Kora's voice was flat, clean, devoid of any emotion that might cloud its singular purpose. It was the sound of a blade being sharpened, each number a stroke against the whetstone.
The word landed in the gully's tense silence with the weight of a tombstone. Retour's mind, which had been a frantic swirl of panic and half-formed plans, suddenly stilled, freezing over into a sheet of cold, clear ice. The world seemed to slow, every detail sharpening to a painful intensity. He saw the individual rust pits on Dean's vambrace, the frantic pulse beating in Ciski's throat, the way Roty's shoulders had already slumped in defeat. He saw Ile, a statue of observation, his gaze fixed on him, waiting to record the outcome of this live experiment. And he saw Kora, a silhouette of perfect, predatory patience against the sickly sky. She had engineered this perfectly. The gully was a stone coffin, and using the mist here would be the same as nailing the lid shut himself, burying his allies in the same ash as his enemies.
"Two."
The mist raged against his control, a starved beast smelling blood. It whispered of an easy, final solution. A flash of crimson, a wave of silent energy, and the thrumming machine, the soldier, Kora herself—all would be rendered into memory. But the cost would be everything. He would become the very annihilation he feared, a king of bones and dust. Dean's look of horrified fear would be the last human thing he saw before he erased them all.
"Three."
His father's face, from the Codex's searing vision, surfaced in his mind. Not the man consumed by the mist, but the king in his prime, his hands on the same leather-bound cover, his eyes blazing with a terrible, glorious power. The crown is not worth this. The warning was a splash of freezing water. His father had learned the price of that power and had chosen to become its final prison. Retour, in his rage and fear, had chosen to become its key. Now, he had to choose what kind of key he would be—one that unlocked destruction, or one that opened a different path.
"Four."
Surrender was unthinkable. To hand himself and the Codex to Rotard was to surrender the kingdom to a tyrant armed with a cataclysm. It would make his father's sacrifice a grotesque joke and condemn every surviving soul in Asterfell to a fate worse than the red mist. He would not be the cause of that.
"Five."
So. No mist. No surrender. That left only one path: a desperate, stupid, human gamble. He had to stop thinking like a weapon and start thinking like a prince. He had resources. Not just the curse, but a loyal fighter, a brilliant tactician, and two survivors who knew this land. He had to use them.
"Dean," Retour said, his voice low but cutting through the tense silence like a knife. He didn't shout. The calm in his own voice surprised him. "The walker's leg joints. The second articulation. The piston housing looks weak."
Dean didn't turn. He didn't question. His entire body, which had been coiled like a spring, subtly re-oriented. His focus shifted from the soldier in the saddle to the complex joint where the machine's middle leg met its body, a nest of pistons and hydraulics.
"Six."
"Ile," Retour continued, his mind working with a cold, crystalline clarity he'd never known. "The payload on that bolt. Your assessment?"
"Highly volatile alchemical agent," Ile responded instantly, his voice a calm counterpoint to the counting. "The emulsion suggests a meta-stable state requiring violent agitation for activation. Primary effect appears to be rapid exothermic decomposition of silicate-based materials. In essence, it dissolves rock."
"Seven."
"Roty," Retour said, turning his head slightly toward the brooding brother. Roty flinched, shocked to be addressed. "When that thing fires, the recoil will be substantial. The soldier will be focused on controlling the walker, not on us. For one second, maybe two. That's your window." Roty's eyes widened, the sullenness replaced by a flicker of stunned comprehension. He was being given a purpose, a thread of agency in their impending doom.
"Eight."
"Ciski," Retour's eyes found hers. The defiance in them was already hardening into something fiercer: resolve. "When I give the word, we're not running for the entrance. We're going up. Straight up the gully wall to the ridge. The moment you have a clear path, you take it." She gave a sharp, single nod, her body coiling like a spring.
"Nine."
Kora's impassive mask finally showed a hairline fracture. A faint crease appeared between her brows. This was not in her calculations. There was no begging, no negotiation, no terrifying eruption of crimson power. There was only this quiet, methodical preparation. It was the opposite of what she expected from the walking cataclysm she had been sent to exterminate. A predictable monster was a manageable monster. This… this sounded like a commander. And that was a far more dangerous variable.
Retour took one last, deep breath, filling his lungs with the dry, dusty air of the gully that had almost become his tomb. He made his choice. He would not be the heir of the mist. He would be the heir of Asterfell.
"NOW!" he roared.
Dean was already in motion. He didn't charge the impossible slope. He bent at the knees, his powerful muscles bunching, and seized a jagged, melon-sized rock from the gully floor. In one seamless, powerful explosion of movement, he hurled it. It wasn't a wild throw. It was a precise, calculated projectile. It sailed through the air in a high arc and smashed directly into the delicate piston assembly at the walker's leg joint.
The sound was a shrieking tear of metal. The piston housing buckled. A jet of black, viscous hydraulic fluid sprayed out like blood from a severed artery. The walker, a creature of balance and precision, lurched violently to one side with a grinding shriek of tortured metal.
The soldier, startled by the sudden impact and the violent, unpredictable movement of his machine, instinctively clenched his hand on the firing lever.
THWUMP.
The sound was a physical blow to the air. The ballista fired. The massive bolt, with its glowing green orb of death, launched from its cradle. But the walker's lurch had skewed its aim. Instead of slamming into the narrow gully entrance and sealing them in, the bolt flew high and wide, striking the rocky face of the ridge just a few feet below where Kora stood.
The world dissolved into green-white fury. The roar was deafening, swallowing all other sound. The glass orb shattered, and the alchemical agent within didn't so much explode as it consumed. The rock where it impacted didn't shatter; it vaporized, boiling away into a sizzling, acrid cloud of toxic vapor and liquefied stone. A entire section of the ridge edge, a ton of solid rock, simply ceased to exist, collapsing inward in a waterfall of molten debris.
Kora, thrown off balance by the violent disintegration of the ground beneath her feet, was forced to leap backward, her cool composure shattered into a snarl of pure, undiluted rage. The perfectly laid trap had just blown up in her face.
That was the second Roty had been promised. As the soldier fought desperately with the bucking, shuddering controls of his crippled machine, Roty moved. He didn't have a rock. He had his knife. He threw it not as an assassin, but as a harrier. The blade tumbled end over end and sank deep into the meat of the soldier's thigh. The man screamed, his attention fully, completely ripped away from the people in the gully and onto the searing pain in his leg.
"GO! NOW!" Retour yelled, his voice raw.
Ciski was already moving, a blur of feral energy. She didn't head for the blocked entrance. She scrambled straight up the near-vertical gully wall, using the new handholds and footholds created by the collapsing rock. Dean was right behind her, shoving Retour forward and up before following. Ile brought up the rear, his movements surprisingly agile and efficient.
They hauled themselves over the lip of the ridge onto level ground. The scene was one of beautiful, chaotic devastation. The walker was a hobbled, hissing ruin, spewing black fluid, one leg completely useless. The soldier was writhing in his saddle, trying to stem the flow of blood from his leg. The air was thick with the eye-watering stench of acid and burned rock.
And Kora stood amidst it all, her winter-pale eyes locking with Retour's across the swirling smoke. The look in them was no longer just professional. It was personal, venomous. He had not acted like a frightened animal or an unstoppable force of nature. He had acted like a leader. He had outthought her. And in doing so, he had transformed in her eyes from a mere problem to be eliminated into a rival to be destroyed.
There was no time for words, for boasts, for final threats. "This way! Run!" Ciski shouted, and they did. They fled into the twisting, labyrinthine channels of the badlands, not as prey in a headlong panic, but as a unit, having just snatched their future back from the brink through sheer, bloody-minded will.
Retour ran, his lungs burning, his legs aching, but his heart pounding with a fierce, new rhythm. It wasn't the chaotic drumbeat of the mist's hunger. It was the steady, determined cadence of a choice made. He had chosen his people over his power. He had chosen strategy over destruction. For the first time since setting foot back on the Red Plains, the ghost of Prince Retour Monarc felt solid. He felt real.