The earth trembled beneath the thundering footfalls of two stripped iron titans.
Without their bulky outer armor plates, the two quasi-Nascent Soul Blood-Puppets moved with terrifying, fluid speed. Their exposed skeletal frames glowed dull crimson, powered by burning corpse-cores that whistled like boiling steam engines. Long iron halberds dragged behind them, carving deep furrows through the scorched gravel road.
They had covered two miles of blasted fog corridor in less than ninety seconds.
Now, the towering iron doors of the inner Academy gate stood right before them.
Before those heavy cedar-and-iron doors stood three figures. Sera Thorne planted her boots into the flagstones, both hands locked around the shaft of her Storm-Pike. Beside her, Mina Vance stood with her Frost-Crescent Bow slung across her shoulder and twin ice-daggers leveled in her palms, her breath crystallizing in the sub-zero air.
Between the two young women stood Elder Sterling.
The old swordsman leaned heavily on his wooden cane, his green robes fluttering in the blast of demonic heat radiating up the pass. His face was pale, his cracked dantian throbbing with a dull, persistent ache. Yet his gray eyes were steady, fixed squarely on the approaching monstrosities.
A hundred yards up the terraced slope, outside Kaelen Vance’s tent, Barnaby Holt stood beside a waist-high brass pedestal.
