The hybrid defenders stationed along Arkona’s walls saw the threat coming before it truly announced itself.

  A flicker of flame flared from the forest before the city limits. Out there in the dark, the silvery eyes of the hybrids’ mortal enemies were staring at them hungrily. They could feel that look.

  And the general shout went up:

  “Man the gate! Man the-!”

  A fireball the size of boulder smashed into the battlements and cut off the cry of the Hopla who had seen the Greys coming. From out of the forest the last Greycloaks of Argwyll advanced, their feet carrying them with unmatched speed thanks to the spells of the wizard who led them.

  Raxel Baren, staff raised in one hand and moonlight blade held aloft in the other, ordered his men to charge the walls, scale them, and push towards the monolithic palace in the city center.

  But the Hybrids were not about to let their new home go sitting down. They pelted the advancing Greys with Onixia-tipped crossbow bolts – a parting gift their Archon had given them – which sunk into the skin of Raxel’s squad and caused their limbs to seize up and fail them. About half of his warriors were dropped before they even made it to the gates of the city proper, clutching their burning skin and crying out in defiance.

  And to the Hybrids’ dismay, the Greycloaks simply hopped over their fallen towards them, bound ceaselessly for their home.

  The Grey mages made it within striking range – their magic missiles tore into the defenders’ lines and crippeled the warriors on the walls. Though desparate, the Grey mages magicks were still potent, and before Raxel’s eyes the Hybrids manning the walls began to slowly trickle away – until, finally, he witnessed a general rettrat being called from within their pilfered city.

  Our city, he corrected himself. Our jewel of the West. Upon this night, you will all burn for how you’ve corrupted it.

  As though propelled by this thought alone, Raxel launched himself with levitation magic into the sky and let a shower of firebolts rain down on the retreating enemy forces. He saturated the battlements in winding, twisting snakes of flame – flames that sought out the fur and flesh of their prey and burned them to a crisp before his eyes. As he hovered above, gazing down at their burning bodies, he heard the cheers of his squad behind him.

  He had about twenty five men left to his name. It would be enough.

  It would have to be.

  He lifted his eyes to the palace and dropped down to stand upon the charred walls.

  “Men of Krea!” he yelled. “Are you ready to take back what is ours? Are you ready to deal these beasts a blow that they won’t soon forget?”

  His mages answered him first, each one of them leaping up to join him on the walls. The warriors came next, their arms and chests still stinging with the deadly projectiles that they’d tanked to get here. Just to get a chance at whatever victory they could grasp tonight.

  Raxel eyed each of them before turning and sending a gout of molten flame right at a screaming Hopla. Then he turned his attention to the city streets themselves, expecting to see narrow alleys filled with deadly traps and determined but foolhardy beasts – a challenge to rival what they’d seen below ground.

  Instead – he saw nothing.

  The streets were empty. Eerily quiet – filled with the kind of silence that conjures more fear in a warrior’s mind than any opposing force could. For a few moments Raxel scanned the area, using his magically enhanced vision to penetrate the walls of the repaired houses and the strange mushroom-tree buildings that were now dotted about the capital city beside the human architecture.

  And within them all he saw – nothing. No occupants. No soldiers hiding in wait. No frightened civilians hugging their pathetic children close. Just dust and old mementos.

  “They evacuated the city”, one of his mages said beside him.

  Raxel tightened his grip on his stave. He wanted to turn and beat the mage that spoke. It was as though, in uttering those words, the man had somehow orchestrated the evacuation.

  “My Lord,” he said. “Are you certain that the target is –“

  Raxel’s death-glare silenced the Grey mage before he went any further. No – the signs could not be mistaken. The one they wanted was here, inside that converted palace. Even from down here, he could sense her power. He could feel the energies of a mage more powerful than any he’d ever known up there, watching them as they entered the dead city.

  And that was when the thought suddenly occurred to him with crystal clarity. The fact the Dixit and his traitor compatriot had not pursued him. The fact the city’s frontline defenders had buckled so easily. The fact that the target was up there, waiting on them…

  The thought then lanced through Raxel’s mind, cold and clean.

  This is a trap.

  He turned to bark new orders—and the wall behind him exploded inward.

  Stone went to powder. A length of battlement the size of a wagon flipped and tumbled into the street below. The shock hammered his ribs even through his mage’s ward. Debris clattered across the empty rooftops. And through that smoking gap came something the Greycloaks had sworn they would never see again.

  Revok. The Chimera of Westerweald.

  It hit the wall like a siege ram fitted with claws. The lion’s face in the center, mane black as a moonless well. To its right, a goat’s jaw studded with iron-brown teeth and eyes that crackled with a storm caged behind them. To its left, the serpent’s head swayed, scales the color of old bruises, tongue tasting the quiet city. A body stitched from nightmare and battlefield memory: bat wings slick with soot, forelimbs like plated pillars, hindquarters muscled to sprint down cavalry.

  The Archon’s latest pet. It was back. It was exactly as he remembered the beast.

  No, he gulped, standing his ground with more and more hesitation by the second. It’s worse.

  Raxel’s men froze for a heartbeat—the way men do when a fireside story steps out of the dark and eats the fire.

  “Loose!” he roared, voice breaking. He thrust his staff, conjuring a fan of force that shoved his nearest mages sideways, out of the beast’s dive path.

  Revok didn’t dive. It tore. A bat wing snapped once—Wing Buffet—and air bucked like a living thing. Three Greycloaks went over the side with strangled screams, gear clattering as they pinwheeled into the street. Another flap smashed a line of his warriors flat to the stones, armor ringing as if struck by hammers.

  “Form on me!” Raxel shouted, already weaving a containment ring. “Wards up—”

  The lion head inhaled. Heat swelled, a pressure he felt on his teeth.

  Raxel knew what was coming. He remembered.

  [Storm of Revok]

  The beam knifed out, white at the core, orange at the edges, and for an instant the whole wall turned to glass. The Hopla corpses that had been smoldering were gone—no ash, no shadow—just a smear of fused stone that ran like candlewax toward the street. Two of Raxel’s veterans vanished with it, shields raised, faces set, erased mid-shout.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Left flank!” Raxel snarled through his teeth. He cut the beam with a wedge of night, moonlight blade flashing as he carved a turning crescent. Fire broke on the blade’s arc and spilled aside, slagging a rowhouse and a fungal-lamp post that detonated into spores and greenish flame.

  “The legends weren’t lies…” one mage breathed.

  “Shut up and work,” Raxel snapped.

  They worked. Patterns slammed into place. Magic missiles streaked out—needles of force scanning for joints, eyes, soft parts. Chains of binding spun from the staff of his elder thaumaturge and wrapped the chimera’s forelimb with rings of iron light.

  Revok’s goat head answered.

  [Cry of Baphomet]

  Lightning writhed out in a harp of lines, each string plucked to killing pitch. It walked along the chains and turned them to drifting sparks. It found a pair of mages behind Raxel and stitched them to the wall with their own shadows. The stink of ozone bit the back of his throat.

  “Break its sight!” Raxel snapped. “Smokes!”

  An orb burst. The world went grey. Another Wing Buffet hit and the cloud shredded into whirling sheets. Something hit Raxel—maybe a tail, maybe a stone thrown by the wind. He staggered and went to a knee, forced the levitation to kick and carried himself backward, sliding on the cushion of air.

  Revok’s serpent head dipped. Its jaws unhinged wider than any natural thing should. Raxel’s stomach clenched.

  “Mask!” he shouted, but he’d already pulled a ward over his mouth and nose.

  Winterbreath came out not as frost, but as a green-white fog that moved like it already knew the shape of the men it wanted to kill. The cloud poured along the battlements, spilled down stairwells, and hugged the stone like it had weight. Where it touched bare skin, it crawled. Where it crawled, it hardened.

  “Don’t breathe—don’t—”

  The warning fell apart under the chorus of choking. One Greycloak clawed at his throat. Another staggered, blade clanging from stiffening fingers. The fog flashed, pulsed, and Raxel watched the man’s skin glaze over. A statue—eyes wide, mouth half-open—took the place of a friend who had ridden with him from Krea’s southern marches. The statue cracked, then split, then collapsed as the petrification ran deeper than flesh to the heart.

  “Back!” Raxel flung a cutting crescent low along the stones, a desperate broom-sweep to clear the fog. The arc carved a groove the length of the wall and gave the poison a place to slump, hissing where molten stone met alchemic cold.

  Twilight Edge answered him.

  It came off Revok in a tidal sheet of darkness, not shadow but absence, edged in angles that refused to hold still. The wave scythed the parapet from knee height to the crenels, took men at the thigh or the waist, and left halves of Greycloaks blinking down at their legs as they toppled. Raxel threw the moonlight blade into the dark—one crescent, then another, then another—cutting stairs in the wave so it broke in tiers instead of whole. Even so, the wall around him looked like a butcher’s block.

  “Down! Streets!” he shouted, voice hoarse. “Pull it away from the breach!”

  He dove first, levitation snapping him over the inner lip. The drop was three stories; he hit the air hard, warped it with force, and landed running as rubble whipped past on either side. The mages that remained followed, boots slamming the cobbles. A pair of warriors slid down the wall on ropes and hit beside him, faces grey and cut with ash.

  Behind them, the chimera came through the gap like a king taking his steps into a hall he owned. Tiles slid from roofs and shattered. Mushrooms that had taken root in the repaired human gutters burst under its weight, spattering cold phosphorescence across its flanks. The serpent head hissed. Its tongue wrote question marks in the air, then pointed toward the palace.

  It remembered, Raxel thought. Of course it did.

  “Cut it apart in the alleys,” he said, forcing steadiness into the words. “It’s big. We’re not.”

  The street grid of Arkona had been a maze before the hybrid rebuild; now it was stranger. Human masonry stitched into living wood. Mushroom trunks the width of wagons. Rope bridges and fungal lanterns strung above; root-steps and secret doors below. Traps? Maybe. The city was empty but for the fight. Raxel took a corner hard, boots skimming water in a gutter channel, and his men split like thrown knives: two up to the roofline, three into a side lane, mages fanning for angles.

  “Mark it,” Raxel said, and snapped his staff. Blue runes bled out from the tip and painted a net across the crossing. “When it steps—”

  Revok stepped.

  The net fired. Spikes of force rose and clamped like a bear trap on its leading leg. A dozen magic missiles hit joints and eyes in a timing drill drilled so deep into them that even terror couldn’t shake it. A warrior darted in with a hooked blade and slashed a tendon that looked like braided cable.

  The chimera roared.

  Raxel moved with the roar, not away from it. He slid under the bat wing, felt the air drag his hair to one side, and put the moonlight blade into the seam where lion chest met plated shoulder. He pushed a sun into the wound and tore it sideways. Heat burst out—thick as blood, bright as a forge’s mouth.

  “Now!” he barked.

  The senior mage spoke a word old enough to make the street shudder. A pillar of stone heaved up out of the cobbles like a finger, lifting the chimera’s forequarters and canting it left. The rooftop pair dove, blades spearing for the goat’s eyes.

  Skein of Typhos rippled.

  The serpent head sang without a sound, a vibration Raxel felt through the grip of his blade and the bones of his forearm. The wound he had made crawled shut. The tendon that had been cut knitted. The chimera’s hide drank the light he poured into it until the blade felt like it was biting wool. Then the goat head snapped and took one of the rooftop men out of the air like a bird.

  “Break! Break!” Raxel yelled.

  He didn’t make it clear before Cry of Baphomet lashed the crossing. Lightning walked up the stone pillar and shattered it in an avalanche. It crossed the net and burned the runes out of the street. It found the veteran with the hook and pushed him smoking into a doorway that collapsed on top of him.

  Raxel’s mages were good. It just wasn’t enough.

  They ran the chimera down two more alleys. They set the street itself against it and turned windows into knives. They froze one forepaw with a conjured winter and set the other in glue-thick mud. Revok tore free each time, growing angrier, growing more certain of the work. Twilight Edge scythed. Wing Buffet hammered. Winterbreath crawled where it could. A rooftop garden became a waterfall of petrified vines and stone fruit that shattered into gravel when it hit the ground.

  Raxel knew the skills as a boy knows saints from tapestries. As a younger man he had faced the thing in a cave mouth lit by lava. He had watched men he respected become stories. The chimera looked worse now. Bigger. Meaner. Or maybe he was simply down to twenty-five and counting.

  Seventeen.

  Twelve.

  Nine.

  Every name had a face. Every face had a last sound.

  But it wasn’t the time to think about any of that. They’d already lost too much before they’d even set foot on Westerweald again.

  “The Palace,” he said when the count in his head hit a number he hated. He locked eyes with the men still close enough to hear him. “We don’t win this in the streets. We win it where we came to win it.”

  They didn’t argue. The moonlit blade flickered in his hand, steady as a breath now. He pointed with it. The palace rose over the channels and fungus gardens, an old human skeleton wearing new hybrid skin: ramps grown from living wood, windows reworked into gills that exhaled a faint silver mist. Whatever waited inside pulsed like a wound in his senses.

  “Move,” Raxel said.

  They moved.

  Revok followed.

  The beast came on in great, hammering strides, tail scything, wings flaring to throw its bulk through turns men had to take at a sprint. It didn’t lose ground; it stole it. Every time Raxel glanced back, the thing was nearer and the goat’s eyes were more sure. It wasn’t chasing prey. It was finishing a task set in another life.

  They broke into the palace square—a wide, circular court with a fountain in the center. The fountain was dry now, filled with bioluminescent moss that glowed pale in the dust, painting their boots with ghost-light. The great doors beyond were shut. The hybrid sigils hammered into their face looked like a ward and a dare.

  Raxel counted.

  Five mages close enough to matter. Two warriors, both cut. One archer who had never put his bow down, even when the lightning came.

  He made himself meet each gaze. He didn’t need to be eloquent. He needed to be understood.

  “We go through,” he said. “We finish the task.”

  The youngest mage—Kerr, freckles washed grey with ash—looked at the doors, then at the chimera shouldering into the square behind them. “If we draw it,” Kerr said, voice even, “we can give you the opening.”

  Raxel knew what he meant before he said it. He still wanted to be wrong. “No.”

  “There’s no other way.” Another mage, Orla, touched his arm. Her eyes were steady. “You told us to be men of Krea, Lord Baren. Today, we are.”

  The goat’s head lowered. Lightning crawled along its horns like a crown warming up to burn. The serpent’s tongue flicked, tasting the promise of them. The lion’s breath steamed the winter-chilled air and left the taste of iron on Raxel’s teeth.

  Kerr lifted his chin. “We give our lives,” he said, and he wasn’t loud. He didn’t need to be. “For victory tonight.”

  Raxel’s throat closed. He forced words through anyway.

  “You’ll rest with Krea,” he said. He raised the moonlight blade in salute. “I’ll make it matter.”

  They bowed. All five. Simple, clean. Then they turned on their heels and walked toward the chimera at a measured pace that made Raxel’s heart hurt.

  “Draw it wide,” Orla called over her shoulder. “Get the doors.”

  Raxel moved. He put the warriors on the hinges and the archer on the lock. He set his own hand to the center seam and breathed his will into the radius of the square, feeling for the wards sewn into the stone. They were old. They were layered with new work. They were watching him.

  Behind him, five voices rose as one.

  The chimera sprang.

  The mages didn’t flinch. They pressed their palms together and opened them, each revealing the mouth of a tiny sun. The air around them pinwheeled. Dust lifted and hung motionless in a widening circle. The temperature dropped hard enough to make his teeth ache.

  “Now!” Orla screamed, and the five of them took a final step forward as if into Krea’s last temple.

  Raxel’s System showed him the Skill they’d all collectively let loose. They all knew it would come to this. Raxel had known as much even before they did.

  Still, he burned every letter of this moment into his mind as the flames of the last Greycloak mages lit the dark skies above their city:

  [Implosion]