Ashtoreth felt something impact her from the side and there was a flash of blue-white light…

  She was tossed against hard stone ground, her wings crumpling under her as she rolled to a stop. She lifted herself off the ground, glancing around frantically to see the rest of her allies scattered around her.

  For a moment, she was so relieved that it felt unbearable: everyone was alive. They’d escaped a mess with a level 2500 dragon and a… who knew what level of fallen angel.

  They’d come out of the teleport at the mouth of the cave-street that had led to the soulweaver’s in the first place. Hunter had already pulled out his stele and was printing runes into the middle of the street.

  “You know the drill, everyone,” she said. “Crowd around Hunter. We’re getting—”

  She was interrupted as the ground beneath their feet shook, then shifted. A white light bloomed in the depths of the cave, and a moment later she felt a hot wind stirring her hair. As long as they distracted each other for just a couple more seconds…

  A two-note klaxon began to blare as the lights around the whole of the outer market changed color, plunging them into a world that was suddenly made of nothing but red and teal as even the beams of light meant to guide traffic shifted and intensified.

  “Shit,” Ashtoreth said. Her head snapped to Hunter, who was staring at her with an anxious expression. “Did we just get locked out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. How—” But then she stopped. She’d been about to ask Dazel how long it would take him to get them out anyway.

  He was Dazel, after all: he’d never failed to get the upper hand on any static magical defenses or systems. He was their perfect ticket out of here.

  Or had been.

  “Can you analyze the spell that’s keeping us in?” she asked, looking between Hunter and Kylie. “Either of you?”

  “I can try,” Kylie said, giving a little shrug.

  “Let’s get moving,” said Ashtoreth. “We’re going up. Kylie, carry Sadie—don’t object, if we get in a fight you’re the last person who needs to be mobile.”

  Kylie grunted, but moved toward Sadie nonetheless. A moment later the ground shook once again and a crash could be heard from inside the cave.

  Ashtoreth winced. She had no idea who was going to win the current battle, but she doubted either outcome was good for her and her people.

  “We’ll go for the textile layer,” Ashtoreth said. “Come on.”

  She took to the air, extending her magical senses to make sure that the rest of them were falling in line behind her. The air above them was filled with denizens of the outer market, though most of them were hurrying toward solid ground elsewhere.

  She was faster than they were, and had to slow to keep pace with them, but a few moments later they landed on the textile layer and hurried into an alley.

  As they did, she glanced up at the mouth of the cave they’d fled, now just a dark hole in the distant wall of the outer market. It wouldn’t matter how far they got, she realized. Flying at full speed, she could cross the inside of the outer market in a few seconds. Neither the dragon nor the fallen angel would take any time whatsoever to follow her; they were just too powerful.

  But distance diminished a creature’s ability to see through illusions. With luck, a little space between them and the dragon would make it harder for him to see through the Eldunari deception that still enchanted them.

  With luck, they had enough time to get out.

  “It’s like a net,” Hunter said, his eyes distant. “Nodes like knots holding this massive interdiction spell together.”

  “Get me to a node,” Ashtoreth said.

  “Knock out one node and the others will fill in instantly,” said Kylie. “We still won’t be able to leave—we’ve got to alter it to disconnect without having any reconnections occur.”

  “Maybe,” Ashtoreth said. “Find me a node.”

  Wordlessly, Hunter snapped his fingers to conjure a tuft of white fire, then sent it at a nearby section of stone outer wall to mark a position. “More than a hundred feet deep.”

  “Can you ghost me in?” Ashtoreth asked Kylie.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Right now?”

  “It’s an interdiction field, right?” Ashtoreth said. “It doesn’t stop us by building a wall, it stops us by…” she gesticulated as she tried to finish her metaphor. “—Shooting our teleports down as they leave, or something. If I burn out a node, then burn out the field right after, we can get through.”

  “Uh. Are you… sure?” Kylie asked.

  She almost winced again. Was she even right? She thought so. But while they’d all accrued a great deal of magical knowledge by eating their enemies, none of them had ever had to rely on that knowledge with Dazel around.

  “We’ll lose a lot of accuracy,” she said. “But yes—Hunter, get us ready. Kylie, let’s—”

  She was interrupted by a plume of white fire that burst from the cave on the other side of the market. A shadow streaked free from the flames, moving fast: within a heartbeat it had crashed into the pillar at the center of the outer market, sending out a cloud of dust.

  Ashtoreth blinked, then squinted as the shadow fell free of the dust cloud a moment later, wriggling. Her enhanced perception meant that she could make out Massemeliact, the dragon, as he fell through the air, trailing blood.

  Fell. His wings had been cut from his back.

  No, she realized as she looked closer. Not cut: torn. Nadir had gouged them out by the root as if she’d been paring a lesion from an impskin. It was a deliberate act of mutilation that spoke not only to her cruelty… but to how soundly she’d outclassed him. How long had that taken her?

  Her thoughts were interrupted a moment later as the dragon caught himself by gripping the sides of the central pillar with his claws, then jerked his head upwards to look directly at her.

  Her breath caught. For a moment they simply stared at each other. Surely she wasn’t Massemeliact’s priority, right now? He had no reason to attack her; he didn’t even know she was the Monarch of Earth.

  Did he?

  There was no flash of light to indicate that he was attacking her, no burst of power and rush of sound. Instead, the air in front of him fluttered faintly, almost imperceptibly even to Ashtoreth’s eyes.

  A moment later, however, a beam of white light as thick around as her little finger appeared in the air between them. Immediately, Frost’s blue-white barrier appeared in front of her, a flare of light to stop the beam from shearing her in half.

  And then it broke.

  The dragon’s beam sheared her in two in an instant, parting her by drawing a clean line through the center of her abdomen that also severed the bottom half of her wings. Distantly she heard Frost cry out in alarm as the beam stopped on a dime once it had left her body, then began to glide toward her head.

  But Dazel had given her four spells, and one of them was a defensive barrier, one that she could activate just by expending a buff that it had given her and that she’d affixed herself with before the trip.

  Except when she tried to expend the buff, she found she couldn’t. Somehow, the beam was keeping her from using the spell that would have saved her.

  Desperate, she conjured a flare of Hellfire to obstruct the beam’s path, and a moment later it fractured into a hundred smaller threads of energy that had been scattered to the world around her… but even then, Ashtoreth shielded her face as she felt the beams slicing deep into her body, engraving her bones after passing through her flesh and blood with ease.

  She conjured her greatsword, interposing it between herself and the fractured beam, then tried to re-attach her lower half and wings.

  Something was wrong, though: whatever the dragon was attacking her with, it didn’t just have incredible [Defense] penetration, but the ability to suppress her regeneration.

  Keep the fire going, Kylie’s voice said in her mind. Pale hands slid up out of the ground next to her, grabbing her by the shoulders. She felt Kylie’s spell flow through her, then was pulled down through the scorched ground beneath her and into darkness.

  Can you get the node yet? Kylie asked.

  Yes.

  Hunter’s ready, she said. Go.

  She reached out with her magical senses, trying to find the node that Hunter had marked earlier as she felt Kylie drag her through the stone. She felt the rock around her shake, and guessed that Massemeliact must have come closer once she’d disappeared… but she couldn’t sense him, and she was sure that his beam should have been able to cut through the rock anyway.

  But nothing happened as they approached the magical node for the outer market’s interdiction spell. Perhaps Nadir had re-engaged him?

  Would Dazel have told her to do that? He wanted her alive, after all.

  Pushing that thought from her mind, Ashtoreth reached out toward the node and began to conjure Hellfire in the middle of the solid rock, pouring as much of her [Bloodfire] into the stone as she could.

  The node’s primary defense was clearly meant to be the hundred feet of stone encasing it, because it frayed and broke almost immediately. Ashtoreth re-absorbed her Hellfire, then emblazoned two [Hellfire Runes] into the stone itself.

  Good! she thought to Kylie.

  She felt herself yanked backward as Kylie pulled her out of the stone. Light struck her eyes, and she got the brief impression of the outer market, still colored only in red and teal, a flash of white light making her squint before she was dragged through a window and pressed against a hard floor.

  Call it, Hunter thought.

  Ashtoreth triggered her runes.

  Now.

  Another flash of light encompassed her, and she felt a white-hot burning across the whole of her body before the air cracked like a whip and they were all sent hurtling away into the cosmos.