Chapter 680: Arrival
Almond laid them out beside the originals and examined both sets for a long time. Even he, who had watched them being made, had to check twice to tell which was which.
"They are ready," Vorth said. She looked exhausted and satisfied in equal measure. "If anyone tests one of these by trying to develop it, they will eventually find out it is hollow. But a scan will never catch it. Not even a careful one."
"A scan is all anyone will run," Almond said. "Nobody develops a blueprint they think is already in their possession."
He gathered the five forgeries.
The last step was the simplest and the most exposed. He had to return each forgery to the depth it came from, putting it in the place of the genuine one he had taken. For the Oblivion blueprint, there was no original chamber to return to, since the island and its development facility were rubble, so that forgery would simply be retired. For the other four, the swap had already been done on the dives, when the team had sealed a duplicate into each chamber before leaving with the original.
That had been the clever part of the plan. The forgeries had been left behind at the time of each dive, built from the signatures Ainen captured on site. The team had not needed to return.
So there was nothing left to put back.
The originals were already in the vault. The forgeries were already in the chambers. The development of the genuine blueprints was already underway in the lab. The four depths each held a perfect fake that would read as genuine to anyone who checked, exactly as Jaskrit had just discovered.
The operation was complete.
Almond stood in the lab and looked at the five genuine blueprints in his vault, and the development consoles running the designs into production, and the exhausted but triumphant faces of Vorth’s team, and he allowed himself a slow breath.
"It is done," he said.
Lily came to stand beside him. "All five."
"All five."
"Nobody knows."
"Nobody knows."
She smiled. "Then let us go back to the Mountain. We have an event to win."
Almond nodded.
He raised his hand a final time.
"Master Key. Absolute Override."
The expedition team vanished from the lab beneath the Suryax island and reappeared at the rear of the Suryax-Regalon formation at the base of the Star Mayhem Mountain, where the army had held the line without them for days, and where the leaderboard above the peak still showed them in last place.
That was about to change.
Rudra turned as they appeared. He took in Almond, Lily, Ainen, and the rest of the team, all of them returned, all of them whole, and he understood from their faces alone that the operation had succeeded.
"Welcome back," he said.
Almond looked up at the leaderboard, at the fourth-place ranking that had hidden everything they had done.
"Catch me up," he said. "And then let us stop holding back."
---
The fourth wave came on schedule.
It poured over the inland horizon the way the others had, a tide of Doom infantry and monsters and siege creatures and the Tier-98 class that had appeared in wave three. The sensor count climbed past seven hundred thousand. Around the Mountain, the four alliances braced.
Almond walked to the front of the Suryax-Regalon line.
He did not announce anything. He simply stepped past the forward ranks, past the soldiers who had held this arc without him for days, and stopped at the edge of the formation where the Doom Army was about to hit. The first wave of dark infantry surged toward him.
Then he stopped holding back.
The Grimblades came first.
They did not appear one at a time. They appeared all at once, dozens of them, then hundreds, tearing out of his storage in a torrent that filled the air above the southeastern arc. Blades of every shape and size, each one carrying its own properties, each one drawn from objects Almond had transformed and refined over months of work. They spread out across the sky in a slow, rotating cloud, and the light from the Mountain caught their edges and scattered into a thousand cold reflections.
The Doom Army hit the arc.
The Grimblades answered.
They did not fall like rain. They moved with intent, each one selecting a target, each one striking with the layered effects Almond had built into them. Grim Severam spread across the entire front in a wide field, and every Doom creature that entered it lost its connection to the army’s coordination, lost its regeneration, lost the structural integrity that held it together. The Grimblades cut through the severed creatures in clean, efficient arcs, and the front rank of the Doom Army came apart in the space of a few seconds.
Behind Almond, the seven Spirit Lords rose into the air.
They had been with him the entire time, restrained, holding their smaller forms, contributing only what was needed. Now they expanded.
Each Spirit Lord opened its domain.
The seven domains spread outward from behind Almond and overlapped across the southeastern arc, layering into one another until the entire front was covered. The air inside the domains changed. Gravity shifted. Energy flows bent toward the Spirit Lords’ control. The Doom Army, which had been advancing in a coordinated tide, found the ground beneath it turning hostile, found its momentum betrayed, found every law it had been relying on quietly rewritten against it.
And Almond’s presence spread with the domains.
It rolled outward across the entire Mountain. It was not an attack. It was simply the weight of a power that had spent days hidden and was no longer hiding. The soldiers of Suryax-Regalon felt it at their backs and stood straighter. The Doom Army felt it ahead of them and faltered. And across the Mountain, on every other arc, every other alliance felt it too.
In the west, Tessovaen Ire of Thalmyr-Ronethis turned his head sharply toward the southeastern arc.
In the northwest, Joaka Nel Fein paused mid-strike, her radiant wings flaring.
And in the east, Jaskrit Kezinos, who had returned to the Mountain with a feeling he could not prove and an enemy he could not pin down, went very still.
The presence was unmistakable. He had felt it before, at the depth chamber two months ago, when Almond had escaped four powers at once with a deck no one could read. He had been searching for that presence for two days. He had swept the entire mainland for it. He had descended into the depths for it. He had stared at a fortified island knowing it might be inside, unable to do anything about it.
And now it was here.
It had been somewhere else this entire time, and now, without warning, it had simply appeared at the base of the Mountain, on the southeastern arc, exactly where the Suryax-Regalon line had been holding last place while three of its strongest members were missing.
Jaskrit understood, all at once, that whatever the three of them had been doing, it was finished. And they had come back to win.
"Milord?" the Kezryx commander asked, watching his face.
Jaskrit did not answer immediately. He watched the torrent of Grimblades tear through the Doom Army on the far arc, watched the seven overlapping domains bend the battlefield, watched the presence of a power that had been hiding for days fill the entire Mountain.
"They are back," he said quietly. "All of them."
He looked at the leaderboard, at the fourth-place ranking that had not moved in days, and he knew it would not stay there much longer.
"Hold our line," he said. "And watch them. Watch everything they do. Whatever they have been building, we are about to see it."
On the southeastern arc, Almond stood at the center of his torrent of blades, the seven Spirit Lords expanding behind him, his presence covering the Mountain, and the Doom Army breaking against him.
Beside him, Lily’s Dreadlings began to pour onto the field, and the Dreadgates she had put here before, spewed out their new creations as more Dreadlings popped up all over.
Ainen’s flames rose in full, all three layers and more, creating a domain of an exotic world filled with myriad of flames.
Rudra cracked his knuckles as he grinned. "Time to get to our rightful rank."
The Suryax-Regalon sphere, whole at last, stopped holding back.
