Now that reinforcements had arrived and Jumo’s team had the backup they needed, Edge could focus on finishing off the strike leaders without having to worry about his friends.

  His body was still sore from the scalding steam bath, but his mobility had been restored, and the pain was gradually fading away as Regeneration worked its magic. He set his sights on Blaze, using Shadow Play to circle around to the firebug’s blind side while scanning for the landshark out of the corner of his eyes.

  Edge was getting ready to make his move when he spotted something that set alarm bells ringing inside his mind. While Blaze was still firing jets of flame, he’d stopped unleashing the combos that made his magic turn gold. That would have been a promising sign that the man was running out of magicytes if it wasn’t for the intense weaves of mana his reactor was pumping out.

  When Edge followed the fiery flows, he spotted a dense concentration of energy centered on the spot where Trapper, Alice, and Lilly were standing. When he realized what he was looking at, adrenaline raced through his veins like a flash flood. It’s that Explosion spell he’s been using, but way bigger than any other the others.

  After having his magic countered time and again, the firebug was trying to win the fight through trickery rather than raw power. He was keeping the defenders of Puppet Town distracted with Fireballs and Flamethrowers, preventing them from noticing the spell he was getting ready to unleash on their position.

  “Watch out!” Edge yelled, abandoning stealth in a desperate attempt to save his friends. “A massive Explosion is centered on Trapper!” Fortunately, she heard him—eyes widening when she noticed the pool of volatile mana congealing between her boots.

  Her team fell back while preparing countermeasures, but the moment Blaze realized they’d seen through his ruse, he activated the skill. The battlefield disappeared as an enormous eruption ensued—powerful enough to knock him down from a considerable distance away.

  In that moment, Edge was terrified that his friends were dead. But when the night breeze blew the smoke away a few seconds later, they were still in one piece. They had managed to raise some defenses in the nick of time, although their efforts had only partially protected them from the blast. Alice and Lillian looked shaken but uninjured, but Trapper’s body was blackened, and half her hair had been burnt away.

  Blaze let out a furious shriek, turning to face Edge with vengeance in his eyes. “You’ll regret that!” He began an endless volley of flame as he finished his sentence—Fireballs falling like rain.

  Edge manifested Foebinder and pulled his scapula shield out his vault, handing it to the chain and then dousing them both with some water from Repel. He dodged like a man possessed, slipping through the searing spells as Blaze howled in rage. Fortunately, the Gardener’s shield boasted significant elemental resistance, and the handful of hits Foebinder blocked weren’t sufficient to destroy the durable bone.

  Even still, he was in danger of being overwhelmed, and one wrong move would be his last. Just when he didn’t think he could withstand any more, he heard the elite cry out in surprise. He turned in time to watch a small, sky-blue device fly straight into the firebug’s face as Riller used his Scout Drone in a way Edge hadn’t considered before.

  Blaze destroyed the drone a few seconds later, but it had bought him enough time to open some distance and regain his balance… at which point he realized he’d lost track of the shark during the chaotic exchange.

  Edge couldn’t detect Tiburón when he was swimming below the soil until the moment he began to surface. However, by this point, had had begun to get a sense of the man’s tendencies and combat style, which were aggressive and direct while consumed by Blood Frenzy.

  Thus, he had a hunch the elite was coming for Trapper, who was injured and wouldn’t be able to dodge the man’s lightning-quick ambushes anymore, even if she knew they were coming. Riller, Byron, Lilly, and Alice were peppering Blaze with ranged attacks to keep him distracted, which meant Edge had a chance to reach Trapper before it was too late.

  He began sprinting toward her position—dismayed by how the hunter was staggering around instead of displaying her usual agility. Shit. That blast must have dazed her. I have to hurry.

  Edge pressed his body into a burst of speed, putting away his shield so Foebinder could pull the crew leader out of the way the moment it was in range. When he noticed a line of displaced soil heading straight toward her, he knew deep in his bones he wasn’t going to make it in time—that before he had time to cry out a warning, the elite would end his friend’s life in a fountain of gore.

  However, both Tiburón and Edge had underestimated Trapper—one of the most accomplished hunters in Puppet Town and a woman who was no stranger to the mindset of a predator.

  In fact, she was counting on it.

  Trapper had known the shark would be drawn toward the motion of wounded prey, and just as Tiburón lived up to his name, Trapper lived up to her own.

  Her daze was a ruse, and she’d been tracking the elite’s approach with Sense Vibrations the entire time, waiting for the right moment to make her move. The second Tiburón sped up and began his final approach, the hunter ignited her core and cast her most powerful spell.

  Spreading darkness stained the soil and her boots started to sink as Quagmire took hold—centered on her position. The shapeshifting jailbird had been so focused on devouring Trapper that he hadn’t noticed her mana saturating the ash-covered earth. He swam into the altered ground at full speed, immersing himself within the semisolid substance before he knew it was there.

  While the elite could breathe and swim in dirt, his skills offered him no such advantage in navigating waterlogged quicksand. One way or another, Tiburón would find a way to escape Trapper’s Quagmire before long—time that Edge had no intention of giving him.

  By that point, he had closed the distance, sending Foebinder reaching out with his left hand while conjuring an iceblade in his right. When he felt the living links wrap around Trapper’s waist, he dug in his heels and retracted the chain, pulling the hunter out of the muck and onto dry land. She grinned as he ran past. “I knew you would figure it out.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Edge came to a skidding stop and dipped his iceblade into the quicksand while flaring Elemental Blade as hard as he could. Once again, he could feel the avatar in his village lending its aid. Working together, they froze the pool within a couple of seconds and entombed Tiburón inside.

  He doubted it would be enough to kill the elite warrior, but enduring the extreme cold had to be taking its toll. More critically, it gave the man who was the shark’s natural enemy time to reach Edge’s side. While the rest of the team kept Blaze busy and Violet’s squad prevented the strike leaders’ crews from repositioning, Earl’s apprentice made his move.

  By this point, an intense flow of mana was streaming out of Able’s core, conducting through his palms to coat his colossal hammer in a shimmering mantle of might. Edge thought the elite peacekeeper was about to activate a powerful combo, but the man was just getting started. His eyebrows shot up when Able added a third skill to the mix—the first time he’d witnessed anyone execute a triple combo other than himself.

  The move drained Able’s reservoir to the dregs, but not before the peacekeeper unleashed one of the strongest attacks Edge had ever seen. His hammer came down like a meteor strike, creating a Shockwave so intense that it knocked everyone within a hundred yards to their knees.

  Cataclysmic force shattered the sand-studded ice, reverberating throughout Tiburón’s bound body like the fury of stone personified. Shaken out of his Blood Frenzy by the subzero chill, abrupt imprisonment, and extreme pain, the shark screamed as the impact from Able’s combo flung him out of the ground and into the air.

  The Claw’s limbs were twisted at unnatural angles, and he’d clearly suffered significant damage. It seemed that being unable to feed for the last few minutes had been sufficient to drain his energetic reserves, and Regeneration was healing him slower than before since he couldn’t afford to flare it.

  That being said, the elite warrior known as landshark was one tough bastard.

  Tiburón was still coming, walking on broken legs that were slowly pulling themselves back together. His body was so durable that he could shrug off normal attacks, which meant if Edge’s team wanted to kill him, they needed to land some heavy hits to lay the strike leader low.

  In time with his thought, Lilly appeared in front of Tiburón, using Vanish to close the distance while preparing to make her move. Her magitech boltcaster already had a round in the chamber, which was in the process of being saturated with the shadowkiller’s magic as she activated her strongest skill.

  She fired an Assassin’s Vortex that caught the convict in the chest, shattering ribs and leaving a concave wound in the shape of a whirlpool. The shark charged anyway and almost caught her, but Lillian leapt back while firing Scattershot after Scattershot from point-blank range. The repeated blasts pumped hundreds of miniature bolts into his body with every beat of her heart, peeling away the man’s skin and muscle layer by layer.

  Even that wasn’t enough to end the fight. But her barrage was rapidly burning through his dwindling reserves of mana. Any second, she would dig deep enough to hit something critical.

  However, the elite had one last card to play. He used a skill Edge had never seen before, which consumed his vital force and converted it into mana, trading months of his lifespan to weather the assault. His wounds sealed shut as he rushed for Lilly, who had been caught off guard by the dramatic turnaround.

  Just before Tiburón caught her, a lance sliced into his back and a red rope closed around his ankle, as Byron—the shadowkiller who had gone by Snake in the Savage Garden—joined the fight.

  He finished drawing the last line of Death Mark as the rope snapped, transferring a torrent of kinetic energy into the convict’s body. The disabling skill sapped the power from his limbs, and Byron’s lance was certain to be coated in a potent poison.

  Tiburón still had some fight left in him, but he was weaker than ever, and Trapper, Lilly, and Byron seemed to have the situation in hand.

  Edge turned his attention to Blaze, who was trying to slip Fireballs past Able’s walls of stone. Alice and Riller were doing their best to keep the man off balance with a hail of arrows, along with some of the other stage-two warriors and the hunters up in the towers.

  Unfortunately, Edge had been so focused on the strike leaders that he hadn’t noticed when a member of Yussuf’s crew broke away from the pack and started heading his way.

  By the time he spotted the shadow of someone’s body moving through the magelights, he was already under attack. He turned while raising his iceblade to block, but even with his insane Speed, he wasn’t going to make it in time.

  The jailbird’s sword was coming down, angled to chop into the side of his neck. He didn’t have time to turn into shadows, so he activated Harden while getting ready to flare Regeneration, knowing there was a good chance that he was about to take an incapacitating wound or even lose his head.

  Diamond scales started spreading across his skin, but it was too little too late.

  A fraction of a heartbeat before the weapon struck true, Sakura materialized beside him. She had her short sword extended to catch the Claw’s blade, and though she didn’t have the Power to block the strike, her weapon intercepted the jailbird’s killing tool.

  The impact reverberated throughout Edge’s body as the flat of Sakura’s sword was driven into the side of his neck, cracking his vertebrae but saving his spine.

  She was holding a magical manifestation in her other hand, which looked like a rapier made from iridescent mana. She lashed out, and it passed straight through the jailbird’s body and armor like they weren’t even there. The skill didn’t leave a visible cut, but it must have been a deadly attack, because the man dropped bonelessly to the soil. Half a heartbeat later, Sakura stabbed him through the eye to finish him off. “Be careful when you face Yussuf. Lore-Weaver is convinced that he hasn’t revealed his true power.”

  “Thanks.” As that word faded from the air, she Darted to safety, hiding until another opportunity to land a surprise attack revealed itself. She’s pretty strong for someone who prefers to avoid combat. Edge shook his head to clear his mind and raced to rejoin the fight.

  That was when the defenders on the wall started shouting. When he looked to where they were pointing, he let out a sigh of relief. The expedition’s stage-one warriors had arrived and were ready to join the fight.

  Those brave women and men had a score to settle with the prisoners who had ambushed them in the Savage Garden, then besieged them for weeks beneath the Sweltering Green. They had learned a great deal about how the Claws fought during those desperate days, and it was time to pay the convicts back for the lives they had stolen.

  Riller was still in the tower, providing covering fire while issuing orders using flag and flare codes. With Dialla’s assistance, he had assumed command of the defense. The resourceful young hunter ordered Puppet Town’s reinforcements to avoid the battle brewing between the elites and attack the jailbirds milling around the base of the wall.

  Over the last few minutes, the defenders fighting on the ramparts had begun losing ground and were in danger of being overrun. That all changed when a squad of hunters and peacekeepers fell upon the Claws from behind. Instead of overwhelming a rapidly faltering resistance while waiting to climb to the walkway above, they were under attack from fresh troops with their backs against the wall.

  When the uncored militia and hunters inside the settlement realized what was happening, they advanced and hit the jailbirds on the walkway with everything they had, risking their lives to assist their allies fighting atop the ramparts.

  The defenders still had to deal with a handful of prisoners who were already inside, but the tide of war had turned, and now the Claws were in danger of being overwhelmed.

  Yussuf’s crew was forced to deal with the emerging threat instead of supporting their leader. They split up—half moving toward the hunters assaulting the rear of the army while the rest ran to assist the convicts trapped against the wall.

  The stage-two warriors were a deadly threat, but being forced to reposition had created a valuable opportunity as well, leaving their warlord more vulnerable than at any other point in the war.

  In that moment, Edge understood that the outcome of the conflict had been reduced to a single variable—which elites were still standing when the dust settled.