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Dato Buller. Prime armamagus, the Crystal Knight. Arkan had thrown one of his precious five at us. Oh shit.
Buller saw me.
I fired, squeezing the trigger. The bullets smashed into the helmet and slid to the ground.
He flicked his arm. A thin razor-sharp blade made from a single crystal slid from his forearm. Death was coming for me.
A sniper rifle cracked. I saw the bullet strike—it smashed into his head, jerking him a bit, and fell to the ground, flattened.
A firestorm erupted from Leon’s tower, a weird noise halfway between a deafening vacuum cleaner and a high-powered drill—the M134 minigun. Leon was trying to help me.
The stream of bullets staggered Buller. He leaned into it like a man fighting a strong wind.
I dashed around the clump of greenery. Singing would do no good. My wings wouldn’t work. Within his armor, Buller was deaf and impervious to mental magic. It was ballistic resistant, it maintained a temperature of exactly twenty-four degrees Celsius, and it somehow generated its own breathable air. It was a bulletproof spacesuit he could alter on the fly, and he was about to murder me.
The bushes went flying. A crystal blade emerged. Buller bore down on me like a nightmare come to life.
I scrambled through the brush to the main driveway. He was only feet behind me.
I burst through the hedges onto the main driveway and straight into Alessandro. He grabbed me by my shoulder and shoved me behind him. An unfamiliar man who was probably Konstantin in a new shape caught me and pulled me out of the way.
Buller carved his way through a hedge and loomed in front of us, a faceless knight ready to slaughter.
Orange sparks flared around Alessandro’s hand and coalesced into a short sword.
Buller struck. The crystal sword sliced through the air. Alessandro leaned out of the way and sliced across Buller’s forearm. It wasn’t a lash. He’d planted the knife onto the crystal bracer and rolled his wrist, cutting a half crescent through it. Before Buller moved to counter, Alessandro caught the knife on the other side of his arm and sliced upward. Buller whipped around, but Alessandro clamped his hand on the bracer and ripped it away.
How?
The Crystal Knight howled, his voice muffled. Blood drenched his right arm from mid-forearm to his fingers. Muscle glistened under the blood, as if Alessandro had skinned his hand.
Buller flicked a second crystal blade onto his left arm and stabbed at Alessandro, crystals flowing over his injured right hand. Alessandro dropped under the thrust, sliced at Buller’s leading leg, and tore another bloody chunk of crystal free.
Buller screamed and kicked at him in a frantic frenzy. Alessandro had nowhere to go. He braced, took the kick, rolled across the driveway, and sprang to his feet. A trickle of blood wet his lips. He flicked it off and started toward Buller.
The armamagus took a small step back.
The crystal armor was like a ballistic vest—it stopped a fast projectile but not the comparatively slow knife.
I needed a blade.
I whipped around and saw a boot knife in Konstantin’s hand. It looked like one of ours. He must’ve taken it off somebody.
“Knife!”
He blinked at me.
“Give me your knife!”
He held it out to me. “This is unwise . . .”
I grabbed it off his palm.
Buller was a whirlwind of crystal blades. Alessandro floated around him, carving pieces off.
I was a siren through my father but also magus Sagittarius through my mother. I only got a little bit of it. She never missed while my magic helped me stab my opponent in the most vulnerable spot. It required two things to activate: a blade and a target. I had both.
Magic zinged through my palm and pulled me toward Buller. I swayed from foot to foot, looking for an opening.
Buller slashed at Alessandro. Sparks pulsed, and a heavy modern replica of a falcata on my sword wall popped into his left hand. Instead of dodging, Alessandro blocked the vertical slash, knocking the arm aside, and carved a cut on Buller’s helmet. Blood swelled.
My magic pulled me. I darted behind Buller and lashed across his back. It was like slicing through a thick bunch of fiber-optic cables. The blade sank in with an odd crunch. Buller whipped around toward me. His crystal sword grazed my arm, drawing a hot line of pain across my shoulder, and then Alessandro carved a three-inch ribbon off his side.
We moved around him, slicing, slashing, cutting, just as we’d practiced hundreds of times against every conceivable practice construct and mech Linus could throw at us. We bled him cut by cut, like two wolves fighting a bear.
Buller raged. He had been invulnerable for so long, and now we hurt him again and again, and the pain and fury had driven him mad. Blood drenched his crystal armor. He kept trying to regrow it, but we had ripped too much of it away. Chunks of raw muscle wept blood through the gaps. The crystal crawled, trying to seal the gashes, but it was slow, and we kept opening more.
