Chapter 18: Warzone

  Cole quickly assigned his spell points. He had two, so he put one into Black Halo Lance, bringing it to rank 1, and one into Null Hymn, bringing it to rank 1. His two attribute points automatically went into Authority.

  He also had another notification blinking about his title, but the rift was starting to close. As he had no idea what might happen if he was left behind, he entered it. Faelen having already left.

  The rift swallowed him, much as it had the first time he had entered one.

  First was that empty, stomach-dropping cold of being yanked out of the world.

  Then weight.

  Then air.

  Cole stumbled one step forward and caught himself with the Crozier, staff tip scraping concrete.

  He was deposited into a warzone.

  The sound hit him. The chatter of gunfire. Short bursts. Long bursts. The echo of rounds snapping against hard surfaces. Shouts layered over shouts. The wet, animal sound of things dying.

  Cole’s mind struggled to process the monsters around him. His thoughts tried to fit the shapes together into something recognizable, something his brain could label so it wouldn’t have to feel the full horror of it.

  They were humanoid. Sort of.

  Horned figures, some with dark red hide-like flesh stretched tight over muscle. Others were blob-like things that hissed and spit, their bodies slick with acid that steamed where it touched the ground. One figure had tentacles hanging from where a mouth should have been, and when it turned its head, those tentacles fanned twisting and tasting the air.

  Cole’s breath caught.

  For a moment, in some safe part of his mind, he was back on a street with Nathan. Sunlight. A hand in his. Normal.

  Then a horned thing shrieked and the illusion snapped.

  He looked up, orienting. The gunfire was coming from the top of a wall that surrounded a warehouse. A high concrete barrier, patched with pallets and sheet metal and chain-link. People crouched along it, firing down until their barrels smoked. Below them, near the main gate, a cluster of fighters were trying to keep the line from breaking. Spear. Hatchet. A baseball bat with nails. A man swinging a shovel wildly.

  Cole recognized the warehouse.

  Hawthorne Warehouse.

  He had delivered here before. He remembered the loading bay smell. The way the lot always had those yellow lines that never seemed clean. The way it looked in the morning when the trucks came in and out.

  Now the lot was packed with bodies. Some were human.

  A horned figure spotted him near the rift shimmer and turned, its posture shifting from hunting to hungry. It started toward him on long, uneven legs.

  Cole did not shout. He didn’t have the breath for shouting anymore. He didn’t need it.

  “Ashen Aegis,” he muttered calmly.

  The space around him tightened, reality drawing a line in the dust.

  The creature lunged anyway.

  It hit the invisible boundary. There was a soft, awful resistance. The monster clawed at nothing, hissing, trying to force its way through the word no.

  “Black Halo Lance,” Cole gestured.

  Seraphic black light shot from his palm and took the thing in the center of its chest. There was no gore, it simply became ash that drifted down and smeared on the concrete.

  Cole’s eyes flicked to the wall.

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  “Get out of there!” a woman was shouting from above, pointing toward the gate with her rifle barrel. Her voice cracked, raw with hours of screaming orders that didn’t change the world.

  “Move! Move!”

  Gunfire peppered monsters, rounds punching into hide and slime. Some of the things fell. Others didn’t. Some staggered and kept coming.

  Near the gate, the fighters were straining. They weren’t winning. They were holding, which was not the same thing. Every time someone shoved a monster back, two more pressed in.

  Cole’s authority flared behind his eyes. This was more than a danger to him. It was a danger to everyone.

  The gate was going to break.

  He stepped forward, shoulders loose, staff in his left hand. He didn’t run, because running invited panic, and panic invited mistakes.

  “Edict: Disarm,” Cole said calmly.

  The word fell over the yard.

  All around him, any monster that held a weapon shuddered. A crude blade clattered to the ground. A jagged axe made of bone slipped from taloned fingers. A spear of sharpened pipe fell and bounced, ringing.

  For half a heartbeat the humans at the gate stared.

  Then one of them, some guy with a blood-smeared hoodie, let out a roar.

  They redoubled their efforts.

  A woman with a machete stepped in and took advantage of the opening, cutting down something that would have gutted her ten seconds ago. A man with a crowbar slammed it into a horned skull. Another shoved a creature back and slammed the gate closed a foot more.

  Cole kept moving.

  A huge tree monster lumbered toward him from the side. Its bark looked like muscle, wet, bleeding in places. Its branches were tentacles, thick and twitching, leaving slick trails in the air. When it opened what might have been a mouth, the inside was black sap and teeth.

  It lashed out.

  Cole didn’t flinch.

  “Ashen Aegis.”

  The tentacles slapped the invisible boundary and rebounded as if they’d hit stone. The creature shrieked, more rage than pain, and tried again.

  “Black Halo Lance.”

  Black light stabbed into the core of its trunk. The bleeding bark turned to ash in sheets. Tentacles sagged and fell, dissolving into drifting soot. The thing collapsed with a heavy, wet thud.

  The wall was quiet for a second, and Cole could feel eyes on him.

  He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.

  His staff hummed in his hand.

  A warmth, subtle as a heartbeat, spreading from the Crozier’s halo-circle down into the wood. He felt the staff approve.

  And then something in Cole’s vision shifted.

  Suddenly, he saw shadows far more clearly than he ever had before.

  Not the shadow under every monster. Not every corner of the yard. It was selective. The shadows of some of the creatures were deeper, thicker. They moved with added weight. And when those creatures moved, their shadows moved.

  Cole lifted the Crozier.

  The light within its halo brightened, focused. The ring at the top seemed to sharpen the world instead of illuminating it.

  A black halo shone over Cole’s head.

  He felt it settle there.

  Calmly, he uttered his spell, authority ringing in every word.

  “Black Halo Lance.”

  Instead of the normal seraphic black light shooting from his palm, the dark light shot forth from every marked shadow like a blade. It ripped upward, not from Cole, but from the world itself. From the places the monsters touched. From the shapes they cast.

  A dozen spears of darkness flashed in the same instant.

  They pierced skin, hide, tentacles, slime, bark alike.

  The yard filled with inhuman screams.

  Monsters dropped as if strings had been cut. Some simply fell apart into ash. Others collapsed in heaps, twitching, and then went still.

  Cole exhaled slowly, surprised. Not at the power, but at how it made sense. The Crozier wasn’t giving him a new spell. It was giving him better leverage.

  He could feel the weight of his own title over the top of his head.

  That earned him attention.

  The wave of monsters, of which a dozen remained, turned their ire on the one who had just slain a score of their brethren in the span of a breath. Heads snapped toward him. Bodies pivoted. The yard’s pressure shifted.

  They came.

  A horned brute with a cleaver made of something that might once have been metal charged first. A blob-creature flowed behind it, acid bubbling and steaming. Two more humanoid things, one with a jagged spear, one with hooked hands, sprinted in low and fast.

  Cole stood calmly as they rushed him, bloodlust palpable, nearly a living thing.

  “Choir of Verdict.”

  His voice rang out, and for the briefest instant wings of shadow appeared behind his back. Subtle, almost easy to miss. His halo drank in light as quiet judgment threaded through the air.

  The dozen monsters promptly crashed to the ground.

  Knees hit concrete. Claws splayed. A spear clattered as fingers went slack. A cleaver hit the ground with a heavy thunk.

  Cole moved.

  He killed them. His Black Halo Lance ended their lives as he calmly, but quickly, executed them all. One lance to the throat. One to the chest. One to the center where a shadow was thickest. He didn’t waste motion. Smooth and simple, he did what was necessary.

  The fighters at the gate stared at him. The woman on the wall stopped shouting mid-word.

  For a second, the entire yard seemed to inhale.

  Then the ground rumbled.

  Something crashed into the concrete from the top of a ruined building. The impact was so heavy it sent a shiver through the lot, dust puffing up in a ring around where it landed.

  Cole turned.

  Before him stood a blood red rhinoceros creature, massive, broader than a man, taller than a man. It wore dark green armor that was hammered or grown, maybe both. Plates of overlapping scales. Its eyes were open wounds, raw, wet, furious.

  In one clawed hand it held an axe.

  Heavy-headed, edges gleaming even in the smoke and firelight.

  The creature rolled its shoulders. A hoof pawed the ground, cracking concrete. It lowered its head a fraction, horn angling forward, and breathed out a hot, wet snort.

  The humans on the wall started yelling again.

  The kind of yelling that wasn’t instruction.

  Warning.

  Cole’s authority flared. Sharp, clear.

  An elite had arrived to finish the job.