Lunaris was nervous going up the tower…
The spiral staircase ended in stone.
Luna paused at the threshold, longsword loose in her right hand, rapier in her left. The chamber beyond was circular, vaulted, and had been actively darkened. The windows along the walls were veiled with something that wasn’t quite shadow, and the air smelled of dust and magic.
Katherine was at her shoulder. Lisa to her left. Ian a half-step behind. Fty last, staff in hand.
“Nice mood lighting,” Lisa muttered.
“He set it up,” Luna said.
“Yes.” The voice came from the far end of the chamber, unhurried, the voice that had been waiting to use itself.
“At last.”
Luna’s eyes adjusted. She could make out, vaguely, the outline of a figure at the back of the room. Tall, robed. The faint outline of a staff. A second shape standing beside him, larger, plated. Behind and around them were silhouettes she couldn’t fully count. Skeletal shapes. Slow grey forms. The minions Yuki’s briefing had warned about, arranged in the dimness like furniture in a room no one used.
“I had wondered,” the voice continued, “if anyone would ever come. Not hoped. Wondered. There is a difference when one has waited fifty years.” He breathed in a way that almost sounded like a laugh. “My new minions mentioned you might.”
Luna said nothing.
The voice continued anyway.
“You came from Altandai, of course. I felt the signatures the moment you passed the threshold. The same arrogance. I would know it anywhere.”
Lisa’s head turned slightly toward Luna, a question on her face. Luna gave the tiniest shake of her head.
Let him talk.
“Tell me,” the voice said, and there was something almost conversational in it now, almost amused, “does Drethain still sit on the council? Or has the gout finally taken him?”
Silence.
“No matter. Whoever sits in the Grandmaster’s chair sent you. You are pawns in someone else’s game. Whose game?”
“Queen Charlie,” said Ian, and Luna shot him a look.
“A new name. I do not recognize it.” He paused. “But the practice is the same. When the Academy faces a problem it cannot acknowledge, it sends others to die in its place.”
The figure shifted. Luna couldn’t see his face yet, but she could feel attention moving across the group, weighing each of them. She felt the weight pass over her and dismiss her without effort.
It rested on Lisa.
“You,” the voice said, almost gently. “I feel you. Unstructured. The Academy must still hate that, doesn’t it? Some things do not change.”
Lisa didn’t answer. Her hands were already glowing faintly at her sides.
The attention shifted. Found Katherine. Rested there a moment, puzzled.
“And you. I do not recognize what you are. A duelist, but… different. The Academy’s taxonomy never accounted for your kind.” A small, dry sound that might have been laughter. “You are who they sent for sport?”
Katherine grinned in the dark.
The attention moved past Fty and Luna. “And weaklings to support them. Typical.”
Glanced at Ian.
Glanced away.
“Hey,” Ian said. “What about me?”
Nothing.
“...okay.”
The figure raised one hand. The plated shape beside him stepped forward into a faint pool of light Luna hadn’t realized was there; a Death Knight, full armor, eyes burning a pale violet. The greatsword across her back gleamed dully. She moved with the wrong kind of grace, the muscle memory of a fighter who had died long ago.
“My apprentice,” the voice said. “She came south to help me. She was my best. She would not have approved of what came after.” He let out a long sigh. “But she stayed. The Academy never wondered where she went. I think they suspected… and chose not to ask.”
Luna kept her face still. Yuki had mentioned an apprentice in the briefing, somewhere between the dietary preferences of Grandmaster Thevian and the architectural notes on the Twir outpost. Brilliant young researcher. Vanished. Recorded as “absent without notice.” She had not pictured plate.
The voice was quieter now.
“Fifty years ago I wrote to your Grandmaster’s predecessor. I asked for an army. I offered him the chance to end something terrible before it grew.”
He breathed violently. “He calculated the cost. He wrote one word in the margin of my letter and filed it.”
“Denied. I extend the same word to you.”
Luna did not move. The team did not move.
Then Fty stepped forward and lifted his staff.
He said nothing.
Light slid out from the head of his staff in a clean white arc and met each of the veiled windows. The veiling parted; his magic hadn’t torn it, but politely removed it, and Luna imagined the gentleness of a nurse drawing back a curtain on a patient who had been sleeping too long.
Daylight poured into the room.
Luna saw him.
[Veranthos Lv.47]Type: 7-legendary HP: 4,500/4,500
He was tall, taller than she had expected, with long bones and stooped shoulders. His robes had once been the deep blue of the Academy and were now a uniform sun-faded grey, worn at the cuffs, the hem trailing in dust. His skin was pale to the point of translucency, with a faint violet wash beneath it that was not bruising but the wrong color showing through. His hair was thin and grey and shoulder-length. His eyes were perfectly ordinary. Brown.
He looked like a man.
A man who had not slept well in five decades.
The staff in his hand was very old.
Beside him, the Death Knight stood ready.
[Faithful Assistant (Death Knight) Lv.42]Type: 6-marvel HP: 4,000/4,000
Around them, arranged in a thin perimeter, were skeletons in rusted plate, slow grey shapes Yuki told them as the detonating kind, one or two larger forms she did not have time to identify. The room held perhaps thirty hostile entities.
Veranthos looked at the new light without surprise.
“Useful,” he said.
He looked at the group again, fully, now that he could see them.
“Useful,” he said again, in exactly the same flat tone, “is also what I would have called you. Once.”
Luna did not look at Veranthos when she spoke. “Lisa. Attack with magic.”
Lisa’s hands lifted at her sides without question. Heat washed off her in a slow wave that made the dust on the floor rise an inch.
“Kath. You know what to do.”
“Yes!”
“Fty. Support them.” Fty’s staff turned a quarter turn in his grip. The first sanctifying glow began at its head, pale gold.
“Ian. With me.”
“On it.”
She did not shout it. She mimicked how Mila had spoken during the attack, when there was nothing to discuss and only the order mattered. To her surprise, the team moved without complaint.
Veranthos watched them place themselves. He did not adjust or seem to register that the Lunaris in the front had given commands. He watched Lisa’s flame with wariness and ignored everyone else.
Luna was offended that he didn’t take her as a threat, but she ignored it. She drew the longsword forward. The rapier balanced in her left hand.
The fight began with no one calling it.
Katherine was moving first. The aura came up off her in a slow red wash, and the air around her thickened past the point Fty’s buffs reached, and she did not break stride. She crossed the chamber in five long steps and brought the greatsword down on the bone armor across Veranthos’s shoulder, two-handed, with full weight.
The armor took it. Bone chipped along the strike.
Veranthos did not move because he was still looking at Lisa, and she moved her hands once. A small fireball came off her right palm and crossed the chamber in a clean line at Veranthos’s chest.
His left hand moved. A sphere of darkness, the same size, traveled the same line toward her at the same speed.
They passed each other in the middle of the room.
Lisa’s fireball broke harmlessly against a thin necromantic ward at the last instant. Veranthos’s necroball broke harmlessly against a wall of heat Lisa had raised before she finished the throw.
Lisa stared.
“You—” She didn’t finish and threw a firebolt instead. It was a short lance of compressed flame moving at high speed.
A necrobolt left his fingers along the same line, the same shape, the same speed.
They cancelled mid-air and sparks fell.
“Mirror me,” Lisa murmured. “He’s mirroring me. Luna!” Lisa called. “He’s matching my casts, same size, same speed!”
“Copy,” Luna said, not looking back. “Keep him occupied.”
Lisa nodded, and her hands grew brighter.
Katherine had pulled back from her first strike and was moving for the second. The bone armor at Veranthos’s shoulder had a crack in it that had not been there before. He let her come.
Behind them, the minion line moved.
Luna saw the apprentice shift first. The undead didn’t move with the wild-undead twitch; it was the way a fighter resettled her weight before committing.
The Death Knight raised her greatsword.
The skeletons came forward in a coordinated half-arc, the slow grey shapes moving up behind them in a second rank.
Luna’s mind already had the map.
“Right side,” she said to Ian. Her voice turned into Mila’s cadence, somewhere behind her own. “Skeletons first. Stay behind me when the grey ones come close. I’ll call your window.”
“Got it.”
She moved.
Luna’s first cut took a skeleton at the joint. The rapier slid in low; the longsword swept up to catch the second one before the first had finished falling.
She didn’t slow.
Ian was at her elbow, daggers loose. He had stopped flinching. The cave engagement had done that; somewhere between Toxica going down and Korven’s wall, his shoulders had stopped riding up to his ears, and now he watched the line and moved when she pointed.
“Two, left flank,” Luna said.
He went.
Behind her, the magical exchange continued. She did not look, but she heard it. Fireball, necroball. Firebolt, necrobolt. Lisa was casting faster now, smaller throws, trying to break the rhythm. Each time, a perfect counterpart left Veranthos’s hand. The casts cancelled. The room filled with sparks that smelled wrong.
“The Academy never tolerated your kind, did it?” Veranthos said pleasantly. His voice carried; he didn’t have to raise it. “All that potential. No discipline.”
Lisa threw a column of flame the height of the chamber.
A column of dark mirror-fire rose to meet it. They struck. The chamber shuddered. The columns collapsed inward and dispersed.
“I had so much respect for the unstructured once,” Veranthos said. “Before I realized what it cost.”
Lisa’s hands went brighter.
Katherine was hammering at the bone armor in a rhythm Luna would have recognized blind: heavy, heavy, half-step, heavy. The crack across Veranthos’s shoulder was longer. The plate on his ribs had a chip in it. Katherine grinned through blood on her teeth.
A grey shape came up off the floor near the back of the minion line and started forward.
“Ian. Hold,” Luna said. “Wait until it commits.”
Ian held.
The detonator came on, a slow grey body, dragging gait, the wrongness of a thing that wanted to be near her badly. Luna felt the heat-pressure of Katherine’s aura at her back and used the cover of it. Three steps forward. The detonator picked up speed.
“Ian. Now.”
[All-in]
Five seconds. Zero defense. Pure killing.
Ian crossed the gap before the detonator had finished its lunge. Both daggers, Quick-Draw, the strike density that turned his frantic style into something nearly elegant. The detonator’s chest opened along a vertical seam, and the explosion came out behind it instead of forward, a clean directional vent that took out two skeletons in the second rank and dropped a third without touching him.
He landed on his back, got up, and sheathed.
“Nice,” Luna said.
“Thanks.”
Across the chamber, Lisa staggered.
It was a small stagger, the kind that wouldn’t be on a stream highlight, but Luna saw it because she had trained herself to see exactly that. Lisa’s left hand had gone down. Her right hand kept casting, but the throws were getting smaller.
Something was at her feet.
A tether. A thin grey line from Veranthos’s left palm to Lisa’s sternum, almost invisible against the daylight Fty had let in. It was siphoning her.
Lisa hadn’t noticed yet. She was too focused on the mirror magic.
“Fty,” Luna said.
His staff swept once, low, and a clean white line of light cut between Veranthos’s hand and Lisa’s chest. The tether broke without ceremony. Lisa’s left hand came back up and her color returned.
“Lisa,” Fty said, and the single word carried everything else.
Lisa threw a fireball with both hands this time.
A necroball met it with both hands.
Fty was already moving back to his station, buff lines refreshing on Katherine where the chip damage had eaten the edges.
Veranthos had not stopped speaking.
“The Academy will send another team after this one fails,” he said, almost kindly. “And another. They never tire of spending people. I have time.”
Lisa’s hands went brighter again.