Chapter 143 Combined
The battle had been going for three hours when Azrael made the call.
The construct army was still coming, and the dead were still coming, and the seven kingdoms’ forces were holding, but holding was not winning, and everyone on the field knew the difference.
The front line had pushed back twice and given ground twice, and the soldiers were tired in the way soldiers got tired when the enemy did not get tired back.
Armageddon was still on the rise, watching all of it like a man with nowhere else to be.
Azrael pulled back from the line and shouted for the brothers, and they came, all seven of them, bloodied and breathing hard, and they formed a circle in the space behind the front line.
Lilith came with them.
“Together,” Azrael said. “Now.”
Nobody argued.
They had never done it before. There had been no time to practice, no ceremony, no preparation for what joining seven demon princes and one Seraph in a single combined push of power actually looked like in practice.
But the binding was in all of them now, the marks on their palms and the mark on Lilith’s wrist, and when Azrael reached out and took the hands of the brothers on either side of him, and the others followed suit, and Lilith took the hands offered to her on both sides, the binding answered immediately.
It was not subtle.
The light came off Azrael first, gold and bright, and it moved through the circle and picked up Cain’s fire, Mammon’s metal, Lucian’s perception, Asmodeus’s heat, Beelzebub’s consuming force, Belphegor’s shadow and stillness.
It moved through all of it.
And it moved through Lilith last.
What came out the other side was not seven separate powers combined, but something that had no name, because it had never existed before.
It went outward in a wave.
The constructs hit by it came apart, not broken, not damaged, simply undone, the force that held them together dissolving as something older and larger moved through them.
The dead armies stopped.
They didn't burn, they just stopped moving.
Whatever Armageddon had used to animate them could not hold against what was washing over the battlefield, and they went down where they stood, thousands of them across the entire northern approach.
The wave kept going until it reached the rise and the last of the constructs and the last of the dead were gone.
The battlefield was quiet for the first time since dawn.
The soldiers behind them were completely silent.
Lilith let go of the hands on either side of her and felt the absence of the combined power like stepping out of warmth into cold.
She looked at the brothers around her and saw the cost of it on all of them, the effort of it, not fatal, not breaking, but real.
Then someone in the front line shouted.
She looked up.
Malachi was moving through the field.
He had been there the whole time, she realized, moving through the back of Armageddon’s armies, staying out of the main battle, and now that the armies were gone, he was visible.
He was crossing the empty battlefield toward the rise where Armageddon stood, moving fast with his head down like a man trying to reach something before someone noticed him.
Belphegor noticed him.
He was moving before anyone said anything, stepping past the front line and onto the battlefield, his sword drawn, his shadow spreading across the ground around him.
Lilith watched him go and did not call him back.
Because she understood, because some debts had to be paid by the person who was owed them.
Malachi saw him coming and stopped.
He stood in the middle of the empty battlefield, surrounded by the evidence of the destroyed armies, and looked at Belphegor approaching.
Then he raised Infernus.
The weapon that had killed the Devil.
Divine bone and chains of betrayal, blessed by darkness, the only thing in any realm that could kill the being it had been made to kill.
Malachi held it like a man who knew he was out of options and had decided to use what he had.
Belphegor did not stop Walking.
The shadow expanded fully around him, the complete stillness of his power at its maximum extension, pressing against Malachi like something physical.
The air around him went cold and heavy.
Malachi felt it.
His movements slowed, his arm heavy, Infernus difficult to raise.
He pushed against it with whatever power he had.
And he was not nothing, he had served Armageddon for decades, and that service had given him strength, but he was not Belphegor on a battlefield with something personal driving every step.
Malachi threw Infernus.
Belphegor stepped aside.
The weapon passed close enough to catch the edge of his sleeve and struck the ground behind him.
Belphegor closed the remaining distance.
His sword found Malachi’s chest.
Malachi went down.
He looked up at Belphegor from the ground.
“You took everything from him,” Belphegor said.
His voice was the same as it always was, quiet, even.
“His sprite. His father. His trust.”
He looked at him without anger, which was somehow worse than anger would have been.
“This is for all of it.”
Malachi said nothing.
Belphegor’s sword came down once.
Malachi was still.
Belphegor stood over him for a moment.
Then he turned and walked back across the battlefield.
Nobody said anything to him when he returned to the line.
There was nothing to say.
The battlefield was empty now.
The armies were gone. Malachi was gone.
The soldiers of the seven kingdoms stood in the quiet aftermath and looked at what the combined power of the binding had done to Armageddon’s forces.
The silence had the particular quality of people who had just seen something they would be telling stories about for the rest of their lives.
Armageddon stepped off the rise.
He walked down the slope unhurried, alone now, his armies gone, his servant gone, and stepped onto the battlefield.
He stopped.
He looked at the seven brothers and Lilith standing behind the front line.
His silver eyes moved across all of them.
Then settled on her.
He had always been going to end up here.
Both of them had.
“You bound them,” he said.
His voice carried across the battlefield without effort, smooth, even, and deeply wrong in a way that never got easier to hear.
“I wondered if you would manage it in time.”
A pause.
“It doesn’t change what comes next.”
Lilith stepped forward.
“Yes,” she said, “it does.”