"Roar!!"

The sound rolled out across the canopy and didn’t finish before Ethan and Hela were already moving, two streaks of white light cutting between the trees in a straight line, branches blurring past on both sides.

Ethan had run the options the moment the pit disappeared behind them.

The stronghold was gone as a destination. Walking back through those gates meant walking into whatever Jacob’s family had already set in motion, and that was before accounting for Vincent, who had come into the forest specifically to find him. Whatever version of safe the brothel had represented three days ago no longer existed.

The forest was what remained.

He kept pace with Hela without speaking, his eyes reading the terrain ahead, mapping the gaps between trees, watching for anything that would force a change in direction.

Behind them, Eric had cleared the pit.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Eric had one thing in his mind.

Kill.

The word sat there without anything else around it. Clean. Total. The kind of focus that arrived when everything else had been stripped away and only one outcome was acceptable.

He moved through the air above the canopy with his eyes locked onto the two white streaks below him, tracking their path through the forest without blinking. He had lost blood. His chest was compromised on the left side in a way that was going to need attention. His summon had taken damage he hadn’t fully assessed yet.

None of it registered as a reason to stop.

The revelation that he had been seen working alongside a Demi-human was enough to bury him and his family regardless of their standing. That was not sentiment. That was the structure of the kingdom, the way it had always worked, the line that every family with any foothold in power knew better than to cross. It didn’t matter how prominent the first elder’s name was. It didn’t matter what the clan leader’s son was supposed to represent to the stronghold’s future.

None of that survived contact with what Vincent had just witnessed.

And standing at the center of all of it, the person whose presence in that pit had started the chain, was the same person now running through the trees below him.

He had dared raise a hand against him. He had dared push that fight to the edge it reached.

He would not die cleanly for it.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

While the chase cut through the forest below, the sky above the stronghold walls carried its own weight.

Three figures stood at altitude, the wind moving across them without pulling their attention from each other. Below, the walls of the Algar stronghold stretched across the earth, torchlight still burning along the parapets despite the morning light that had already begun to spread across the horizon.

And beyond the dark forest, visible now even from the walls, the horde.

It moved steadily. Not fast. It didn’t need to be fast. Its scale made speed beside the point.

One of the three figures, a slightly aged man with white hair, sat atop a salamander with steel-dark scales. His eyes moved between the other two with the expression of someone delivering news they had already exhausted themselves trying to prevent.

"I don’t know why you’ve called me." The High Regent’s voice came out level, though the frustration behind it was present if you knew where to look. "I told you all this months ago."

She had.

Twenty years in the White Tower had given her a particular ability to read a threat before it fully formed, and she had read this one clearly. She had come to the stronghold, laid out what was coming, explained what the numbers meant and what the timeline looked like. She had done everything short of moving the walls herself.

They had pointed to their record. Their history of holding the line. The confidence of people who had never been wrong before and had decided that was the same thing as never being wrong.

"Sister Arian." One of the two elders across from her spoke, and the shamelessness and grief in his eyes existed simultaneously without canceling each other out. "This is not the time for past grudges. You are a tier 5 summoner, the same as our clan leader, and though he is not here now you have a responsibility to help us."

Arian.

High Regent of the White Tower. Twenty years of missions into beast territory, against Demi-human forces, against horde formations that lesser summoners had looked at and turned back from. And her fifth summon, the one that sat at the top of everything she had built across those years, was an S-ranked White Dragon.

In the entire kingdom, the number of people who held an S-ranked summon could be counted on one hand without using all the fingers.

The king held one. The leader of the White Tower held one. Arian held one.

The remaining two were kept deliberately undisclosed by the kingdom, for reasons the kingdom had never explained and no one had successfully pressured out of them.

"S-rank or not," Arian said, her gaze moving past the elder to the dark line at the forest’s edge where the horde was visible now without needing to look hard, "this is unwinnable. You have doomed this stronghold and everyone in it."

She said it without raising her voice.

Then her eyes lit.

White, sudden, the glow filling her irises completely in the space of a breath. She crossed the distance between her position and the horde in an instant, appearing above the leading mass of it with both hands raised, and the rock formed in the air above her palms in layers, pulling material from the surrounding atmosphere and compressing it as it accumulated.

At tier 8, a summoner gained the capacity to replicate their summon’s abilities at ten percent of the summon’s output. Each tier beyond that added five percent to the ceiling. The math meant that no summoner would ever fully close the gap between themselves and what they had bound.

An S-ranked summon changed the rate of that increase.

Ten percent compounding differently, moving toward a ceiling that sat much further out than anything a standard ranked summon could offer. Given enough time and enough tiers, the distance between summoner and summon became something closer to parity than imitation.

"Fire Giant."

The words came out of her with a different quality behind them. Something in her eyes shifted color, the white edging toward red at the center, and the rock above her hands ignited.

It went downward at a speed that didn’t allow for watching it travel.

—boom

The impact sent a column of light straight up into the sky, visible from the walls, visible from the forest, the sound of it arriving a half second after the flash and rolling outward through the air in a wave that pressed against everything it reached.

For a brief moment the hoard stopped.

But then it started moving as if nothing has happened.