-haired, shield raised: Patroclus, who in eight months of border service had never once let a shot through to his contractor and plainly did not intend to start on a night this crowded.
"You don't count because you're losing."
"I don't count because I'm a mage, Chris. When I fire into a formation, attribution becomes a statistical question."
"Fifty-two," Chris repeated, with relish, and threw himself back off the rail.
Odysseus went with him—not beside him, never beside him, but somewhere adjacent and unaccountable, the grey spirit slipping between hulls and shadows so that pirates who turned to face the swordsman kept discovering, at the worst possible moments, that their armour's stabilisers had been quietly sabotaged mid-air, their ammunition feeds jammed, their comm channels filled with a voice giving them contradictory orders in their own captain's accent. Chris privately considered half his tally to be assisted kills and had decided never to examine the matter closely.
Brad watched a wing of six power armours dive at the deck, gathered a lance of compressed flame between his palms—months at the Principality border had burned the wastefulness out of his casting; the old Brad would have thrown a fireball the size of a barn and drained himself in ten minutes—and put the lance through the wing's leader with a marksman's economy. The formation scattered. His drones ate the stragglers.
"Fifty-three!" came Chris's voice from somewhere below the rail.
"Patroclus," Brad said wearily.
"I know," said Patroclus, and raised his shield against the night.
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Aboard the crippled cruiser, matters had progressed—if that was the word—considerably.
Olivia stood on the quarterdeck with her Dēgen resting across her shoulders like a farmer's yoke, watching the last of the crew queue up at the escape skiffs in an orderly fashion that pleased her enormously. Order was important. She'd told them so, at volume, while Berserker hung off the mainmast above her making its noise.
The noise, she felt, was really coming along. The vocal track had started as an unmodulated shriek—effective, but crude—and she'd since layered in a low warble underneath, a sort of grieving-whale undertone that got into a person's back teeth. Judging by the speed of the queue, the blend was working. One pirate at the skiff rail was weeping openly. Another appeared to be attempting to pray to the construct directly, on the theory, presumably, that anything that sounded like that was best approached as a deity.
"There's a good lad," Olivia told him kindly. "Off you pop."
Her Stork Ritter constructs herded the stragglers with gentle, inexorable shoves of their shield faces, and within another minute the cruiser was hers: hull intact, floating stone intact, guns intact, one bridge in need of professional cleaning, and a flag she was already planning to replace with something in Bartfort colours.
That made two tonight—the corvette had struck its colours to Berserker's voice alone, which Olivia had decided absolutely counted—and the night was young, and the fleet was enormous, and somewhere at the back of her mind a tally had begun that was not entirely unlike Chris's, except that Chris was collecting kills and she was collecting assets. Leon would grumble about the paperwork. Leon grumbled about all the best things.
At the rail, Sella and Leysritt exchanged a look.
"She is cataloguing the fixtures," Sella said.
"Mm," said Leysritt.
"During a fleet action. She is walking the deck and cataloguing the fixtures."
"Mm."
"I am not going to strike her," Sella said, as though reciting a vow under strain. "It is technically initiative. It is technically even thrift. Master Leon asked for intact hulls." A boarding skiff crawled past below them, its occupants goggling up at the white giant on the mast, and Sella flicked two fingers; a lance of pale light holed its engine and left it drifting, crew intact and thoroughly demoralised. "But if she starts measuring for curtains—"
"Partner," Leysritt said.
Sella followed her sister's gaze. Across the gap, the flagship was shouldering through the fleet with three fresh clusters of grapple lines sunk into her flanks—stubborn souls, these pirates, apparently unmoved by the fate of the previous climbers—and dozens of power-armoured figures inching up her hull like ants up a whale.
Sella sighed through her nose. "Very well. Lady Olivia! We are seeing to the Partner. Try not to annex anything else while we're gone."
"No promises!" Olivia sang back, already elbow-deep in the cruiser's chart locker.
The two lunar spirits stepped off the cruiser's rail and fell into the battle, shaking their heads in perfect unison, and went to peel pirates off their master's warship one grapple line at a time. It was, Leysritt reflected as she sheared through the first cable and watched its owner begin a long educational descent, honest work. Somebody in this household had to do some.
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Leon, meanwhile, had acquired an audience.
It had happened gradually, the way these things did. He'd been picking off gun platforms from a mid-altitude station, unhurried, when some enterprising wing commander in the pirate ranks had evidently concluded that the lone red-armoured figure was the fleet's most soluble problem, and the sky around him had filled with power armour. Twenty suits. Then forty. Then a rough globe of them, layered and rotating, cutting off every line of ascent and descent, muzzles bristling inward.
Leon turned slowly in the centre of the sphere, Kanshou and Bakuya in his hands, and did the arithmetic without heat. Forty-plus suits, standard kingdom-pattern armour with pirate modifications, coordinated well enough to hold a globe. In the game, an encounter like this had been an endgame raid mechanic. In the here and now it was mostly a scheduling problem.
"You're surrounded, red!" one of them called, amplified. "Shed the blades and maybe you fall soft!"
"You know," Leon said, "I keep meaning to have a quiet year."
The globe contracted.
And Durga arrived.
She came down through the top of the formation like a thrown temple, and the sphere's entire upper arc simply ceased to be a formation and became a debris field. She fell past Leon, arresting herself at his back with a flare of her boots, and around her silver-white hair her arms multiplied into motion—all of them, the full argument: twin talwars scissoring, the broad khanda sweeping guard, the urumi uncoiling in a five-metre ribbon of singing flexible steel that opened three suits along their seams in one lazy circle, the parasu's hook catching a fourth by the ankle and hauling him screaming into the path of a fifth, the dhal turning rounds with contemptuous little chimes, trishul, gada, katar, and the bagh nakh raking sparks down a breastplate as its owner scrambled away, having discovered that somewhere in the last two seconds his suit's entire left arm had gone missing.
"You started without me," Durga said. Her blood-red eyes were bright behind her visor.
"I knew you'd catch up." Leon crossed Kanshou and Bakuya and turned a burst of fire off their flats. "I wonder if the guardian spirits would like some power armour of their own. There's rather a lot going spare tonight."
Somewhere on the far side of the battle, Chris, Brad, and their guardian spirits choked on the idea. Somewhere else, alongside Art, Setanta's grin turned even more feral.
"Will that not put a bigger target on your back?" The urumi hissed out again and the globe's western arc developed a hole. "Back to back?"
"Back to back."
They turned together, and the sphere of pirates—who had, to be fair to them, signed on for merchant convoys and the occasional under-gunned patrol, not for whatever this was—began to learn the difference between surrounding two people and being arranged around them. Leon fought in economical lines, married blades crossing and parting, each parry flowing into a throw, each thrown blade detonating in a soft crack of released prana that never quite killed anyone but reliably removed their suits from the argument. Durga fought like a festival. Between them they made the globe smaller from the inside, which was not how globes were supposed to work, and after ninety seconds the surviving pirates arrived at a unanimous, unspoken tactical decision and left in forty directions at once.
Durga watched them scatter, weapons stilling around her. "They had spirit."
"They had a pay dispute waiting to happen." Leon rolled his shoulder. "Come on. Luxion's ledger is getting ahead of ours."
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Elsewhere—and this was the trouble, Leon thought, there was always an elsewhere—Art and Setanta had found each other, and having found each other had found a shared calling.
They were ploughing through the fleet's eastern wing. There was no gentler verb for it. Art moved from hull to hull in flat silent arcs, the enormous ornate blade of Marmyadose shearing masts, rudders, and gun decks with strokes that looked unhurried and covered ten metres of timber each; Setanta ran the tops parallel to her, crimson spear a blur, whooping on an open channel every time he beat her to a target, which was often enough to keep him whooping and rarely enough to keep her going. Behind the pair of them stretched a corridor of drifting, dismasted, thoroughly disarmed hulks—crews mostly intact, dignity nowhere to be found.
"That's nineteen!" Setanta bellowed. "Nineteen to your seventeen, quiet one, and I'll have an even score of twenty before—"
"Mn," said Art, and took two.
"THAT'S CHEATING—"
"Both of you," Leon said into the channel, pinching the bridge of his nose again, again through the helmet, again achieving nothing. "Structural restraint. Restraint, structurally. The hulls have value. The stones have value. I have said this."
"They float still," Art reported.
"Most of them float," Setanta amended cheerfully.
"Setanta."
"The one that doesn't float was already unhappy when I got there!"
Leon let the channel breathe for a moment. Beyond the eastern corridor of shame, he could see Brad's drone lattice strobing along the portside approaches and, further out, the flat blue flash of Chris's blade-arts opening another wing of power armour like post. Between the two of them and their spirits, they'd cleared or claimed—Luxion's overlay obligingly totted it up—some sixty vessels' worth of resistance.
The two of them had lost everything at Folkvangr. Rank, spirits' pride, the prince's cause, their own certainties. They'd been demoted, exiled to a border, worked half to death under Barret, and here they were anyway, fighting like men with something to prove because they were men with something to prove.
'That's their share,' Leon thought, and let them have it.
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"Master," Luxion said, and his voice had changed.
Leon's spine changed with it. "Report."
"The Rachelle transport is opening. Demonic armour signatures deploying—sixty-seven confirmed, matching the survey count. Vector: not the fleet, Master. They are ignoring the fleet entirely." A pause of one full second, which from Luxion was a speech. "They are coming for me."
Of course they were. The Offreys wanted Leon ransomed; Rachelle wanted the Partner dead and everyone aboard her with it. The pirates were the wrapping paper. This was the parcel.
"All units," Leon said, and the dry humour was gone from his voice as though it had never lived there. "Demonic armour inbound, sixty-plus, converging on the Partner. Priorities invert—the ship is now first, everything else is now second. Durga, Art, Setanta, Chris—on me, defensive sphere around the hull. Brad, you're the outer picket; anything that gets through us, burn it before it touches her plating. Sella, Leysritt—clear the remaining grapplers and hold the deck."
"And I, Master?" Luxion enquired.
"You," Leon said, "keep doing what you're doing. Try to look helpless."
"I do not know how, Master, but I shall improvise."
They came out of the dark behind the pirate screen in a loose black swarm, and even at four kilometres Leon felt them the way one feels a draught from an open grave. Demonic armour didn't fly so much as lurch through the air in impossible ways, all wrong angles and stuttering acceleration, plating fused to pilot in weeping seams, and the mana they gave off was the smell of a wound gone bad. 'Seventy-two hours.' Every one of the pilots in those suits was already dead; their bodies just hadn't finished the paperwork.
The swarm hit the defensive sphere and the night turned into close work.
Durga met the first wave head-on and stopped it—actually stopped it, ten weapons against a dozen shrieking suits, the urumi wrapping one and the gada crushing another and the trishul pinning a third against a drifting hulk—while Art carved a silent bright line across the second wave's flank and Setanta, all laughter gone now, drove his spear through joints and cores with a butcher's focus. Chris fought at the hull line itself, blade-arts flashing, Odysseus feeding him openings; Brad's picket fire fell in disciplined sheets.
And the Partner—the Partner, which was supposed to be the protected party in this arrangement—kept hunting.
She did not slow. She did not withdraw to the centre of her defenders like a sensible flagship. She continued to stalk through the pirate fleet exactly as before, batteries conversing, hull swinging through clusters of hulls, and every so often, whenever a demonic armour strayed across one of her firing arcs in its rush towards her, a single point-defence battery would traverse with what Leon could only describe as relish and swat the thing out of the sky.
"Luxion."
"Master?"
"Was that a laugh? Did I hear a laugh on the private channel?"
"A harmonic artefact of the battery traverse mechanism, Master."
"It went 'heh'."
"The mechanism," Luxion said, "is complex."
The sphere held. That was what mattered, Leon told himself, cutting a shrieking suit out of the air and feeling its corrupted mana spit and gutter against his blades. Minute after minute, the swarm broke against them and came again and broke again. He could read the frustration in the enemy's movements now—demonic armour didn't emote, exactly, but the swarm's patterns grew jagged, wasteful, suits hurling themselves at the same failed approaches with mounting fury, and somewhere behind them a Rachelle handler was watching a sixty-seven-piece investment achieve nothing at all.
Olivia arrived twelve minutes in, Stork Ritter streaming behind her, having presumably run out of fixtures to catalogue.
"Started without me!" she called—the household's phrase of the evening—and dropped into the sphere's western arc, Dēgen flashing, curse-rounds streaming from her free hand in ropes of violet light. Berserker came down after her onto the spine of the nearest hulk and made its noise, and even the demonic armours, dead men in dead steel, seemed to hesitate at it.
She was, Leon registered distantly between exchanges, in tremendous form. She was also—he registered this too, and filed it, and had no spare half-second to act on the filing—enjoying herself rather more than the situation strictly warranted. Two hulls taken without a scratch. A fleet parting around the household like water. Every curse-round finding its seam. It was the sort of night that whispered to a person that everything they touched would keep coming up gold.
The battle ground on. Below and around them, the pirate fleet's remaining wings still fought—raggedly now, in knots and eddies, nine hundred hulls whittled towards six hundred and fifty, a full third of Draake's flotilla drifting, dismasted, captured, or gone. A thousand vessels was a great many vessels. Even reduced by a third it was a great many vessels. But numbers, as Aldric Draake was somewhere presently discovering, were only numbers, and the demonic swarm was thinning, and the sphere had not once cracked.
"They can't get through," Olivia announced, parrying a black gauntlet and putting three curse-rounds through its owner's core seam. Her voice had gone bright in the way it only did when a plan was discovering itself as she went. "Leon! They can't get through us! Look at them—they're falling apart—"
"Livia—"
"We should start thinking about salvage priority! If even half of these are recoverable—" A black blade shrieked off her Dēgen's guard; she barely seemed to notice. "—Rachelle units, Leon, actual Rachelle units. Do you know what the Crown would pay just to put one on a table in front of—"
"Livia, tighten up. Hold the arc."
"I am holding the arc!" She was holding the arc. She was holding it brilliantly, and laughing, and drifting—a metre at a time, exchange by exchange—towards its outer edge, the way she always drifted towards whatever she was thinking about. "One of them's running! Ha—no you don't—"
A single demonic armour had peeled from the swarm's edge and was clawing upward, stuttering, lurching, black vapour bleeding from a ruptured seam along its flank. It looked wounded. It looked slow. It looked, above all, collectable.
'Evidence,' sang the bright acquisitive voice that had been keeping her tally all evening. 'Better than evidence—an exhibit.' An intact demonic armour, recovered and presented: the sort of prize that turned a report into a verdict. Erica needed defendants and evidence both. Olivia would bring her the evidence gift-wrapped.
She went after it.
Ten metres beyond the sphere. Ten metres was nothing; she could fall back across ten metres between one heartbeat and the next.
"Livia, hold position—"
Twenty. The runner floundered, dipped, lost more vapour. It was practically drifting into her hands. Behind her the Stork Ritter streamed out in a white ribbon, and some distant, sensible portion of her mind observed that her escort screen was stretching thin, and was overruled by the rest of her, which had already begun composing the way she'd describe all this to Angelica.
Thirty. Her Dēgen sang out ahead of her, angling for the tether-cut that would bring the prize down softly—
"LIVIA—"
Fifty metres, and afterwards she would never be able to say where along the line the decision had actually been made. Only that every individual metre had seemed such a small, reasonable thing to add to the one before it.
—and the fleeing suit stopped fleeing.
It turned in the air with no deceleration at all—nothing wounded turned like that; nothing alive turned like that—and the black vapour cut off as cleanly as a tap being closed, because it had been vented on purpose, because the wound was a costume. And above it the empty night sky opened like a trapdoor, and demonic armours poured down out of the dark—a second swarm, fifteen, twenty of them, dropping from an altitude where nothing should have been.
"Master—" and for the first time in their acquaintance Leon heard something in Luxion's voice that he never wanted to hear again—"they were positioned above my drone envelope. Beyond my sensor umbrella. I could not—I did not see them—"
The Partner's dorsal batteries traversed faster than any mechanism had a right to move and blew the leading armour into vapour at the exact instant it ploughed through a drifting pirate sloop, timber and black plating scattering together—but there were nineteen more, and they were not aiming for the Partner at all, and Olivia was fifty metres outside the sphere with her blade extended and her weight committed entirely the wrong way.
Black gauntlets closed on her arms. On her legs. On the white lattice of her suit.
Berserker's vocal track ripped into a scream with nothing engineered left in it—raw, unmodulated, every month of artistry gone—and the construct threw itself upward, and three demonic armours peeled off to meet it and dragged it down onto the hulk by sheer massed weight. Her Stork Ritter shattered against a wall of black steel.
"Leon, I—"
The first grey band snapped shut around her wrist, and her channel collapsed into static and went out.
Leon was already moving. Kanshou and Bakuya gone, Hrunting half-traced in his hand, Durga a silver blur beside him, Setanta ahead of them both—
—and he stopped.
He stopped because his eyes were faster than his hope, and they had already finished the arithmetic.
One of the black gauntlets held a fused, weeping blade against the line of her throat. Not near it. Against it. Half a dozen more caged her from every side, points resting at the joins of her body—throat, armpit, the soft seam below the ribs—and the things holding them did not breathe, and would never flinch, and had nothing left in them that could be threatened. The whole cluster was rising, fast, back through its trapdoor of dark sky, and pieces of white-and-turquoise plating were falling away from her as it went—the lattice guttering dead section by section as band after band closed, torn away in efficient, practised handfuls. Drilled handfuls. Someone had written this manoeuvre down—the grab, the cage, the stripping, in that order—and made dead men rehearse it until it was smooth, and they had rehearsed it for his household.
Suppression bands. Leon knew the design from the border. Every circuit she had, silenced.
His mind ran the vault anyway, because it was his mind, and it had never once learnt how to stop.
Hrunting: the hound never missed its mark—but the mark was buried in a cage of black steel, and a blade was already touching her throat, and steel at a throat needed a tenth of a second that no thrown sword in the world could beat. The lattice of a thousand blades: a wall did not discriminate; it would reach her captors and her in the same instant. Gae Bolg: thrust, it took one heart; thrown, it made craters—and either way the rest of the cage answered before the spear arrived. Gae Dearg, Gae Buidhe: swords for hands he could not close to within fifty metres. Rho Aias could stop anything thrown at her from without; nothing about it could peel away steel already resting on skin. Caladbolg—
He did not finish the thought about Caladbolg. Everything within half a kilometre. Her included.
"Master." Luxion, already on their private channel. "I have no firing solution. Every member of the cluster is in continuous contact with her body. I calculate no intervention—mine, yours, anyone's—that does not carry an unacceptable probability of—" The voice stopped itself. Luxion's voice never stopped itself. "I have no firing solution."
Setanta could cross fifty metres faster than anything else the household could field. The blade at her throat needed to move half a centimetre. Speed did not beat contact. Nothing beat contact.
'Later,' he'd promised the vault, all those months. 'When there's time.' It was later now. A thousand blades, a dead man's centuries of answers, and not one of them catalogued for a night when the enemy stopped trying to beat him and simply took the one thing he could not spend.
Every line of the ledger returned the same figure.
"HALT!" Leon's voice cracked across every channel at once. "All units halt! Hold! Nobody moves!"
The sphere froze. Durga froze, ten weapons trembling around her. Setanta froze mid-lunge, spear-point a metre short of the nearest black suit, murder held on a leash of pure will. On the deck of the Partner, Sella had gone the colour of chalk.
And through the frozen sky, amplified across half the battlefield, rolled the voice of Aldric Draake.
"WELL NOW." The Carrion Crown was turning away, and behind her what remained of the Blackfleet was turning with her—six hundred and change hulls disengaging in surprisingly good order, wounded wings folding inward, the whole flotilla flowing away eastward with the cluster of demonic armours and their prize sliding into its protective heart. "That's better. That's much better. All stop, the lot of you, just like the man says!"
"Draake." Leon's voice came out flat and quiet and carried anyway.
"Viscount! Grand to finally make your acquaintance proper. Lovely ship. Lovely evening. Terrible losses, but that's the trade." The pirate's bravado was back in full sail, and only a careful ear—Leon's was very careful—could hear the fresh sweat underneath it. "Now, here's how the rest of the night goes. You sit. You wait. We'll send along a ransom note, all civilised, figures and terms and a nice wax seal. And your little vassal there—" a low, oily chuckle—"well. She's a pretty thing, ain't she, boys? Long voyage ahead. She'll be lucky if we don't—"
Leon threw.
He had traced it somewhere in the last four seconds without deciding to, the way a heart doesn't decide to beat: Caladbolg, altered, compressed, overloaded past its structural tolerance into a Broken Phantasm, every fault line in the spiral blade glowing white. It left his hand not as an arrow, not as a sword, but as a rising star, and it came down in the exact centre of a cluster of retreating pirate vessels a full three kilometres from the Carrion Crown and further still from Olivia.
The horizon turned white.
The sound arrived a heartbeat later, a flat continent-sized crack, and where fifty vessels of the Blackfleet's rearguard had been sailing there was now an expanding sphere of incandescence and, presently, nothing at all—no hulls, no stones, no debris worth the name. Fifty ships. One throw. The pressure wave rocked the retreating fleet from end to end, and every channel on every hull went silent at once.
Into that silence, after a pause of several long seconds, came Aldric Draake's voice again. It had shed a great deal of its oil.
"...Okay. Right. No—no having our way with anyone, none of that, figure of speech, the boys know the rules." A cough. "But! But you will not follow us, Viscount, hear me now—you'll sit that pretty ship of yours down and you'll wait on our demands like a good and patient man, or the precious life of your vassal will be—"
He let it trail away. Even Draake, it seemed, could not find the end of that sentence with fifty ships' worth of light still fading off the horizon.
The fleet shrank eastward. The demonic armours shrank with it, and somewhere inside that mass of black steel and rotten mana was Olivia, banded and silenced and stripped bare of her lattice, and Leon stood in the empty sky and watched them go and did not blink.
"Master." Luxion, very quietly. "Your orders."
Durga drifted to his side. Chris and Brad hung below, Setanta above, Art silent at his shoulder; on the Partner's deck, Sella gripped the rail hard enough to score the metal.
"Leon," Durga said. "What do we do?"
"We follow them." The words came out level, and beneath the level was something that made every spirit present, ancient beings all, decide as one not to speak again until spoken to. "Remember what the arsehole of a King did when we were on our way to the capital?"
"Yes."
"Calculate the same kind of approach vectors. The Partner follows beyond radar range."
-=&&=-
End
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