by Chloe Cullen
Ione grinned wickedly. “Excellent.”
When they reached the Compound gates again, the two parties, Legion and Shadow Legion on either side of the gates were now talking to each other.
The four of them moved forwards, weapons ready in their hands. There were no more than ten Legionnaires on the other side of the gate, taking the taunts and smirks of the enemy standing only feet away from them. As they drew closer, he could hear what they were saying.
“Let us in, pretty boy,” one sneered, “and we might not gut you where you stand.”
“Why?” a young female Legionnaire asked with a smirk, “do you want to join the other idiots now trapped inside?”
The Shadow Legion shuffled, unsure of themselves suddenly, providing the perfect opportunity to strike.
Thoren and the Legion Five warriors strode out from the shadows, the stones orange in the dusk, and they moved towards the gates and the attackers, their backs still to them, unaware of the threat looming behind. The female Legionnaire who’d spoken saw Thoren and the other warriors first, her eyes widening with purpose before she grabbed the attention of her comrades and nodded once.
It was only another moment and the gates began to slide open slowly.
Thoren then leaped on the closest black cloaked soldier, weapon swinging.
***
Nero’s eyes had grown as wide as they could go, fury and wrath written upon his face. “Not possible.”
Maveron said nothing to him.
Because it was possible. Days ago, Cori had sent pigeons out to Lullin and Damerdale to track down the other Legion Five members, begging them to return at the earliest possible moment. To her surprise, they had, and Cori had insisted in her letters that their return was kept silent, stashing them in an empty room in an Inn. Ione had protested the most, arriving last, even though she’d followed her instructions to return in darkness and cover her features. Cori had been bringing them food and updates for two days now. Ione had been close to strangling Cori earlier that morning when there was still no word from the Shadow Legion, but she’d insisted they be kept a secret, knowing they would choose to attack while the Legion seemed vulnerable. It was also the reason Cori had been late to her shift with the Princess that Trey had found so dishonourable.
“This is your last chance,” Maveron said quietly to Nero, imploring him to listen.
Nero slowly shook his head, emotions flickering over his face. Fear, wrath, vulnerability, scorn. It changed so often that Cori couldn’t discern how he was really feeling.
Something nudged Cori’s side and she glanced over to see Thoren standing next to her. Her heart lurched with a desperate kind of relief as she quickly assessed him and found no injuries. He met her gaze and held it for a moment. Thoren was clearly out of breath, and there were a few rips in his tunic, and Cori figured the Shadow Legion that had been outside the gates were no more. He nodded infinitesimally and they both turned back to Nero.
“There are no chances in this world,” Nero said, “only opportunities, and what we do with them.”
Cori knew they never intended for Nero or the rest of them to leave the Compound, but looking at him, just a boy, made her feel conflicted.
“Nero,” Cori said, and she took a small step forward as his eyes swung to her, “I beg you to reconsider this fight. If you come quietly you will live. You cannot win, and you… cannot retreat.”
Maveron turned to Cori and saw Thoren just behind her. Relief flickered across his features at seeing his son unharmed and back amongst them. He turned back to Nero.
“Corisande is right. There is no way back out the tunnel you came through.”
She could almost see it – the look of regret flashing over Nero’s face and knowing that he’d been beaten, but it was quickly replaced by a cold fury.
“I had no plans to retreat,” Nero said vehemently.
The next few moments moved slowly for Cori. She watched as Nero turned on his heel and began sprinting back towards the tunnels entrance, his black cloak billowing out behind him.
Maveron turned to his Legion and roared, “Legionnaires, on me!”
They all, Cori included, surged forward as one towards Nero’s retreating figure and the tunnels, knowing that the Shadow Legion had no way out but to bottleneck at the tunnel entrance, giving the Legion the upper hand.
Cori ran, her heart in her throat, whipping out one of her blades to palm it. She saw Thoren glance at her as they moved side by side, and she met his gaze for a moment. So much had changed between them since the first run-in with the Shadow Legion two years ago. Cori wasn’t certain if Thoren would ever trust her again, but this was something they had always been able to do together. Fight.
He nodded at her, and Cori returned the gesture, and she looked back just in time to see a swarm of their attackers erupting from the tunnels like a black river from a broken dam.
***
Thoren was already feeling the threat of fatigue in his muscles. He had trained hard that morning, trying to sweat out his fear and frustration about Cori’s hidden identity. Then the fight outside the Compound gates had taken a toll. Thoren was never fond of killing, but this was a necessary evil to keep the innocent safe. Having Ione, Ryker and Valentina with him for the fight had made it a rather quick one, dispatching each with ease. Though he was not used to fighting so many who wanted to genuinely hurt him. His many days in the training hall were nothing like the true battlefield.
They had swarmed out of the tunnel, Cori and Thoren together jumping straight into the fray where weapons clashed and sang. Now, Thoren wrenched his sword from the gut of someone with a grunt, the muscles in his shoulders protesting.
Thoren got shoved from behind and he turned to block a strike coming straight for his face, he knew that he was sweating profusely to keep up with the pace of the fight. They had been easy enough to best so far, but he could feel himself tiring.
Thoren could sense Cori fighting near him, could hear her as she breathed and grunted her battle cries that he was so used to from her practice sessions.
He moved his feet, he whirled, and he thrust his sword forward as each of them surged towards him.
***
Cori had just ended another life. She’d had to sink her blade into his back, finding no other way to overpower him without taking him out of the fight. He had been a bigger and stronger male, forcing Cori to get on the defensive immediately. It had been a stroke of luck that someone had stumbled into him and he’d tumbled to the ground. They were trying their best to take some of them alive, but it wasn’t always a possibility.
Cori climbed off his back, pulling her blade free with a horrible sound, and stepped away from him as she pulled a gasp of air into her lungs and measured her surroundings.
She saw two younger Legionnaires close to her that were both being overpowered by a large, hulking figure in black.
Cori started towards them, but was quickly knocked off her feet, her blade flying from her fingers. She was on the ground and a dark mass was on top of her. They struggled for a few heart-stopping seconds, until Cori was able to throw them off her, and gasping, she shot back to her feet.
“Cori!”
She looked over just in time to see Maveron throwing a blade into the air towards her as he ran at the two Legionnaires that had needed help. She snatched it cleanly out of the air and faced the attacker as they came for her again. Cori heard a snarl come from her own throat at their approach. They were nearly on top of her again, but at the last second, Cori dropped to the ground. As she fell purposefully, her blade swiped out with a vicious precision. Cori rolled back onto her feet, and she saw them falling to the ground, hands clutching at their belly to keep their insides where they belonged to no avail, a guttural cry erupting from their lips.
Cori panted and licked at her dry lips, not getting a moment to gather herself before she turned to her next targets. There were two of them in front of her and they had seemed to stop in their approach, their eyes
flicking to the man on the ground who was clutching his own intestines. Cori crouched for their attack, her eyes moving from one to the other in a silent challenge.
Adrenaline coursed through her as one advanced on her, bringing their weapon down with speed that made the air ring. Cori grunted as she parried the attack with her dagger, whirling away just as another blade sang past her, disconcertingly close. It was in those close-call moments where she finally took Thoren’s warnings about the smaller blades seriously.
Before she could catch her breath, she sensed someone behind her, a third attacker. Before the unseen person could come for her, Cori surged forwards to get on the offensive to those in her eye line.
Just as she reached them, Cori slid to her knees, a blade narrowly missing the top of her head as she flew between them, knees sliding on the damp grass. She twisted, and sliced out, her blade slipping through flesh at the ankles of the one closest to her.
A scream, a spray of blood, and they fell.
Cori pushed herself back to her feet and turned, her hair sticking to the side of her head and neck with sweat. To her amusement, she saw that the person she had sensed behind her had been Thoren, seemingly coming to her aid against her two attackers.
She saw that he had paused with his eyes on her, a small, impressed grin on his face before he slammed the hilt of his sword across the head of her other attacker, who promptly fell to the ground, limp.
Cori wiped her blade on her black slacks and took a moment to gulp in some air before saying, “thanks, but I had him.”
Thoren shook his head, that smile still on his face. “I know you did.”
Then he was off, moving to his next opponent.
The Shadow Legion had spread out from the tunnels entrance, the fight slowly expanding across the grounds towards the statues and the main building. Cori briefly took in that they had stopped coming from the tunnels mouth, and there were not as many as she would have thought. The Legion would out-number them by now, the lawns littered with bodies clothed in black.
Cori took in the scene with confusion for a second, having expected many more than this, before she shook off the feeling of wrongness and threw herself back into the fray.
***
Thoren still had the ghost of a smile on his face as he planted his boot into the backs of someone’s legs, and swiping the handle of his blade, knocking them unconscious as they fell to the ground.
He didn’t know why he had been concerned about Cori, but he had felt a surge of pure panic at seeing her face down two attackers, outnumbered. He had been ready to intervene, to even the playing field, but then without skipping a beat, Cori had easily taken one of them out and he had no doubt she was about to throw herself at the other until she was the only one left standing.
She was a force to be reckoned with, who certainly hadn’t needed his help.
Thoren had perhaps fought and taken out no more than ten of them, when he noticed the amount of dark-clothed people were thinning. There were dead or unconscious Legion and Shadow Legion on the ground, but the Legion were clearly out-numbering them now. He had expected there to be a lot more of them, considering the bloodbath of the Massacre.
Thoren was engaged in an extended fight with one of them, and he could feel the muscles in his sword arm and shoulder screaming for a reprieve, but the man he faced off was coming at him with a brutal efficiency that had Thoren sweating with unease. He didn’t know where these people had trained, but they weren’t amateurs.
The man brought his sword down as Thoren tried to block the attack, but the strike was strong, and his muscles were so tired, that he felt his arm buckle under the power of the attack. Thoren fell to his knees with a grunt of pain, the sword falling from his fingers in a heart-stopping moment. He had never dropped his sword in a fight before, and Thoren looked at the blade on the ground as though it had betrayed him.
He looked up just in time to see triumph flicker in the eyes of his attacker before the blade started its descent towards him. He sent up a brief prayer to the Gods, hoping for a clean death, when two things happened at once.
There was a flash of metal, and a blade split through the flesh of the man’s chest from behind him. The sword that had been coming for Thoren slowed, giving him just enough time to duck out of the way. In the next second, there was a dull thud, and he looked up to see a much smaller knife had been embedded into the mans’ face, straight through his left eye.
The man, sword dropping to the ground, reached up to his chest once and then went completely limp, sliding off the blade in his chest to crumple in a heap next to Thoren.
Maveron stood above them both and tried to shake some of the gore from his sword as he looked down at him. “You okay, son?”
Thoren nodded once, his chest still seizing from the adrenaline. He glanced behind him to see Cori nearby who was pulling another knife from one of her boots and scanning her surroundings before taking aim and throwing with a deadly accuracy to take out another one. He had no doubt the blade in the man’s eye had been her handiwork.
***
Cori panted, swallowing against a dry throat. She was feeling the undeniable ache in her muscles, the sweat sticking her clothes to her in an unpleasant way.
There was a cut across her stomach that was deep enough to be painful, but not enough to stop her from carrying on despite the bleeding. The swipe of that knife had been much too close and was about to disembowel her, but she had been quick enough to twist away and lessen the impact of the attack. She had also twisted her ankle a little from an off-kilter kick when a female had dodged at the last moment, causing the wrong part of Cori’s foot to connect instead to the side of the thick thigh muscle and twisting painfully.
Cori was feeling her body resent her for continuing to engage in the rigorous activity, but the fight was not over yet. She gritted her teeth and pushed through.
They had slowly moved, progressing across the lawn until they were near the Gods and Goddesses, who towered high above them.
The grey far outnumbered black by now, and then Legionnaires were racing about, restraining the Shadow Legion soldiers who had fallen but were not dead, while others were trying to help the Legionnaires who had been injured.
Cori wanted to help, but she was among those still harrying the last of the Shadow Legion. Thoren had been dragged off the field by two Legionnaires not long ago, and he clearly hadn’t wanted to leave the fray, but Cori had seen him almost killed in one of the most harrowing few seconds of her life, experiencing a flashback of watching her father and sister being killed. She had been sure she was about to lose Thoren too, her panicked fingers scrambling to pull a dagger from her boot and without even pausing to aim, she had thrown. She would have been a second too late to save him, but Maveron had stopped the attacker, thank the Gods.
Before Cori could identify her next target, a hammer-like fist slammed into the side of her head, and she fell onto her knees with a ringing sound erupting in her ears. She swiped out blindly but didn’t make contact. Instead, something knocked her to the ground, and she heard a grunt of pain from next to her.
Cori shook her head, trying to clear the black spots from her vision and shake off the feeling of nausea rising in her gut. She opened her eyes to see her attacker on the ground and three Legionnaires falling atop them, incapacitating them effectively.
She breathed a sigh of relief and looked over her shoulder to see Adeline standing before her, a hand extended to Cori.
“Ade,” Cori grumbled, accepting the hand and was pulled to her feet, “why are you still out here?”
“Hey,” she said with a small grin, “I just got that beast off you, didn’t I?”
Cori looked down to the very unconscious person being dragged away. “You got them off me? Uh... thanks.”
“Any time,” Adeline said, she looked behind Cori and her eyes grew wide, “and I hope you’re feeling better because—“
Adeline pointed and Cori turned to find one lone assailant comi
ng towards them. Cori pushed Adeline away, who began retreating away from them, back towards the statue of Andromeda and ducking behind it.
Cori only had one weapon left, and she hoped it would be enough. She took aim and flung the small blade into the air as they drew closer to her.
Cori watched with annoyance as they easily ducked the blade and barrelled into Cori so they both tumbled to the ground. Cori found her feet slower than normal after her knock to the head, expecting another attack at any moment, and when one didn’t come, she looked up in confusion.
She watched in horror as the attacker had ignored Cori altogether and was moving directly towards Adeline. Cori cried out as Adeline crouched by the statue of Andromeda and looked up with only seconds to spare before a sword was swinging towards her face.
Cori moved her feet, willing them to get to Adeline in time, no weapons left on her person.
She watched, time moving in slow motion, as Adeline’s eyes widened with terror, and she brought her arm up to shield her face from the attack.
Cori halted, and a gasp teared out of her throat at what happened next.
The assailant reared back; their cloak having been set alight with a powerful flame that grew quicker than any fire Cori had ever seen. She heard a guttural scream as they were engulfed by the flame, as bright as a beacon.
Cori shielded her eyes for a moment against the flare of light, and then the fire was gone as quickly as it came, and the Shadow Legion attacker was on the ground, unmoving and silent, small tendrils of smoke rising from their body.
Cori met Adeline’s gaze over the corpse. Her eyes were wide, not in surprise, but as though afraid of… what she had done.
Because Cori had watched the flame ignite in Adeline’s hand before the person had been set alight.
Adeline had used magic.
***
The fight was over.
Thoren had watched from the steps of the main building as the last, black-clothed figures had been swarmed and over-powered by the Legionnaires.
He had been all but dragged from the grassy field by two healers who were telling him he had dislocated his shoulder and couldn’t carry on. He’d insisted that they put his shoulder back into place right there on the steps so he could get back into the fray, but there had been no point. It was over now.
