Shadow Slave

The majestic figure of a dragon whose scales were like the midnight sky had grown vague and unclear against the backdrop of a silver moon. It was not because of the darkness of the night, though, or because Seishan’s vision had turned hazy from sweat and blood.

It was because the dragon was entirely covered by transparent silhouettes of the glass wasps, who were sinking their stings into his body and ripping his scales away with their razor-sharp mandibles.

The dragon snapped its jaw shut, shattering the body of an especially powerful abomination, and then let out a deafening cry.

The glass bodies of the lesser wasps vibrated, and then exploded, a cloud of sharp shards raining down upon the Lake of Tears.

Diving down, Nightingale opened his maw once more. In the next moment, a devastating sonic blast slammed into the surface of the Mirror Gate, making it ripple. Seishan could have sworn that a net of thin cracks appeared on the surface of the lake. Even driven mad by bloodlust and rendered numb by exhaustion, she felt stunned for a moment.

‘He’s attacking the Gate.’

She had not even known that it was possible.

Perhaps it wasn’t, but Nightingale made it possible through sheer will and his strange ability to command the world with his words.

He did not manage to shatter the Mirror Gate, but he did manage to get Mordret’s attention. A great number of the King’s vessels pulled back from the assault on the frayed formation of the defenders of the Lake of Tears to concentrate their ire on him.

Some of them could fly, some were capable of ranged attacks. The Ascended human vessels were especially dangerous, each possessing an Aspect and an array of Memories — those were the remaining warriors of the Maharana clan, no doubt, who had perished in Red Hill.

Or perhaps they were the unfortunate bodies who had been stolen by Skinwalker first, and then wrestled from under its control by the King of Nothing.

In any case, it gave those fighting on the ground a little breathing room.

Seishan could not see what was happening atop the plateau, where Silence and Moonveil were. The enemies must have breached the defensive line there, since some of them had spilled into the Citadel that clung to the cliffs. There, Beastmaster and Death Singer were barely holding Mordret back from reaching the Gateway. Here on the shores of the Lake of Tears, it was Seishan and her Blood Sisters who served as the anchor of the entire formation. Far away, Lonesome Howl and Ceres were locked in a battle against a gargantuan abomination that threatened to collapse the entire right flank of the human army — the latter in the form of a ferocious wolf, the former in the form of an enormous three-headed canine.

On the left flank, Helie and Bliss were barely staying alive in the tide of weaker vessels of the King of Nothing. The casualties on that section of the battlefield were especially grave, and both Saints seemed to be running low on essence.

Most of them were, at this point.

Some of the Saints had been forced to dismiss their Transcendent shapes and clash with the adversary in their human bodies. Others could not even use their Aspect Abilities and the enchantments of their Memories anymore, conserving the last drops of essence they had left.

Seishan was not that desperate yet, but her Blood Sisters were slowly buckling. She had already been forced to pull a few of them back to save their lives.

There used to be more than a hundred Handmaidens under her command, all the way back on the Forgotten Shore. Too few of them were still alive, so the loss of even one was painful.

‘I wonder...’

Seishan left a small cut on the body of a towering abomination and dashed back, using her Awakened Ability to make a river of blood flow from the modest wound.

The abominable vessel ignored it and rushed at her, managing to tear her flesh before she could grasp its head and snap its neck.

As the grotesque creature died in her arms, it whispered:

”Careful, Seishan. Your weakness is showing...”

She tore off the creature’s head.

‘l wonder if Hel was finally right. Are we all going to die today?’

Of course, she knew that they would not. Even if the battle reached a breaking point and the forces of the Human Domain collapsed, she and her sisters would abandon the civilians and escape. Countless lives would be lost, and Mordret would get more vessels to make up for the ones he had lost today, but at least they would survive. The same went for the other Saints fighting on the shores of the Lake of Tears, powerful Masters, and most fortunate of the Awakened soldiers.

But, still...

She was reluctant to lose this fight. Perhaps it was because she was a former princess of Song, and Mordret was a former prince of Valor, but Seishan did not want to give him the satisfaction of winning. Perhaps it was because she had grown attached to the Human Domain and its people, becoming infected by the idealism of Changing Star.

That girl...

Seishan remembered when she had first come to the Dark City. Others had been slow to catch on, but she had known that Nephis would become a catalyst of either destruction or salvation from the very start... after all, the girl had managed to survive countless assassination attempts made by the Great Clans. She was the heiress of the Immortal Flame.

Granted, even Seishan had never imagined just how far Changing Star would come.

‘So... where the hell is she now?!’

Kai had not informed them why exactly Nephis and the Lord of Shadows were missing. In fact, Seishan suspected that even he did not know. After all, the enemy they faced had the power to read minds — so if one wanted to keep a secret, they had to hide it really well.

The ground quaked suddenly, and she fell to her knees. Looking up, Seishan saw a tall plume of foaming water soaring into the air from the shallows of the lake. There, a black dragon had just fallen from the dark sky like a meteor, splitting the earth by the force of the impact.

A few seconds later, Kai crawled ashore in his human form, shaking his bleeding head dazedly.

His usually refined appearance was gone, replaced by a haggard and disheveled look. In fact, he looked like he had been pushed through a meat grinder.

But the soft white radiance was already igniting under his skin.

The problem was that a swarm of powerful abominations was also rushing toward him, eager to finish the job.

‘Damn it...’

Seishan pushed herself off the ground and lunged forward.

She managed to reach the Steward of the West just before Mordret. Grabbing Kai, she dragged him away from the water while shielding him with her body and tearing the vessels apart with her claws.

”Hey... Kai...”

Having finally shaken off his daze, he began summoning a Memory and gave her a questioning look.

Seishan briefly wondered if she looked just as unpresentable, herself. The thought made her uncomfortable.

Granted, she was currently in the form of a ghastly blood beast, somewhere between a woman, a shark, and an indescribable horror. So she had no business wondering about appearances, really.

She grimaced.

”I don’t think we’ll last two days.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then forced out a smile.

”Just a bit more, Seishan. Our reinforcements are almost here.”

She gritted her hideous teeth, unsure if he was telling the truth of lying to reassure her.

Soon enough, the first rays of sunlight shot from behind the horizon. The sun slowly showed its molten crown in the east, chasing away the darkness.

And in its light, a radiant figure seemed to reveal itself.

When it did, something strange happened. Both the lake and Great Waterfall seemed to come alive, countless water whips rising to cut into the flesh of the King of Nothing. Then, a river of liquid metal flooded from one of the canyons, drowning the upper levels of the Citadels and eviscerating the vessels storming them.

A ghastly creature that was half-human, half-goat landed on ground some distance away, tearing into an Ascended vessel with its bare hands.

Countless Awakened poured over the cliffs, joining the fight with grim determination. Seishan froze for a moment, staring at the rising sun.

‘Summer Knight... Jest...’

It was Morgan.

Morgan had finally arrived from the east, bringing the exiles of Godgrave with her.