Reitz ignored the pain clawing at his side.
It burned—bright, hot, wrong—each time he twisted, each time his lungs expanded against bruised ribs and torn flesh. The cauterization had stopped the leak; the damage remained. Every movement sent a jolt through his nerves, like a branding iron pressed into his kidney.
Pain, he could handle. The stab was the problem. It looked fatal. It was fatal for commoners; for a high-ranking mage like him, it should have been a major inconvenience. He drove mana into the wound, reinforcing and knitting as he moved.
Something fought him.
With this much damage, his mana control should have stayed clean. Instead, it seeped.
A little. Still wrong.
Pain could wait. Pain meant he lived. The leak meant something else.
Focus, he told himself.
In the heartbeat after Allister became glass and ash, the battlefield reacted.
Four figures blurred into position, grey cloaks snapping in the heat, boots skidding on fractured stone. They moved with Imperial Military Doctrine—tight, efficient, built to close on a higher-level combatant.
They fanned out in a diamond, hands dropping toward the ground.
Reitz's vision tinted orange through the slits of his burning helm. Heat shimmered off his [Flame Armor], and he tracked them anyway.
Their auras flared in his senses—dense, compact knots of power. Baron-level, third circle. Maybe higher.
Reitz lifted a brow and grinned inside the helm.
"Come on, then. Show me who paid for you," he growled.
Two of them slammed their palms into the dirt.
The ground softened.
Stone slumped to sludge in a circular patch beneath all of them, liquefying like hot wax. The earth sagged, then dropped, forming a bowl-shaped depression five yards across.
The other two had arms sheathed in stone—thick gauntlets to the shoulder, jagged and heavy. As the pit formed, they bent their knees.
Catapult, Reitz realized.
The softened earth snapped back, hardening and rebounding with vicious force.
The gauntlet-wielders launched like human projectiles. One rose high, stone-clad muscle aimed at Reitz's head. The other skimmed low, fists drawn back to shatter knees and pin him in the kill zone.
A pincer for someone who liked to stand his ground.
They expected a block.
Reitz jumped.
The world slowed.
The leap stayed tight and measured. He spent the exact mana to hit the gap—or he meant to. The cost bit harder than it should have.
He willed mana to condense at two points—chest and knee. His [Flame Armor] thickened and burst outward, surface flickering as he forced mana into those nodes.
Reitz knit his brow.
There. The leak.
Two lances of compressed fire burst from him.
Thwip.
One fluid motion.
The upper mage took a lance through the chest.
Stone armor meant nothing. The fire punched through rock, mail, and ribs, exiting between shoulder blades. For an instant, the man glowed from within.
Then he became ash, stone gauntlets still swinging at empty air as they crumbled.
The lower mage flared mana around his arms, trying to guard.
Useless.
The second lance hit his shoulder, drove him down like a hammer, and pinned him into the ground. He struck with a crunch. The fire cut out an instant later; the momentum and half-molten earth finished the job. His skull collapsed. Then his body became ash.
Reitz hit the ground in a three-point landing, [Flame Armor] throwing sparks where it scraped stone.
Two down.
The burning slits of his demon mask fixed on the remaining pair.
They stood at the pit's edge, hands on the ground, watching their perfect execution turn into a double funeral.
Reitz stared at them for a beat.
Then he laughed.
The sound burst out of the helm like a broken furnace.
"Forty mages?" he shouted, heat haze amplifying him. "Just forty of you?"
He spread his arms, [Flame Armor] flaring brighter.
"Are you insulting me?"
Indignation tightened his chest, heat rising behind his teeth.
He was the Ashbringer—Augmenti of the Rex, the man who turned battlefields into graveyards of dust. Forty baron-level mages made an annoyance, not a death squad.
"Let your patron kill me instead," he roared, pointing a flaming gauntlet. "You small-fry lack the punch. You think I'm some country Lord?"
The two earth mages traded a glance. Their auras spiked with instinctive fear, then steadied under training.
They began to retreat.
"Stay," Reitz hissed.
He moved.
His guard tightened behind him, shields interlocking and leaving a clear lane. They needed no orders.
Reitz pushed through the throbbing in his side and sprinted off the half-melted ground.
Most mages needed stillness. The mind could only juggle so much—maintaining a construct, shaping aura, modulating flow—while reciting archaic chants honed by generations.
Reitz ran anyway.
Stone shards and broken spears crunched under his boots. His [Flame Armor] shed sparks as he wove through fallen men and carved trenches.
And he began to chant.
[ Oh most wondrous, Fire of heaven the sun ]
[ Thy light shines upon both valorous and evil ]
[ By day thee art the scorn of toil, the scourge of darkness ]
His awareness split.
Shift Casting.
Few could do it—moving while chanting, fighting while holding the spell intact. Most let the construct collapse the moment attention wavered.
His [Flame Armor] flickered, ripping mana from protection to feed the spell.
The earth mages felt the drop in pressure and took it for weakness.
They stopped retreating and braced, palms slapping the ground, ready to raise walls, spikes, or seize his ankles.
Too late.
[ May thy frown beest upon those who doth me harm ]
Heat pooled behind them, a tight knot ten inches above the ground.
[ And the fire ablaze pour forth toward mine enemies ]
Reitz kept his eyes on their backs.
He aimed at reflex, not flesh—the hop backward every trained imperial fighter made when death rushed close.
They stepped.
[Fire Implosion]
The air screamed.
Temperature spiked behind their skulls. A barrel-sized sphere flashed into a miniature sun. Pressure collapsed inward, then detonated outward.
BOOM.
The two earth mages died.
One head became red mist. Torso and arms disintegrated into ash and wet dust.
The other took the blast through upper spine and ribcage. His head vanished. A smoking arc that might have been skull flew high, trailing embers, and disappeared over the ridge.
A scorched crater marked where they had stood.
Reitz stumbled to a halt, boots skidding. His [Flame Armor] crawled back over shoulders and helm a heartbeat later, thinner and dimmer.
His lungs burned. He spat blood onto the cracked stone.
A fourth-circle spell should have stayed easy. This felt like a fifth-circle throw. The numbers refused to match.
A leak.
He locked his expression down and kept his attention forward.
"Predictable," he growled.
The battlefield quieted.
Men still shouted. Horses screamed beneath broken carts. The mountain groaned under distant earthwork.
The center stilled.
Every eye that could see turned toward him.
The Ashbringer stood alone in a ring of glassed earth and bone dust, four killers erased in a few breaths.
"…Ashbringer."
The word slipped out like an exhale.
It came from near the rear—an injured man-at-arms pressing a torn sleeve against his bleeding flank, eyes wide and glassy.
"Ashbringer."
Another voice picked it up, from the archers' line.
"Ashbringer!"
The sergeant behind the shattered wagon snorted.
"Here we go," he muttered.
The whisper spread.
Men hunched behind shields straightened. Archers who had flinched at every stone spike leaned out, eyes burning.
"ASHBRINGER! ASHBRINGER!"
The canyon threw the chant back, walls turning the name into a war drum.
The boy with the cheap spear felt his heart slam in time with the roar. Terror stayed, and found something to cling to—something hot, wild, and bigger than fear.
The sergeant rolled his shoulders to loosen cramped muscles under the shield.
The boy swallowed. "He—he killed four of them like—"
"Bugs," the sergeant snorted, finishing it.
He watched Reitz turn from the crater, shoulders rising and falling with ragged breaths, Flame Sabre burning at his side.
"Keep your head," the sergeant said. "You know why we're here. We get close enough that they have to worry about us. The bastards know we turn lethal inside stabbing distance."
"But—"
"Shut up. Shield up," the older man grunted. "Live while the Lord turns his annoyance into ash."
On the ridges and behind earthen barricades, enemy mages felt the morale shift.
Blackfyre troops stopped collapsing. They rallied.
Archers climbed for higher firing angles, using broken ground for cover. Men-at-arms re-formed around the Great Flame Formation, shields overlapping in a disciplined half-circle behind their Lord.
The earth mages had suppressed an army.
Now they faced an army with a god of war in front.
The flank teams understood their positions would fail.
"Pull back!" someone shouted in a clipped, professional tone that suited soldiers, not "bandits." "Regroup with the main squad! Do not engage the target alone!"
Three mages on the eastern ridge broke cover, sliding down loose scree and raising stone bulwarks to catch arrows as they ran for the main barrier where their strongest waited.
Reitz watched them.
A laugh rasped out of his helm, low and ugly.
"Too slow," he snarled.
He moved before any of his men could think to stop him.
He held his pace this time.
[Fire Implosion] had eaten a chunk of his reserves; it had no right to. The stab in his side flared with every heavy stride. His [Flame Armor] rebalanced—thinning on the legs, thickening around his core.
Mana allocation lived in his bones.
He raised his right hand.
Fire along his forearm dimmed, then shrank, sucked inward toward his palm.
A tiny ember appeared in the center of his gauntlet.
Reitz fed it.
The ember stretched into a line, then a spear of coherent fire—twenty yards long, tapering to a wicked point. Heat bent the air around it; the world rippled at the edges.
He kept running.
He drew his arm back. Visualization was enough.
Thwack.
The spear crossed the distance in a blink.
It punched through the back of the rearmost mage, entering between the shoulder blades and bursting out the sternum. The impact lifted him off his feet and drove him forward, nailing him to a tree trunk.
He died before he could scream. Flame raced along cloth and hair and skin. Seconds later, a charcoal silhouette clung to blackened wood.
The second mage glanced back, saw what held his comrade, and broke into a full sprint.
His aura flared with panic as he threw up clumsy stone bulwarks.
Zip.
An arrow hummed through the air and buried itself in his calf.
The mage shrieked and went down hard, tumbling in the dirt.
On the ridgeline, a Blackfyre archer lowered his bow, hands shaking.
"Got you, you bastard," he whispered.
The stumble gave Reitz what he needed.
He reached the fallen mage in three strides.
The [Flame Sabre] hissed into existence along the outside of his right hand, sprouting from the base of his thumb like a third finger. Blue-white fire buzzed against the air.
Reitz swung once.
The cut stayed quick.
The mage hit the ground in two pieces, the seam sealed by heat.
Reitz left him and kept moving.
Near the earthen barricade, four more noble-rank earth mages felt their numbers thinning.
"He's cutting through the outer teams," one snarled, sensing auras winking out. "We can't let him reach this position or—"
The warning died.
Reitz was already on them.
They ran.
Subtlety vanished. They hurled terrain into his path.
A ridge of stone lunged up to clothesline him.
Reitz dropped into a slide, knees bent, greaves of his [Flame Armor] sparking as they scraped rock. He skimmed under with inches to spare.
A pit yawned where he would have landed.
He kicked off the slide's momentum and twisted in the air to clear it.
Spikes burst up behind him, late.
The mages cursed, hands a blur.
A spell launched through rock, mail, and ribs, exiting between shoulder blades. For an instant, the man glowed from within.
Then he became ash, [stone gauntlets] still swinging at empty air as they crumbled.
The lower mage flared mana around his arms, trying to guard.
Just short.
To his left, someone launched a boulder at his back—an opportunist with heavier specialty.
Reitz kept his head forward. He felt it in his field, air bowing and pressure shifting behind him. The [Flame Armor] hummed, heat extending his awareness.
He jumped backward.
His boots met the boulder's rough surface as it screamed past.
He bent his knees as if the stone were ground.
Then he kicked.
For a heartbeat, Reitz rode the projectile—a demon of fire atop a moving mountain.
He sprang off, using its momentum as a launch. The boulder slammed into an abandoned cart and exploded it into splinters.
Reitz became a streak.
He landed behind two fleeing mages, impact cracking the earth.
They started to turn.
Slash.
One stroke. Two lives.
The [Flame Sabre] cut a diagonal line across the first mage's torso, hip to shoulder, then reversed into a horizontal stroke that took the second at the waist.
Both dropped in smoking halves, then ash.
The remaining two spun on reflex, fear turning into attack.
[Stone bullets] flew at point-blank range, each fist-sized rock packed with kinetic force.
Thud. Thud.
They slammed into Reitz's chest.
His [Flame Armor] flared. The stones disintegrated into dust that hissed across glowing plates.
He staggered two steps, pain flaring from his wounded side, and held his footing.
"You little shits," he growled, rumbling inside the helm.
"Flies," he spat.
He raised his hand to condense another spear, to erase them as cleanly as Allister.
Whoosh.
The sky answered first.
A hail of stones screamed toward him—dozens, each the size of a man's head. They came in oblique angles, slamming into the ground around him and forcing him to move.
Reitz bobbed and weaved, cursing as he twisted left, then right, hopping to keep clear. His breath clipped and his cadence wheezed.
"Fuck"
A stone clipped his shoulder and jolted the [Flame Armor]. Another exploded at his feet, shock climbing his legs.
The two mages used the barrage to dive away behind a freshly raised wall of jagged rock.
Reitz pushed through dust, vision narrowing.
A shadow fell.
The ground split beneath his boots.
Earth peeled apart in a controlled line, opening a chasm into blackness. Thin stone spikes lined it like teeth.
A coordinated trap.
They'd timed it with the falling stones, betting on his dodge.
His right foot lost ground.
Reitz moved on instinct.
He slammed his left hand into the fissure's edge, [Flame Armor] melting a handhold into the rock. His body swung down, momentum tugging him toward the spike-lined maw.
He snarled and heaved. Muscles locked.
He cleared the crack and landed in a low crouch on the far side. Stone ground against stone as the fissure snapped shut.
He stayed down for a breath, one knee and one hand on the ground, panting. Each inhale scraped raw.
"Persistent bastards," he muttered.
He forced himself upright.
He faced the mountain.
Beyond the earthen barricades more figures emerged—first in twos and threes, then in clusters. Cloaks. Armor. Noble auras pressing into his senses.
They spilled from shadowed tunnels like ants from a kicked nest, filling ridges and ledges, taking attack positions with crisp efficiency that spoke of training.
Reitz straightened and squinted through the shimmer.
Dozens of signatures. Mana burning bright. Lines of power to the edge of his reach.
His lips curled in a humorless grin inside the helm.
"So," he rasped. "The rest of you finally crawled out."
The bandit reinforcements had arrived.