***
Batarel skirted the inside track of the stadium and watched the screens, trying to get a better glimpse of Phillip. But the jumbotrons wouldn’t budge from their focus on Lucifer and Elandril.
Phillip sat to Elandril’s left on a raised dais at the center of the Coliseum, but far enough away that he was mostly out of the views. Batarel’s other nephew, Michael, sat closer to Elandril’s right. Most of Phillip was obscured, except for a hand covering his mouth and eyes dancing back and forth between the brothers in front of him. Batarel tried to nod to Phillip to put him at ease, but the ambassador only stood up straighter.
As he continued to skim the walls, Batarel prepped a zip-line back to the Chaos Primal and aimed it at Phillip. With just a flick of his wrist, the zip-line would gain a threshold into this universe, and an immense fountain of pure energy would be at the wizard’s disposal for as long as he could keep the portal open.
In front of the royal platform were hundreds of ornately decorated seats, and there wasn’t an empty cushion in sight. Batarel watched as Lucifer strode confidently down the aisle with wings flaring, and he smiled as the jumbotrons showed his apprentice Sariel apologizing exaggeratedly after he knocked over several of the Chaos assassins with his wings. Anne followed closely behind the brothers with hands over her knives. The jumbotrons seemed to avoid her white-masked face; apparently, the announcers didn’t find her as interesting.
The assassins shifted in their seats as the demon princes bowed low to Elandril, just twenty feet from the pavilion, but Lucifer didn’t appear to take notice. He was distracted by a trunk that rose up from an opening in the floor, directly in front of Elandril.
Batarel used magic to peer into the platform and marveled at the marriage of technology and automated magic hidden there. He couldn’t be certain at this distance, without playing with the gadgets, but it looked like the wood, cloth and steel of the dais hid a summoning machine—a device that was only untested ancient theory in the Chaos University Library. And yet here it was fully operational in the Elven Realm. What could be so important that it would need summoning just before a blood bath? He looked into the box and found objects that were far more familiar to him, and certainly more recognizable to Sariel and Lucifer.
The jumbotrons circled Lucifer and his brother, and the elves around the stadium grew restless as the awkward silence continued. Now would have been a perfect opportunity to tell the crowd why the princes were here.
“Lucifer needs his voice,” Sariel whispered to Batarel over a direct magical link.
Batarel nodded as he pinched the zip-line and molded an amplification charm from a small amount of raw energy. With his other hand, he pushed the invisible, shaped magic on a thread to Lucifer. As his nephew received the charm, he straightened his posture and addressed the new king.
“We, the rightful rulers of Chaos, intend to repay our debt to you,” Lucifer said, his voice booming over the screams of hundreds of thousands of elven spectators.
“You owe me nothing,” Elandril said.
“Then we will repay your immortal citizens for our asylum within this great universe,” Lucifer said, “by declaring our official friendship to the Elven Realm.”
A dozen Chaos assassins fell out of their chairs, and Lord Phillip let out a series of muffled coughs.
“And how would you repay this debt you claim to owe us?” Elandril asked, raising his voice as well, though it was mostly unnecessary as the crowd had silenced itself.
“The same way we seem to repay all of our debts here, Great King,” Sariel replied.
“We were thinking of another Certamen,” Lucifer added, “but in a style more fitting with Chaos traditions.”
“I see,” Elandril said. “To the death, I presume?”
“To the death,” Lucifer agreed.
“Deal.”
Two dark red wing tendrils shot down the aisle from Lucifer’s back, exploding the chest in front of the King into a thousand pieces and retrieving Lucifer’s two six-foot zinanbar blades in blurring speed. The crowd roared its approval as fireworks lit up the sky overhead and a magical barrier raised itself above the wall behind Batarel.
Sariel retrieved his own various daggers with his purple wings from the remnants of their former receptacle, and Anne shadowed him as Lucifer turned the other way. Hundreds of elves and ambassadors from Order toppled over rows of chairs as they exited the stadium, and behind them, the demon assassins kicked over their seats and spread out to encircle the princes.
Above him, Batarel could hear bookies taking bets on whether or not the Chaos princes would survive the fight with the assassins. Batarel smiled. Chaos assassins were trained in the art of surprise. Frontal assaults were not their forte. Phillip was the real problem. Batarel readied his zip-line to the pattern. He wouldn’t open it unless Phillip tried to tip the scales.
Lucifer whirled his swords as he paced in front of Eranos’s demons. “I offer an official peace treaty to Elandril and this universe. You demon assassins will not have the Elven King’s head today. Instead of his head, I will offer you yours. Peace welcomes you at the exits behind you, and death waits just underneath you. Follow the pretender or follow me. The choice is yours.”
A single knife arced wide of Lucifer and flipped end-to-end across the dirt and grass. The bolder assassins placed their hands over their throwing blades, and the other half of the demons eyed each other and the exits.
“So be it!” Lucifer yelled. “Death it is!”
The Crown Prince turned into a tornado of wings and blades as he moved directly toward the demons with weapons drawn. As they stumbled backward, apparently trying to find a weak point to throw their knives at, Lucifer sent wings at them and pulled them to him, eviscerating them cleanly and throwing their bloody remnants at the others.
Several fell within the first minute, and another half a dozen were taken out of the fight temporarily by slippery torsos and legs. Lucifer pinned others down with his wings like a Chaos Army striker before sliding a blade into their bellies and adding their bodies to his carnage.
“Ten Chaos champions are down,” the announcer yelled excitedly over the loudspeakers.
“Come on, Anne!” Sariel said. “He’s already got a lead!”
Batarel scooted down the wall as he switched between watching Phillip and his nephew and adopted daughter. He opened up a line of communication to Phillip.
“It’s over, Phillip. Let’s return to the Council.”
“You first,” Phillip sent back before closing the channel.
Batarel shook his head. He wanted so badly to fire a warning shot over Phillip’s head, but that would be foolish. Even if he wasn’t a combat warlock, Phillip was still a dangerous wizard. He wouldn’t be able to compete with Batarel for long, but he could easily harm the Kadingirs in the center of the arena.
The floor of the Coliseum shook as hedges began to rise from the ground. Assassins slipped over bloody remains and vines, and bunched together as they ran down the Certamen corridors in abject confusion.
On the jumbotrons, Batarel watched Sariel apparate into small groups of assassins and drive his short blades into their backs and sides as Anne marched directly at them. When they frantically retreated from Sariel’s surprise attacks, they ran right into her knives. Death was everywhere for Eranos’s assassins—just as Lucifer had promised.
The pavilion rose with the mountain peak. Michael looked even more nervous than Phillip, but Elandril stared straight ahead, betraying only a smirk.
Lucifer jumped atop a hedge in the center of the maze and stalked the assassins until he had an opportunity to surprise them from above.
“Forty Eranos champions remain,” the announcer called. “It’s a slaughter, folks.”
And then Phillip was gone from the pavilion. Batarel looked to the jumbotrons, but they were tracking Lucifer, Sariel, and Anne. He readied his zip-line as his eyes searched the maze and the stands. Phillip must have apparated. Maybe they would be luc
ky. Maybe Phillip had gone back to Chaos.
A whooshing noise answered that question once and for all.
High above the pavilion, Lord Phillip was unleashing hell. A bolt of pure chaos was ripping through hedges and careening toward Lucifer.
“A new challenger appears!” the announcer clapped into a microphone. “Just look at that concentrated malice, ladies and gentlemen!”
Batarel quickly pinched the zip-line and morphed a charm to his own throat. “To me, children! To me!”
He could see Lucifer pivot on a hedge and look first to Batarel and then to the massive channeled bolt that was moving toward him from the pavilion. Lucifer jumped from the hedge and punched into the ground with his wings, sending him flying toward Batarel. The jumbotrons focused in on the demon assassins, who were getting the hang of the maze and launching themselves in pursuit.
Batarel had an idea. Phillip was no doubt shielding himself, but to maintain a primal bolt that big from this far out would require a far greater amount of concentration. He couldn’t stop the bolt, but he might be able to knock it off course for a moment.
Batarel opened the zip-line and unleashed a concentrated burst at Phillip’s shoulder. Phillip rotated sideways, causing the bolt to veer wildly up the slope and into Lucifer’s pursuers. Airborne and vulnerable, the frontrunners perished instantly in the chaos. The ones that didn’t disintegrate screamed and grounded themselves back to the mountain before flinging their bodies into the hedges.
“Anne, Sariel!” Lucifer yelled through his charm. “Get out of there!”
Sariel apparated to the base of the mountain, within full view of Batarel, but Anne didn’t emerge for over a minute. Behind her, the channeled spell devoured dirt, leaves, and rock, leaving a twenty-foot-wide path of destruction down the mountain.
That bolt wasn’t going away. They needed a shield and quick, but they were too remote and too spread apart for Batarel to conjure something adequate to protect them from pure chaos.
“Hurry, my children!” Batarel screamed. “Hurry! To me!”
He opened the channel back to the Chaos Primal and shaped a bubble fifty yards in front of him. Lucifer was the first to reach it. He turned around and watched his brother apparate just in front of and then inside the bubble. Batarel walked toward the shield, but it needed to be bigger. He opened the zip-line more and channeled additional energy into it. The purple shield expanded, but he had to stop in his tracks to maintain it. The bubble contracted with every step he took.
He set his feet and yelled into the roar of the coming bolt. “Tell me when Anne is clear.”
“Thirty feet,” Sariel said. “Twenty feet.”
Batarel was still exposed. He tried to take another step, but the shield wavered.
“Tell me when she is inside!”
“The bolt is gaining momentum, Uncle!” Lucifer said.
He was right. Phillip had a good handle on the source now. Anne wasn’t going to make it. Batarel pushed the shield and Lucifer and Sariel along with it.
“She’s in!” Sariel yelled.
Batarel waited for a second before releasing the shield, but it was a second too long. The bolt scorched its way to him, and as he dove out of the way, he felt sharp pains throughout his body. His fingers dug into the soft ground around him, but his left arm was unresponsive. He tried to kick but the pain was too unbearable.
He screamed, but nothing came out, and through the tears, his eyes searched around the stadium for the bolt. He tried to yell at Anne as she ran toward him, but again, there was no sound. Only pain. He pushed at the dirt, but his left arm just wouldn’t comply. He flipped over onto his back to check what he was caught on, but there was nothing there. He lifted his head from the ground and reached down to his belt to pull himself up, but there was no belt.
The pain was agonizing, but as his fingers worked their way over the cauterized wounds that marked where his abdomen used to be, the realization was worse. He closed his eyes and struck at the ground with his lone fist. A wizard was loose in the arena, and his kids were without a magical protector. He heard Lucifer’s footsteps before he saw them, and he panicked as he realized, through the pain, that they weren’t coming toward him. Lucifer was heading back up the mountain.