Page 9 of Elven Throne

The only thing that mattered was reaching it before the storm reached its peak, with nowhere else to go but out along an unavoidable path of destruction.

She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could keep that burning white column from exploding. That part couldn’t be stopped.

She just had to be inside it when it did. At its very center, the source of all this awful power, to mitigate as much of the damage as possible when it finally lost control.

If Rebecca got blasted to bits in the process, fine. She could heal herself, and she was certain she’d healed herself from far worse than whatever this storm might do to her.

But the effectiveness of her healing magic didn’t mean a damn thing if her only options were to either heal her entire task force all at once—an impossible feat, even for her—or watch most of them die while she chose who to save first and who to forsake by default.

That was no choice at all. She refused to let it get that far.

Finally, she broke free of the griybreki swarm spilling around her, throwing the last dying frogman off the end of her spear and ignoring his last wetly gurgling croak. Then she spun back toward the white-hot vortex of power, swirling and shuddering and ready to burst once it could no longer contain itself.

Battle magic ignited the air above her with streaks of sizzling red and crackling purple. Churning fireballs of every color. Neon-blazing magical rounds from augmented weapons. Plus a handful of yammering griybreki bodies catapulting across the battlefield, cartwheeling through the air with gangly arms and legs flailing, garbling their final shrieks before the end.

Rebecca fought her way through all of it, drawing ever closer to the blinding white column of blazing energy, doing her best in the split seconds she was provided to either cut down the frogmen in her path and toss them aside, or to lead larger numbers of them away from the compound. Sometimes both.

She dodged a massive orb of yellow-brown attack magic belching from the mouth of an augmented grenade launcher. Then she spun and stuck her spear through a chubby griybreki hopping from foot to foot as he prepared to leap at one of her operatives.

Always, she moved closer, bit by bit, drawn to the light and the heat of that storming column while sowing cold and darkness and death in her wake.

Then she was almost upon the storm, standing at the outermost edge of its blistering heat while the vortex churned endlessly just a few yards in front of the old factory’s front doors.

Magitek rounds strobed through the open second-story windows above her, whistling and keening through the air before they found their targets in scrambling griybreki. Even more rushed in to take the fallen’s places, as if the buggy little cretins had no idea what had happened. Or they just didn’t care.

What were one or two or a few dozen bodies compared to the thousands throwing themselves at the compound building, or the survivors left to defend it from the inside, or the combat operatives who’d finally returned to help?

Still, so many more of them ran straight for the blinding nexus of storming magic in front of the building, and they just kept coming.

As far as Rebecca could see, not a single griybreki throwing itself into the white-hot vortex made it out again, but that didn’t tell her what this was. It could have been anything. Another portal. A trap. A swift death, though hardly painless.

Shouts from above distracted her as someone in one of those second-story windows—it looked like Adam but could have been anyone in the chaos—chucked his empty weapon through the window toward the half-dozen griybreki scrambling up the building’s exterior wall.

The firearm smacked the first frogman full in the face and sent him dropping like a stone to the asphalt below, taking four others with him in their tumbling, screeching descent.

The Shade members left behind to defend against Eduardo’s unexpected ambush still fared better than Rebecca would have expected.

But it didn’t mean they could keep this up forever.

They’d already been at it for hours, and Shade simply didn’t have the numbers to throw at their enemy like Eduardo did. That asshole’s advantage now was nothingbutnumbers.

The white-hot storm pulsed again, pushing a wave of searing heat outward. A trembling roar of unstable magic shuddered through the air and the earth and everything in between.

Rebecca raced headlong toward the swirling outer layer of blinding light. She couldn’t have stopped when she heard the bellowing war cry rise from directly in front of the building’s entrance, even if she’d tried.

But she did glance that way to catch a brief glimpse of something she would never forget.

It was Bor, defending his position in front of the glass double doors with his heavy staff clenched tightly in both ancient, gnarled hands.

He handled the weapon like someone five hundred years younger, moving with quick, efficient steps within a small ring of combat he never left. Rebecca hadn’t seen a giveldi engage in battle before, but the short-lived sight of him phasing in and out of existence as he moved in a surprisingly fluid and deadly dance didn’t surprise her.

Shade’s cook even phased through two griybreki barreling straight toward him before he spun around, re-materializing, and cracked both their skulls with the twirling ends of his staff moving so quickly, they became a constant blur.

A deafening boom and hiss rose beside Bor as the business end of an ancient, bulky blunderbuss exploded in the hands of an even older gnome fighting at Bor’s side. The fired shot of blistering orange light—and more sparks than seemed entirely safe for the shooter—careened from the weapon and into two more griybreki surging toward the compound’s front doors.

By the time that shot finished with them, the griybreki toppled to the asphalt with a spray of thick dark-green blood, both of them missing their heads.

Only then did Rebecca recognize Earl wielding the blunderbuss—the last Shade member she would have expected to still be capable of fighting at all, given his age.

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