Chapter 1673: More Alive Than Ever
Void had not moved from Scar’s back.
The mage was still draped across the assassin with her eyes shut and her chin on Scar’s shoulder, content, and Scar had stopped complaining for a few seconds, which meant she had either accepted her fate or was planning a murder.
The remaining three Scarlet Lilies stood where they were like statues, watching them at a distance.
Bronnya’s arms were folded across her breastplate. Jallen had her spear over one shoulder like a fishing rod. And the looks they sent at Void’s back carried the exhausted disbelief of parents watching their child do something unforgivable in public.
Then Lilith suddenly laughed.
It came out of nowhere, a sharp cracking sound that started as a bark and kept going, rising in pitch until it hit a register her companions had never heard from her in four centuries of shared combat.
Jallen’s eyes slid sideways.
"...All good?"
Lilith wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm, and the grin that split her face was wide and unhinged and entirely too beautiful for the state of the woman wearing it.
"Good?" She cleared her throat, still grinning. "Of course I’m good, Jallen. What else could I possibly be?"
She spread her arms.
"We’re stuck inside some kind of suppressing barrier that nobody fully understands, which has been stunting our growth past level 74, and who knows what else it has been doing. We still don’t know what’s outside there, besides some vague and far too old to be credible tales from long dead ancestors. For all we know the barrier could be suppressing more than just our XP gains. I wanted to break it, I wanted us to be free."
Jallen said nothing, which was her version of agreement.
"So I allied myself with the only woman who promised to take it down for me. Then my friend dies."
The grin didn’t waver.
"My friend dies, and some magic I still don’t understand turns her into a blue-skinned..."
She gestured vaguely toward Scar’s retreating back. "...thing, that is somehow the exact same person, only stronger, sassier, and... more alive?"
Her grin remained, but pain was evident in her eyes as she spoke the next words.
"She’s more alive after dying, Jallen, Bronnya."
Her voice came out broken. "Why is our friend more alive after dying? She never joked this much when she was with us. She never talked this much. She was a quiet, professional killer who did her job, and now she’s calling the man who killed her ’Master’ with genuine affection in her voice and despite complaining, she even lets Void piggyback ride her? If she was the old Scar, she would’ve thrown Void off, stating her efficiency is reduced, or something... How am I supposed to process that?"
Bronnya’s lips pressed together. The big woman was fighting something.
"Then she gets in my way. Over and over again." Lilith’s stride picked up as the words poured. "Every step I take toward the man who I have to kill to fulfill my end of the deal, my dead friend is there, blocking the path, shielding her own killer. And at this point I cannot for the life of me even say with absolute certainty that she has been brainwashed into doing so."
She ran both hands through her white hair, and the mess it left behind suited her better than the composure she’d been wearing for the last several minutes.
"Then the same man bursts out of the ground beneath my sister, uses some kind of supreme domination magic, turns Morgana’s own royal guard against her, and enslaves the Queen of Vraven." Her voice climbed. "And my response to this is to... march behind him? Observe if he at least takes good care of her? While my mage rides my dead assassin like a horse?"
A sound escaped Bronnya that she converted into a cough at the last possible second.
"And the best part." Lilith’s pitch had gone high and thin. "The absolute best part is that I think I’m not even angry at him, but at everything... Even I understand what happened. He’s a powerful man with his own interests, and we got in his way. So he did what any powerful person would do."
She shrugged, and the gesture looked almost peaceful.
"He moved the obstacles out of his way with force."
She stopped the rant, let her chest rise and fall heavily, before she chuckled.
"Jallen, be honest with me. Am I losing my mind?"
Jallen looked at her captain for a long moment, the kind of look that measured structural integrity.
"You lost it about three centuries ago, my friend," she said. "But they say people at our age all have a few things loose, so it’s okay. Also, I heard powerful men like a bit of crazy in their women."
"How relieving. Thanks. They must love Miss Freak herself then, I can’t believe she licked Scar..." The laugh that left Lilith this time was quieter, breathier, and real in a way the first one hadn’t been.
She wiped her eyes again, exhaled through her teeth, and her shoulders unlocked.
"Fine." She shook her head and started walking. "Let’s see how my sister’s slave master operates... Dear Goddess... I can’t believe I just said those words."
...
They only walked a minute or so before the terrain began to rise, and Quinlan led the column toward a particular ridge without explaining why.
His women crested it first.
The change in them was immediate. Ayame’s stride broke. Her blue eyes went wide, and the murmur that left her carried back across the grass to where the Lilies trailed behind.
"Quin... I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this."
Beside her, Seraphiel’s cheeks had gone pink. "Same..." The elf’s lips were parted and her eyes were huge, and she was leaning forward without knowing she was doing it.
Lilith exchanged a glance with Jallen. Without their trusty assassin, the Lilies lacked a proper scout. Void, using her supernatural senses, had been an acceptable substitute, but not if she was busy snoozing on the aforementioned assassin.
Thus, with both scouts occupied, the Lilies were blind, unaware what was on the other side.
They crested the hill, angling wide of Quinlan’s group, and looked down.
"What?" The gasp left Lilith’s lips.
"I..." Jallen was lost for words.
"What the fuck?" Bronnya wasn’t.
The valley below held an army.
Tens of thousands of elven women filled the basin floor in formation, rank after rank stretching to the far tree line.
Armored. Bows at the ready, blades at hips, quivers full. Long ears catching the breeze in synchronized twitches that rippled through the columns like wheat bending under a single gust.
These were not levies.
The women in the front ranks wore the ceremonial armor of matriarchs, with bows and staves in hand, their formations immaculate.
Behind them stood shrine maidens in combat dress, young and fierce, their grips sure.
Army commanders held the flanks in clusters of four and five, their aides at their shoulders. Elders waited among them inside rings of younger women who would not permit them to stand anywhere less protected.
At the center of the front rank, a woman in chalk-dusted ceremonial robes held position with a sword sheathed at her hip.
Bronnya leaned toward Jallen.
"...Isn’t that the Head Shrine Maiden of their faith?"
Jallen’s hand tightened on her spear. The spearwoman had crossed paths with enough Elvardian officials over her career to recognize the office, and what she was looking at was the highest-ranking religious authority in Elvardia at the head of a war host.
"It is."
Around Isveth, a ring of figures turned the spectacle from impressive to impossible.
Lilith counted three matriarchs whose house sigils she recognized from diplomatic briefings, two shrine elders whose ceremonial staves marked them as second only to Isveth herself, and a half-dozen army commanders whose names had crossed her desk over the years.
Every one of them was here. Armed. And looking up at the man on the hill.
Then Isveth’s voice rose from the valley floor, and tens of thousands of voices found it in the same instant, merging into a single harmonic that climbed the hillside like a physical force.
"We congratulate you on establishing your family, Holy Son!"
