Chapter 1083: 1082: Is That...
The beast hung above the steaming sea, and the battle around it seemed to lose its nerve.
Its wings beat once.
Hot wind rolled across the water and flattened the waves, and the mist that had hidden the siren tore apart in long grey shreds.
Where the beast’s shadow fell, the sea hissed. Bubbles rose from below, then broke into steam, until a wide circle of water beneath it was boiling. Dead fish floated up by the hundreds, and they were all cooked white.
The tide lost its hunger at once. Eels that had been throwing themselves at The Wall twisted and dove. A house-sized crab scuttled backward over its own kind, claws raised in front of its face like a shield.
On the eastern walls, a soldier tried to lift his spear and found that his arms would not obey him. Along the terraces, the crystal pillars flickered as if a draught had passed over candles.
Even the bells faltered. One by one, the ringers in the towers stopped pulling.
Simon looked at the creature and thought of the dead dragon egg.
When he had devoured the remnant essence inside that dead true dragon egg, he had seen a dragon. Only a glimpse, only a memory sealed in a shell, and yet it had been enough to stay with him. That dragon had not needed to roar for the world to take notice of it. Its existence had carried authority, as though the sky above it understood who it belonged to.
This beast was imposing, but it was not that.
The longer Simon watched, the more the differences showed.
Its body was too long first of all. It was more serpentine than dragon, and it narrowed toward a tail that was still half in the water.
What he had taken for wings were fins… vast webbed membranes stretched between long, bony spines, the kind of fins a sea creature would have if it had learned to leave the sea.
There were no forelegs worth the name of a dragon, only short, clawed limbs tucked against its chest. Its black scales were cracked all over, with fire leaking through like a crust that had never finished cooling.
And its eyes.
The dragon in his memory had looked at the world and understood it. These white-hot eyes held nothing but hunger and heat.
’This is definitely not a dragon,’ Simon thought. ’Maybe a Leviathan?’
Simon recalled some of the mythological monsters he had read of back on Earth. This creature fit the descriptions of a Leviathan more than that of dragon.
Out over the eastern curve, Rasken had torn himself free of the kraken’s arms and stopped dead in the air. Black blood dripped from his knuckles. He stared at the newcomer with his mouth open.
"What in all the hells is that?"
Nobody answered him.
Torvek had been halfway through another charge at the siren but he quickly pulled up so hard that the beasts around him crashed into the sea.
His hand went to his chest, where the old injury from the siren’s song was still bleeding. For the first time since Simon had met him, the big Daemon looked unsure of where to go.
Above the harbor, Zarven’s coins slowed down.
The glittering swarm drifted around him without purpose while he held the golden scales in one hand. Simon saw the scales tremble. The First Merchant did not look at the serpent pinned beneath his weight. He looked at the burning creature, and his free hand closed over the square black ring.
He could see the disbelief and uncertainty written over the face of the Lord of the Daegrins.
Seraya’s silver crescents stopped orbiting her and hung in place. Her lips parted. Then she started shouting, pulling her squad back toward The Wall, and Simon heard her voice crack on the last order.
Beside her, the Garrun raised his heavy blade in front of his body and his expression was completely solemn as he stared at the beast in the sky.
The beast’s throat began to glow.
The light started deep in its chest and climbed, turning its neck translucent orange, until Simon could see the fire moving inside it like liquid in a glass. It lowered its head and turned toward The Wall.
Toward the place where Seraya’s squad was still scrambling through the gap.
’Damn it.’
Simon was gone before he had finished the thought.
He reappeared above the sea between The Wall and the beast, so close to the boiling water that steam soaked his robe at once. Behind him, he heard someone gasp his name but he didn’t turn.
He swept his hand upward.
The sea answered.
A wall of water tore itself free of the surface, hundreds of meters wide, curving in front of The Wall like a raised palm.
Simon poured his ice affinity into it, and the water turned white from the bottom up, crackling and groaning as it froze.
Beasts caught in the rising sea froze with it, locked inside the ice with their jaws still open. Along the edges where Daegrin soldiers had been fighting, Simon pulled the frost back, leaving gaps of open water around every ally he could sense.
The beast breathed.
A torrent of fire crossed the sea. It wasn’t red or orange but nearly white at its heart, and the air around it rippled so badly that the far horizon bent. It struck Simon’s wall.
The ice screamed.
Steam exploded outward in a wave that knocked flying soldiers out of the sky. The front of the wall melted in an instant, and cracks raced across the rest.
Simon felt the heat through it, through his robe and his skin, all the way down to the Chaos Wraps around his arms. He shoved more energy forward, thickening the ice faster than the fire could eat it, but the fire kept coming. He could feel the ice losing.
Then a second presence appeared at his side.
Simon caught a glimpse of dark hair and a raised hand.
A shield bloomed from her palm. It was made of countless interlocking hexagons, dark green and glowing faintly, like the pattern on an ancient shell.
It spread across the front of his failing ice and took the fire full on.
From the same arm, a dark mark coiling around her wrist peeled away from her skin and grew into a spectral serpent that was thick as a ship’s mast. It wrapped itself around the stream of flame and squeezed, choking it narrower.
The fire split against the shell. Two rivers of flame poured past them on either side and plunged into the sea, sending up columns of steam taller than the harbor towers.
Simon held the ice. She held the shield.
The breath faltered, thinned, and finally died.
In the sudden quiet, Simon turned and got his first proper look at her.
She was tall, almost his height, wrapped in close-fitting armor of black plates that overlapped like scales. Her long hair was black with a deep green sheen where the firelight touched it.
More of that hexagonal shell pattern traced her collarbones and the backs of her hands, darker than her pale skin, as though it had grown there rather than been drawn. Her eyes were jade green, with narrow slit pupils, and the spectral serpent was already shrinking back into a mark that curled up her forearm and disappeared beneath her armor.
As he looked at her, he realized that she was a Supreme Demon King.
Simon could feel it now that she was standing beside him, and he could feel something else too from her stance and actions… she was on their side.
She was watching him just as closely.
The Daemoness kept her face composed, but she had arrived expecting to find a Demon King holding back the fire. What she had found instead was a Greater Demon, and a wall of ice that had lasted far longer than it had any right to. She glanced at his wrapped hands, then at his face, and filed the question away.
She inclined her head to him.
"Stand back," she said. Her voice was low and even. "I’ll handle this."
She didn’t wait for an answer.
The Daemoness shot forward across the boiling sea. The beast turned its head toward her and roared, and the sound rolled over the water like a falling cliff.
She struck it.
BOOOOOOM!
The shockwave tore the remains of Simon’s ice wall apart and flattened the sea in a ring around the two of them. The beast’s head snapped sideways, its long body jerking in the air. Steam and spray burst outward, and for an instant the entire eastern sky shook.
Simon hovered over the open water, his breath still ragged, and watched her hit it again.
’Is that the fourth protector?’