The Extra's Rise

I arrived on the road already moving.

Valeria flowed up my arm and across my ribs in a cool rush, plating my joints and shaping a blade into my hand. The Grey crown above my brow steadied. The Wings of Eclipse opened behind me—two flat pages of refusal that made places I wanted touch, touch.

I took in the field in one breath.

Fence bowing but honest. Ward choir shaking but singing. Marcus on the line, scales along his jaw, spear planted like a promise. Ian above, Domain tight around the choir instead of himself—good—horns out, eyes sharp. And the thing on the ridge: a basilisk the size of a fortress, miasma leaking from every seam, demigod weight in its stare.

'Not a threat,' I decided.

"Erebus," I said.

The Lich King stepped from a shadow that didn't belong to any wall and bowed his skull. I pointed at the map hovering in my mind.

"Open the Necropolis and give me everything. Reinforce the Iron Line. Anchor to their Aetherite. Priorities: wardhouses, choir, medevac, then kill anything with a salt ring."

"As you will," he said, voice like old paper.

The world went colder, then organized. Bone gates bloomed along the inner road. From them marched cohorts in plate made of polished death, shields engraved with lines of law. Wyrmbone cataphracts thundered out, rib-lances lowered. Ossuary guns unfolded like blooming flowers and locked onto hymn cannons with calm hunger. White-robed Redeemers of Ash carried lanterns that burned with gentle light and planted obelisks that drank miasma and gave nothing back.

The Southern soldiers flinched, then saw who the undead hit and stopped flinching.

"Luna," I said.

She was already moving, golden eyes wide, amethyst hair lifting in the war wind. Purelight pooled around her hands.

"Protect the warders and heal everyone you can," I told her.

"Kill it fast," she answered, not breaking stride.

I smiled.

Valeria made a tiny vibration against my wrist. Trajectory hints. Angles asking to be used.

I stepped.

God Flash: Absolute carried me from the road to the basilisk's snout inside the span of a drumbeat. The Wings folded one page over another; the world accepted that the two places touched. The monster opened its mouth, and a carpet of green-grey rolled down to eat color.

I set Valeria's tip to the stone between us.

Pond of Tranquility.

Calm rang out, the way a bell rings out. The wave came in and forgot what it was supposed to be. It folded into itself and slid past without touching anything I loved.

I moved. The basilisk's gaze swept—wrong, heavy, meant to make men brittle. The pages behind me turned with a lazy flip, and line of sight broke like a bad habit.

I hit it with my fist first.

Zero-Inch Punch into scale and bone. The shock didn't explode out. It collapsed in, then unrolled through the skull in a neat line that made nerves go quiet. The head reeled. Lines of miasma hiccuped and lost timing.

'You're using a demigod as a bag,' Valeria said in my head, amused.

'It volunteered,' I thought back.

The monster snapped. I was already elsewhere. Arc Hook Spiral took me around the horn; my elbow kissed the seam under it; the blade followed the kiss and made it matter. God Flash: Singularity turned my next step into a pinprick that opened behind the thought of "guard" and came out under the plate.

The basilisk's tail dropped like a verdict, trying to erase the road and everything on it. I didn't waste time pretending to block mountains. The Wings of Eclipse wrote a quick edit. The tail passed through a place I would not be in for another half-breath, crushed stone impressively, and learned nothing.

I let the Grey see for me. Soul Vision lit the beast in threads and knots. Currents of bad seen as strings strung to a rotten heart. Pillars of malice feeding the gaze. A cyst wrapped in scale inside the skull, pulsing with demigod power stolen and spoiled.

'There you are,' I thought.

The basilisk inhaled and blinked. Its beam cut across the pass. Men ducked. Ian's Domain flexed over the choir like a clear shell; the note held. Marcus pinned three anchors with a single thrust of Spear Unity; the fence steadied a fraction.

"Thank you," I said to both without turning.

Spectral Sword split me into choices. Not illusions. Options. Whichever one the eye picked, the edge waited there. The ridge rang with the high note of cut horn. Pieces hit the road and turned to dust.

Hollow Eclipse—pure power—fell like a hammer where the Wings handed me a nail. The blow drove the basilisk's head down a hand-width. It tried to heal wrong. The Grey pages refused the premise. The wrong wouldn't stick.

It hissed, and the hiss tried to become a command that made knees bend. Mythweaver's thread brushed my tongue.

'Your gaze petrifies the helpless,' I wrote lightly, inside myself. 'I am not that story.'

The command hit me as a polite suggestion and went nowhere.

I remembered Rachel's white hands shaking over me, back when the Second Calamity wore a city like a coat. Bones cracked inside my chest while she poured everything she had into keeping me upright for one more step. Every breath tasted like iron. Every cut fought back. We won by inches and prayer and a price I carried for months.

This wasn't that.

I was not alone now either, but I was free.

"Stellar Cascade," I murmured.

Shooting stars fell from the wrong angles. They came from pages that said the page was sky. Lances of light cut through miasma and stitched the basilisk's joints to pain. It tried to rise into them. It found me instead.

Valeria hummed as I shifted my grip. She shaped the edge just a little, to please the cut I was about to make.

"Marcus," I called, and tossed two fingers toward the left. "Pin."

He understood. Spear Unity wrote a straight line that the basilisk's chin tripped over. For a breath the head dipped exactly the way I had asked.

I slid under the horn and into the thin space behind the left eye.

World's Edge is greedy. It wants to divide false from true until there's nothing left but a single answer. I fed it, but not too much. A ring of Grey formed thin as a whisper.

"Inside this line, the cut will reach," I said to no one in particular, and brought Valeria down.

The road did not split. The sky did not scream. The world learned something small and important. The ring passed, and the cyst inside the skull met the edge built to take it apart.

The basilisk went still.

Miasma stuttered, then tried to flood. Redeemer obelisks drank harder. Luna's Purelight surged along the wall and turned black back to color wherever it could reach. Erebus's bone guns punched holes through hymn cannons in tidy arcs. Wyrmbone lines crashed through bone gliders and left clean ruins.

The basilisk's gaze twitched for me again. It was slower. It was tired. I set Valeria's tip to the stone once more. Pond of Tranquility answered. The beam turned to rain that forgot how to be rain.

It reared, finally angry. The tail rose to make an example of the Iron Line. I folded one page and stepped from road to ridge with no air between. God Flash put me on its spine. CQC made me a knife inside a throat the size of a house.

One-Inch Punch into the spine. Bones bigger than siege timbers hummed and then didn't. Flicker Palm turned a block into a slap that moved a head a meter to the right at exactly the wrong time for it. Ground Reversal Stomp into the base of the skull, using its lift to flip its own weight against its own plates. Zero-Inch again, because kindness is quick.

It came down, shaking the pass. The fence bowed and came back angry. The choir's note swelled like the sound a mother makes when a fever breaks.

I flipped the page once more and faced the basilisk's ruined eye.

"Sleep," I said, and cut.

World's Edge didn't need the whole ring this time. A thin slice through the core. Grey petals drifted from nowhere and landed on what fell out. They hid nothing and told the road the story was finished.

Silence rolled from ridge to sluice.

Then sound returned in the shape of men breathing, someone laughing too high and then choking on it, boots on stone, a warder sobbing into her neighbor's shoulder while still holding the note because she didn't know how to stop yet.

I exhaled. Valeria cooled against my hand, pleased with herself.

'Master, remaining threats at Ironveil and Blue Sluice are below nuisance,' Erebus reported in my mind, dry as bone. 'Redeemers request permission to sanctify the kill zone to prevent relapse.'

'Granted,' I thought. 'Work with the ward engineers. No spooking, no overreach.'

Luna landed at my side, Purelight still burning around her fingers. She looked up at the carcass—the part of it that hadn't already turned to dust and harmless stone—and then at me.

"You took your time," she said, trying not to smile and failing.

"I had to make it pretty," I said.

Her hand touched my wrist, quick and warm, and then she was gone again, sprinting toward a stretcher line where a rider with a broken leg was trying to stand on it.

Ian hovered above the choir, wings beating slow, face pale under soot. He caught my eye and saluted, small, professional, grateful. His Domain didn't drop until the last warder unclenched her hands and the conductor gave the signal to rest.

Marcus lowered his spear. The scales along his jaw retracted. He took one steadying breath and nodded once at the basilisk's ruin, once at Xaldris's halves, and once at me.

"Thank you," he said simply.

I rolled my shoulders. The Wings of Eclipse flexed, pages smoothing. Grey petals still fell here and there in lazy loops until the air remembered itself and stopped giving them reasons to exist.

"Third Calamity down," I said. "Let's clean up."

I looked at the ridge where the world had torn and felt for anything that still wanted to come through. The seam was closing, sulking. Good.

"Erebus, keep lanes open for medevac until the wardhouses hand you off. Valeria, run a check on Aetherite fatigue along this sector."

"Already started," Valeria purred. "Several posts want a nap."

"We'll give them one," I said.

I glanced at Luna one more time. She was smiling at a childlike private who had just realized he still had all his fingers. The sight hit a part of me nothing else could reach.

'All right,' I thought, and the Grey agreed.

I folded the pages, letting the Wings settle. The crown above my brow dimmed to a quiet ring. The sword in my hand stayed hungry, but polite.

The Iron Line breathed out as one.

We had a lot left to do. But the worst thing here was already dead.