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Within ten minutes the Blood Domain was gone. The convention hall was just a convention hall: three walls standing, roof mostly gone, floor covered in material that would take a specialized team several days to address.
Ren leaned against the remaining wall and smoked.
The Abominations had dispersed. Bone Saw alone had stayed, sitting on a piece of collapsed ceiling in full obsidian armor, axe across his knees, eyes closed.
Lu Changcheng was already in the air, Spatial Sense extended through the debris field, moving north to south through the surrounding blocks.
Then he heard it.
"YOU SON OF A BITCH, COME HERE RIGHT NOW—"
His mouth twitched. He had hired that voice.
He followed the sound to the north-facing external wall, where a boulder-sized piece of load-bearing concrete sat at a slight angle over an air pocket in the rubble. He lifted it.
Lucy was inside it, back against the rubble.
She was holding a child, one arm around it, one hand pressed flat against its ear. Her left temple had a cut on it, dried blood tracking down to her jaw.
"You absolute—" She looked up at Lu. "Your phone. Your phone, Guildmaster. Thirty calls."
Lu Changcheng reached into his jacket and took out his phone.
Focus mode. Do not disturb. Thirty missed calls from Lucy.
"My bad," he said.
"My bad," she repeated. "My bad. My fucking bad. I am under a rock for thirty-seven hours, I call thirty times, and what I get is my bad." She shifted the child to her other arm. "I called Chu Xinghe too. Eighteen times. You know what he did? Nothing. Eighteen calls, complete silence, not even a decline. Just nothing. And that doctor." She paused to make sure the weight of this landed. "That man doesn't even have a proper phone plan. It rang twice and cut out. Twice. What kind of person has a two-ring limit." She shifted the child to her other arm. "Do you know what I was doing while I was under that rock? I was thinking about Chu Xinghe. And that doctor. I am going to find both of them and I am going to shove my foot so far up their asses that they will need a surgeon to remove my shoe. And that surgeon better not be him because I will shove that foot up his ass too."
"I'm calling the medical team," Lu said.
"You know what, fine. Call them. Call everyone. But when I get out of here I am going to find Chu Xinghe and I swear to every god currently listening—" She glanced at the child, lowered her voice by about fifteen percent, and continued, "—I am going to commit acts that are not technically legal in this city. Against his forehead specifically."
"His forehead," Lu said.
"That smug, beautiful, completely useless forehead." She sat back against the rubble. "My bad. Write it on my tombstone."
He called.
. . .
An hour later, everyone gathered at the convention center's main entrance.
The morning was full sun. The street was cordoned off, Dao Guild personnel managing the perimeter. Everyone on the front steps carried the specific exhaustion of people who had been in sustained combat since before dawn.
Ren leaned on the railing. Armand stood with his arms crossed, armor marked. Suture stood beside the dragon, which had chosen to remain in its humanoid form and was standing behind her at one meter without being asked. Bone Saw slightly apart. Lu Changcheng at the center, which was where he always ended up.
"Status report," he said.
Armand spoke first. "One undead dragon, extinction-rank, subdued and tamed."
The silence that followed this was significant.
"Tamed," Lu said.
"Tamed," Armand said.
Suture smiled. The dragon remained standing behind her, very still. Ren looked at her. She tilted her head, checking for approval.
He blew a kiss at her.
Armand looked at the middle distance.
Henry and Hans spoke next. Henry spoke for both of them.
"We want to note for the record," Henry said, "that Vice Guildmaster Chu Xinghe took credit for a kill that was, by any reasonable accounting, ours."
Chu Xinghe, standing to Lu's left with his hands clasped and a serene expression that had not moved since the accusation was made, said, "I was in the area."
"Being in the area," Henry said, "is not the same as the kill."
"I contributed to the area," Chu said.
"I," Hans said, "would like the record to reflect—"
"The record," Lu said, "doesn't exist yet. Did you take their kill."
Chu smiled, the specific smile he used when the answer was yes and he found this mildly entertaining. "I may have been somewhat opportunistic about the timing."
Lu Changcheng raised one hand and flicked Chu Xinghe firmly on the forehead. Chu's head moved back two centimeters. The only indication was a brief flicker in the left eye.
"My dear Vice Guildmaster," Lu said pleasantly. "Did you have fun showing off."
"A little," Chu said, with the dignity of a man who had been flicked on the forehead and was declining to register it.
Henry and Hans looked satisfied.
Lu turned back. "The Overlord."
"Escaped," Ren said. "During the shed cycle. We pushed him to the skull and he went through a spatial transition before Brother Lu could lock him. He's alive. He'll be someone else's problem."
"Where," Lu said.
"Unknown."
Lu looked at him.
Ren took a drag and said nothing else.
Lu exhaled. "The soul core."
"Still in him. We couldn't isolate it. He regenerated four times and we couldn't land on it." Ren took a drag. "Destroying it was always the only real option, and we couldn't get there."
The group absorbed this. The Overlord was gone, the domain dissolved, the city outside still standing. But the soul core was still inside that skull, somewhere else in the world, still intact.
"Then we need to find him again," Armand said.
"Yes," Ren said.
"Where is Elias," someone said. Ren didn't catch who.
Nobody answered. Ren scanned the group: Armand, Suture, the dragon, Bone Saw, Henry and Hans, Lu, Chu. Lucy sat on the railing, bandaged, arms crossed, not yet back to full capacity. The child was with a Dao Guild medic.
"I'm here," said a voice.
They turned.
Two figures stood at the edge of the cordoned street, just inside the perimeter where the Dao Guild personnel had stepped back, not quite sure why.
At a distance, in ordinary morning light, it was possible to mistake them for two people standing side by side. That impression lasted about two seconds.
The figure was one. The division ran down the vertical center of the body from the crown of the skull to the ground. On the left: Elias Thorne's face, his jaw, the bone sitting under the skin exactly as it always had, his remaining eye open and dark and watching them. On the right: a woman's face, the cheekbone higher, the eye dark amber, open and present and carrying something Ren couldn't name.
The seam between them was not hidden. It ran through the center of the sternum, through the midpoint of the collarbone, through the center of the mouth, dividing the nose precisely down the cartilage. Where the two halves met, the skin had sealed in a line too clean and too deliberate to be either wound or scar. It looked like metal joined at temperature: compressed, fused, slightly raised at the edge. The kind of join that did not come apart.
The body they inhabited was gaunt. The ribs were visible through the skin on both sides, the collarbones pressed outward, the musculature carrying the look of a body built for a different purpose than ordinary human motion. It stood with its weight distributed evenly between both halves, but the two halves did not carry themselves identically: the left shoulder angled slightly forward, the right held back, the two sides in ongoing negotiation about direction.
The amber eye on the right tracked the group without blinking. The dark eye on the left did the same.
"What the fuck," Armand said.
Lu Changcheng said it at the same moment.
The fused figure regarded them both.
Neither eye moved to indicate who was responsible for the sound that came next. The voice was two voices occupying the same frequency, one pitched slightly over the other: neither Elias's nor the woman's, but both simultaneously.