novelraw Chapter 456: Seven Wounds in the Sky (5)
Chapter 456: Seven Wounds in the Sky (5)
The wind changed direction, carrying the sounds of fighting from across the city like the thunder of elemental spells, the roars of monsters, and the distant screams of the survivors caught between the two forces. Jorik listened to it the way a commander listened to a battle report, reading the rhythm of the sounds for information that words couldn't carry.
For a moment, Jorik allowed himself to think that this might actually work. Not the food plan, not the slow infiltration that Mara had designed back then, and that Reidar had dismantled in an hour, but this. The portals.
The most important thing here was for the Aegis to retreat from the region, to leave the city.
"There is a chance that thing will come… Actually, it is not low either…"
Then a man entered and told Colt something. At that point, his expression changed.
"What?" Jorik said.
Colt lowered his hand. "Report from our people near the eastern district." He swallowed. "The mana dispersal from the first portal… it's being dealt with."
"Dealt with?" Jorik said. "How?"
"Reidar's summons," Colt said. "The ones near the collapsed portal—they didn't stop fighting after the portal closed. They spread out around the area and they're… doing something. Pushing the monsters back but also pushing the mana away somehow with wind spells. The concentration is decreasing faster than it should."
Jorik's grin died.
"The same thing is happening at the other portal site," Colt added. "Our watchers there said the mana concentration dropped by a third within minutes of the portal closing. "
Jorik stared at Colt for a moment without speaking.
That changed everything. If Reidar's forces could neutralize the mana dispersal at each portal site, the lighthouse effect Jorik had been counting on wouldn't happen, or at least it would be much less than he hoped.
The monsters outside the walls wouldn't be drawn in, and the chaos that was supposed to overwhelm even a fifty-thousand-strong army would fizzle out into nothing.
The grin was gone at that point and got replaced by something else.
Marlene spoke next. "If he closes the remaining five portals and contains the mana at each site, we lose our only advantage. His forces will be free to resume searching the city for our people."
"I know," Jorik said.
"Then what do we do?"
Jorik didn't answer immediately. He turned back to the city and watched the fighting at the largest portal, where the thickest concentration of monsters was still pouring through. The Demon-Lords and the other summons were holding the line there, but the portal was still open, and it would stay open as long as the magic circle was there.
Ten minutes. That was all the time the church had left in Kingsgate.
He turned to Colt and Marlene.
"Change of plans," Jorik said. "The evacuation continues. Get everyone who can move out before Reidar closes the remaining portals."
"And you?" Marlene asked.
"I'm going to see the Progenitor."
The two of them went still.
Both Colt and Marlene knew the Progenitor was in Kingsgate, and they knew roughly where he was.
But the Progenitor hadn't been part of any operational plan since they arrived in the city. He was there, yes, but he was a presence, not a participant. Something the church protected rather than used.
Colt opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Marlene was the one who asked. "You're going to make him intervene?"
"Yes."
Jorik knew the Progenitor well enough to understand how the man thought. The Progenitor had rejected the system when it was first offered to him, back when the apocalypse started and everyone else had been scrambling to survive by accepting the guardian system's rules. He had chosen a different path, one that gave him power without restrictions.
That choice had defined everything the church was. The Progenitor's level was unknown to most people, even within the church, but Jorik knew.
That meant that if the Progenitor won, Reidar's army would disappear and Kingsgate would fall to the church, but if Reidar won, the church would lose its founder and everything would collapse.
It was a gamble. The kind of gamble that Jorik hated because he couldn't control the outcome.
But the alternative was a certainty: without the Progenitor's intervention, the church's operation in Kingsgate was over. Reidar had made sure of that.
"Get the evacuation moving," Jorik said. "I'll be back within the hour."
He didn't wait for a response. He turned away from the edge of the rooftop and walked toward the staircase that led down into the building, while Colt and Marlene exchanged a look behind him that he didn't need to see to understand.
They were scared. Not of the monsters, not of Reidar's army, but of the Progenitor and what it meant if Jorik brought him into this fight.
Jorik understood their fear because he shared it. The Progenitor was not the man he had once been. The mutation had gone far—farther than Jorik's, farther than anyone's in the church except for those who had already crossed the line and lost themselves entirely.
But the progenitor was a symbol. It wasn't a man anymore anyway.
Jorik reached the ground floor and stepped into the alley behind the building. Two of his personal guards fell into step beside him without a word, and he moved through the streets of Kingsgate toward the location where the Progenitor waited—a basement beneath a building that the church had reinforced months ago, deep enough and shielded enough that even Reidar's summons wouldn't find it easily.
As he walked, Jorik felt the tremors from another portal collapsing in the distance. A third one was gone.
Four portals left. Maybe forty minutes before all of them were closed.
Jorik walked faster.