Chapter 120: Golden Lion vs. Purified Water (3)

The force hit them like a wall and didn’t stop until the tunnel did.

Ebony came up coughing, grabbed the nearest edge of stone, and pulled herself out of the current with one arm while the other caught Kanary by the back of her jacket.

The water was filthy. She didn’t think about it. She thought about it the moment she was out, standing on a wide circular floor with the channel flowing around the perimeter in a slow, stinking ring before disappearing into a pipe so large she could have walked into it standing straight.

The chamber was enormous — where several drainage tunnels converged into one point, with a domed ceiling that trapped the sound and sent it back distorted, and stone walls blackened by decades of residue.

The kind of place that existed in every large city and that nobody, under any circumstances, chose to visit.

Ebony looked at Kanary, who was on her hands and knees on the stone floor, wringing water from her hair with a grimace that said everything about how she felt about the situation.

"Are you hurt?"

"I’m covered in sewer water." Kanary got to her feet without taking the hand Ebony hadn’t offered. "That’s worse than being hurt."

"Good. Then you can be disgusted later." Ebony scanned the space — the tunnels converging above, the water flowing at the edges, the central floor, the distances. "(Good terrain for water. Bad terrain for me right now.)" She rolled her shoulder, testing it. The cut had closed but the joint still complained. "We need to figure out which direction leads out before—"

"Before he finds us." Kanary finished the sentence with the calm of someone who has already processed the most unpleasant part. "That wouldn’t have happened if you’d let me maintain the water pressure from the front instead of pushing me to the side."

Ebony looked at her. "That wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t decided mid-combat that this was a good time to give tactical advice."

"I was trying to coordinate."

"You were trying to improvise."

"Which is what you were doing."

The silence that followed was brief and productive in the way that silences are when both parties in an argument have just realized they’re both right and neither of them has time to feel good about it. Ebony exhaled through her nose and let it go.

"Fine. We’re both bad at working together. We’ll solve that problem later, if there is a later."

"Encouraging." Kanary wrung out her sleeve and looked around the chamber the same way Ebony had, studying it with a competence that was easy to underestimate. "Where are the others? The elf and the woman with the copies."

"Not coming." Ebony said it without softening it, because softening it wouldn’t have changed what it meant. "Veronica used everything she had left to create the doubles that covered us during the ceremony. Not a fraction — everything. She’s not moving under her own power right now." A pause. "And Lucian was already outside the city before this started. He’s negotiating with a merchant he knows, trying to arrange transport for all of us. Far from here, and far from this country if possible."

Kanary took a moment with that. Not a long moment, but a real one. "She nearly died," she said. It wasn’t a question.

"She nearly died."

Another moment. Then Kanary straightened and let it settle into whatever place people put things they can’t do anything about right now. "You said all of us. That means there’s someone else."

"Yes." Ebony hesitated for exactly one second — not from reluctance, but from the specific frustration of someone who has just remembered a variable they should have resolved and didn’t. "There’s a third member of our group. The youngest. He was supposed to be waiting at the extraction point as a contingency — in case something went wrong and we needed a way out that didn’t depend on the plan working."

Kanary waited.

"He’s not there." Ebony’s jaw set. "I don’t know where he is. He should have been in position two hours ago and he’s nowhere, which means either something happened to him, or—"

"Or?"

"(Or the idiot got lost, fell asleep somewhere, or decided to do something completely different without telling anyone.)" "—or he made his own decisions, which would also be consistent with his character." She said it with the specific irritation of someone who cannot fully rule out the second option even while worrying about the first. "Dark hair. Twin axes. Doesn’t know what standing still looks like. You might have seen him — he was watching you at the ceremony."

Kanary’s expression shifted in a way that was small and immediate. "The one who kept staring at my—"

"Yes." Ebony cut her off before she had to finish. "That one."

Kanary blinked. Then, with the tone of someone who has more pressing concerns but cannot entirely suppress the other reaction: "That’s your backup plan."

"He’s effective in a fight. The other things are a separate conversation." Ebony turned toward the largest of the converging tunnels, calculating. "Right now the problem is that he was our safety net and he’s—"

The sound came from above.

Not from the tunnels at their level. From the pipe they’d been carried through — the opening in the upper wall, three or four meters off the floor, dark and dripping, with the current still running steadily out of it. Steady footsteps on stone, and then the unmistakable quality of someone who has stopped walking because they’ve already arrived.

Regulus dropped from the opening without announcing it.

He landed on the chamber floor with the ease of someone who had calculated the drop in the two seconds it took to reach it, absorbing the impact without losing any of the composure he’d carried through the entire night. The golden energy moved along his arms with that patient, compressed quality it had taken on since the tunnel — not loose, not scattered, but tightly held, ready.

He looked at both of them. Then at the chamber around them, with that cataloging attention that processed information the way someone might review a map before deciding which direction to move.

"Interesting space." He said it with the same quiet tone as always, a tone that had no performance in it, only observation. "I can see why you ended up here." He moved his hand to the hilt of the sword at his side and drew it slowly, the blade catching what little light reached the chamber and holding it. "I was going to let the current do part of the work, but you’re more resilient than I gave you credit for."

The sword pointed toward Kanary first. Then, without hurry, toward Ebony. Then back to Kanary.

"(Mana.)" Ebony ran the count without looking away from him. "(Less than half. The heals cost more than I wanted. A sustained fight is a problem. A short one might not be — but Regulus doesn’t do short fights unless he’s already won.)"

She raised her fists. The purification fire appeared at her knuckles, quieter than before — still green at the core, still precise, but with a steadiness that required more attention to maintain than it had an hour ago.

Regulus noticed. Of course he noticed.

Kanary stepped forward.

Not in front of Ebony. Not behind her. Beside her — and then one step ahead, which was a different thing entirely, and the expression she carried into that step wasn’t bravado or impulse but the decision of someone who has identified the only thing they can actually contribute here and intends to contribute it.

She opened both hands.

"{{Invocation: Guardians of the Rivers}}"

The water along the chamber’s perimeter responded immediately. It didn’t splash or surge — it rose with a deliberateness that had intention behind it, pulling itself into two shapes that built upward from the surface of the channel until they stood at full height on either side of Kanary. Human in form, armored in water so compressed it had taken on the opacity and weight of stone — plates that moved with the figures but held their shape, pauldrons and bracers of solidified current, helmets of liquid sealed so tightly they reflected the dim light of the chamber like metal. Each held a spear, shaft and point shaped from the same dense water, the kind of weight that left marks in stone when it struck.

They positioned themselves at her flanks with the quiet readiness of things that exist only to be used in exactly this moment.

Regulus studied them for a moment. Then he did what he always did, which was to acknowledge the thing in front of him honestly, without false dismissal or overcalculation.

He started to say something.

He didn’t finish it.

The arrow of water came from Kanary’s open palm without a formal cast, compact and fast, aimed at his face. He moved — and moved well, turning his head to the side so the shot passed close enough that the edge of it opened a line across his cheek. A thin line. It bled immediately, small and bright, the first blood anyone had drawn from him tonight.

He touched it with two fingers. Looked at them.

"Will you listen now?" Kanary’s voice was steady in the way a drawn bow is steady — not calm, not relaxed, but held. "You came down here looking for an easy ending. Look around you." The water in the channel responded to the shift in her attention, moving with more speed along the perimeter, the Guardians adjusting their positions to close the angles. "You’re surrounded by water. Every drop in this chamber answers to me. You came down here to trap us, and instead you’re standing in the middle of my territory."

A pause.

"You’re not hunting us down here. You’re trapped with me."

Regulus looked at her for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved in something that was adjacent to a smile but not quite one — the expression of someone who has just been handed an answer they were waiting to confirm.

He raised his free hand to one side, palm open, and the golden energy left it without a command.

"{{Invocation: Lion of the Dawn}}"

The light that built itself from that energy was different from the twin lions in the tunnel. Those had been substantial, present, built to fill space and create pressure. This one built itself with a precision that the others hadn’t had — slower in its construction, denser in its result, every detail of the form deliberate, from the lines of the mane to the weight of the paws to the density of light packed into the chest. When it finished forming, it stood in the chamber and the chamber felt smaller.

"Weak," Regulus said, and the word wasn’t contempt — it was the specific disappointment of someone who expected better and didn’t find it. "Both of you. Cornered in a sewer, running out of options, out of allies, out of time." He lifted the sword again, easy in his grip. "This ends the same way it was always going to end. The only question was where."

The Guardians moved first. They didn’t charge — they pressed, spear tips forward, forcing Regulus into a narrower space between the threat in front and the lion at his flank. The strategy was sound. The lion destroyed one Guardian’s spear with a single swipe of its paw, stone-dense water shattering on contact with the compressed light, and the chamber shook with the impact.

The second Guardian drove its spear into the floor where Regulus had been a fraction of a second before. The mark it left was deep — a crack that ran half a meter through the stone, the kind of force that made its own argument.

Regulus’s sword was already moving. The cuts came low, then high, forcing Kanary to redirect the Guardians faster than she could sustain the pressure, and with each redirect the form of the water figures lost a degree of density, the compressed liquid giving slightly at the joints where the concentration was hardest to maintain.

The lion’s claws found the second Guardian’s torso. What had been solid water became water again, a splash that hit the stone floor and ran toward the channel, and Kanary pulled it back into something functional with a speed that cost her focus she needed elsewhere.

Ebony closed the distance.

She got close enough to matter — close enough that the purification fire at her knuckles forced Regulus to account for it, to build the space between them into his movement instead of ignoring it the way distance had let him ignore it in the tunnel. She landed one hit on his forearm, partial contact, the fire leaving a mark in the fabric that spread and then stopped as he pulled back.

"(Mana.)" The count was worse now. "(Don’t think about it.)"

He answered with a kick that she took on her left side, force enough to lift her off the floor, and the arc she traveled was short but uncontrolled — she hit the channel at the chamber’s edge and went in, waist deep this time, the cold and the smell and the weight of wet clothing hitting all at once. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

She got out faster than was comfortable.

Regulus had Kanary by the throat by the time Ebony’s feet were back on stone. Not with the lion’s claws, not with the sword — with his hand, direct and final, lifting her enough that her footing was uncertain, and the Guardians had dissolved back into ordinary water when his grip closed because maintaining them required exactly the concentration that being grabbed by the throat removes.

He held her there and looked at her with the expression of someone reading the last page of a problem they’ve been working through all evening.

"I’ll admit the initiative was impressive." He said it without sarcasm, which was worse than if he’d been sarcastic. "For a city governor’s daughter who spent most of the last week in bed, you fought considerably better than—"

Something fell from above.

Not from the converging tunnels. From the domed ceiling of the chamber — from a maintenance grate set into the stone that nobody in the room had thought to look at, because looking up when you’re fighting is a luxury, and the grate had been silent until the exact moment it wasn’t.

A body dropped through it.

The axe came down with both hands on the grip, the blade catching the light from the golden lion for exactly one instant before it completed its arc — and the arc ended at Regulus’s right arm, just below the shoulder, with the specific terrible sound of something that has done what it was swung to do.

Regulus released Kanary.

He had no choice.

The arm that had been holding her was no longer attached to the rest of him.

The figure landed in a crouch between Kanary and Regulus, one knee on the stone, axe still in hand, and took approximately one second to assess the situation before straightening up and turning toward the prince with the expression of someone who has just arrived at a party and is deciding how they feel about it.

Dark hair. Twin axes — the second one still on his back. A grin that had no business being as wide as it was given everything around them.

"Hey." Daniel looked at Regulus, then at the arm on the floor, then back at Regulus. "Don’t mess with her." A pause. "I saw her first."