More explosions lit up the night in enemy territory, these finely targeted. Naasir’s team was blowing up the remaining pipes that brought in clean water, and they were disrupting sewage lines so that the filth would flow into the enemy camp. A small demolition team had been tasked with destroying roads that led out of the port area.
Their aim was to trap Lijuan’s ground troops and annihilate her winged fighters.
Raphael’s archers slammed fiery death down on anyone who escaped the angelfire that burned in the sky. His troops began to move forward, squadrons landing on rooftops in a wave of silent death, while ground teams pushed their way through the rubble, eliminating the enemy on every side as they went.
Obsidian rain began to slam at them minutes later, but it was too late. They’d reclaimed much of what they’d lost. Raphael didn’t hold back his angelfire, his aim to wipe out as many of Lijuan’s generals as he could. But the senior leaders suddenly all dropped out of the way at precipitous speed.
KNEEL TO YOUR GODDESS!!
He saw her then, higher in the sky than him.
Her face was skeletal, and she appeared to be missing one side of her body. Her gown flapped against empty air where her thigh should’ve filled it out, and above, the fabric was being sucked in against her side—her rib cage was partially or fully missing. None of that stopped her from raining death down from the sky across a vast, vast area.
Lovely shimmering starlight obsidian shards of pain and horror.
He’d intended to save his wildfire until he could get it into her body, but hundreds of people would die if he didn’t stop her.
He spread out his wildfire in a shield across the sky. The deadly rain hit and dissipated. But Lijuan wasn’t done. She threw down another barrage. His shield held. Just. Wounded she might be, but her power was a terrible thing.
Whatever Lijuan had become, she was growing stronger with each passing day. Even at full power, he couldn’t hope to defeat her, not in a direct fight as this had become. Not when she could spread her attack across such a devastatingly large area.
He could carry on, infuriate her into a mistake so he could get close enough to inject her with wildfire, but the price of his choice would be grave upon grave upon grave.
He had no choice. Retreat! he ordered. Fall back!
Even as he gave that order, he shaped the last drops of wildfire in his body into small pellets, then shot them through his shield. He’d taken a precious extra second to time it just right, so the pellets—so small they were near invisible against her rain of starlight obsidian—would pass through in the gap between one blast of the rain and the next.
Lijuan hadn’t moved since this began; he hoped that held true for another second.
Two of the pellets were smashed out of existence by falling shards, but the other five punched into Lijuan’s heart.
Lightning lit her up from within. Blood trickled out of her mouth.
Raphael didn’t take that for an advantage of any kind. The only reason he’d achieved so much with so little was because she was already wounded. But wounded or not, she had plenty of firepower in her. She targeted him alone with the next volley.
His shield collapsed, the wildfire dissipating under the rain of black.
Raphael had nowhere to go that wouldn’t put his troops in the line of fire. An angelic squadron was retreating below him. He used angelfire to disrupt the starlight obsidian. It couldn’t eliminate or cancel out Lijuan’s poison, but it was strong enough to send it off course.
The shards smashed into the buildings on either side of the squadron; they flew out of danger moments later. It was the ground troops he had to worry about now—they were too deep in enemy territory. It’d take them time to retreat to safe ground. Even had the subterranean network of tunnels survived the aboveground detonations, they’d been designed for lone operatives, not large numbers of troops.
Lijuan laughed and the sound was incongruously lovely. Why do you fight so? A chiding tone to her mental voice, almost of the archangel she’d once been. You have only the power in your flesh. I am a goddess. I have the power from my people. Another hail of pain and death clothed in beauty.
He had nothing left. No wildfire. No angelfire. Nothing but his swords, with which he’d attempt to deflect some of the shards, so his ground troops would have a slightly higher chance of a safe retreat.
Gray bodies suddenly filled the sky in front of him.
His Legion took hit after hit, each body falling limply to the earth as the black poison ate them up from the inside out.
Bronze lightning fell from the sky at the same instant, aimed directly at Lijuan. One got her in a direct strike, burning great swathes of flesh from the healthy side of her wildfire-riddled body. She screamed and aimed her firepower up above, but the person there was invisible against the smoke-hazed sky.
Raphael recognized that lightning but he couldn’t spot Michaela, either. Infuriated, Lijuan shot another hail of black at the Legion, poisonous shards that they blocked with their bodies. Michaela hit Lijuan with another direct strike—this one succeeding in destroying a wing. Lijuan’s face faded and then her body rippled and she was gone, no doubt to feed again.
Raphael had survived the skirmish but the damage done was catastrophic. For the first time, he saw despair in the faces of his people. It had cost them so much ingenuity and skill and blood to gain that ground. Only for Lijuan to claw it back in a matter of minutes.
Elena. Fly with me. He needed his consort in a way that had nothing to do with war or power—and his people had hurt Lijuan’s forces enough that they weren’t pursuing the retreating soldiers, just holding their side of the line.
Stormfire wings rising from one of the rooftops. “We’ll get that land back,” she said when she reached him. “We did it once, we’ll do it again.”
“No, Guild Hunter. You know as well as I do that the explosions gave away one of our only advantages—Lijuan’s people will even now be scouring any buildings within sight for booby traps.” He just hoped Naasir, Janvier, Ashwini, Demarco, Holly, and the others would make it out. “It is not the loss of territory that worries me, it is what that loss is doing to our people.”
Faces looked up at him from rooftops and even in those who had managed to hold on to hope, the hope held a ragged edge. “They just saw their archangel consummately defeated. Had the Legion not stepped in and taken the blows meant for me, I would not be here speaking to you now.”
“You’re in pain.” Elena’s tone was sharp. “She got you.”
“Twice,” he told her. “Once on the shoulder very close to my neck, and the second at the side of my rib cage. It’s eating away at me.”
“The wildfire,” Elena began.
Raphael cut her off with a shake of his head. “There is nothing left. I am out of power and I know you gave me the last droplets in you.” He deliberately brushed his wing across Elena’s even as Lijuan’s starlight obsidian dug scalding channels of agony in his ribs and shoulder.