AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She ran.
The South Gate had been a melee. But the East Gate was a slaughter zone.
The Nikara soldiers were down. Rin raced toward their posts, but her hope died the closer she got. She couldn’t see anyone in Nikara armor still fighting. The Federation soldiers were just pouring through the gate, completely unopposed.
It was obvious now that the Federation forces had made the East Gate their main target. They had stationed three times as many troops there, had set up sophisticated siege weaponry outside the city walls. Trebuchets launched flaming pieces of debris into the unresponsive sentry towers.
She saw Niang slumped in a corner, crouched over a limp body in a Militia uniform. As Rin passed, Niang lifted her face, streaked with tears and blood. The body was Raban’s.
Rin felt as if she’d been stabbed in the gut. No—not Raban, no . . .
Something slammed against her back. She whipped around. Two Federation soldiers had crept up behind her. The first raised his sword again and slashed down. She ducked around the path of his blade and lashed out with her sword.
Metal met sinew. She was blinded by the blood streaming into her eyes; she couldn’t see what she was cutting, only felt a great tension and then release, and then the Federation soldier was at her knees howling in pain.
She stabbed downward without thinking. The howling stopped.
Then his comrade slammed his shield into her sword arm. Rin cried out and dropped her sword. The soldier kicked it away and smashed his shield at Rin’s rib cage, then pulled his sword back to deliver the finishing blow while she was down.
His sword arm faltered, then dropped. The soldier made a startled gurgling noise as he stared in disbelief at the blade protruding from his stomach.
He fell forward and lay still.
Nezha met Rin’s eyes, and then wrenched his sword out of the soldier’s back. With his other hand he flung a spare weapon at her.
She pulled it from the air. Her fingers closed with familiarity around the hilt. A wave of relief shot through her. She had a weapon.
“Thanks,” she said.
“On your left,” he responded.
Without thinking they sank into a formation; back to back, fighting while covering each other’s blind spots. They made a startlingly good team. Rin covered for Nezha’s overstretched attacks; Nezha guarded Rin’s lower corners. They were each intimately familiar with the other’s weaknesses: Rin knew Nezha was slow to bring his guard back up after missed blows; Nezha parried from above while Rin ducked in low for close-quarters attacks.
It wasn’t as if she could read his mind. She had simply spent so much time observing him that she knew exactly how he was going to attack. They were like a well-oiled machine. They were a spontaneously coordinated dance. They weren’t two parts of a whole, not quite, but they came close.
If they hadn’t spent so much time hating each other, Rin thought, they might have trained together.
Backs to each other, swords at the enemy, they fought with savage desperation. They fought better than men twice their age. They drew on each other’s strengths; as long as Nezha was fighting, wasn’t flagging, Rin didn’t feel fatigued, either. Because she wasn’t just fighting to keep herself alive now, she was fighting with a partner. They fought so well that they half-convinced themselves they might emerge intact. The onslaught was, in fact, thinning.
“They’re retreating,” Nezha said in disbelief.
Rin’s chest flooded with hope for one short, blissful moment, until she realized that Nezha was wrong. The soldiers weren’t backing away from them. They were making way for their general.
The general stood a head taller than the tallest man Rin had ever seen. His limbs were like tree trunks, his armor made of enough metal to coat three smaller men. He sat astride a warhorse as massive as he was; a monstrous creature, decked in steel. His face was hidden behind a metal helmet that covered all but his eyes.
“What is this?” His voice sounded with an unnatural reverberation, as if the very ground shook when he spoke. “Why have you stopped? ”
He brought his warhorse to a halt before Rin and Nezha.
“Two puppies,” he said, his voice low in amusement. “Two Nikara puppies, holding an entire gate by themselves. Has Sinegard fallen so low that the city must be defended by children?”
Nezha was trembling. Rin was too scared to tremble.
“Watch closely,” the general said to his soldiers. “This is how we deal with Nikara scum.”
Rin reached out and grasped Nezha’s wrist.
Nezha nodded curtly in response to her unspoken question.
Together?
Together.
The general reared his monstrous horse back and charged them.
There was nothing they could do now. In that moment, Rin could only squeeze her eyes shut and wait for the end.
It didn’t come.
A deafening clang shattered the air—the sound of metal against metal. The air itself shook with the unnatural vibration of a great force stopped in its tracks.
When Rin realized she hadn’t been cut in half or trampled to death, she opened her eyes.
“What the fuck,” Nezha said.
Jiang stood before them, his white hair hanging still in the air as if he had been struck by lightning. His feet did not touch the ground. Both his arms were flung out, blocking the tremendous force of the general’s halberd with his own iron staff.
The general tried to force Jiang’s staff out of the way, and his arms trembled with a mighty pressure, but Jiang did not look like he was exerting any force at all. The air crackled unnaturally, like a prolonged rumble of thunder. The Federation soldiers fell back, as if they could sense an impending explosion.
“Jiang Ziya,” said the general. “So you live after all.”
“Do I know you?” Jiang asked.
The general responded with another massive swing of his halberd. Jiang waved his staff and blocked the blow as effortlessly as if he were swatting away a fly. He dispelled the force of the blow into the air and the ground below them. The paving stones shuddered from the impact, nearly knocking Rin and Nezha off their feet.
“Call off your men.”
Though Jiang spoke calmly, his voice echoed as if he had shouted. He appeared to have grown taller; not larger, but extended somehow, just as his shadow was extended against the wall behind them. No longer willowy and fidgety, Jiang seemed an entirely different person—someone younger, someone infinitely more powerful.
Rin stared at him in awe. The man before her was not the doddering, eccentric embarrassment of the Academy. This man was a soldier.
This man was a shaman.
When Jiang spoke again, his voice contained the echo of itself; he spoke in two pitches, one normal and one far lower, as if his shadow shouted back everything he said at double the volume. “Call off your men, or I will summon into existence things that should not be in this world.”
Nezha grabbed at Rin’s arm. His eyes were wide. “Look.”
The air behind Jiang was warping, shimmering, turning darker than the night itself. Jiang’s eyes had rolled up into the back of his head. He chanted loudly, singing in that unfamiliar language that Rin had heard him use only once before.
“You are Sealed!” the general bellowed. But he backed rapidly away from the void and clutched his halberd close.
