Orthos breathed black-and-red fire at it, but a pane of golden glass appeared in front of his Striker technique. The Forged Heaven’s Glory madra was destroyed, but it slowed the dragon’s breath enough to allow the sword to follow its course.
Kelsa was ready to launch the Fox Dream, her Ruler technique, when she realized the weapon had changed direction.
It was coming for her.
Her technique scattered, and she dove away, using the tree as cover.
The sword broke the trunk in a spray of splinters. It crashed through and rushed at her, and she raised her hands to try and knock it aside. She knew it would be futile.
Orthos arrived like a dark wind.
Red-and-black light surrounded him in a blaze of fire and destruction, and she had to lean back from the heat even as he intercepted the sword on his shell.
He moved his head to swat it aside, but the sword changed direction again.
It plunged directly into Orthos’ side.
He screamed in pain, letting out a rush of black dragon’s breath.
All his time in Sacred Valley, Orthos had held back from killing as much as possible. She had seen it. He didn’t want to make a habit out of killing the weak, he said. You couldn’t always avoid it in a fight, but when he could spare someone, he did.
This time, his dragon’s breath made a man vanish from the waist up.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Elder who controlled the sword. That one gestured with his scarred hand again, and his flying sword pulled back and looped around.
Orthos dodged to one side, but his movements were heavy and his spirit was almost empty. Kelsa knew the feeling. She gathered more madra to work them into a technique, and it was like trying to mold handfuls of soft mud.
She was exhausted.
And then the other two Jades joined the battle.
Golden walls of transparent Forged madra grew around them, and constructs drifted over their heads. A man with a jade Enforcer badge ran in, carrying a two-handed hammer.
It crashed down on Orthos’ shell, but it was only a glancing blow. Orthos’ returning blast of dragon’s breath was thin and insubstantial, and it splashed against a halfsilver-laced shield that the man raised.
Kelsa caught the Forger in a Fox Dream, and he staggered down the hill a few steps, but she couldn’t do anything about the Enforcer or the flying sword.
Orthos bled from even fresher wounds, and he was still moving with more agility than she thought should be possible from a turtle.
He spun, flipping around the sword, and lashed his tail against the hammer-wielding Enforcer in midair.
The instant he landed, Orthos said, “Yield.”
Neither men acknowledged him.
The third Jade, the woman Forger, shook off Kelsa’s Fox Dream and re-focused on her with a look of irritation. She glared up the hill, gathering power.
“We have reinforcements coming,” Orthos said again. “We will accept your surrender.”
The Elder with the scarred arm gestured, and the flying sword flew back to his hand. It gathered power, then shot toward Orthos with greater power than ever before.
Orthos stood his ground, the last of his Blackflame madra gathering in his jaws.
The sword stopped.
It took Kelsa a moment to realize that someone was holding it.
A stranger had appeared out of nowhere, a blur of motion that Kelsa had barely registered before he arrived, and he held the flying sword by the hilt in the grip of a pale right hand.
She didn’t recognize the huge man with the Remnant arm. He glared with eyes like Orthos’, and he was covered by a translucent blaze of black and red. She sensed fiery destruction from him on a level greater even than the turtle.
He had run up behind the sword. Overtaking it and seizing it in mid-flight.
The sword shivered in his grip, trying to escape, but his fingers might as well have been cast from steel.
The stranger’s red-and-black eyes stopped on Orthos before passing over her, and with the surge she felt from his spirit, she was sure he was about to kill her in rage.
He wore robes of black, white, and purple, and around his neck hung a shadesilk ribbon carrying a badge. Not a hammer, a shield, a scepter, or an arrow. One symbol in the old language was carved into that white metal.
Unsouled.
Suddenly, the image of this stranger congealed with the descriptions Orthos had given her. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
How could this be her little brother?
“Lindon?”
Lindon spun and hurled the sword back at the Heaven’s Glory