Free Web NovelRaven watched from a distance.
She didn't move toward them. Didn't speak. Just stood with her arms at her sides and watched Victoria take Enzo's hand, the two of them standing together on the wall like it was the most natural thing in the world.
She sighed.
It was obvious that she liked him. Most people around them had seen it at some point or another, whether they said anything or not. The way she tracked him in a room. The way her attention moved before she told it to.
But Enzo was always oblivious.
To hold another woman's hand in front of her was, to put it simply, distasteful.
She said nothing.
Didn't make a face. Didn't shift her weight or look away with any drama. She simply stood there and made a quiet decision somewhere inside herself, the kind that doesn't need to be spoken out loud to be real.
She would be with Enzo before Lady Victoria.
That was all.
The thought settled and she let it sit.
Then a presence arrived beside her.
A woman took a seat nearby without announcement, moving into the space with the ease of someone who had long since stopped needing permission to be anywhere. She looked at Raven directly.
"You're not human, right?"
Her eyes were steady. Not suspicious. Just reading.
"Me? No, I'm not."
Raven answered quickly, the words coming out slightly sharp, the edge of someone being careful without meaning to show that they're being careful.
"Hmm."
Gaia considered that for a moment. Then tilted her head slightly.
"I must be mistaken then."
She prepared to stand, the motion beginning, small and unhurried.
Then she paused.
Raven's voice had come out before she could stop it.
"Why do you ask?"
A trace of something moved through Raven's gaze. Cold and thin. The kind of cold that comes from depth rather than hostility. Something old sitting behind a young face.
Gaia saw it.
Her eyes flashed.
(I understand.)
She passed the thought directly, no words, just a clean mental note pressed across the short distance between them, and then she stood and left without looking back.
Raven stayed where she was.
Neither of them said anything else.
Several thousand years later, that moment would be the reason all of it happened.
.
.
.
Dawn came quickly.
Everyone moved back into position without being told, the rhythm of the campaign having ground itself into muscle memory over the past days. The horde at the perimeter was cleared in sections, squad by squad, ion cannons cycling through their reload intervals while the divine-led units held the line between bursts.
Then the first federation ship landed back on the planet.
Supplies mostly. Personnel. The kind of material that signals a longer operation being acknowledged from above.
And here, in the space between unloading crates and reorganizing squads, the first real interaction between humans and the Myriad races began. Tentative. Practical. Driven by necessity more than choice.
Nobody had time to make it ceremonial.
Nobody did anyway.
.
.
.
Zinggg!!
Something broke through orbit.
The sound arrived before the visual, a sharp tearing quality that cut through the ambient noise of the battlefield and pulled every head upward without asking permission.
A ship appeared in the mountains far away, dropping fast, landing hard in a location that put stone and elevation between it and the castle walls.
From inside, ten Daemons stepped out.
They moved in formation without a word between them and bowed, all of them, in the direction of a speck of dust that was expanding in the air above the mountain.
Slowly at first.
Then faster.
"Good. You came."
A Daemon with a crown of fire burning across his head stood apart from the group and looked at his reinforcements with a satisfaction he didn't bother to contain.
He turned toward the stronghold in the distance.
The castle. The walls. The people on them. freёwebnovel.com
He smiled.
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On the wall Victoria's expression changed.
The warmth that had been sitting on her face for the past stretch of hours was gone, replaced by something harder and more familiar. Her eyes tracked the mountain. She frowned and unsheathed her sword in one motion, the blade catching the early light.
Enzo saw it.
He summoned the armor without thinking, the set taken from killing the Gore Beast assembling around him in pieces, each one clicking into place with the sound of something settling into purpose. His other hand found the void cutters.
Around them everyone mirrored the motion.
No order given. No signal called out. Just the automatic response of people who had been watching the same people long enough to know what those movements meant.
Armor up. Weapons out.
Something is coming.
Then the ship's hold opened fully.
Wooooooo
The sound built before the shapes became clear, a deep resonant pressure that rolled outward from the mountain and across the entire field.
Then the swarm came out.
Flying beasts poured from the ship in a torrent, body after body after body, filling the sky above the mountain and spreading outward. The sun didn't disappear. It was blocked. The light on the ground changed in the way light changes when something vast moves between it and the source, a slow dimming that covered the entire field.
A scene of impending doom.
That was the only way to describe what was happening above them.
Enzo stood on the wall and watched it spread and something moved through his mind. Fast. A series of images he had seen before, half processed, filed away.
'Hold for seven days.'
He turned it over.
'Doesn't that mean this place will fall?'
His mind moved through the images quickly. Varo King World in the future. The ruin of it. The specific shape of the destruction he had seen, not fresh damage but something settled and permanent, the kind that had been there long enough to grow quiet.
Was that from this battle?
Had it always been this battle?
Did Victoria survive?
The question landed differently than the others. Heavier. He turned it over once and felt it resist being turned.
He looked at her.
She was already moving.
"Victoria!!"
He got her name out and nothing else.
She flew headfirst off the wall toward the swarm of flying beasts, her sword up, her red god battle armor catching the blocked light, heading directly for the Daemons at full speed without slowing and without looking back.
The word died in the air behind her.
Enzo stood at the wall's edge for one second watching her go, the void cutters in his hand, the armor settled across him, the sky above the field still filling with shapes that showed no sign of stopping.
One second.
Then he moved.
