The thirty Pale Celestials did not charge with the chaotic fury of northern wolves or the lumbering momentum of the southern Myrmidons.
They moved with the synchronized, silent precision of a single mind split across thirty glass bodies.
At a flick of Valerius’s staff, the inner rank of fifteen sentinels dropped to one knee, planting the butts of their white-iron glaives into the ancient blue ice. The blades tilted upward at a forty-five-degree angle, locking together into an impenetrable, shimmering palisade of star-glass and crackling black lightning. Behind them, the outer rank of fifteen stepped into the gaps, their glaive tips aimed level at Gideon’s throat and chest.
From the tips of all thirty weapons, an acoustic hum resonated across the frozen plateau—a high, piercing frequency designed to paralyze the motor nerves of living flesh.
The sub-harmonic frequency tore into Gideon’s skull like needle-ice.
The warlord’s vision blurred with sudden, static snow; the muscles in his calves and forearms locked, threatening to drag him down onto the frost.
"Yield the flesh," the thirty sentinels spoke as one—their voices a flat, metallic drone echoing in the air.
Beside him, Lyra’s reaction was instantaneous.
She didn't reach for her daggers. She stepped up against Gideon’s right side, her small, bare palm slamming flat over the center of his chest, directly over the silver-red covenant mark burning beneath his torn tunic.
"You don't silence the mountain," Lyra snarled.
Her hazel-grey eye snapped wide, while her left eye flared into an incandescent furnace of celestial violet flame.
She did not summon defensive starlight; she inverted the acoustic frequency vibrating through the ice. Reaching into the True Loom within her core, she seized the sound-waves of the Celestials' drone and twisted their polarity with a savage, sovereign wrench of her will.
The static in Gideon’s skull didn't merely fade; it reversed, blasting outward through his limbs in a concussive wave of pure, kinetic force.
Gideon’s amber eyes snapped open, blazing with unbridled, feral savagery.
"MY TURN," the northern warlord bellowed.
With an explosive roar that shattered the acoustic frequency into dead air, Gideon lunged forward.
He didn't try to flank the phalanx; he threw his entire two-hundred-and-sixty-pound armored frame directly into the center of the locked glaive-wall like a falling iron ram.
His five-foot star-iron claymores came down in a brutal, twin-bladed cross-cleave.
CRASH.
The impact of northern star-iron striking celestial star-glass rang across the plateau like a church bell struck with a sledgehammer.
Three white-iron glaives sheared clean in half under the sheer kinetic violence of his blow. The kinetic shockwave pulverized the ice beneath the kneeling front rank, throwing four sentinels backward into the outer line in a tangled shower of splintered glass and white, luminescent ichor.
Without breaking his forward momentum, Gideon stepped into the breach.
His left elbow drove into the featureless silver mask of the nearest sentinel, caving the faceplate inward with a concussive crunch that sent the construct skittering across the ice. He spun on his heel, his right claymore cleaving horizontally to bisect two more sentinels at the waist, their severed torsos shattering into harmless crystalline hail before they could hit the stone.
"Close the lattice!" Valerius commanded from behind the lines, his voice losing a fraction of its aristocratic composure as he raised his curved star-iron staff.
The surviving twenty-four sentinels did not panic. They pivoted on their heels, abandoning their formation to converge on Gideon in a tight, collapsing ring, their glaives whistling in synchronized thrusts aimed to impale him from every side at once.
"Lyra!" Gideon roared, parrying two thrusts with his crossed swords, his teeth bared in a bloody snarl as the third blade grazed his ribs, cutting through the leather of his brigandine to draw a line of bright Alpha crimson.
"I have the sky!" Lyra cried out.
She didn't stay on the ice. She vaulted off the frozen shoulder of a shattered sentinel, leaping ten paces into the air above the collapsing ring.
Her star-iron circlet blazed with blinding, celestial brilliance.
She brought both hands down toward the center of the ring, releasing a horizontal nova of sovereign violet starlight that expanded outward in a razor-sharp, circular disc five paces wide.
The starlight hit the sentinels at neck-height.
Twelve star-glass heads were sheared away simultaneously.
The decapitated constructs went rigid in mid-thrust, their bodies dissolving into white, powdery quartz that blew away on the howling mountain wind like snow.
Gideon finished the butcher's work on the remaining twelve.
Moving with the relentless, terrifying stamina of his Drake bloodline, the warlord became a whirlwind of star-iron and slaughter. He parried, crushed, and cleaved through the remaining constructs with brutal, economic precision.
He caught one glaive barehanded, twisting the weapon until the sentinel's wrists snapped like dry twigs, then used the construct’s own body as a battering ram to smash two others off the sheer cliff edge of the plateau into the five-thousand-foot drop below.
Within sixty seconds, the thirty-man phalanx of Pale Celestials had ceased to exist.
The center of the frozen plateau was littered with deep craters in the blue ice, shattered fragments of star-glass, and drifting plumes of white luminescent dust.
Gideon stood in the center of the devastation, his chest heaving with deep, measured breaths, his dark hair wild in the sub-zero draft. Fresh blood dripped from the cut across his ribs, sizzling as it struck the freezing stone, his amber-gold eyes locked onto the sole remaining figure on the plateau.
Arch-Archon Valerius had not retreated.
He stood twenty paces away before the base of the five-hundred-pace black needle, his silver eyes wide with genuine, horrified disbelief as he looked at the piles of shattered glass that had once been his elite guard.
"Barbarians," Valerius whispered, his hands trembling slightly on the haft of his staff. "Filthy, unwashed mud-crawlers... you dare destroy the work of three centuries..."
"We've broken worse than your toys today, glass-man," Gideon growled, rolling his shoulders as he advanced slowly across the ice, his claymores held low at his sides.
"Now drop that stick before I shove it down your throat."
Valerius backed away one step, then two, his back coming up against the cold, faceted glass of the Star-Eater’s Spire.
A desperate, manic light flared in his silver eyes.
"You think you have won, mortal?" Valerius hissed, his aristocratic features twisting into a sneer of pure, fanatic spite. "The siphon is already ninety percent complete! The First Celestial's core is already severed from the earth!"
He raised his staff high, turning the caged storm of black auroras toward the base of the needle.
"If I cannot weave the Sovereign Crown with your blood..." the Archon screamed, his voice breaking into a discordant shriek, "...I will crack the needle and let the sky fall on your heads!"
Valerius drove the butt of his star-iron staff straight into the primary fracture line at the base of the black glass needle.
The mountain stopped breathing.
The black needle did not crack into pieces.
It detonated from within.
A concussive shockwave of pure, unadulterated celestial void-energy erupted from the base of the spire, tearing across the plateau with the force of an exploding sun.
The blue glacial ice beneath their boots instantly shattered into a spiderweb of ten million fractures.
And from five hundred feet below the ice, where the colossal frame of the First Celestial had slept for ten thousand years, a massive, armored eyelid slowly slid open.
Revealing an eye of pure, blinding, apocalyptic silver fire.