Chương 47: Chapter 42 - The floor 25 incident (part 2)

"Except for me," I quickly added. Elsha smirked.

"A correct amendment, if unnecessary. I am moderately wounded you would suspect me of accidentally killing you. I would never hurt you… too much." Lies. She absolutely would kill me to teach me a lesson. We both knew that.

"I am certain you've got enough people to vent your disappointment on around the floor."

"I might." Pink petals floated around her, forming a seat. She sat down, floating up, and started plucking strings on her harp. The first chord rolled over the Ordu like warm water. It was a love song. A tragedy of unrequited love. No words yet, just the harp, and from the harp, threads. Pink threads of light lifted off the strings, filled the air, visual side effects of her song. Thousands of them, thin as hair, pure mana so intense it was visible to the naked eye. She started singing.

In a heavenly melody, her song of fierce despair spread over the floor. In a tongue I couldn't understand, be it infernal or celestial or a language she invented herself only to sing, the song washed away all worries from my mind. Everyone else drew weapons, and in an absolute frenzy, attacked each other. Natives, ex-climbers, my team, animals, everyone and everything launched themselves at everyone else in bloodlusted frenzy. I exhaled, watching the upcoming carnage. Yes, Sarah might have been on this floor.

If she were, this would kill her. But then she would return to her body, which awaited her in the pod back on Earth. Not the way she would imagine being saved, but she would be free to scold me later. Together with everyone else watching down at the dome. Kenji moved the fastest. He leapt off the platform, bolted in a blur toward Adaeze's group, slit the throats of the two men accompanying her, and slashed at her just as she finished casting her best shield.

At the gates, Liu and Henrik annihilated their escorts, and beelined toward each other. One on materialized platforms of golden light, the other forming six layers of shields, spinning up three spells, one fire, one lightning, one shadow, at once. Their methodological differences in approach to power were about to face a peer review. Conti drew his sword with a spin, blade of light extending from the steel sword, cutting up the men around him. Just as Chen threw his horse at him, charging in its stead.

Inside the hall, the Khan drew a maul from behind the throne, smashed the heads of his attendants, and met the royal guard that was charging at him. Hordesmen dragged each other off horses. Out past the walls, the great ring of battlements rippled end to end, every siege camp and trench line turning inward. The three cities smoked harder. In the far distance, the pale garrison on the Anvil turned on itself too. There was nowhere to hide from Elsha's song. No viable defense. No chance to resist.

No option for escape. With an amused smirk, I walked down, looking for a horse. Elsha floated around me, sticking close. Two horses fought by a collapsed paddock, hooves cracking ribs, mouths trying to tear each other's throat. I pointed at the bigger one.

"I need a horse." Above me, without breaking the melody, Elsha plucked an extra string. The smaller horse died mid-bite. No wound. It folded into the mud. The bigger one shuddered, and black horns spiraled out of its skull. Its mane caught a slow, smokeless fire, its eyes flushed pink, and it walked over and knelt. I'd never ridden a horse in my life, and my last documented attempt at athletics had ended face-first on a concrete floor.

I swung into the saddle anyway, with all the grace my charisma didn't actually provide, and the horse compensated for everything, rising under me smooth as an elevator. The cut on my palm stung against the reins.

"To the Anvil," I commanded. It started running. I held myself with one hand and stretched out the other one. Lantern of Endless Suffering. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Souls started drawing into it immediately. Teal threads tore loose from the dying and chased me across the plain. From the town behind. From the trenches ahead. From the cities on the horizon.

They converged from everywhere into rivers of light, all of them pouring into the lantern, until the flame inside stopped looking like a flame and started looking like a star. The attached vial drank too. Nobody attacked me. Nobody even looked at me. I rode through the middle of the battles. Around me, flies rammed into each other, fighting to death. Worms and centipedes duked it out on the ground. Spells and abilities flew all over the place. I spotted Yukiko beheading Adaeze as she focused on Kenji.

Her body shimmered, soul returning to the pod. Yukiko and Kenji bolted at each other, joined by Zhao, who swooped in to attack them both. At the first trench line, I passed Tolun. The welcome committee for this sector lay in the grass with his hands locked around a hordesman's throat and two spears in his back, the dead climber's earpiece still on its cord. As I rode by, the teal thread of him tore loose and slid into the lantern with all the others. Yushi had priced Siegfried at about a hundred pulls.

By how bright the flames shone in the lantern, fuelled by an unending river of incoming souls, this was going to be enough and then some. Others sometimes called me the crown prince of Hell. Riding through the battlefield of everyone killing each other, forced by my summon, I, for the first time in my life, started feeling like one. Perhaps it wasn't just poking and hyperbole. It was one thing to know what Elsha was capable of, and another to see it.

The Anvil grew until it stopped being scenery and became geography. Pale walls. The moat. Towers stacked on towers into the haze. And on the battlements, the garrison killed itself. Up close, the pale soldiers weren't men. Ash-grey skin, white or black hair, ears drawn to points, faces too symmetrical to have been grown. They fought in total silence. No war cries, no screaming, nothing but steel and Elsha's song. Dark elves, if I were to name the Anvil's denizens. It didn't matter.

I reined in before the moat, far enough that falling masonry would be someone else's problem, and reached for the summons. Astarielle. Crimson flame burst beside the horse, and Astarielle materialized next to me. She immediately dropped to her knees, bowing toward Elsha, horns nearly touching the ground. With a pleased nod, Elsha plucked an extra string. Her hair and the third eye on her forehead lit up with inner light. She got up, grinning at me. I motioned at the gate.

"We need to go through that." Astarielle raised both arms. Her lips moved in the liturgical tongue of Hell, and beneath the gate, pentagrams formed.

"Pillar of Hell." That was a lot faster than normal. The pentagrams exploded into a crimson pillar. The gate disintegrated. The gatehouse also went. Fifty meters of wall on either side vanished. The moat flash-boiled into a wall of steam, and the shockwave rolled out across the field and leaned on my shields. When the steam cleared, the Anvil had a new entrance the size of a cathedral. Astarielle smirked at her own crater, all three eyes beaming. Then the haze at the fortress's summit moved.

I originally saw it as a cloud. That proved to be inaccurate. It uncoiled from around the upper towers, a mountain of white serpent bodies braided into one, wings opening like weather fronts, and heads. I counted them as it descended and stopped at twenty-five, because of course there were twenty-five. The overseer of the floor. One head dipped low over the walls and opened its mouth. White light bloomed in the throat, and a column of it fell on Elsha. I knew that light.

Peace had ridden a column exactly like it out of floor eleven, smiling at me on the way up. The overseers' beam. The tower had assessed the situation, identified her as a problem, and decided to deport her. Heh, good luck with that. Elsha plucked one string. The note ran up the beam, pink riding white, and the entire column detonated along its length, a vertical line of explosions from the grass to the open mouth.

The light burst apart, and the head that had cast it went with it, bursting at the neck in a bloom of white scale and lightless blood. The overseer roared. He leapt off the Anvil, descending toward us. Two heads dove first, necks stretching. Astarielle threw out both palms, and a lance of rose-edged crimson took the first one off at the jaw and kept going through the neck behind it. The head crashed onto the broken wall and slid, gouging. The second head filled the sky. Ashy. Pink flash at my side as a sword.

"Ha! Are we figh—" She shut up, shifted into human form, dropped to her knees, and slammed her forehead to the ground toward Elsha. „Sorry," she squeaked feebly. Elsha plucked. Ashy's hair lit up pink, a massive tattoo shimmering on her body.

"Woo hoo!" she shouted, jumped up, and shifted into a sword. Except the sword came out over two hundred feet long, infernal runes glowing pink along its spine. She swung herself up into the descending head and stopped it dead. The impact rang across the battlefield like a cathedral bell the size of a district.

"I'M HUUUUGE!" boomed over the floor. Astarielle slapped her face with her palm. I realized the lantern had gone quiet. No more souls nor blood gathered to it. Elsha's song also stopped. The overseer's main mass was descending toward us. With a smirk, Elsha plucked a few strings.

"Seems like we're going to have a little fight." A swarm of tiny, pink motes of power appeared around her.

"Thousand Tears of Obliteration." The motes flashed across the battlefield. About fifty to the battlements and cities, the rest into the guardian. A series of a thousand explosions echoed through the floor. The last few lights floated toward my lanterns, the winners of the areas that she just finished off around the floor. The explosions threw the overseer back at the fortress, blood and flesh showering into the air. The overseer roared. The ground tore apart all around the floor.

And from the cracks, massive snakes emerged. I immediately recognized the ones I met at floors six, eleven, and twenty-two. The overseers of those floors. All twenty-four guardians of the lower floors emerged, filling the floor. Elsha floated to me, smirking.

"I'm out of mana."