Malachar slumped against the double wooden doors leading to their private quarters. The run from the battlefield raging outside had drained what little remained of his strength.
He groaned and pushed himself up, only to notice the doors were ajar, smeared with blood. Not his, or rather, not only his.
“Theresa!” he roared, and ran, ignoring his body’s protests.
The corridor leading to their chambers was chilly and windy, and half-destroyed; the stained-glass window retelling their kingdom’s history lay in pieces on the ground. His boots crushed a piece depicting his coronation; he didn’t notice, nor care.
From afar, he heard a baby cry. His legs worked faster, as if carried by the infant’s screams. After a few more turns, the door to their chambers came into view. He froze when a man in heavy metal armor flew from the door to the outside, taking what was left of the window with him. The viscous, red tendril impaling him withdrew to let him experience his last fall.
Then came another man, held in the air by four crimson tentacles around his limbs. His wife followed soon after, walking out of the room, the blood tendrils linked to her bloodied left arm. Cradled in her other arm was a baby, crying and panicked.
“Why attack us now? What did we do? What do you want?” she hissed at the hanging man. “Talk, and I’ll spare you.”
The man, powerless, gulped and nodded. “We’re… We’re here for the baby. We were to—”
Her crimson eyes shot wide open. “No one is laying a hand on my daughter!” The soldier fell to the ground as a bloodied, five-piece puzzle. Not the hardest ones to solve, usually.
“My love!” Malachar finally moved and hugged his wife, his hand clutching the back of her robe and a strand of her long white hair. “Thank God, you’re both okay.”
She relaxed against him. “Shut up,” she said weakly. “I’m pretty sure God is why we’re in this shit.”
They couldn’t dally, and Theresa pulled back from his embrace. “You’re bleeding, Mally. Can you even stand?”
Malachar scoffed. “I’m fine. You’re also bleeding, by the way.”
“That’s my power… dummy,” she said with an affectionate sigh. That boy she married had truly only grown up on the outside. She gave Liliene, their newborn, to her husband. “You need to boot up Luna. She’s our only hope. I’ll open the way.”
Malachar cradled his daughter carefully in his arms and followed after his wife. Using Theresa’s domain, he reached for the link he shared with his subordinates.
Nex, regroup in the laboratory. He cut the link before an answer could come; Theresa had stopped dead in her tracks.
Facing them on the other end of the corridor were five men in pristine and shiny heavy armor. Armed with swords and heavy shields, they were no mere grunts, but paladins. It was no use turning back; more clinks of metal against stone came from the stairway behind them. They were cornered.
“Theresa, Malachar.” A tired voice greeted them from the staircase. The man it belonged to finally came into view, one reluctant step at a time.
“George…” Theresa answered back. “Came to hunt my daughter yourself?”
The dark-haired man wasn’t particularly tall for a warrior, holding himself with a languid bearing. But his armor was immaculate, blindingly so, and his beard neatly groomed. “Believe me when I say that I take no pleasure in this.”
Guarding him were teenagers wearing weird, loose clothing and no armor at all.
“That’s the demon king?” one of the teens asked.
“Heroes…” Theresa growled. “You must bring her to Luna. Run.”
“But…”
“I love you… Both.”
How Malachar wished he could have stayed, kissed her, hugged her, or made his last stand by her side. But he didn’t even look back; his resolve would break if he did. He charged at the five paladins, secured his daughter, and let his power course through his right arm.
He took the sword to the belly gladly and used this opportunity to grab the helmet of the man impaling him. His power surged, melting the metal around the head as he crushed the helmet. Using the now-dead body of the paladin, he pushed it against the nearest soldier, who choked and threw up at the scent of burned flesh.
Almost! Malachar spun wildly and clawed another paladin, his fingers tearing the man’s armor as if it were made of paper. He had enough space to run now and slipped between the last two men standing in his way.
Rushing down the stairs, his step skipping whole floors at times, he was back on the first floor. By the screams and the stray spells illuminating the night sky like dying suns, he could tell the battle was still underway. But it was only a matter of time.
Two of his men were panting and wounded against the nearby walls. “My King!” They scrambled back to their feet when they saw him. Malachar was bleeding everywhere, his powerful build battered, and the horns curling back around his wild blond mane like a crown were chipped and broken. When the men saw the baby in his arms, they understood. “Nobody will get past us.”
Malachar nodded and kept descending lower into his castle’s foundations until the staircase came to an end. The air was damp and still, but no sounds reached that deep yet. It was as if he had stepped into another, more peaceful dimension.
He had fled shamelessly, abandoning his wife. Theresa couldn’t even say goodbye to her Liliene. But he knew it was the right call. Theresa was much stronger than he was; if someone had a chance to win, it was her.
***
“Why, George?” Theresa asked while a ball of blood gathered at her side. “We kept our word. We didn’t wage war, we didn’t expand, we stayed in our part of the land.”
George sighed. “It wasn’t my call. They decided your daughter is an abomination.”
“Seriously? We’re here to kill a baby?” a girl next to him exclaimed. She wore light clothes with a scandalously short pleated skirt. Theresa wondered for an instant why heroes always had such frivolous clothing, but she had no time to ponder otherworldly fashion. “That’s messed up.”
“We just need to kill the boss, and we can go home, right?” another boy interjected.
Theresa didn’t hesitate; from the orb of blood, a spear shot, streaking to the other end of the corridor, leaving a red, viscous tube suspended in its wake.
“Duck!” George warned before hiding behind his shield.
From the floating tube grew countless spikes. The girl cut them with an exotic, curved blade. They crashed against George’s shield, but the boy wasn’t so lucky, or skilled, apparently. One struck him in the face, and from it, a pulsing, wet sound came through.
“I hope you have heroes to spare, George.”
“Fifty,” he answered after cutting the spike that was pushing blood into the boy.
Theresa grew paler, the amount of blood outside of her body not being the sole culprit. “What the hell did you sacrifice?”
“I have no idea, and I don’t want to know.”
The wounded boy spasmed and groaned, then tried to get up, his movements mechanical and confused.
“Kenji!” The young girl let out a sigh of relief.
George’s blade came down to cut his head off, under the horrified expression of the girl. “That’s why we can’t leave your kind alone.”
Theresa had planned to kill some with her blood and use a few thralls to buy time, but only one thrall was an utterly useless number. She gathered her blood again and created a wall from which tiny tips emerged. She was ready to rain blood on her enemies. Literally.
George closed his eyes and prayed. When he opened them again, his sword glowed with a faint golden shine. He advanced.
He didn’t charge or run, but instead walked, his stride confident in victory. The wall of blood extended periodically into vicious pikes, each striking him at improbable angles, each deflected, cut, or avoided with a single step.
Theresa couldn’t read the hint of an expression or feeling coming from him. His face was dead and tired, even more so than before.
When in range to strike, George pushed the tip of his blade to Theresa’s heart. Or so was the plan; Theresa barely had time to sacrifice parts of her left arm to divert his sword.
“How?” he asked, and jumped back as innumerable bloody spears crashed and pierced where he had been seconds ago.
“I’m a mother,” was all she answered, as if love could somehow beat God.
Tendrils of blood snaked around her mangled arm to support it. Just because he took her arm didn’t mean she was harmless. Or armless. Eh, Mally would have liked this one.
…
More heroes came rushing, more bodies for her to feed from. She exhausted every single drop of her own blood, used up every ounce of strength to buy time for her daughter. The corridor turned into a hellish scene of dried-up bodies and mutilated corpses, with a lone girl in a pleated skirt crying in a corner. At the center of the corridor was a red sphere rapidly losing shape.
George stood a dozen meters away. He looked behind him, at the massacre their fight had left, and frowned.
The sphere broke and fell in puddles on the ground, revealing Theresa, kneeling, her breath a weak rasp.
“Don’t do this, George,” she said, using what was left of her strength to look up at him.
“Begging for your life, now?”
He walked slowly toward her, each step a countdown.
“No. Yours, George. Humans.”
“What are you saying? Is it a ploy? You can’t even stand.”
He stood in front of her and hefted his sword.
“Please, wait for morning. Kill me under the sun.”
Her plea fell on deaf ears, and she saw his sword descend upon her neck.
I’m sorry, Mally, Lili. I pray we won’t meet again, for there would be no love left in me.
***
Malachar pressed a golden medallion on what looked like a normal wall and infused it with his mana. A shimmer revealed a door. Behind the door was another, narrower set of stairs. After a descent that felt eternal, he reached a wide room, filled with notes, research, and what he had always assumed were arcane tools.
At the center of the room stood four massive glass tubes filled with a bubbly green liquid. Inside the first three were naked girls in a fetal position, floating peacefully. They looked identical, save for their hair. White as snow, the green of the first leaves, and finally a fiery red.
Resting in front of the last tube, this one empty, was another girl, her electric blue hair wrapped around her like clothing. All that was left exposed was her face, free of defects and perfectly symmetrical, her skin an almost ivory white. What had been the point of making weapons so beautiful?
“Luna. Boot up.”
The girl opened her eyes and looked at him. Long lashes parted to reveal eyes of the same vivid blue as her hair. Her arms rotated at the elbows once, then in reverse. She looked at the ceiling as if it held some mystical truth known only to her. “You’re losing,” she stated neutrally. “Even I will struggle against that many heroes.”
Malachar waved a hand. “Don’t bother. We lost already. How long can you function?”
Luna blinked. “Less than an hour at full combat capacity. One week if matching a hero’s strength. At minimal output with regular rest cycles... twenty years at best.”
“Hm.” He nodded. “Good enough.” He came closer to the girl and presented Liliene to her. “Take my daughter with you and run. Find a nice place, give her a peaceful life. When she comes of age, give her full rights over your systems. Prioritize managing your battery over combat if possible. You must keep her safe at all costs, for as long as you can.”
Luna accepted the child and looked at the infant curiously. Her eyes blinked in rapid succession, each time focused on a different feature of the baby’s face. And, after a moment of silence, she poked one of the baby’s cheeks with her finger.
“She looks like her mother, right?” Malachar asked with a boyish smile.
“Not really.” Luna then turned to look at the glass tubes. “What about my sisters?”
Malachar winced, the guilt so heavy on his gaze that he couldn’t lift it from the ground. “I’ll seal the room. That’s the best I can do. I swear they won’t find them.”
“Just like you swore to fix them? I won’t abandon them to the Church,” she said, putting her hand against the nearest glass tube and looking at the girl inside. “Don’t make me.”
“That’s an order, Luna.” His voice held more authority than a King’s. It was a father’s.
Her hand against the tube clenched, as if she would be able to stay with her sisters if she held tightly enough. But the command won; Luna turned on her heel and stood above the sewer’s entrance. Malachar stopped her. “Wait!” Leaning on whatever furniture was nearby, he limped towards them and pulled on the medallion around his neck, breaking the chain. He secured the bloodied, golden circle inside the cloth wrapped around his daughter. “Farewell, Lili.” The baby grabbed his index finger.
“Farewell, Malachar,” Luna said. “I hate you.” She then jumped down into the sewers.
Malachar dragged his battered body against the nearest wall and slid down. Nothing happened save for his breath gradually slowing down. But suddenly, a dome of darkness materialized in front of him. Hope filled his heart.
“Theres—”
The dome faded to reveal a petite, kneeling girl holding a severed hand, still in its gauntlet. She threw it away with a disgusted frown and looked at him. “My King!” She was all black. Black hair in a bob cut, black armor, black horns, one apparently freshly cut. She could have passed for a gargoyle if she hadn’t looked so juvenile.
“Nex.”
“My King, you’re…” When Nex took in his state, she understood. “What about the Queen? The Princess? Where’s the Princess?”
“Nex. What was your oath?”
“To be the Princess’ blade and shadow,” she answered immediately, her head low.
“She’s with Luna. I ordered her to flee,” he said, pointing to the sewers’ entrance with a movement of his chin. “Seal this place and go after them.” Malachar focused on the link with his subordinates once more. “To everyone, secure the Eastern Plai—”
He felt it. Or rather, he stopped feeling it. His wife’s embrace over the castle, her domain, was gone. “Theresa…”
But the sobbing came from Nex. “My Queen…” Theresa had been like a mother to her, and Nex had hoped to become one of her maidens, to be a big sister to the Princess in turn.
“Go, Nex.” Malachar smiled. “Please, be good to her. Luna is… Well, Luna. She’ll need someone like you by her side.”
She nodded, once, twice, and a few more times. “I will. She’ll never be left wanting, I promise.” Nex took a knee and lowered her head once more. “Farewell, My King.” She pressed a switch at the base of the stairs, then turned one last time when standing above the sewer’s entrance. “When you see her again, tell Theresa I love her.” She jumped and disappeared.
Selfishly, Malachar would have enjoyed hearing someone say that they loved him. He chuckled, coughed, and closed his eyes. Sorry, Luna. I won’t be able to keep my promise.