Lopsy was just about to spit fury at Morvane when she caught the sight of the energy sphere in Ethan’s palm—lightning packed tighter than before, writhing and snapping in on itself.
All her questions got answered in an instant.
"You two!"
Lopsy didn’t even bother patching up her face. She threw her voice across the battlefield.
"Knock it off—the king’s in danger!"
A Treant rose out of the mud beside her.
It rolled its cloudy eyes, confused, following the direction she was pointing.
On the other side, Gravehook’s hook had just torn itself free from the Umbral Servitor Catheryn had created. It twisted around, ready to go help the king—
—and Kaelira shoved a purple-red energy orb forward.
A savage burst of power slammed into the hook.
Boom!
The metal hook-body blew apart again.
The chain snapped into several pieces, and dark green flames scattered through the debris like sparks.
Gravehook stared at the empty length of chain in its hand. Finally, it ran out of patience.
It raised the lantern and smashed it into the ground with all its strength.
Glass and bone framework cracked at the same time.
If it couldn’t break free the normal way, then fine—mutual destruction. It would burn everything down and still go save its king.
A flood of shattered souls surged out of the lantern.
Some were nothing but faces. Some kept scraps of limbs. Most had been tortured so long they couldn’t even hold a human shape anymore.
The moment they got their freedom back, their first instinct wasn’t to flee.
They wanted bodies.
They wanted to live again.
So the people inside the flame barrier became the perfect target.
And Auri—standing near the rear—carried the strongest, purest life force of them all.
The wretched remnants locked onto her almost immediately.
Queen Elowen pushed herself to her feet.
The juvenile sea serpent had already been tossed out of the shield. With her now-free hand, she gathered a cold sphere of energy. Wind spiraled around it, and the blood rain caught in its wake froze into fine, needling ice pellets.
Elowen walked to the edge of the barrier.
The charging souls hit the fiery red screen Phoenix Queen Ignara was sustaining first.
Flames seared across their surfaces.
Shrieks ripped through the air, one after another.
But their numbers didn’t noticeably drop. If anything, they crowded tighter along the outside, clawing and squeezing, trying to burrow their way in.
Gravehook watched in silence.
Then, slowly, it turned its head.
Elowen had already sent the energy sphere out through the shield.
The ice ball stretched the instant it left her palm, drawing out into a straight, piercing beam of cold light. It cut through the swarm and shot straight at Gravehook.
Gravehook had been ready to go save Morvane.
But feeling that freezing wave from behind, it had no choice—it turned back again.
A hook and lantern reappeared in its hands. Thick green light boiled up in its skull as it charged into the oncoming ice beam.
"You’re all disgusting."
Its bony jaw yawned open.
"Fine—then let them play to their hearts’ content!"
The newly formed lantern slammed into the ground again.
Even more souls erupted from the cracked shell, spilling over the shield’s perimeter until it looked like the barrier was being drowned under a living tide.
The ice beam met the hook head-on.
Frost raced along the metal tip in a heartbeat.
Every soul caught in the beam’s path was sealed inside ice the moment it touched the light. The hook froze solid almost instantly, and even the chain stiffened into a rigid pillar of ice.
Gravehook stared at its frozen weapon, expression unreadable.
It had expected this.
Still, seeing its attack suppressed again made irritation flare in its chest like a splinter it couldn’t pull out.
A new hook and lantern formed in its hands.
Same trick, again.
Hook after hook crashed into the ice beam, while the lantern kept vomiting out broken souls. With every collision, the cold power weakened a little.
More and more spirits surged at the barrier.
Elowen was closing in on the limit of how many she could freeze at once.
Up above, Seraphine was blocking most of the blood rain. Most of it never reached the battlefield—yet a few droplets still slipped through gaps between the Light Force layers and fell toward Gravehook.
The blood rain hit its skeletal body and seeped fast through the seams in its bones.
The green fire in Gravehook’s eye sockets started staining red.
A blazing scarlet force erupted inside its skull, lighting the fuse on something feral.
Gravehook stopped maintaining the lantern.
It tossed the soul-storage tool aside and condensed a hook in each hand.
Its skeleton broke into a forward jog. Chains whirled overhead at high speed, both hook blades dragging a swelling blood-colored power as it barreled straight for the people inside the flame shield.
It was completely seeing red now.
Lopsy saw Gravehook slip into madness and instinctively wanted to shout for it to come back.
But it didn’t react to any voice at all.
So she let it go.
Lopsy turned to the Treant at her side.
The two of them locked onto Ethan—the one controlling Morvane—and surged into the chaos from different angles.
Ethan wasn’t afraid of Lopsy and the Treant working together.
Morvane was still under his control. As long as the King of Mournreach stood in front, Lopsy and the Treant couldn’t close in without holding back.
But those two weren’t stupid, either.
They didn’t try to push through Morvane head-on. Instead, they swung wide to either side. It added distance to their approach, but it kept them out of the king’s sword line.
Ethan kept tugging at the white lightning he’d threaded into Morvane’s body.
Morvane pivoted toward Lopsy. A ring of blood-red ripples spread under his footstep as he lunged, dragging his greatsword along as he charged.
Ethan already understood Lopsy’s ability.
She could twist space and change position in an instant. Against a frontal rush from Morvane, her easiest move would be to teleport right next to Ethan.
White energy started gathering in Ethan’s palm.
He curled his fingers, hiding the growing light behind his hand, and waited with careful patience for Lopsy and the Treant to get closer.
The second they stepped into range—
this sphere would make them "wake up" the hard way.
Lopsy watched Morvane charging straight at her, the stitched-together eye on her ruined face trembling.
That was her king.
And now he was swinging a sword at her like a puppet on someone else’s strings.
Tears slid down the torn fabric of her face, soaking the thread and needlework. But Lopsy didn’t stop—and she didn’t try to call Morvane back to himself, either.
The scissor fragments orbiting her body split cleanly into two groups.
One group snapped together in front of her into an irregular shield, catching the pressure of Morvane’s approaching blade. The other gathered in her hand, forming a long sword riddled with jagged cracks.
Lopsy clenched the hilt, slipped past Morvane’s line, and shot straight for Ethan.
The Treant attacked from the other side.
Thick roots drilled out from behind it and from under its feet, punching deep into the mud. More roots spread along the underground layer, sliding forward in silence toward Ethan’s position.
At the same time, the Treant’s right arm reshaped.
Its palm and fingers fused together. Branches braided tight, twisting into a spinning wooden drill. The drill’s tip churned the air, spraying flecks of wood as it stabbed for Ethan’s chest.
Below the surface, the roots had already split off in multiple directions.
They didn’t break through to strike. They gathered under Ethan’s feet instead, ready to hollow out the soil, force a collapse, and trap him inside a writhing cage of roots.
Ethan watched Lopsy charge in a straight line, and a hint of helplessness crossed his face.
She didn’t teleport.
If that was how she wanted to play it, then the energy sphere he’d saved especially for her...
was going to have to be used on him instead.
Off to the side, Morvane was still chasing Lopsy.
But Ethan could feel it clearly now—keeping control was getting harder by the second.
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