Chapter 46: Finally, the Last Loop of Akhartenzia?!
The key to this trial really was time.
If the ancients had lost only one of their own, it was surely because the high demons had been forced to turn back, called away to their command camp before they could kill the rest. And that explained everything else too — why Lazaüs was still alive, in our present, at the castle. He had simply never fought a battle to the death here against the ancient heroes. He’d left before that, summoned elsewhere.
This hero who, unlike the others, didn’t know how to hold his tongue had just handed us, without even realizing it, the way forward.
Adam, for his part, stretched like someone waking from a good nap.
"Anyway, now that I’m awake, I’ll go rejoin the others. I’ll leave you to it. Thanks again!"
And he turned on his heel, looking perfectly serene.
"... But what just happened?" Leon let out, still a little lost.
"He’s completely moody," Alice answered. "It must be exhausting to live with him day to day."
... Huh?
My mind went blank for a few seconds.
Had she really just said that? Her, of all people? The one who went from sweet to chilling in the space of a few seconds had just called someone else moody?
My thought was cut clean off when Adam reappeared in my field of view, having doubled back.
"Hey, guys, where’s Isaiah, by the way?"
I pointed him toward the northern gate.
"He should be over there."
"Ah, all right, thanks. Well, see you!"
And off he went for good.
This time, Alice openly snorted, and Evelyn didn’t last three more seconds before following suit, a hand over her mouth. Around us, the others were laughing quietly too at the situation, at this eccentric character who was... surprising, let’s say.
It was Yu Ganshu who cut in, deadpan.
"He did solve quite a few mysteries, at least."
Evelyn tried to compose herself, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.
"Yes, despite everything, he..." She caught Alice’s still-hilarious look and immediately dissolved back into a fit of laughter she could no longer hold in.
While the two women were struggling, without much success, to calm down, I picked the conversation back up with Ganshu, more evenly.
"At least we know where we stand now. The key is time — not victory."
"So we hold, and we wait for the demons to withdraw," Ganshu summed up.
"That’s it. As long as the city doesn’t fall, none of us dies, and no ancient hero falls either, the loop keeps turning in our favor. We don’t need to beat Lazaüs anymore, only to last long enough."
Seorin, who was listening, shook her head.
"Except there’s a ’but.’"
"The giant," I guessed.
"The giant. We can’t stop him, or slow him down long enough. His size, his strength, his regeneration... even the storm isn’t enough. Until we’ve got something to hit far harder, he’ll always end up breaking through the wall, and the trial will end in failure."
Gabriel, silent until then, spoke up.
"And what if, instead of spreading out, we formed a united front? What if we all went north, to concentrate our power on the giant?"
"That’s a good idea," I said. "Judging by what we’ve seen of the previous loops, the eastern and western fronts should hold long enough before the demons retreat, even without us. Might as well bet everything on the north."
What did have a certain irony to it, all the same, was watching this guy — the one who, at the first loop, wanted to handle everything alone and had nothing but contempt for the others — now championing cooperation as if it had always been obvious to him.
And then, all at once, the words from the very start of the trial came back to me. The foremost qualities of great heroes are trust and mutual aid.
This trial was making us all grow, each in our own way — as people as much as heroes. Maybe that was it, at bottom, the true function of this tower.
But the moral lessons could wait. We had a city to save, and this time, a plan to do it.
The seven of us convinced, we set off together toward the northern front, where we rejoined Isaiah and Adam.
A few hours later, the wave crashed down, and our united front proved far too powerful for mere demons, even in overwhelming numbers. With seven heroes — eight with Isaiah, nine with Adam — we weren’t defending a wall anymore, we were grinding down everything that came near it.
Adam, for that matter, despite his character, turned out to be a monster of power. His great black bow spat arrows at an impossible rate, each one split with mana, and where they struck they didn’t open a hole but a detonation — a single arrow loosed toward the sky multiplied into a rain of luminous shafts that came down over a whole stretch of the wave, pinning demons to the ground by the dozen. He fired without even seeming to aim, half laughing between volleys.
We held for hours, cutting into the flood.
Then, in the distance, the giant appeared.
"This is it," I said.
Before heading up, we’d agreed on how to go about it.
"There’s something I saw, the last time we struck him with lightning," I’d explained to them. "With my Eye, I follow the flows of mana. And when he regenerates, all his mana rushes at once toward wherever he’s taken the most damage. He funnels everything to one point to seal it. That’s why we can never break through him: we hit one spot, and he pours absolutely everything into patching it."
"So as long as we strike a single spot, he’ll always hold," Yanshu understood.
"Exactly. The only solution is to attack him on two fronts at once." I pointed to the colossus in the distance. "We crush one of his legs under the storm — enough damage to draw the greater part of his mana to that side. And while he empties nearly all his regeneration putting out that fire, he won’t have enough left for the other leg."
"It’ll close much more slowly," Seorin grasped. "For lack of mana."
"There it is. That’s where we strike, all together. His regeneration will be split between the two, unable to keep up on both sides at once."
The plan met with unanimous approval. All that was left was to carry it out.
"Get ready!" Gabriel called. "This time, we pull it off, once and for all!"
I raised my hand.
My Arsenal burst into mist around the colossus’s left leg, Seorin closed her vortex over it — the wind howling, the water pressed against the flesh — and Alice discharged into it, a storm of lightning that set the whole leg ablaze in a single stroke. The giant staggered, his left thigh smoking, and through the Eye I saw his mana rush toward that leg, drawn almost entirely to that side to put out the fire we’d just lit.
His right leg found itself stripped of most of its regeneration.
It was ours.
I sprang forward first, Naia and Laia drawn, Worldflow carrying me straight beneath the colossus. Yanshu shot out to my left, two blades dancing in his hands, and Gabriel charged to my right, his skin hardened into a shell of dark stone, launched like a battering ram. Isaiah followed behind, heavier, slower, his giant sword trailing a second before it fell.
My first cut opened the skin of the knee. Yanshu slipped into the wound, severing tendons as he went; Gabriel slammed into the joint with all his weight, forcing it to buckle a notch; and Isaiah finished with a vertical blow that carved the bone to the core.
Behind us, the others never let up. Alice’s storm still held on the left leg, devouring the giant’s mana, while with her free hand she loosed bolt after bolt, lightning spells of every kind raining down on the colossus to keep him from turning his attention back on us. From the ramparts, Leon and Adam strafed the right leg without pause, their arrows riddling the wound we were carving, while Evelyn raised both hands and a shaft of pure energy shot out to pierce the thigh clean through. Seorin, for her part, gritted her teeth, her whole being strained to hold the vortex at any cost.
The right leg wasn’t closing fast enough. For once, his regeneration was caught out, his mana drawn to the wrong side.
"Now! All together!"
We struck the same point as one.
My two sabers, Yanshu’s blades, Isaiah’s sword, Gabriel’s weight, the volley of arrows from Leon and Adam, Evelyn’s shaft — and over all of it, my Arsenal, a dozen lances compressed to the extreme that I loosed into the gaping wound. The colossus’s right leg gave way with an immense crack, severed clean before it had time to rebuild, and the giant toppled, crashing onto his side with a din that shook the whole ground of the city.
A silence.
Then a clamor rose from the ramparts, immense.
The soldiers were shouting, brandishing their weapons, incredulous to see this mountain that had crushed them loop after loop finally laid low in the dust. Some laughed, some wept, a few dropped to their knees. They’d spent hours watching death bear down on them without hope, defending a city they’d been told was doomed — and now, for the first time, a breach opened in that fate, a glimmer to hold on to.
"He’s down!" a soldier cried, his voice cracking. "The giant is down!"
"We can do it! We can actually win!"
Even the heroes let themselves go. Leon laughed on the wall, Evelyn breathed at last, Gabriel wore a fierce grin of satisfaction.
Me, I didn’t quite share their joy.
Something was off.
"That’s strange..." I swept the red sky with my gaze. "Where’s Lazaüs?"
"Maybe he’s hiding," Gabriel offered, still winded from the melee. "Scared off by our gathering?"
"No, that’s not like him." I frowned. "He’s not one to back down."
And at that instant, to my right, over on the eastern front, I saw it.
A beam of black mana, immense, that surged out of nowhere and swept the entire front in a single stroke — the ramparts, the soldiers, the defenses, all razed in a fraction of a second.
No! No, no, no!
The world stopped.
Then flowed backward.
[ Mission: Rewrite the tragic history of the fall of Akhartenzia, and the death of one of the great heroes. ]
[ Loop completed: 9 ]