Lee staggered back, his white shirt turned black from the wound on his chest. He used the crystal-lined tunnel wall to keep upright as lightning magic continued to flicker over him. I looked down at the blade, which was considerably larger than I’d been trying to form, and attempted to shut it off. Even this far underground, and this close to so many crystals, the particles in the air made my magic even more unpredictable and dangerous.
I concentrated on the magic until it finally vanished, but as the last remnants of it extinguished, a small spark leapt uncontrolled from my hand to a nearby crystal, causing it to explode. I wrapped myself in dense air as the blast tore through the tunnel, flinging me down it like a rag doll. Every blast ignited more crystals, until I was a hundred feet from the original blast. I was covered in dust and dirt and remained on my hands and knees in the center of another cavern as I tried to shut off my magical shield of air before I lost control of it.
Thankfully I remembered that the destruction of the crystals meant that the particles in the air were no longer volatile, and shutting it off became easier after the noise of the explosions stopped ringing in my ears. I wiped my face, finding it covered in blood, and tried to get back to my feet, but my ribs felt as if they were on fire. My wrist was broken, but even with the agony I was in, there was no time to use my magic to heal. I forced myself back to my feet just in time for Lee to barrel into me, smashing me against the nearest wall.
Thick black blood oozed from the dozens of cuts across his face. “It’s not that easy,” he snarled. “You don’t get to win.”
“There’s no win or lose, Lee,” I told him, and drove another blade of lightning into his chest. I removed the magic and watched him slump to the ground, blood pouring from the new wound.
“Your body can’t keep up with all the healing,” I said. The shadows around Lee moved up over him as he scrambled to try and escape. They wrapped themselves around his limbs and began to drag him into the shadow as Lee screamed in defiance, trying to change into a mist form, but the shadows blocked his escape, forming a dense shield around his body as he vanished down into the shadow realm with a final, muffled scream.
A few moments later I felt a surge of power the likes of which I’d never received from a single person, healing my injuries in an instant. I switched off my magic and looked down the nearby tunnel. I just hoped I could get back aboveground before whatever Abaddon and her people had planned for Shadow Falls could come to fruition.
After running down several tunnels—and spending what felt like hours of desperately wasted time—I found explosives that had been drilled into a portion of the tunnel wall. With no detonators in sight, I stepped back as far as I could and threw a tiny ball of flame at the crystal closest to the explosives. A large part of the wall vanished in a plume of smoke and dust, igniting several other crystals.
Worried that the tunnel would cave in, I wrapped myself in a shield of air and sprinted toward the hole in the tunnel wall, throwing myself through it just before another explosion sounded from inside the tunnel. Thankfully the explosions of the crystals allowed me to control my magic with relative ease.
I found myself in a corridor. But instead of the jagged stone and natural appearance of the underground tunnels, this new corridor had smooth walls. I followed it around a corner and ignored several doors until I came to some stairs, which I quickly ascended, and then I opened the door at the top.
I exited the stairs and found myself in a room with an open door in front of me, with the sights and sounds of fighting just beyond it.
I sprinted through the open door and collided with a blood elf. I quickly disarmed it, driving its own sword into its skull. I parried the blow from a second blood elf, thrusting the blade up through his throat, then pushed the body aside and killed a third and fourth, who thought they had a shot at killing me.
Dozens of blood elves lay on the floor amongst just as many of Galahad’s guards. “Where am I?” I shouted to a nearby guard as the fighting in the courtyard ended. He held his arm as blood flowed out of his armor and onto the floor.
“The realm gate,” he told me as a medic helped him out of his armor to tend to his wound. “The one you helped discover.”
“You know who I am?”
“Nate Garrett, yes, I know you. You saved my life when we had the troubles here a few years ago.”
“What’s happened in the two hours since I went under the palace? I’ve been mostly trying to find a way out of the tunnels.”
“The blood elves swarmed out of the mountain.” He winced as the medic went to work.
The alchemist’s own ability would heal him, but that could take hours, and frankly, when you’re wounded in battle, you take all the help you can get.
“Thousands of them,” the medic said. “They flooded out of the mountain like a wave. They destroyed a portion of the outer rim of the city until the guard got it under control and managed to push the majority of them over to the plains.”
“Which means you guys were in the middle of a battlefield,” I said.
“That about sums it up. A hundred guards were here. Now we number sixty. They hit us like a hammer. And that woman with them . . . she tore through us.”
“A necromancer?” I asked.
The medic nodded.
“Abaddon. If you see her again, avoid her.”
“She ran off toward the forest.”
“Thanks for the info,” I said. “Any chance you have a horse I can borrow?”
The guard pointed to a stable just outside the ruined portion of the fort wall. Large boulders were visible in the grassland outside of the fort, the work of alchemists. If the blood elves thought this would be an easy fight—even after an ambush—they were about to learn otherwise.
“Best wishes to you,” the medic said. “There’s a chestnut mare. She’s the fastest, not easily spooked, either.”
“Yeah, you, too.” I ran out of the fort, leaving the surviving guards to their rebuilding and defense of the second realm gate. The stables weren’t large, with only a dozen horses in residence, and I picked the chestnut mare as the medic suggested. He’d been right, too. She ignored the bodies that littered the ground and the sounds of battle that hung in the air as we raced back toward the city of Solomon.
CHAPTER 29
Nate Garrett
The flames could be seen well before I reached the outskirts of the town, with thick, black smoke billowing up into the sky at an alarming rate. The smell of acrid smoke and death mingled together, creating something that I had to force myself to ignore. More dead lay where they’d fallen, and I continued past them without stopping to check. There was nothing I could do except avenge them.
As I got closer to the palace, the fighting intensified, with thousands of blood elves going up against the guard, while in the distance civilians were evacuated to safer parts of the city. I really hoped that Harrison and his men would be able to stop the blood elves before too many lives were lost.
I rammed the horse into two blood elves, sending them spiraling. She kicked out, catching a third in the breastplate, sending him sprawling to the ground, unmoving. I climbed down and gave the reins to a nearby guard, whose leg was bleeding.