Chapter 80: Chase

Thirty of them, surrounding all five.

For a heartbeat the slope held its breath. The ring tightened, thirty Core Genesis experts moving with the easy coordination of people who had drilled this, the ones above on the high ridges, the ones below choking off the descent, weapons already lit, spells already humming behind their hands. Not one of them carried a bell. Thirty hunters who had banded together and come up empty, and now meant to fill their hands all at once off a single cornered team.

It was a good ambush. Patient. Well placed. The kind of trap that ended most teams.

It would have helped them to know who they had cornered.

"Lyra," Rudrean said quietly. "Where’s the nearest open run?"

Her crafted eyes had already mapped it. "Downslope, past the broken ridge, there’s a long ravine that opens into a flat. I can have the Dragonfly there." Her hand was already moving, a sliver of will sent racing out through her gear. "Thirty seconds."

"Then we run. We hit them on the way through. We don’t stop." A flicker of a smile. "Ready?"

The ring lunged inward.

"Now."

The team broke downhill like a thrown stone, and the trap shattered the instant it tried to close.

The leader of the ambush, a broad man with a glaive of red lightning, came at Rudrean first, fast and sure, the strike aimed to cripple. Rudrean did not slow. He stepped inside the swing the way a man steps through a doorway, almost lazy, caught the haft in one hand, and let his momentum do the rest. He simply kept running, and the man came off his feet and went with him, dragged a dozen meters before Rudrean flicked his wrist and sent him cartwheeling into two of his own allies. All three went down in a tangle of limbs and stolen breath.

Aelira sprinted past the heap of them, laughing.

A wall of crimson-green plasma bolts came screaming in from the upper ridge, a dozen shooters loosing at once. Rivera did not break stride. Her hands rose, Starlight Stream flaring, and a lattice of hard white light wove itself across the team’s flank in the space of a breath. The bolts struck it and scattered into harmless sparks, and through the dazzle Rivera’s own counter-beams lanced back up the slope, clean and precise, catching three shooters in the shoulder and the hip and folding them where they stood.

Two of the bell-less ones tried to flank low, cutting across a scree field to intercept the team at the ravine’s mouth. They were fast. Ryzen was faster than he used to be, and twice as eager to prove it. He met the first head-on, took the man’s flaming fist on a forearm sheathed in his awakened talent, and felt it splash off him like water off iron. The shock on the man’s face was almost worth the whole trial. Ryzen grinned, grabbed a fistful of the man’s collar, and hurled him bodily into his partner. They tumbled together down the scree in a clatter of loose rock and lost dignity.

"I’m getting good at this!" Ryzen whooped.

"Stay humble," Rivera called, not unkindly, vaulting a boulder beside him.

They hit the ravine.

It was a narrow, twisting gut of stone, walls rising sheer on either side, the floor a treacherous run of shattered rock and old rain-channels. For the pursuers it was a funnel that forced them into single file. For the team it was a gift.

The thirty, or what was left of them upright, poured in behind, and the chase became something almost like art.

Some sped ahead recklessly, burning mana to close the gap, and learned why that was a mistake. The first to catch Aelira lunged for the bell bobbing at her shoulder, hungry to tear her hard-won ticket away for himself, and got a lesson in the Bloodbound Armory for his trouble.

A bead of her blood beaded at her fingertip and unfolded, in the space of a thought, into a weapon. Not a summoned object but a created one, shaped straight out of her mind: a heavy revolver of dark crimson metal, its chambers already glowing. As it formed, she poured her elements into it, Phoenix Flame curling along the barrel and Heavenfall Wind threading the chambers, enchanting the thing past any ordinary make, the wind lending its rounds impossible velocity and the flame lending them a punch that could crack a wall. She fanned the hammer without looking. The round did not pierce the man, she’d aimed it not to, but it slammed into his chestplate like a wind-driven battering ram wrapped in fire and folded him backward off his feet, his suit ringing, his lungs empty.

"Still my favorite trick," she said cheerfully, and the revolver dissolved back into nothing as she ran on.

The second to try it found the rock beneath his lead foot suddenly slick, Lyra had skipped a palm-sized device off the ravine wall as she ran, and it had bloomed into a sheet of frictionless glaze across the stone. The man’s sprint became a windmilling slide, and he went down hard and skated into the wall.

Others gave up the foot race and threw everything they had down the corridor. Spears of fire. Chains of wind. A spinning disc of edged light that howled off the walls. Rudrean answered in kind, and answered bigger. He did not break stride; he simply let his own blood flower into a Bloodbound creation as he ran, a broad fan-bladed glaive of crimson steel taking shape in his grip, and wreathed it in the fused roar of Heavenfall Wind and Phoenix Flame until the whole weapon burned cyan-and-crimson and screamed through the air. One sweep of it met the incoming volley head-on. The wind-enchantment gave the blade a reach far past its edge, a crescent of cutting air that scattered the fire-spears and wind-chains and shattered the edged disc into harmless sparks against the ravine walls in a single contemptuous arc. He let the glaive come apart back into nothing the instant the volley was dead, never once slowing his run.

"Bridge!" Lyra shouted.

A natural arch of stone spanned the ravine ahead, low and thick. The team passed beneath it. As the densest knot of pursuers funneled under after them, Lyra’s hand snapped out, and three of her crafted eyes that had been clinging to the arch’s underside detonated in a soundless flash of concussive force. Not lethal. Just enough. The arch shed a curtain of rubble and dust straight down onto the pursuit, and a third of the remaining chasers vanished into a choking cloud, stumbling, blinded, their momentum dead.

The ravine spat the team out onto the open flat.

And there, skimming low over the rock with its four long wings shimmering, came the Dragonfly.

Lyra’s aircraft was a thing of her own making, sleek and impossibly fast, and it dropped into a run beside them without ever fully stopping. They poured aboard one after another, Ryzen last, hauled in by the scruff by a laughing Aelira, and the Dragonfly’s wings flared to full power.

The last few pursuers burst out of the ravine just in time to watch it go. The aircraft did not flee so much as cease to be relevant, a streak of light arcing up and away across the vast face of the Mountain, leaving thirty would-be hunters scattered, bell-light, and bruised in the dust behind it.

"That," Ryzen panted, flat on his back on the deck, "was the most fun I have ever had being ambushed."