Reina was true to her word. It took her just about three hours to get here, and she brought a team of trusted folk to help. He recognized Ethan, the burly bear-like man he'd dueled once, who nodded cheerfully to him.
It took a few more hours to free all the prisoners, set up temporary housing, and get meals going. She upgraded the Beacon to C-rank. She used it remake a chunk of land right in the heart of Portland, where most of the folk there could stay.
There were a couple thousand of them, and they looked like they'd crawled straight out of a prisoner-of-war camp. Most of them were scarcely over Level 20. When Reina looked at them she had this heartbroken look in her eyes. It seemed to spur her on.
By midnight or so, she'd gotten pretty much everyone housed and fed. There was much more work to do—she'd already started on the urban planning—but Zane convinced her to rest. It could wait for tomorrow.
Her attitude toward him was pretty much what he expected. She seemed pretty mad, which she understood. Usually she came off as determined with a take charge can-do attitude, but she was still kind about it, especially when she spoke to people.
When he tried talking to her at first, she brushed him off. She was brusque, cold, standoffish. Later, she answered in clipped sentences. She wouldn't look him in the eyes.
When bedtime rolled around, she said he'd stay at the palace. And she'd stay with him. He thought she'd start grilling him as soon as the doors closed behind them.
It turned out he'd misread her.
Almost the instant the doors shut, she… showed that she was happier to see him than he'd thought.
He didn't get a lot of sleep that night.
They lay on Elliotts' silk four-poster bed the next morning, sunlight filtering through the windows, warming them. There she confessed to him, murmuring softly, eyes closed, head pressed up tight against his chest. She'd been restraining herself earlier so she could get her job done. He'd hardly been gone, and somehow she'd already missed him—so much that she'd found it hard to think straight around him.
She kept murmuring. She said she felt safe around him. She knew he'd always be there for her, that she could always depend on him. He was something to hold onto, always stable—never despairing, never too high or too low. She said, in a happy, dream-drunk voice, that he felt like the earth under her feet, holding her up—always strong, even when she wasn't.
Zane found all this utterly baffling. He was pretty sure she didn't need him to feel all that—it was all in her head. As far as he could tell, he didn't do anything. He was just kind of… there? Late at night, every day, she'd come and confess her worries to him. All he did was listen and hold her. He was kind of like an emotional support animal, now that he thought about it. Her unusually large emotional support animal.
… he didn't mind it, honestly. It was kind of nice.
With everyone else, she was Reina the fearless leader. But with him, she melted—she let herself be vulnerable. He felt it was a privilege to see her like this. She trusted he would take care of her. Somehow, he knew he was the only one she trusted like this.
She had fallen back asleep, using him as a pillow. And he just watched her sleeping, the way her chest rose and fell gently, the warm brown curls of her hair splayed messily across his chest. She had a soft little smile on her face. She seemed like she was having a happy dream.
Zane had seen her face before, obviously. A lot. He'd had a certain thought the very first time he'd seen her, and somehow he kept having it. He was struck with it now.
She really was very, very pretty.
***
Later that morning, he took out the Orb of Azeroth, found a quiet room in the palace, and sat. There, he gazed into its murky red depths. There were black clouds staining the red, slowly moving. In the same way you could find shapes in the clouds in the sky, he started finding shapes in these black clouds. His gaze grew soft, fell away, unfocused. And those black clouds, which had been mere impressions, grew more and more vivid…
He tried focusing on the Law of Fiery Rebirth. On Rebirth in Flame, the Skill he meant to learn.
A scene began to form.
He saw jagged black mountains staining the horizon. The ground was pitch black too, as far as you could see, and rivers snaked across it, splitting and winding a thousand different ways, flowing with pale blue fire—like the water itself was burning.
This wasn't earth.
His gaze was drawn to a man standing in the midst of it all, clad in armor made of an odd blackness, a blackness so dark it seemed to absorb the light around it. The man's face was blue-black, gaunt as a skeleton. And twin blue flames burned where his eyes had been.
His skull-like face was frozen in a giant, permanent, horrifying grin.
Somehow, Zane got the sense this was the demon Azeroth.
Azeroth stared up at the sky. Then Zane looked up too, and had a moment of whiplash.
He saw stars in the sky. But nothing like the stars he knew—not tiny pinpricks but blown-up spheres. He saw planets with swirling brown clouds, bright blue planets laden with icy rings, dark red planets so close he could see the dust storms playing across their surface. The sky was alive with the stuff of space. But Azeroth was looking at none of those; Azeroth was looking at what seemed like a dust cloud in front of it all. The dust cloud drawing closer, growing bigger. Zane made it out.
That was no cloud.
That was an army. An army of men with faces streaked in red war-paint. They wore flowing robes, spiked helms. In their hands were lances big enough to run an elephant all the way through, burning at the tips.
They rode on the backs of dragons. Dragons. Gold-scaled, black-scaled, red-scaled. Some small as canoes, some big as warships. Fire foamed at their snouts, burning with Laws that went straight over Zane's head.
And Azeroth rose to greet them.
The demon leaped. An explosion blasted off the soles of his feet—Zane had a moment of vertigo. What was that? Azeroth did it again, like a rocket launcher blasting off, throwing him suddenly into the air. It was some sort of Skill. The Law of Eruption woven with something else, something Zane couldn't catch.
Now Zane's defense was patched, movement was his greatest weakness. He'd always been slow and lumbering… he'd probably never be as fast as, say, Avery, or those with Laws made for speed. But he was getting a little embarrassed by how little he could dodge. If only he could get something like that…
He didn't recall seeing it in the Inheritance description, though. And when he tried to focus on it, there seemed to be a veil covering his senses, masking the Law. He frowned.
Right—wasn't he meant to be learning Rebirth in Flame? What was going on?
He turned his attention back up just as Azeroth splayed out his hands, and two monstrously large claws seething with ghostly flame burst into being. Like avatars of his clawed hands—the same shape, blown up to the size of small mountains.
Azeroth and the dragon army collided.
He raked out his hands, and dragons fell out of the sky.
They didn't seem burnt on the flesh. But the light in their eyes was snuffed out. Azeroth drew back for another swipe—
A river of dragonfire took him in the face. Skin melted, and muscle, then bone—
White fire blazed where the red one touched.
And Zane watched him burn in reverse.
Bone healed. Muscle strung it up. And flesh, new and whole, made the finish. It was like he'd never been burned at all. Rebirth in Flame!
That was almost instantaneous. So fast Zane would've missed it if he'd blinked.
So fast, Azeroth didn't even react to it. The demon laughed maniacally, and kept slashing. Each swipe ripped a chunk out of the army. A dragon-claw ripped off his arm—there was a flash of white flame, and a new one took its place. It was so ridiculously fast, it looked as though the dragon had torn off a fake toy arm, and Azeroth had his real one hidden up a sleeve, just ready to throw out in a flash.
Azeroth rocketed about, making a constellation of light in the bursting night sky, tearing through that dragon rider army. Everywhere he went, those huge, proud beasts were snuffed out. Their soulless bodies went limp, cratered into the ground.
The dragon riders were getting desperate. They're trying to crowd them up close, but they couldn't seem to do a thing to him. Azeroth kept laughing—
Something loomed up behind him, a dragon bigger and greater and angrier than all the rest, so big it eclipsed the sky. Its eyes were the size of Azeroth's whole body. Azeroth turned to face a mouth unhinging, so huge it eclipsed the world, like a night sky unfurling—and those shining teeth could've been a field of cruel stars.
Azeroth screamed, kicked away. The massive jaws clamped down.
Its teeth took off the demon's body from the chest down. And as Azeroth, scarcely more than a head now, fell spinning—
For half a second.
The world flashed white. A new body flared into being, and like that, the demon was whole again.
That fire healed so fast, it was like it turned back time.
Azeroth shrieked out a laugh and made a fist.
A giant ghostly fist smashed the dragon out of the sky…
The scene faded.
And then he was back in the palace foyer again, staring dumbly at the orb, soaked in sweat.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕖𝕕!
ℝ𝕖𝕓𝕚𝕣𝕥𝕙 𝕚𝕟 𝔽𝕝𝕒𝕞𝕖 [𝔼𝕡𝕚𝕔]
He was breathing heavily, and he hadn't even been fighting.
For a while he sat there staring dumbly, trying to understand what the Hell he'd just seen. Then he began to smile.
Every single time he saw a battle like this... a battle that threw his idea of what was possible out the window… It just got him so excited. God.
It should be him up there, battling it out amongst the stars. Scenes like this teased him painfully.
He sat there and tried dragging out a little more from the Orb—maybe a Minor Law or two? Maybe that soul defense Skill? But he could tell he was shot. He couldn't stop himself from trembling. No—no more comprehension for the day. He had to fight.
These Laws could wait for later. He had Steel Laws to comprehend too, from that B-ranked Treasure Elias gave him. He figured he could stack them—once he got his hands on some Law Treasure, like the Law Fruit, he could do one intense session and mine them all out at once.
And where better to get rare treasures than a C-ranked Dungeon?
He set out for the Gorge.
***
Once he was at the edge, he couldn't see the bottom. As he leaned over, peering into the murk, it was like he'd put his head into a wind tunnel—the howling was deafening.
Apparently he wasn't even in the Dungeon yet. There was nothing on the mini-map. He had to go farther—he had to go in.
There could be a nest of Monsters down there, for all he knew.
He could probably jump from here and be fine in terms of fall damage. But just in case, he got out an Axe. He set it to about half its maximum length, which was very long, and dropped it straight into the murk. He waited.
Halfway down, the Chain started to tremble, like it was being heavily battered by a great many powerful things. At this length, the Chain was heavy as a cargo ship. Which made the vibrations he was feeling…
Interesting.
He didn't feel his Axe hit the ground.
Just how far down did this thing go?
He swung it into the wall. It caught something there, and held. He figured he could just keep swinging down until he hit something.
He would hit something, right? Surely.
Only one way to find out.
Time for his first C-rank dungeon.
He leaped into the dark.
𝕐𝕠𝕦 𝕙𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕖𝕕: 𝔻𝕦𝕟𝕘𝕖𝕠𝕟: 𝔾𝕠𝕣𝕘𝕖 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔼𝕝𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕎𝕚𝕟𝕕𝕤 (ℂ)