Horns bellowed in the echoing distance.
"You hear that?" Ikari asked in the middle of my smoke cloud.
Our fight halted for a moment. I lurked in my smoke cloud, silently circling Ikari for an opening.
"SOFYA! Go welcome our new subjects!" Ikari called out.
I turned in my Night Armor, and my heart sank when I saw Sofya still there, watching from the safety of the doorway with her mouth puffy from Ikari's smack.
"Yes, my Lord Husband." She curtsied towards my smoke cloud before leaving.
"W-Why would she-"
"Because she knows what happens if she disobeys." Ikari stated, "She can't survive on her own. You can't either."
"I'll find my way back!"
"After I tell them what happened to Herzt? Or, well, what my side of the story was."
"And they'd trust you?"
"You'd be surprised! I fought alongside them, I became a Hero! They trust me far more than you can possibly imagine. And what is the use of trust if it isn't used?"
My blood boiled.
"TRUST DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT!" I roared back, my Night Armored form rushing front on. Ikari sneered, and stabbed his sword right into the Armor.
"It's just another resource in this game we call life."
But it was nothing but smoke.
Ikari realized he'd plunged it into smoke far too late as I surged my blade up from beneath the darkness, aiming directly for his throat..
Ikari scrunched his neck, pulling and closing the opening. The tip of my sword glanced and screeched against his hoplite helmet, gliding upwards against the steel until it pierced into an eye socket.
Ikari stumbled backwards screaming as I retracted my bloodied blade, ready to lunge again if the opportunity presented itself.
Instead, Ikari wrenched his helmet off, trying to catch the blood that poured out of his empty socket. His one remaining eye then looked at me, his breath huffing in pain and boiling wrath.
"Is that just another resource?" I spat at him.
Ikari chuckled his way into a sickening laugh.
"They'll see me, once this is all healed, as a sage. A wise ruler who'd do anything for the people beneath him, including his own body."
Static light crackled in Ikari's blood stained hand. He whimpered as he cauterized the wound. Then he turned to me, his burnt eyelid scarred shut as his entire armor began to crackle with lightning.
"And he would turn all those who dared get in his way to dust."
I realized that I needed to stop him far too late to do so, engrossed in whatever madness he'd gotten himself into.
I charged him out of desperation.
Ikari's shield clattered to the ground.
My eyes went wide when I realized the horrible mistake I'd made.
Ikari roared, a torrent of unguided lightning pouring out of him in all directions. The tendrils blasted the corpses of my former allies, the voltage spasming their dead muscles, steaming as they did so.
Every single flammable material flashed into flames and the entire room burned.
The lightning rod that was my sword guided the tendrils towards me, and in a fit of panic I dropped it. But other tendrils stabbed their way through my Night Armor and against my gambeson, leaving thick lines of carbon as they did so.
I commanded my Shadow to go Half-Sail, tearing me back directly into the throne chair. I crashed into it, toppling the throne over and turning it into a flammable piece of cover.
I saw Ikari's knees grow heavy before he… he levitated…
An orb of quivering plasma comforted his tired body on a throne of lightning.
"You felt it, didn't you, when you first drank blood?" Ikari said, panting, "It was Evil, wasn't it? A single Whore can let a Vampire slaughter an entire village if desired. That fact, one that everywhere else deems as Evil, is a Good here."
Ikari chuckled at the simple thought, the super villain phrase that all the stupid TV shows of his youth used.
"It's all just Power at the end of the day. Good things are whatever's in People's interests, and Evil things are whatever's not. And it's in People''s interests to be viewed as Good."
Ikari sat upright in his Throne of Thunder, pointing at me with regal authority.
"And I am a Good Person."
I dodged as a blinding bolt of lightning struck the old throne, carbonizing it into crackling mist.
And I kept dodging.
Inaccurate bolt after inaccurate bolt clacked against the floor, wall, and the bodies of my once-allies, striking everywhere and everything except for me. So Ikari demanded more out of himself, and a dozen more inaccurate bolts poured out of him every second, and every one that missed only infuriated Ikari even more.
Ikari screamed as he pushed his own body, his armor steaming in his Arcane fury.
Then he blanked out, and the bolts stopped as he slumped back in his floating Thunder Throne. I fell to my knees, gasping for air as my muscles burned and quivered.
The Thunder Throne resuscitated Ikari with a jolt, making him gulp air like a drowned man.
We looked at each other, both at our limits.
Only then did both of our minds turn to the door. It was open. Sofya had left the door open.
Ikari and I looked at each other, then at the open door, and back.
Using my last reserves of strength, I ran towards the door as fast as my legs and magic could.
Using his last reserves of strength, Ikari pointed his finger towards the door.
Lightning screamed its way out from Ikari's finger towards the door, and I knew I wasn't going to make it through the doorway.
But the doorway wasn't where I was going.
No, my target was behind the door. A heavy door like that might just survive Ikari's lightning long enough for my Shadow magic to cast Otherside Mirror, the Shadow Teleport spell Inks had talked about in my first lessons. It only worked in Shadow, and was… unreliable, as its pioneer had met her end after ending up several meters above her house.
And it was my only chance.
I dove into cover behind the door.
Ikari's lightning blasted and slagged the heavy door, but it would hold.
My heart, brain and lungs pounding, I desperately tried to concentrate on the spell that would save my life.
The door broke down into slag and carbon, and Ikari saw that I was no longer there.
That was enough for him.
He collapsed back into his dissipating throne.
Meanwhile, I saw the sky. A dull, ugly sky full of snowclouds that gently floated their way down, as I was.
My hands and feet flailed as my back came crashing down into ice-cold water. I gasped as I hit the freezing water, only for it to come flooding into my lungs as I kept on falling into it.
I swam upwards in the muddy water, spitting water from my lungs as I quickly looked and made for the bank of the river moat. My gloved hands dug into the icy mud of the riverbank, effort after effort petrifying my fingers before I could no longer feel them anymore. I clambered upwards and towards a nearby tree. My back up against it, I saw my entire body was shivering. I needed to get my drenched gambeson off, fast.
My petrified fingers just poked at the buttons, unable to grasp them, let alone my meat knife that I desperately needed to cut the fabric off from me.
It was no good. I was going to die here. I'd known that from the very beginning. I wasn't supposed to have become a soldier, dying for causes that had no meaning for me.
My head rested against the tree, and spent the last moments looking at this world.
The tree was the beginning of an apple orchard, snow cresting the top of its leaves, each shadowing and protecting their own small ring of chamber pots that had been retrofitted as herb pots.
The last thing I saw was Sofya rushing to my side.
"I'm sorry," she whimpered helplessly to me, "I'm so, so, so sorry."