Page 142 of Renegade Kingdom
Until… One thousand, five hundred and thirty-seven.
The last chain severed with a sound like the world exhaling.
They fell.
All of them. At once. Every single Endless, freed in the span of seconds, collapsing where they stood as the strings holding them upright were cut. The battlefield lurched. The synchronized formations dissolved into chaos as bodies hit the ground, not dead but overwhelmed. Freed minds flooding back into freed bodies, the sudden return of sensation and autonomy after months or years of imprisonment hitting them with the force of a physical blow.
They screamed. They wept. They curled in on themselves and pressed their hands to their heads, making sounds that weren’t words but were unmistakably human. The sounds of people remembering who they were and what had been done to them.
I opened my eyes.
The world swam. My legs buckled and I caught myself on my knees, hands braced against the ground, the shadow magicpulling back into my body like a tide receding. Everything hurt. A deep, bone-level exhaustion that went beyond physical fatigue into something magical, as if I’d poured out a part of myself that I might not get back.
The wolf whimpered and pressed close, its warmth a counterpoint to the cold void left by the shadows’ exertion.All I could do was breathe. In. Out. In.
Around me, the battle had changed.
The freed Endless weren’t fighting. They couldn’t. They were down, scattered across the field like fallen leaves, and our fighters were doing exactly what Alyssa had planned. Redirecting. Instead of fighting the Endless, they were protecting them. Pulling them out of the line of fire. Dragging them behind Maddox’s burning thorn wall. Carrying them to the healers. Ezra’s people moved with an urgency that came from recognition. They knew what those people were going through because they’d been through it themselves.
The dark creatures didn’t stop. They didn’t care about the Endless one way or another. But without the human shields, without the formations of controlled bodies that had forced our fighters to hold back, the creatures were exposed. Ryder’s storms hammered them. Maddox’s fire found them. The guardians tore through them with renewed ferocity. Dean’s ice sealed off retreat routes, funnelling the creatures into kill zones that Rhidian’s infantry exploited with brutal efficiency.
The battle had been a chess match until now. Both sides constrained, both sides holding back. The Endless had been Arik’s queen on the board, the piece that limited every move we could make.
I’d just taken it off the board.
And Arik felt it.
I couldn’t see him from where I knelt, but I felt it through the shadows that still lingered at the edges of the battlefield.The moment the last chain severed, something in Arik’s magical signature had changed. Contracted. The vast, confident web of power that had sustained all those tethers was suddenly empty. All that energy, all that control, snapped back to its source like a rubber band stretched past its limit.
For a moment, the briefest moment, Arik’s attention turned entirely inward.
Dealing with the backlash.
And in that moment of distraction, our forces surged.
Rhidian’s infantry charged the northern line. The guardians hit the flanks. Ryder’s storms concentrated into a single, devastating assault on the cluster of dark creatures protecting Arik’s position. Maddox’s fire found the gaps that Ryder’s wind created and poured through them.
The tide turned. Not gradually. Not incrementally. It turned the way a wave turns when it reaches the shore. Completely. Irreversibly.
I stayed on my knees. The wolf pressed against my consciousness, worried, and I rested my hand against the ground and let the shadows settle.
But the thing with monster, was that once they were cornered, they lashed out in terrible ways. When they had nothing left to lose, what might have once felt like a risk, no longer mattered.
And we’d just severed Arik from over a thousand chains that had taken power to maintain, and returned it all back to him.
The battle wasn’t over.
This was just the beginning of what was to come.
Chapter Forty-Three
Tank
Ididn’t need Alyssa to tell me it was time, that was pretty obvious from the chaos that erupted across the battlefield as every Endless soldier dropped in a wave of anguish. It was heartbreaking to watch, but there was no time to mourn with these people who still needed our help.
Even so, I felt Alyssa reach for us all through the bond. A pulse of certainty that cut through the chaos like a blade through water. The Endless were freed. Damon was on his knees, spent but alive, the shadows settling around him like exhausted hounds. Arik’s dark creatures were still fighting but there was a desperation about it now. That last flailing snarl of a cornered animal knowing it was outmatched. But it wasn’t over yet.
Arik was cornered at the northern edge of the field. His forces stripped. His shields gone. But all that power had returned to him and joined with whatever he’d been pulling from the realm. He was still dangerous. More dangerous than anything I had ever faced. A cornered god-child with nothing left to lose.
