The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 749

The old man never saw the sword’s attack.

He was still looking up with his arms spread when something moved through the space above him, and then the forty tons of stone he was holding in the air came down all at once, because there was nobody holding it anymore.

His head was on the flagstones before the slabs finished falling.

The other four did not move for a full second.

That second was all they had. They'd been standing behind him for twenty minutes doing nothing, because they hadn't needed to do anything — he was the one who could attack the machines, and the four of them had spent the whole fight watching him work and feeling safe.

The drones came in off the wall.

The nearest man got two words of a hex out before the needle took him in the jaw. The second turned and ran and made it eleven steps. The third and fourth went down back to back in the middle of the yard with their hands still up, and the whole thing was finished so fast that the dust from the falling stone hadn't settled yet.

Alex landed in the courtyard among them without a sound.

Overhead, the sky was moving. A thousand more machines were coming in from the south in a long unhurried line, and behind them another line, and the light was already starting to run along the drone formation above the Ravenhollow roof.

That branch would be white by morning like all the others.

"Where's the next one?"

The pane unfolded in the air in front of him. Four marks left, all red.

He went straight up.

...

The second one was worse, and it was worse in an interesting way.

Five men in a walled garden, and above them a slow spinning cloud of wreckage — forty, fifty drones, crushed and folded and hanging in the air like fruit, and more coming in and stopping dead as they crossed the wall.

Not being shot down.

Collected.

"Bring them," the man in the middle was saying. He had his fists closed and his elbows in, and every time another machine crossed the wall it simply stopped flying and drifted toward him. "Bring all of them. Bring ten thousand."

Brannock had been Brown Tower once. Twenty-two years of stone and ore and the patient, unglamorous work of pulling metal out of the earth, and he had been extremely good at it — right up until the night he killed his own apprentice over something nobody now remembered and ran east to the only tower in the country that would take a man like that without asking.

Black had given him a robe and never once asked what he'd done.

But he had never stopped being what he was before.

"They keep sending them," he laughed. "Metal. They're sending metal at me. Whoever is doing this, whoever you are — you have picked the one man in this country who has never in his life been afraid of metal, because I own it, I have always owned it, I can hold every ounce of it you can—"

Alex had been watching him for ninety seconds through forty pairs of drone eyes and had already understood exactly how the trick worked and exactly what it did not cover.

He was six hundred feet out and well above the wall.

He drew.

...

He didn't fly in. He didn't need to.

The sword came around in a flat clean arc, and what left it was not metal at all — a blade of pale aura, thin as a line drawn on the dark, crossing six hundred feet of night faster than the eye had any business following.

Brannock's cloud of stolen drones went on turning above him.

Two of the five men beside him came apart at the waist.

The third had time to look down at himself.

Alex moved his wrist a second time, and a second line went out, and Brannock — who owned every ounce of metal in that garden, who had spent twenty-two years learning to hold iron the way other men hold a cup — discovered in the last quarter-second of his life that there is no metal at all in a blade of light.

Fifty drones fell out of the sky and clattered down around the man who had been holding them.

...

There was one left.

He threw his wand away so fast it bounced, and then he was on both knees on the wet grass with his hands up over his head.

"Don't — please. Please."

Alex came down out of the dark and stood in front of him.

"Please don’t kill me." the man said, and his voice went right up through the register. " I'll come with you. I'll join you. I'll join the White Tower, I'll swear to it right now, I'll swear on anything you want—"

"How many people have you cursed?"

The man blinked up at him.

"Sir?"

"It's not a difficult question. How many hexes have you laid, on how many people, for money."

"That—" He wet his lips. "Sir, that is the work of the tower. That's what they demand. I couldn't refuse. Nobody refuses. It was never my choice, it was the tower, I only ever did what I was told—"

Alex looked at him for a moment.

"Fine," he said. "You can join the White Tower."

The relief that went across that man's face. "Thank you. Thank you. You won't regret—"

Alex had already turned away, and was looking at the fallen machines to see how the magnetic hold had been anchored.

Behind him, the man came up off his knees with a knife.

He was fast. He'd killed men from that position before and he was genuinely, professionally fast, and he got three full steps into the lunge before he noticed that the garden had turned over and the sky was underneath him.

He never worked out why.

His head was already on the grass.

"Stupid," Alex said, without looking up.

...

The third tower took eleven minutes and taught him something.

Nine of them there, and every single one had come from somewhere else first — a Blue water-caller, two Brown, a Green who'd been struck off for something the record didn't specify.

...

Alex snapped his fingers.

Two hundred drones came in over the wall behind him, spreading as they came, and for the first three seconds it looked like every other courtyard that night.

Then Ashe brought his wand down and struck the flagstones with it.

The shockwave went out from that point in a ring, and it was not a spell that touched minds, and it did not care in the slightest whether the thing in front of it could think.

It picked up two hundred machines and threw them, and half of them broke against the wall behind and the other half came apart in the air, and not one of them got within sixty feet of him.

The courtyard rang like a struck bell.

Alex looked at the wreckage on the stones.

Then he drew the sword properly for the first time that night, and stepped off the blade, and landed on the ground.

"You brought this war upon yourself." He took a menacing step closer. "If you're looking for someone to blame for the blood spilled tonight, Elder Ashe, blame your own foolish decision to align with Ferrowgate."

And he swung.

...

Ashe met it.

That was the part nobody would have predicted, least of all the men who had spent two days watching him fall apart in a council room — but Dorren Ashe had been the strongest magician in Black Tower for nineteen years before he was ever its administrator, and everything he had not been able to do to a machine, he could do to a man.

His wand came up. Something enormous and black came off the end of it.

The two things met in the middle of that courtyard and the middle of that courtyard stopped existing.

Alex went back through the front wall of the great hall, through the hall behind it, and through the far wall of that, and the entire front of the Black Tower headquarters came down on top of him in about four hundred tons of five-hundred-year-old stone.

The dust went up two hundred feet.

...

Ashe stood in the ruin of his own courtyard, breathing hard, watching the dust.

Something moved in it.

Alex walked out of the collapsed hall with the sword low at his side, brushing stone dust off his shoulder with the back of his hand, and stopped at the edge of the rubble.

He looked at Ashe with something that had not been in his face all night.

Interest.

"Seems like you're strong," Alex said.

Dorren Ashe leveled his wand once more, hand trembling with rage.

"You die here," he spat.

Alex let out an easy, mocking chuckle. "Perhaps. But by sunrise, the Black Tower won't even be a memory."