The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 744

Thirty attackers went over the service wall at eleven and nobody stopped them.

No guard at the loading gate. No clerk at the freight desk. The stairwell door on the east side opened on the first pull, and the man holding it stood there a second longer than he needed to, waiting for a bell that never rang.

"It's open," he said.

"What do you mean, open?"

"I mean I turned the handle and it opened."

Torvan, the leader came up and looked at the door, then past it at the lobby — all that glass, all that marble, not one living soul in it.

"Fifty floors," Torvan said. "One woman. She works late every night and she works alone."

"Feels wrong."

"It feels lucky. That's a different thing." He put his hand flat on the door. "Nobody comes back down until she's dead."

...

They climbed in three groups, two flights apart, quiet the way men are quiet when they've done this before.

The last man in the last group was called Emmet.

Something touched the back of his neck. Light, barely anything, like a moth landing.

He reached up and came away with a needle between his fingers, thinner than a fishbone.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, what's—"

His knees stopped belonging to him. He went down sideways and never hit the concrete, because something caught him under both arms and lowered him the way you lower a sleeping child, then carried him back down into the dark without making any sound at all.

...

Four flights up, a man named Boyd turned to say something and found the stairwell behind him empty.

"Emmet," he said.

The word went down the shaft and didn't come back.

"Emmet, don't play."

Boyd leaned over the rail. Forty feet of switchback, all the way down, and nothing standing on any of it.

He took the needle in the shoulder while he was still leaning.

...

It happened eleven more times on the east stair and nine on the west.

Not one of them made a sound the man in front of him could hear.

The drones came out of the dark twenty feet behind and never came closer than they had to. Fire once. Catch what falls. Carry it down. Small, black, and they never once got ahead of a man and let him see one.

None of them had been prepared to be hunted.

...

By the thirty-eighth floor Torvan had six men.

By the forty-fourth only he left.

He turned around slowly, and the hall was empty.

Something shifted above him.

His hand came up before his head did. The air went hard and rang like struck glass, and the shield closed around him in a full sphere — the good one, the expensive one, the one that had cost him a year of his life to learn.

Two needles hit it and skidded off like rain on a window.

He laughed out loud. He couldn't help it.

"Darts," he said to the ceiling. "All that, and you brought darts."

Fifty of drones dropped down the shaft.

...

They filled it. Ceiling to rail, floor after floor, arranged in a lattice too even to be a swarm.

Then they started firing in rotation. One, then the next, then the next, around and around, from every angle at the same time.

Torvan held.

His shield was good. It held at ten seconds. It held at thirty. Sweat came down his jaw and he laughed again, uglier now, because he knew this game and this game had a bottom to it. A caster runs out. A machine doesn't.

"Come on, then," he said. "Come on. Come—"

At three hundred and eleven, the sphere flickered where his own breath had thinned it.

One needle went in.

He got his hand halfway to his neck.

Then the forty-seventh floor came up to meet him, and something caught him before it did.

...

Fifty floors up, one window was still lit.

Beatrix Hargrove had been on the same page of the same contract since nine and hadn't looked up once. She heard nothing, because there was nothing to hear.

...

"Fifty," Ashe said.

The room came up at once.

"Elder—"

"Fifty of ours. Not hired men. Magicians." He was already writing. "Torvan was one and Torvan didn't come back, so the answer is fifty. I want the ones who fight."

He sent them the following night.

They were, without any argument, the fifty best fighters Black Tower had.

They went in at eleven.

By half past twelve there was nobody left in the stairwell to go in.

...

The reports came back to a room full of people who could no longer make their faces work.

No bodies. No blood. No inquest. No sound.

Regent Group opened at the usual hour. Beatrix Hargrove signed a shipping order at eleven, and the market closed up two points, and a fisherman on the north quay bought a curse-breaker for his boat and told the shop clerk it was the best money he'd ever spent.

"Eighty," someone whispered. "We've sent eighty people into that building."

Ashe stood up.

He had spent two days not sleeping and it had gone somewhere behind his eyes and stayed there.

"Regent Group is holding eighty of our people," he said.

The room went very still.

"Then what are we doing?" someone asked.

"Everything." Ashe put both hands flat on the table. "We stop being polite. By morning I want it announced in every hall in the city: Black Tower is at war. We take the White Tower and we take Regent Group, every soldier we have, all of it, unless they hand back our eighty."

Renwick didn't unfold his arms.

"And if the eighty are already dead," he said, "then there is nothing left to hand back."

"That is the reason it will be all of it." Ashe was already looking past him, at the door, at the city. "Ferrowgate will support us. Red Tower will come in. Eighty of ours in the ground buys me two towers and a gate, and no building holds against that."

He picked up the list of names and did not look at it.

"We have thousands of people ready to fight. We'll win this one," he said.