Every house in the inner city had come back.
The streets had reclaimed their lines, the facades had sealed themselves, and from behind the wall of one of the newly-rebuilt homes, Achlys could almost convince himself the city looked normal.
Could almost.
The sound coming from the streets corrected him every few seconds, the percussion of ice against stone, the crack of something structural giving way, a voice cutting off mid-shout.
He pressed his back against the wall and slid down it until he was sitting.
"My mana." He said. "I have nothing left. I need to restore it."
He leaned out past the corner of the building. His clones were moving through the street in a long, silent current, some sprinting, some clearing houses in single leaps, none of them showing the cost that was eating him hollow from the inside. From somewhere further down the block, ice pillars erupted from the stone in quick succession, each one cut off before it finished forming.
"Crevial! Keep it up…your brother is overpowering us!"
He found her when he looked. She was on the ground, bleeding through the side of her robe, pushing herself back up with the heel of her palm against the stone. He watched her press both hands flat against the street and pour herself downward into it, a brief flash of energy running through the contact and then she was gone from where she'd been, appearing at Lecia's shoulder as though she'd always been standing there.
"Throw me," Crevial said.
Lecia didn't ask twice. She seized her by the leg and launched her toward Polo with everything she had.
Crevial's hand closed around an ice chunk mid-flight. "Cryo!" she called, pitching it high. "Ice cage…but keep reforming it around him, don't let it-"
Polo's staff tapped the chunk as it passed him.
The ice detonated.
The concussion hit Crevial before she'd landed and sent her sideways.
Cryo clicked his tongue.
"Ice's dominion, violent shattering, frost crush!"
He said it quietly, which was the more alarming version. Forty pillars tore free of the ground beneath Polo simultaneously, driving upward in a wall of white, purple lines racing along their surfaces and across Cryo's arms where the mana was running heavy. The pillars didn't just push, they sent Polo airborne and followed, spreading outward as they rose, encircling him in a shifting latticework of ice that continued forming even as the outermost columns curved back inward, beginning the shape of a cage.
"Fool." Polo found his voice somewhere in the middle of it. "I can simply destroy-"
Something thin and precise slid up between the bars of ice near his hand. A smaller spike…not a pillar, barely a rod….angled just so. The chakran left his grip before he'd registered losing it.
"DAMN YOU!" The word came out ragged. "Give it back!"
He reached for it. The main pillars answered, driving him back toward the center of the cage, then past it, slamming him against the far wall of ice hard enough to fracture it. The cage was still sealing. The gaps were closing. The weight of forty interlocking columns was beginning to bear down on the space he occupied.
"DENIAL."
The voice came from above.
And everything stopped.
Mid-swing. Mid-step. Mid-breath, almost.
Every person on the battlefield went perfectly still as though the air itself had thickened into something that held them. The only sound was the word still echoing off the restored facades of the buildings around them.
Qyioza descended slowly from above the roofline, his paper trailing behind him, the gray light of his written laws pulsing in long, steady intervals.
"New law," he said. "Decreed by will. Absolute dominion. By the clap of my hands…ice within a thousand kilometers shall be erased. Ceasing to exist for eternity."
His hands began to rise toward each other.
"DOP DOP!"
She came out of the sky at a speed that turned her into a streak, and she hit Qyioza across the skull with the full weight of her momentum behind it. The sound carried through the whole city. The ground shuddered with the aftershock, and a dozen of Achlys's clones dissolved at once, their forms unraveling into mist as the tremor broke his concentration.
Qyioza hung in the air where she'd hit him, suspended for a moment by what seemed like pure incredulity. "You can move..." He turned to look at her. "Even through my law?"
Lisare was already attacking.
"Dop dop longet sisi!"
The blades at either end of her pole detached. They didn't fall…they orbited, spinning in a tight, accelerating ring around her as she landed, the air humming where they passed, a sound like something alive and looking for a direction. She moved on him without stopping, the rotating blades sweeping the space around them clean, and the Governor began retreating, reading angles, searching for the gap that wasn't there.
"First Order! Full moon!"
Achlys appeared above them.
An ice pillar had lifted him, already fading, the last of Cryo's mana spent on the platform and he was coming down from it, sword extended, the weight of the Order gathered into the blade's edge in a single column of intent. He had enough left for one swing. He knew it. He took it.
Qyioza's memory returned faster than his body moved. His hands came together.
The echo of the clap rolled across the city, and the ice began to go. Not all at once, it faded in increments, the pillars thinning, the frozen surfaces of the streets turning dark and wet as the cold vacated them, Cryo's constructs dissolving from their edges inward like frost burning off glass in morning light.
"You are done!" Achlys was already through the first layer of the Governor's defencean air shield, cut cleanly…and the second, and the third. The remaining two tried to close the angle on his blade.
They failed.
"Dodge body!" Qyioza's voice cracked with something adjacent to panic, and his body obeyed, twisting aside, but not far enough. The blade caught the paper.
A third of it came away.
The ice law Qyioza had decreed moments ago went with it, shredding apart as the document that held it tore. The remaining ice across the city froze mid-disappearance, some of it returning, some of it already gone beyond recall.
"Lisare!" Achlys was falling, had been falling since the swing, the last of everything spent. "The paper…focus on the paper!"
He hit the ground hard enough to feel it in his teeth. He looked up from the stone. One section of the ice law was still legible on the remaining portion of the document.
"Cryo-"
Cryo raised his hand. Nothing came.
Achlys stared at the remnant of the paper above him. Then he looked at his clones—dozens of them, standing motionless in every street of the city, watching him with his own blank face.
"Fuck." He exhaled. "This is going to hurt."
He pointed his blade at Qyioza.
"Charge my mist." His voice carried across the city, finding every clone that still held shape. "Charge until your life gives meaning to everyone."
The clones moved.
All of them. At once.
Streaming from every street and rooftop toward him like water finding the lowest point, their forms beginning to blur as they ran, the mist that made them unraveling at the edges and funneling back inward toward Achlys's prone body in a torrent of returned energy.
Then he was still.
"GUARDS!" The voice was Lecia's, raw, carrying the full force of everything she had. "Don't protect me…protect him! Protect Achlys!"
They were already running.
.......................................................................................................
Cryo turned back to where Polo had been and found only the chakran lying in the street.
"Where is he-" The word hadn't finished forming before the fist arrived.
It caught him square across the face with enough force to take him off his feet and send him through the street in a straight line, through the front of one building and out the back of it, through the next, and the one after that, a row of houses opening up in a clean sequence before Cryo hit the edge of the flying city and found the catapult.
It stopped him.
He lay against it for a moment, blinking, then turned his head to read the sign mounted on its side.
*Human catapults — dead or alive. *
"What in the-" He pushed himself upright and looked at it for one more confused second. "I need to tell the others about this."
"That," Polo said, "will not happen."
Cryo crossed his arms in front of his face as the kick arrived. It was the right instinct and the wrong result, the force carried straight through and launched him off the edge of the island entirely. He had time to register the sky, then Polo's hand closing around his skull, and then the lower city of Libertatis was coming up very fast.
The building accepted the impact poorly. Its roof folded inward on both of them. Debris spread across the surrounding street, and when the dust thinned, Cryo had already pushed Polo off him and put distance between them, landing in a crouch in front of a cluster of pegaluve who'd backed themselves against the far wall of the road.
"Stay back." He spread his arms wide—a wall between them and the rubble. "He's dangerous."
The roof of the collapsed building lifted.
Polo walked out of it.
Unhurried.
Not a scratch on him, not a trace of dust that hadn't already shaken free.
"You're going to be the one to save them?" His eyes moved from Cryo to the pegaluve and back. "You, specifically."
"I'm a servant of my master's will." Cryo held his ground. "He will save them."
Polo took a step forward. "I want to see him try to end the law."
Cryo took a step forward. "He'll break the law." His fist closed at his side. "And make a new one."
They came to a stop a pace apart. Polo had the height advantage…barely, but visibly. Neither of them moved.
"Laws rule the universe," Polo said. Quiet. Like something he'd believed for a long time. "Everything that exists, exists inside a law."
Cryo's mouth pulled into a grin. "And yet humans have always broken them," he said, "to make new ones."
.......................................................................................................
Qyioza floated above the inner city and looked down at the unconscious shape of Achlys on the street below.
"He didn't follow the law." His voice carried its own echo, unhurried. "You should all be bowing before me. Not inviting your own destruction."
"SHUT UP!"
Lecia's voice split the air like something thrown. She was standing in the street below him, and the mana leaking off her was visible…not a shimmer, not a suggestion, but a full outpouring, the kind that warps the air around it, driven by the particular fury of watching someone she would die for lying on the ground beneath the person she wanted to kill.
"You don't know anything about him. You don't know anything about us."
Qyioza let her finish. Then he looked away from her.
"I wouldn't particularly care to," he said. He raised one hand and pointed, not at Lecia, not at the unconscious Achlys.
At Crevial.
She looked back at him. No flinch. No shift of expression. A stare that had nothing behind it except the decision not to show him anything at all.
"I need her," Qyioza said, spreading his arms, the paper unfurling wide at his back, "to build an empire. To rule this world." He said it the way someone might announce a plan they've already considered from every angle and found flawless.
"DOP DOP LONGET!"
Lisare leveled her swallow at him. The blades were spinning again in their orbit, humming in that living register that meant they were fully active.
"Dop." She took a breath. "Sisi."
She vanished.
It wasn't speed in the way that speed usually presented itself, no blur, no afterimage, no visible transition. She was in front of him before the space she'd occupied had finished registering her absence, and her swing was already arriving: a low, perfect arc from the right, the swallow's haft catching him across the stomach with everything behind it.
Qyioza absorbed it. He looked down at the point of contact. He looked back up at her.
"I have a perfect defence." He said it like a correction. "Why would you expect that to do anything?"
Lisare's expression was confident. Her eyes, for just a moment, were something else…searching, reading, reaching for something she hadn't quite found yet.
He noticed.
He shoved her backward and ducked a spinning blade that had been tracking toward the back of his head.
"You are starting to genuinely irritate me."
He extended his arms to either side. His eyes went purple at the edges…a slow, spreading glow, the color of something burning behind glass.
"With my word and my will. The new law will be written into the universe's foundations."
He paused.
"Impenetrable defence."
His voice settled across the battlefield like a stone settling into still water, and the ripples it sent out were felt rather than heard.
One of Lisare's spinning blades found its angle and drove into him.
He didn't move. He watched it come.
It hit.
It spun.
It continued spinning, fast, faster than before, throwing sparks where it found purchase and did nothing. The blade pushed against him with the full force of its rotation and Qyioza stood in the air above the city as though it were a light breeze.
"Longet?!"
Lisare's eyes went wide. Lecia and Crevial's matched hers.
He reached up with one hand and flicked the blade off his arm. It tumbled away and hit the ground and stayed there, the connection to Lisare's will severed, no longer answering.
Lecia stared at the blade on the street.
"I think I understand it." She kept her voice level, working through it even as she said it. "He can nullify laws. Remove them from objects. The blade operates on laws the same as anything else and he just revoked its right to obey her."
Qyioza made a sound. He looked at Lecia with something grudging in it.
"It seems you were right," he said.
"Frequently," she said, and put her hand flat on the street.
"Fly and pierce the heavens."
The rock she'd pressed her palm against compacted. The air around her grip shimmered, the gravity she was applying reducing it and not crushing it outright but forcing it smaller and denser and hotter by degrees, until the stone had lost its original form entirely and become something dark and molten and extremely compact.
She threw it.
"Counter element!" Qyioza's hand came up. The force of the projectile stopped dead in the air a meter from him, hanging there, spinning.
"Forward!" Lecia drove her palm at the air, and her gravity followed it,seizing the stone, overriding the stopped force, pushing it through.
It hit his leg. The compacted gravity holding it small and dense released on contact.
"Shit-"
He looked at his own leg as the stone came apart in an expanding flash of pressure and heat. The burns across his lower leg were significant. He looked at them, and then he looked at Lecia, and the wound began to close.
Lecia watched it regenerate. She exhaled through her nose. "Thought as much."
Qyioza waved his hand in her direction.
The cut was clean. A section of the inner city…street, foundations, and all…separated along the line his hand described and began to fall, carrying Lecia with it, dropping away from the floating island in a slow, enormous descent.
"Curse you, law abuser!!"
She was falling face-up, watching him recede above her, and she had a second…a clear, specific second…before the distance made things difficult. She found Crevial with her eyes. Crevial was already looking at her, guilt written into every line of her face, her feet rooted.
"Don't you dare look at me like that." Lecia's voice hadn't changed. Still full, still carrying. "Don't be sad because I'm falling…be angry enough to keep fighting. CREVIAL! STAND UP AND FIGHT!"
"I can't control my powers!" Crevial's voice broke through the quiet it had been keeping. She slammed her fist into the ground hard enough to leave a shallow crater in the stone. "Why would I fight if it just destroys my own body?"
"Because fighting to the death," said a voice behind her, "doesn't mean you have to be the one who dies."
It was tired. Thoroughly, comprehensively tired. But it was clear.
Crevial turned.
Achlys was sitting up.
One arm rested on one knee. His head was lifted toward Qyioza above them, but his focus slid sideways, to her, or near enough. "If Cryo and Lecia went into a fight, do you think they'd sit there and let someone put a blade in their throat?"
"I'm not the same as them,"
His pupil snapped to her.
He got up.
It wasn't graceful. His legs dragged behind each step, his body moving through the effort of it like a man wading against current, but he covered the distance and stopped in front of her, close enough that she had no choice but to look up at him.
"You want to die on a battlefield?" His voice had shed the exhaustion, somewhere between standing and arriving it had found the edge it needed. "You want to die in someone else's hand, when you have your own? You shouldn't let anyone push you around. Your brother-" He stopped, steadied himself. "Does he want to see you this miserable? Does that feel like what he'd want?"
Crevial's eyes had filled without her permission.
He reached his hand out.
She took it.
"Be yourself," he said. "And push forward. Whatever's in the way."
She stood.
Lisare hit the street between them.
Not uncontrolled and she arrested herself at the last second, the impact calculated rather than accidental, and Achlys and Crevial had already moved clear. She rose from the crouch immediately, turning back toward Qyioza.
Qyioza waved his hand toward her.
Achlys stepped in front of her.
"First Order, Full Moon!!"
The slash came and met his, and the two forces ground against each other in the space between them for a long, crackling moment before Achlys's held.
"Tch."
The shockwave that came out of Qyioza hit in every direction at once, rolling across the street, throwing grit and shattered stone outward in a ring.
"The Orders," he said, the irritation precise and contained, "are always in my way."
.......................................................................................................
Lecia landed in the inner city a fraction of a second before the falling piece of street would have gone beyond saving.
"Earth firm, my command."
She pressed both hands upward, and the purple lines came, tracing from her wrists to her elbows, branching up past her shoulders, the activation running through her at full draw. She let it.
"Gravitational grab."
Her hands swept right.
The falling section of the city reversed its direction. It didn't slow, it went from falling to flying in roughly the same motion, the change in vector happening fast enough to break the sound barrier on the way, a crack rolling outward through the lower air. The mass of street and foundation and stone crossed the sky and met the western mountains at full speed, and the collision was the kind that didn't stop at the moment of impact…it kept going, pressure converting to heat, the mountains themselves melting where the stone met them.
Lecia lowered her hands and looked at what she'd done.
Something blurred past her at head height.
"CRYO, WHAT THE- don't hit my face!"
He was already past her, colliding with Polo mid-air in a long trading of impacts that had clearly been ongoing for some time…fist into chest, forearm into jaw, neither of them giving the other a clean second to think. Cryo drove an elbow into Polo's guard, read the recoil, and used it to put him through the front of a row of houses. He paused outside the resulting hole and glanced at Lecia.
"I really wish I could punch it."
He went through the hole after Polo.
Lecia stared at the space where he'd been. She extended a middle finger in his direction with feeling.
Then she followed him in at a full sprint.