Chapter 293: Sentinel Elias’ Return

The wind screamed past Althea’s ears as the ground rushed up to meet her.

She had maybe three seconds before the fall became irreversible. Her female elemental soul mass was tumbling alongside her, still partially formed, arms flailing as the dispersion of the Owl disrupted the careful equilibrium of energy Althea had maintained. Althea reached out through her soul, grasping for the Owl’s mass as hard as she could, but found nothing. That channel was dead. Whatever Elias had done to it had been thorough.

Just as she was wondering how she would tackle her fall, something large and warm slammed into her from the side, knocking the remaining breath from her lungs.

She felt the coarse fur of a beast and the hard muscle beneath it. Lord Malakor had steered his avian-feline mount into a steep dive, leveling out just in time to intercept her fall. Althea scrambled for a handhold, her nails digging into the creature’s thick feathery hide as she hauled herself onto its broad back. Her female elemental soul mass followed, dissolving into a stream of essence that settled back into Althea’s soul.

​”Hold on!” Malakor shouted. He pulled the reins hard, bringing the beast into a wide arc. The creature’s wings beat against the gale, trying to stabilize from the abrupt maneuver.

​Althea lay flat against the beast’s back, her heart hammering against her ribs. She looked up, squinting against the biting wind. High above them, Elias remained motionless on his floating sword, his white robes flapping in the wind.

​”Who is that?” Malakor demanded. He didn’t look back at her, his eyes fixed on the old man in the sky. “The power rolling off him… it’s suffocating.”

​”Elias,” Althea managed to choke out. She sat up slowly, wiping the dust that had entered her eyes. “He was a Preceptor. To my knowledge, he still held the rank when I last saw him.”

​Malakor’s jaw tightened. “And why would a Preceptor strike down one of his own?”

​”According to Preceptor Odette, he was stripped of his title recently,” Althea explained. Her voice was thin, carried away by the wind. “She didn’t say why. Only that he was no longer part of the official Ossuarist hierarchy.”

​The Feraxian Lord banked the beast, giving them a clearer view of the old man. Elias hadn’t moved an inch. He stared down at Althea with a cold, clinical assessment that made her skin crawl. There was no anger in his expression, only a profound, detached interest.

​”Stripped of his title,” Malakor repeated. He glanced back at her, his brow furrowed. “And he shows up here, in the middle of this slaughter, specifically to target you. Does it feel like you might be the reason he lost his standing, Seneschal?”

​Althea didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Because she’d already come to the same realization the moment she’d locked eyes with Elias and found nothing but that flat coldness in them.

​”Look,” Malakor whispered.

​Elias had finally shifted his gaze. He was no longer looking at Althea. He had turned his head toward the Husk, which hovered a mile away.

​The creature was changing. The mask of confusion it had worn while watching Althea had vanished. Its features were melting back into that default, horrific smile, except this was even more gleeful. It looked at Althea with recognition in its eyes.

It had finally remembered who she was.

​”Get ready,” Malakor warned, his body stiffening in anticipation, ready for action. “It’s going to move.”

The Husk made the first gesture, its body tensing for a spatial jump. But before it could vanish, the sky itself seemed to fracture. A vertical line of white light descended on the Husk’s position. It was a sword slash of such speed and purity that the sound of the air being severed only reached them seconds later.

The Husk reacted with a desperate twitch, blinking away. It reappeared only twenty meters from its original position, its movements sluggish and uncoordinated. It hadn’t jumped far enough, as if the space around it had briefly thickened and refused to let it travel further.

The smiling expression on its face slowly disappeared, twitching into one of confusion and anger, its facial muscles flickering in the wrong directions.

Elias watched its expression shift as it stared at him, and immediately, a slighted, condescending look colored his face. “An abomination like you should not have the audacity to even look at me with such eyes.”

In a blink, he blurred towards Husk. The sword beneath his feet remained as a platform while he propelled himself forward with a burst of raw soul force. In the span of a single heartbeat, he closed the distance.

​His bare hand was wreathed in heavy bolts of purple lightning, hissing with violent energy that turned the air to ozone. He had manifested a soul mass — a human Arcanist who must have been a master of lightning magic in their lifetime.

​The Husk immediately tried to blink again. Althea saw the creature’s body flicker, the telltale sign of a spatial displacement.

​Then, the world stuttered.

A beat of lag occurred, causing the Husk to stay exactly where it was for a fraction of a second, pinned in place just enough for Elias’ fist to connect fully.

The Fragment of Restriction, Althea thought, her breath catching.

She knew that power all too well. Elias wasn’t just using soul masses; he was subtly and covertly weaving the power of his Transcendent fragment into his strike. He had restricted the space around the Husk, making the act of blinking through space as difficult as swimming through lead.

Elias’ fist connected, releasing a massive discharge of purple energy that exploded outward, engulfing the Husk. The creature was sent hurtling backward, its body trailing sparks as it skipped across the air like a stone across water. It finally came to a halt hundreds of meters away, its limbs spasming uncontrollably.

The lightning hadn’t been a simple elemental attack. The currents coursing through the Husk were dense and heavy, carrying a weight that seemed to crush the creature’s very essence. The Husk swayed in the air, its head lolling. Yet, through the blackened skin and the twitching nerves, that smile remained.

It was trying to shift into an expression of confusion again, but the lightning kept its face locked in a frozen grin.

Elias didn’t give it a moment to recover. He charged again.

The second strike hit the Husk before it had finished twitching from the first. The third came after that. He drove it back across the sky with each blow, chasing it through the air at a pace that looked almost unhurried.

Each strike carried more charge than the last, carrying the Husk further and further away, the purple of the lightning deepening with every exchange until by the final blow it had gone so dark it was nearly black.

The air grew heavy. The evening clouds, once gold and red, turned black and storm-filled. The temperature plummeted, and a bleak, unnatural chill settled over the battlefield.

The sheer amount of energy Elias was discharging had begun to warp the local weather patterns to the point where even the feline-avian beast gave a low sound deep in its chest and pressed closer to the fortress on instinct.

Malakor and Althea had drifted close enough to the outer wall by now that Althea could make out specific faces along the bone ridges. Caretaker Lance stood near the forward edge, arms folded, watching without expression. Osei was beside him, eyes also locked on the distant battle with attention. The other Ossuarists behind them were still and quiet, watching the same thing.

Eventually, the sound of the strikes stopped. The lightning faded, leaving the sky in a state of eerie, twilight gloom. The heavy pressure in the air began to dissipate.

​Elias appeared in the distance. He was returning at an easy pace, standing on his floating sword with his hand behind his back as if he had just taken a stroll through a garden. He wasn’t breathing hard at all, and even his robes were still pristine. He looked entirely unruffled.

“Here she comes,” Althea said, spotting a new movement from the fortress.

Preceptor Odette emerged from the upper reaches of the fortress on a flat, obsidian black disc, rising into the open air with the particular unhurried quality of someone who had been watching and had decided, now that the main event was over, to make her entrance. Preceptor Odette floated outward on the disc, her dark robes pooling around her, her expression composed.

Beside Althea, Malakor’s eyes widened. He leaned forward, staring at the disc. “Is that…?”

​”What is it?” Althea asked.

“That’s a Mechanus-forged multipurpose ward disc. Full-spectrum defensive artifact.” Malakor muttered, his voice full of a strange reverence. “There were only five made. Four are accounted for, passed down the bloodlines of the great Mechanus houses. The fifth…” He watched the disc carry Preceptor Odette out into the open sky.

“The fifth was lost centuries ago. Everyone thought it was destroyed. But here it is, serving as a soul mass for a scavenger.” He spat into the wind, going silent for a moment before sighing resignedly.

“I used to think the Aethelosians were being dramatic when they called your kind parasites… but now I’m beginning to reconsider.”

Althea didn’t share his indignation. She didn’t particularly care about the history of the disc in the first place. Her attention had already split three ways and the disc was the least pressing of them.

The first pressing thought on her mind was that Elias was coming back, and he was going to come for her.

The second was that Preceptor Odette had a Fragment. Every Preceptor did — it was the actual source of their power, not the soul masses they displayed so freely. Althea had seen what Elias could do with the Fragment of Restriction, but she had no idea what Odette’s fragment was.

But third, and most pressing of all, Althea’s gut was twisting with a sense of wrongness. She looked back at the spot where the Husk had been pounded into the earth miles away, and she didn’t for a second believe the Husk was finished.

She had watched Elias pound it across the sky. She had felt the shockwave of that final strike from a kilometer away. The evidence was plain. By any reasonable measure, that fight was over.

And yet…

Althea’s eyes locked onto Elias. He was perhaps forty meters away now and closing, his sword carrying him at a measured pace toward their position. His eyes were on her.

Preceptor Odette had adjusted her trajectory slightly to intercept him, or at least to meet him at the same altitude.

“Elias,” Preceptor Odette called out as the old man drew near. Her voice was light, almost playful. “Why have you come all this way to play hero? I was quite enjoying the show. I wanted that thing to wreak a bit more havoc. Our adepts are in dire need of more exquisite soul masses. A few more dead Arcanists would have been perfect for the collection.”

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