Rory could hardly believe it. They had almost done it, nearly stopped the Homeworlders and their Lindas from defeating them and taking the Sigil of Weaving, only for them to be reinforced by more Lindas. Rebellious, Otherworlder Lindas. As if things weren’t bad enough.

Stormvir jumped off the balcony and landed on the street hard enough to make the tarmac crack. “They were correct. You ought to surrender before something irreparably horrible occurs to anyone.”

Rory got to his feet as well. The area around them had been destroyed, littered with flames and rubble everywhere. That explosion had been far too powerful. He checked their vehicles and swallowed when he saw the jeep smoking, though the pickup seemed fine. At least there was that.

“Irreparably horrible as performed by you?” Rory asked, turning to Stormvir.

The elf’s dirty blonde hair was pulled up in a high ponytail that swung as he shook his head. “We have little time to bandy words as we might. Therefore, I will give you this one warning. Will you surrender, or will you require the use of force?”

Viv stepped forward with her Omnipresent Sabre flashing to life. “You can’t stop us by your—”

Stormvir raised his arm and snapped his metal-clad fingers. The other rebels appeared behind him. Some were arrayed on the nearby rooftops, some poked their weapons through doorways and windows, and the rest were arrayed along the roads. There was no way for them to escape.

Rory looked around quickly and noted two dwarves on the rooftops, another elf blocking the road to their left, three kobolds poking strange crossbows out of the windows, and Guvoric himself walking slowly up to Stormvir.

Even if there weren’t a lot of them in the objective sense, that was still far too many for Rory’s group to even consider taking on.

“See now?” Stormvir said. “Your plight is hopeless and your victory impossible. Surrender, and I promise that we will treat you with respect.”

“I wonder why you all are so interested in having us surrender,” Ned said. “You, the Homeworlders at the back, all of you seem so interested in having us give up. What is it? Are you that afraid of getting hurt?” He took a step forward. “It’s all a bluff, isn’t it?”

Stormvir laughed softly, but it was the Homeworlders behind them who answered.

“Are you so stupid to think we want to kill our fellow humans?” Aaron asked. “We’re supposed to be cooperating to drive these invaders from our homes, and yes, we’re upset that you would rather collude with them instead of shunning them, but that doesn’t mean we want you dead.”

Rory rounded on him. “Oh yeah? Because you could have fooled me the way you were so happy to use your Sigils to attack us.”

“We all were carried away by the intensity of the fight. But no matter what happened, none of that means that’s how it has to end. Think clearly, Rory.”

“I am thinking clearly, and all I see are hypocrites who expect us to do what they themselves couldn’t do.” Rory pointed at the rebel Otherworlders. “You have them as your allies, but you expect us to betray the ones we’ve made friends with?”

“Face it,” Viv said. “You just want us to join your side, and that’s it.”

“This conversation is pointless,” Guvoric said. “Let’s get rid of them and leave while we can.”

Stormvir looked reluctant, but then nodded. It seemed they had settled on ferociously attacking them in the end.

Rory’s heart started hammering in his chest. The others tensed nearby. As much as none of them had any intention of giving up, the situation was hopeless if they got embroiled in a battle.

“Viv,” Rory whispered. “Can you get us out of here?”

Viv took a second to think before answering. “The same trick won’t work again. These people aren’t completely dumb. They’ll have an easier time stopping us if we try the same thing.”

“Then we’ll just have to think of something a little different.”

“Enough talking,” Thomas shouted. “Let’s get this over with.”

Stormvir sighed. He raised a hand, then let it fall. “Subdue them.”

Rory tensed, ready to activate the Sigils within his staff to protect his party however he could. But no attack came. The Homeworlders behind them had frozen, and the rebel Otherworlders were turning as one to look at one of the windows where a kobold was stationed.

A dead kobold.

The draconic Otherworlder fell through the opening to strike the street with dull, wet thud. Rory blinked at seeing the vicious wound on the kobold’s neck. Copious black blood pooled around the corpse in a steaming puddle. Then the kobold’s strange crossbow clunked down, making Rory look up.

Arelland had arrived.

He had never seen that kind of a look on the elf’s face. Even with the metal mask obscuring half his face, his narrowed eyes spoke of nothing but the promise of violence. Rory’s heart would have lifted to see a friendly face appearing, but that expression shuttered his relief.

“Really?” Stormvir tutted behind his whirring mask. “You interfere now? Of all times?”

Arelland didn’t reply. Unlike the rest of them who had been all about warning Rory’s party to surrender, the elf had no intention of letting anyone go. As his answer, Arelland threw himself through the window with the force and speed of a cannon, crashing into the street hard enough to send bits of it flying in every direction.

“Ah, he’s arrived,” one of the Djinn at the back said. “I believe it’s time for us to depart, yes?”

“Truer words have never been spoken,” the serpent-headed Djinn said.

“You’re leaving?” the Wraith Lord asked. “Face me properly, you cowards.”

The Djinn didn’t even bother replying to him. Instead, they disappeared in blooms of dark fire. The way the Wraith Lord cursed meant they truly had vanished instead of hiding somewhere.

Stormvir ignored the Djinn and pointed his arm at Arelland, several thin barrels bursting out of it like a minigun. “He’s assaulting!” he shouted. “Don’t hold back or your life is forfeit!”

The dozen barrels around Stormvir’s mechanical arm started firing off a staccato blast of energy. A furious storm of energy bolts, each no larger than the lines of light Rory’s Weaving threw out, shot at Arelland with the speed of bullets.

None of them hit their target. Arelland’s landing had sent up a little cloud of dirt and dust, which had obscured him from view. When Stormvir’s shots pierced through and dispersed it, they found nothing there. The elf was nowhere to be seen.

A throaty scream preceded the fall of another kobold. Rory jerked his head to see the lizard-like body thudding to the ground with viscera bursting away at the impact.

“He’s coming for—”

The last kobold never got to finish his sentence. A large metal arrow launched from the point where the second kobold had fallen, punching through the walls and the intervening space until it was buried in the last one’s neck. Rory’s eyes landed on the chain flashing off the arrow’s end.

Arelland immediately hauled the chain, pulling the kobold bodily through the windows and walls before slicing his blade hard. The final kobold was chopped into two, one of half of the draconic body flying out the opening to squelch onto the street while the other half plopped onto the streets.

Guvoric cursed in a language Rory didn’t understand. There was a strange weapon in his hand, like a speargun, which he fired. The short spear flew at Arelland like a lightning bolt.

Rory found himself shouting in warning. He recognized the shot. It was the same—

The explosion roiled through the battlefield, its shockwave nearly throwing everyone to the ground. Rory blinked away the dust and tried to see what had become of Arelland. He hated to think of the elf getting caught in that blast, but it had been launched fast and it was all too possible Arelland hadn’t been able to evade it.

There was nothing. The whole second floor of the building Arelland had been inside of had burned down and was destroyed, the upper floors threatening to collapse as the shattered walls and columns creaked in their final moments. Even the dwarf who had been on the roof had disappeared.

Rory froze. The dwarf on the roof. He looked around and didn’t see him anywhere. But then, Arelland jumped down from said roof, the dead dwarf held in one arm. He dropped the corpse on the street, then started slowly moving forward.

“Stormvir,” Guvoric said. “Think we should leave while we can.”

The rebel elf didn’t move or reply. They had been whittled down to just three of them now—Stormvir, Guvoric, and the other elf who was smartly keeping her distance.

“Leave?” Thomas stepped forward, his fists flaming. “Scare of one little Otherworlder? I’ll show you how it’s done then.”

“Tommy, wait!”

Rory didn’t get to see who had called out so shrilly. Thomas had leapt high and far, clearly powered by some Sigil. The rebels scattered as he landed before Arelland then immediately blasted the elf with a wave of white-gold fire.

Arelland disappeared inside the stream of fire. Rory’s hart skipped a beat. He had no idea why the elf hadn’t dodged or moved away or evaded somehow. A part of him wanted to call out, to perhaps even help, but he was certain he’d only be interfering.

With his other hand, Thomas summoned a hammering vortex of compressed air, then blasted the spot where Arelland had been standing before the flames had overtaken him. “That wasn’t so hard,” the big man crowed. “He’s just one, dressed-up little elf.”

The fires exploded without warning. Thomas took several heavy steps back, eyes wide in alarm. Arelland flexed his arms to repel the rest of the flames off him, emerging from the inferno with no sign of damage except for a few reddened spots on his mech suit.

“Impossible,” Thomas said. “You should be burned to ash and molten goo!”

Arelland shot his metal arrow again. Thomas leapt back in time so that the arrow crashed into the road instead of his body, but Arelland pulled himself forward using the chain connecting arrow to mech suit, accelerating at incredible speed. He was too fast for Thomas to evade . Even as the big man jumped out of the elf’s path, Arelland’s blade burst out of his left arm and sliced a tremendous, killing arc through half of Thomas’s body.

As the other Homeworlders screamed and shrieked out in dismay, Arelland carried on his momentum to charge into the others. Just as he had done with Thomas, he tore into them like a bulldozer going through flimsy slums.

Linus pelted his green fire at Arelland, but the elf dodged with ease. He would have sliced Linus in half, but Aaron threw himself in the elf’s path. Arelland’s sword dug into Aaron’s armour, and though it didn’t pierce the crystal breastplate, the force behind the blow still sent Aaron flying into a wall a few yards away.

“Now’s our chance,” Viv said. “We can get going while he’s dealing with the rest of them.”

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Ned said. He waved his hand over the area. “Look around us. No one is going to attack while Arelland’s here.”

Rory looked around. Indeed, the rebel Otherworlders had fallen back, though hesitating from completely running away just yet. “Just keep your guard up. You don’t want to get caught and end up being held hostage.”

His attention was jerked back to the fight when there was a sudden scream. Arelland had whirled, targeting Sylvia, but then Shen jumped in.

The big man’s enormous, transformed weight meant his crashing landing cracked the ground and made the whole area quake. Arelland moved just a bit to evade the worst of the impact, and when Shen slammed down fists as big as tree trunks, the elf raised and blocked with a single arm. The power behind Shen’s far bigger body weighed Arelland down, but the elf had more than brute strength.

He activated his Sigil.

Rory had just enough time to notice its image was bright red before gawping as a spiky ball of mauve energy burned to life in Arelland’s other hand. Before Shen could react, before he even knew what was going on, the elf stabbed the energy ball into the Shen’s chest, where it sank inside as though it didn’t care about corporeal barriers.

For a second, nothing happened. Then a forest of lavender spikes erupted out of Shen’s body. He screamed, blood spilling everywhere in a stormy spray. Shen staggered back as spikes burst out of his guts, thorned out of his limbs, crowned his head like horns, and turned the half-man,, half-monster into a quivering mass of broken flesh and bones.

Shen fell to the ground with a heavy thump and the screech of the spikes scoring against the road. He was dead. Sylvia screamed again.

“Fall back!” Linda shouted.

Wherever she had disappeared to, she had now reappeared next to where Aaron had fallen. He was back on his feet, though only by supporting himself against Linda’s shoulder. Then they started falling back.

Linus and Sylvia joined them, both looking at Arelland in sheer terror. Whatever horrific things they had witnessed over the course of the war so far apparently didn’t come close to the massacre they had just witnessed.

Sylvia’s eyes landed on Thomas’s unmoving body, Shen’s now-normal corpse, and finally, on Rory himself with regret. There was an apology there, and the fact that she even felt such a thing at a moment when her companions had been brutally killed by their enemy took Rory aback enough to silence him completely.

Strangely, Arelland didn’t give chase. The Homeworlders retreated, keeping their eyes on the battlefield in case the elf gave chase, but he didn’t move as they had disappeared around a corner. He waited some more, perhaps using some Sigil-powered sense like Perception to ensure that they really were gone, before turning around to face the rebels.

Stormvir and Guvoric were smart enough not to stay within Arelland’s striking range. They had broth retreated farther down a road, staring at Rory’s group a little wistfully.

“You have been fortunate that your saviour arrived in time,” Stormvir said. His voice was carefully light, despite the rather horrific way he had been defeated. Well, the way his comrades had at least. “But make no mistake. This is far from over. The truth of the matter shall be revealed in time.”

“Leave!” Arelland shouted.

Stormvir glared at him, then turned and sped away. Guvoric and the other surviving elf followed soon after.

Rory took a deep breath,. He hadn’t realized that his body was shaking. So much death and destruction around him. Even during the tensest moments in his conflict with the Homeworlders, he hadn’t properly actualized that something this viscerally bloody was going to be the outcome.

But they had survived. Without anyone dying, or being severely injured, or suffering much in any way. They had come out of it alive.