CHAPTER 469: CHAINSFREE LANCED

Malz’s magic eye hovered over the city as she sent the invisible construct flying over it.

She’d tried to push herself into her lesser seraph form but found she couldn’t, though it didn’t feel as out of reach as it had been for the last two years. This spell, a scrying one, was something she’d learned while in that form, and it felt right to get a sense of what the situation outside was without risking her recovery.

Outside her room, she’d discovered a pair of guards at the bottom of the stairwell leading up, and from there she’d hovered around the Chapterhouse before letting her spell venture into the city.

The sounds she’d thought were normal had a different edge to them the closer she got to the markets. Hawkers selling charms for protection and merchants selling weapons were making a killing, or at least it seemed so. The Chainsfreers didn’t trade in precious metals so much as they did in tiny enchanted pieces of clay. They were still identified by their coin equivalents, but Malz wasn’t particularly interested in learning how a city-state of escaped slaves handled their finances.

So instead she watched the people. Especially those with faction sashes, trying to figure out the dynamics of how they were reacting to the impending invasion. An hour of this was enough to tell her that the Chainsfreers were optimistic and united. Some drunkards even broke out into a song about the last time the Syndicate sent a mercenary army against the city. It featured a lot of sunken boats and mentions of Rose the Lyre and her lover, an unnamed woman referred to as The Hunter.

From how the sky looked after listening to their bawdy song, Malz guessed she’d woken up fairly late as she brought her scrying over the city roofs and towards the outer wall, looking for any signs of Ferro and Anko.

There, she found soldiers marching from the gates toward the split in the mountainside, along with less organized groups that seemed to be adventurers. She inspected one group, a set of five humans and half-humans, comprised of two frontliners, a mage, a druid, and an archer. The shortest amongst them, who carried an axe almost the size of his body, possibly half-dwarven, complained loudly about the dungeon being shut.

"It’s a conspiracy to get us to fight, I tell ya!"

"Doesn’t matter to me," the archer said, her voice cocky. "As soon as the seas open up, I’m spending all the gold they gave us in Sul Lun."

The mage cleared her throat. "Doesn’t it bother you that they paid us in real gold up front? I think things might be more desperate than they seem."

"Exactly!" the short one said. "We can’t spend gold if we’re dead."

Malz listened to their banter a bit longer before her scrying began to fade into white as she reached the end of her range. Pulling it back, she raised its elevation until she could just see the wall that capped the end of the pass.

Beyond it was a dark splash on the horizon, an army gathered directly before and somewhat to the south of the pass. It seemed an odd formation, but Malz wasn’t exactly an expert on land armies. They didn’t seem close enough to threaten the guardian wall, even with long-range spells.

A sudden, physical sensation interrupted Malz’s contemplations. She felt someone grab her shoulders. Cutting off the spell, she found herself being stared at by a very distressed looking Kir.

For a moment, she wondered why his touch wasn’t burning her, but the noises he was making, and the look he was casting out the window quickly overruled those thoughts. The spirit dormouse hopped off his head and out the furthest window from the one Kir was looking at.

"Calm down! What is it?" Malz asked as she tried to stand, only for Kir to pull her into his arms and run for the door. The heavy wood disintegrated as he approached it, leaving the iron as he ran down the stairs, half-tripping on the uneven steps until he burst past the guards who cried out "Hey!"

But before they could give chase, Malz watched helplessly as a wall of white light consumed them, deleting the very stones of the Chapterhouse as it blazed into existence. Malz forced her eyes shut and looked away, feeling the heat of the magic fade as Kir sprinted away from it before coming to a stop.

Only then did Malz risk opening her eyes, and what she saw made her breath catch and her heart stutter in fear.

The northern corner of the Chapterhouse was gone, as was a wide swath of the city beyond it. A strip at least a great measure wide had been disintegrated into nothing, and what was left in its wake were melted stones and the screams of the Chainsfreers as the shock of what happened began to wear off.

A smell like ozone and seawater rose into the air as the ocean began to enter the furthest stretch of the trench that had been gouged into the earth, and even at this distance the groan of breaking iron and stone drew Malz’s eyes to one of the guardian towers in the bay, which tumbled like a felled colossus into the water.

And beyond it, a hundred sails appeared on the horizon.

There was only one weapon Malz knew that could possibly deliver this devastation.

The Lance... they fired the Lance of Heaven. But something was wrong. Heaven was gone, right? But as she searched her memories, Malz discovered that the beam had come sideways, not from above, because if it had come from space, it would have destroyed the entire city in a circle.

Reconciling this with the intrusive knowledge of past Aikos led her to several conclusions.

Heaven really is here, and they’ve got enough mana to power the Lance... Araqlun was made to draw power from the Anomaly, the mother dungeon, so the city must be in Aaru... This means that in destroying Heaven, Maledict... oh no.

Maledict’s actions served to empower Vinam to use the Lance more, not less, and from what she could recall of Vinam, he seemed the sort to prefer bold, direct action with minimal personal risk.

But surely the Council of Choirs would stop him... unless they couldn’t...

If that was the case, then the Heaven Malz knew was truly gone. Perhaps the angels had given in to their fears, or perhaps Vinam had leveraged the Heavenfall to seize power. Her speculations felt increasingly pointless as the sounds of suffering rose.

Kir let her down a moment later, a sad look on his face as he stared out with her until she made her decision.

"We need to find Ferro and Anko," Malz said.

"Ferro. Anko." Kir acknowledged. Then he bent down and started to pick her up again.

Startled, Malz shouted, "What are you doing?"

"Ferro. Anko." Kir replied. Leaping out past the molten destruction, six radiant angel wings burst from his back, each shrouded in the same rainbow flames that covered his body, but with those same flames flaring for almost a measure past his wings. The sight was mesmerizing, a mystery Malz would have loved to investigate in less dire circumstances.

He flew in an arc up and away from the Chapterhouse before angling towards the west. And Malz turned her gaze to find that the northern edge of the pass had been forcibly widened, melted into nothing just as thoroughly as the section of city Heaven had destroyed. Molten stone filled the lowest point of the gouge, a river of orange, red, and black that led all the way through the city and out to the ocean where it steamed the seawater into a great cloud.

The enemy army was creeping forward, spells already flaring between the defenders and their attackers. Kir flew Malz towards the battle, and below, Malz saw adventurers and defenders alike retreating toward the city, their eyes ever on the destruction the Lance of Heaven had wrought.

As they neared the pass, Malz saw the defenders struggling against the onslaught of magic and mavenry that chewed away at the failing wards of the gated wall. Those wards were still intact around the gate, but it was clear that Heaven’s strike had done more than create a potential path around them.

Kir landed behind the wall before Malz could spy out Anko or Ferro from above, and they were immediately approached by a squad of fighters in blue sashes while Kir put away his wings.

"Who the Hell are you?" the man in charge demanded, his eyes flickering to Malz’s one wing.

"We’re here to help," Malz said. "I know what caused that." She pointed at the melted mountain.

The leader regarded her with a look of slight incredulity before he rallied himself. "Is there any way to defend against it?" he asked.

"Not that I know of," Malz answered, "But I doubt they’ll fire it on their own army. Get me to my friends, and we can help with the defense."

At that moment, a familiar face arrived.

"I’m afraid we can’t get you to them," Bardoulf said as he approached, the fighters opening their formation to let him through. "Anko and Ferro were outside the wall when that thing struck, with instructions to infiltrate the enemy camp."

Malz’s jaw dropped. "What the fuck are they doing out there? What did you force-"

"I forced nothing! They volunteered to find the enemy general and assassinate him."