It was good that there were witnesses. It made the whole thing feel much more real.
We rose into the sky once more. The air felt thin here, or it may just have been the stress or anticipation.
Far from earshot, Lightbane and I had a moment where we could talk.
"You ready?" he murmured.
"Yes," I answered. "Let's make it spectacular. Don't undersell it."
Magic stirred immediately - his coherent, gathering like light. It was a four-word fire spell: Ra-Agni-Sek-Vul, which was pretty destructive.
I channeled far less than he did, but I needed to concentrate far more, as mine was chaos magic. There was prickling at my fingertips like a swarm of angry sparks.
We'd practiced this a dozen times in miniature, small versions of this attack that fizzled like firecrackers. But this? This was the full-scale performance. The third act. The moment everything either looked real or fell apart.
It felt like my bones vibrated because of the strength of the chaos magic. Lightbane's aura intensified until he was a rising sun.
The final beam clash of the fight, after we destroyed parts of the city.
His fireball was the size of a blimp, while mine was the size of a baseball, and I threw it like one.
The beam balls met.
And for a heartbeat, nothing happened - just two clashing stars hanging in the air between us, wobbling, swelling, their surfaces rippling.
And then they exploded.
For a split second, there was no sound, no air, no sense of direction - just pressure.
Hell yeah.
My ears rang sharply with a piercing whistle that drowned out everything else.
The blast washed over me in a wave of heat and then cold and then static.
Wind spiraled outward in a violent rush, whipping the city below into chaos.
When the shock wave finally collapsed inward, the blast punched the air out of my lungs. Dark spots were at the edges of my vision. My armor absorbed most of the backlash, but still, it hurt.
The whole city lit up in light.
Across from me, Lightbane must have thought the same thing as I did.
Crap. This was too much.
Both of us were shot hard back onto the cracked clock tower.
I let the armor slough off me with a shiver, like peeling a second skin slick with cold oil, and hung it on the stone lip beside me.
All the air was forced out of my lungs, and I needed to breathe.
Lightbane did the same with his pristine white suit, the stuff spiraling into a neat coil beside him.
And we rested there for a moment.
Below us, the fight continued.
Six figures blurred across the city - six streaks of motion, dust plumes, and snarled war cries. Stone cracked under their feet as if it were thin ice. Shocks of force rattled the ground with every hit.
I leaned forward on the crumbling ledge to watch.
Catherine and Regan were in the middle of reshaping the street. Catherine dodged Regan's massive but plentiful swings with that uncanny quickness, redirecting every punch, while Regan bulldozed forward like a living catapult. Every time Catherine landed a counter, there was a small grin on Regan's face.
Juliet and Morgan dueled with impossible precision; they were so accurate they cut apart dust motes.
Juliet was stronger, but Morgan countered much and kept the elf at bay with magic. Of all the girls, she was the most proficient in it and could spam a lot of low-level magic if she wanted to, which she used here.
Medea and Elizabeth, though - their fight didn't have rules.
Or rhythm.
Medea shot across the street and rooftops, bounding around.
She used carts and stalls and window frames, and even briefly bounced off Regan's shoulder as she raced past.
Elizabeth answered every attempt of her opponent to run away by simply running into her at high speeds, like a guided missile.
Not that everything hit.
One missed swing and she obliterated part of a building's corner or put a hole in the street - the stone turning into dust under her knuckles.
Another missed, and she punched straight through the wall of a bakery, sending a cloud of flour billowing into the air like battlefield smoke.
Medea appeared behind her with a knife in her hand, ready to strike.
Elizabeth spun with both fists outstretched like a wrecking ball, but Medea quickly dodged under them, then launched herself upward, snapping from rooftop to rooftop, breaking tiles and snapping gutters as she went.
Elizabeth followed.
Medea cackled - an actual laugh - flinging arcs of lightning behind her. Each arc detonated like a miniature starburst, blowing holes into anything unlucky enough to be in the path.
Elizabeth caught one blast with her forearm and punched straight through the next, the air cracking around her. She grabbed a piece of fallen masonry mid-fall and hurled it, forcing Medea to bend backward in midair to avoid it, her tail brushing its surface as it screamed past.
"Can you keep up?" Lightbane asked, lying beside me.
"Barely." I gripped the stone edge, watching them dart faster than my eyes wanted to track. "If I blink too long, I lose the thread."
"Same," he said.
My eyes darted across the battlefield again, tracking flashes of steel, bursts of magic, streaks of dust, and broken stone flying everywhere.
I thought that this should be about enough.
I patted my belt, and my heart froze for a moment.
The vial. It wasn't there.
I checked my pockets, the inner lining of my clothes, and even underneath the goo.
I'm going to fucking kill myself.
"Where is it?" I whispered in frustration.
Lightbane glanced over. "Where's what?"
"The vial. The prop."
He sat up fast. "…You're joking."
"It was right here," I muttered.
Then we both bolted upright at the exact same time, scrambling over the broken stone.
"Maybe it rolled," Lightbane said frantically, lifting a slab of stone three times his size like it weighed nothing.
We searched everywhere.
Inside the roof hatch.
Behind the broken clock gears.
Inside my shadow armor again.
Nothing.
For a horrible moment, I imagined the vial simply falling off the building sometime during our fight - plummeting into the city, rolling into a gutter, or just shattering. That would have been better than the alternative.
If one of the girls found that vial...! There was a chance the entire fake narrative could unravel.
My stomach almost twisted. "This is bad. This is actually, genuinely, catastrophically bad. Fuck!" I yelled into the air. "Months of preparation, of practicing and choreography, of worldbuilding. The entire scheme is about to collapse because I couldn't keep track of a single, stupid glass bottle."
"So this is how the evil plot ends. Not because of the hero, but because of incompetence." Lightbane let out a noise of frustration and dragged both hands down his face. "Oh well, don't beat yourself up too much. We just have to end this. Now. Before one of the girls finds it."
We exchanged the same look.
Time to wrap this up.
"Okay," Lightbane said, straightening, slipping back into his calm, noble persona like a mask. "We end the clash here." Then he paused. "Who won?"
Right.
That mattered.
You couldn't just stop a story thread like this without a result.
"Well," I said, rubbing the back of my neck. "If I win the first time, it sets the stage. Raises the stakes. Makes the Prophet of Entropy a legitimate threat for the narrative. You get motivation for the next rematch."
"Alright then," he said. "Darkness wins round one."
"Light retreats," I laughed.
"Regrouping with his followers," he continued, "after a hard-fought battle that… looks convincing enough from below?"
We both peeked over the edge.
Catherine and Regan had migrated to what used to be a row of neat merchant stalls.
Catherine was hurling large chunks of broken stall frames at Regan - planks, beams, even an entire shattered countertop - each one flying with enough force to whistle through the air. She moved like a catapult with legs, snatching debris without looking and whipping it forward.
Regan met every projectile head-on, either blocking with the flat of her sword or smashing it apart with her bare fists. Wood exploded around her in sprays of splinters, peppering her in debris, but she didn't seem to care in the slightest.
Juliet crashed through a second-story balcony in a blur, Morgan chasing after her in the blink of an eye. Juliet swung her sword down in a clean diagonal arc that cut parts of the building she had just crashed through in two; Morgan answered with her own sword swung upwards, perfectly meeting Juliet's strike, causing both blades to shatter at the impact but not before releasing a shock wave.
Medea and Elizabeth had taken their chaos vertical again - vaulting from roof to roof, Medea's lightning trailing behind her like an unhinged comet tail. Elizabeth bulldozed through anything in her path, sending tiles raining down into the streets below. At one point she grabbed the corner of a chimney and tore it free just to throw it.
But of course, she missed.
The girls were still trying to kill each other with increasing enthusiasm. Maybe they were enjoying it a little too much.
"Yes," I said. "Very convincing."