The Broken Halo

[A/N: This Chapter is thanks to TheCollector515!!!! Please thank him in the comments everybody!]

Sonya’s blind eyes remained fixed in the direction of the fallen demons.

Elara still held her above the ground. Her fingers were locked around the woman’s wrist, but she had stopped pulling. Beneath the shriek of the blizzard, she listened for the sounds that had filled the clearing only moments before.

Rathen’s axe moving. The Runemasters calling to one another. Rellis speaking.

Too many were missing.

What had happened returned in fragments, assembled from sound, displaced air, and the familiar shapes of metal her weakened senses could still follow. There had been no approaching barrage. No warning whistle before a spear arrived.

The cold had opened inside their shelter.

Frozen edges had grown between bodies, beneath raised arms, and behind the protections facing outward. The demons had not been given time to find somewhere safe. They had already been standing inside the attack.

Rellis had shouted for them to get down. Rathen’s axe had struck something hard enough to ring through the storm, and for an instant, Sonya had thought he blocked it.

Then his armour split. Two sharp sounds followed, his movement stopped, and the heavy axe struck the ground without another swing.

Someone beside him had tried to duck. Another had reached toward the limping Runemaster. Their armour drew closer, almost touching, before a cutting sound passed through both positions.

The four cases fell among the bodies.

The Runemasters had raised their protections. Sonya had felt their demonic energy surge desperately, then falter as the cold spread between them. Their defences had been facing an attack that was already inside.

Afterward, there had been one last splash of water.

Rellis.

His technique had stopped halfway through its movement. The water froze, broke, and fell. Then his body followed.

Sonya could not make those sounds mean anything else.

Ice crept beneath her jaw and spread over her collarbones. She barely noticed. Her bare toes curled above the ruined platform, searching for ground that was no longer within reach.

She had thought humans were weak.

Not every human. She knew there were powerful ones. But she had entered their world laughing, broken soldiers with stones, and complained whenever Simon gave Akaza a better opponent.

Even after his warning, some part of her had expected to find a way through this woman.

Now Elara held her like something she could put down whenever she became bored.

’I can’t even make her let go.’

The thought was so unfamiliar that Sonya did not know what to do with it.

”RELLIS!”

Virella’s scream tore across the clearing.

She scrambled from the shallow hollow and caught his shoulder before his head settled against the ice. Her knees slipped beneath her, but she dragged him closer and pushed the hair away from his face.

”Rellis. Rellis, look at me.”

His eyes remained open.

She had seen them move toward her before he fell. She clung to that last movement as though it could outweigh everything that had happened afterward.

”You heard me. I know you heard me.”

A small vial appeared in her hand. She tried to pull its stopper free, failed, and tore it out with her teeth.

Akaza watched her lift Rellis’s head.

”Virella...”

”Don’t.”

The word came out fiercely. She pressed the vial against Rellis’s mouth and tipped it, but he did not swallow. Medicine ran over his lower lip and down the side of his face.

Virella wiped it away with her thumb.

”Come on,” she whispered. ”Just a little.”

His chest did not move.

Her gaze dropped to the diagonal wound. Beneath the broken armour, white crystals threaded through the exposed flesh.

The cut had reached his Demon Heart. It was not another torn muscle or a broken rib. The damage was deep, fatal, and the Aether left behind by Elara was still spreading through his body.

Virella poured the remaining medicine across the wound.

A faint warmth stirred beneath her fingers. For one desperate instant, she leaned closer.

Then frost swallowed it.

”No.”

She transferred her demonic energy into his chest, trying to drive the foreign power out. The freezing Aether resisted, and it was dense and viciously cold. It had come from a Blessing far beyond her ability to overcome, and the phoenix’s strange cold continued crystallising everything it touched.

Numbness climbed into her fingertips. She pulled back with a gasp, then reached toward him again.

The elixir could not repair a Demon Heart damaged this badly. Even forcing out the Aether would not undo the death that had already occurred.

Virella understood that, but her hands kept moving anyway.

”You said you would cover me,” she whispered, her voice breaking. ”You can’t just...”

She stopped.

He had covered her.

The broken curve of frozen water lay beside them.

Virella bent over his body, holding the empty vial so tightly that it cracked in her hand.

Akaza tried to push himself up.

Pain tore through his pierced forearms, and his right elbow collapsed. He struck the ground beside Virella without getting any closer to Sonya.

He could hear her struggling to breathe. He could see Rellis lying still.

His body would not obey him.

’Why am I this weak?’

He had trained. He had fought. He had swallowed his pride often enough to learn from Blackmoon, and moments earlier he had finally made the Broken Rhythm Art work against an opponent who should have been beyond him.

Now he could not even stand.

’Why can’t I be stronger?’

He drove his fingers into the ice. Demonic energy stirred unevenly within him, but it was insufficient for the things he needed it to do.

Blackmoon had stood before Sunshear and kept every member of their core alive. Akaza had been given one opponent to face alongside Sonya.

’Why can’t I be a monster like him?’

Ammor remained beside the hollow.

His eyes moved from Rathen’s broken axe to the other two combatants. Farther away, the four Runemasters lay among the cases they had carried through the entire battle.

He had known which teammate could hold a passage. Which one needed an order repeated. Which one would complain and still obey.

Now there was nobody left to command.

’What did Velmora gain by choosing me?’

His Low S-grade Earth affinity had not saved them. The training and resources had not carried them to Frostveil. Even after reinforcements arrived, he had failed to protect the four demons whose survival made the mission possible.

The cases remained there, but the hands meant to deploy their contents did not.

Ammor looked at the narrow cut in the ice beside his neck.

A few inches.

That was all.

Virella had fallen because a root broke. Akaza had already been lying below the crossing edges of ice. Ammor had thrown himself into the same hollow.

None of them had survived because they were stronger than the dead, and they all knew it.

Elara spoke before any of them could.

”How fortunate.”

Her voice was clear through the storm.

”One broken root. One shallow hole. A slightly different position, and you would all be lying together.”

Virella lifted her tear-streaked face, but Elara had already turned away.

Her attention returned to the demoness hanging from her hand. Sonya’s fingers still gripped her wrist, but the smile that had accompanied every insult was gone.

”There it is,” Elara said quietly.

Sonya’s blind eyes shifted toward her voice.

”I wondered what your face would look like when you ran out of jokes.”

Sonya tried to lift a knee. Frost tightened across her hip, and Elara raised her slightly, taking away what little leverage she had found.

The woman’s free hand opened.

Ice lengthened above her palm, forming a short spear. Sonya felt the cold gather close to her stomach and finally pulled harder against the hand at her throat.

Elara did not move.

”Keep that expression,” she said with cold satisfaction. ”It will suit your corpse.”

Her right hand thrust forward.

PUCHI!

The spear pierced Sonya’s stomach.

Her body jerked against Elara’s grip. A strangled cry escaped her, and blood ran over the fingers still locked beneath her jaw.

Elara held the spear in place.

”Now you can wait quietly for your death.”