Chapter 124: Chapter 123 - Free The lightning dragon descended with a roar that swallowed every other sound.
For a single moment, everything turned white.
The whole church vanished beneath the impact.
Stone, wood, glass, runes, it did not matter, as everything was swallowed at once when blue-white lightning descended through the temple and the ground beneath it.
The priests behind Regulus were engulfed before they could even scream. The arrays that had protected the church flickered wildly, cracked, and shattered under the force of Tepesh’s spell.
The blast rolled outward in a blinding wave.
Paladins were thrown from their feet. Inquisitors were hurled through ruined walls. Villagers hiding in nearby houses screamed as roofs tore apart and windows burst inward.
When the light finally began to fade, nothing remained of the church but a smoking crater and broken stone.
Almost nothing.
At the center of the destruction stood a black sphere.
It was perfectly still.
Lightning crawled over its surface for a moment, hissing and snapping like a living thing, but none of it passed through. Slowly, the darkness peeled away layer by layer, dissolving into smoke until the figure inside was revealed.
Teclos stood unharmed in the middle of the ruined dungeon.
The cuffs that had bound his wrists and ankles lay broken on the ground around him, reduced to twisted scraps of burned metal. Everything else had been erased. The walls, the cell, the floor, the ceiling above him, all of it had been torn apart.
Only the patch of stone beneath his boots remained untouched.
Teclos looked around at the devastation.
Smoke drifted past his face. Ash fell through the air like black snow. A few feet away from where the blast landed, men wounded by the shrapnel groaned.
Teclos shook his head slowly.
Then he looked up.
Regulus, Tepesh, Dallion, and Alvira stared at him from above where the entrance once had been, all four frozen for the first time since the battle had begun.
Teclos smiled.
"One would think you wanted to erase me," he said as his red eyes moved toward the thralls. "Hello again, comrades."
They stayed silent and simply observed him for a while.
Regulus was the first to speak, his voice cold and heavy with suspicion.
"How did you remove the cuffs?"
Teclos glanced down at the broken restraints, then gave a small shrug.
"Well, it seems that something is eroding every chain or restraint placed on me... might be that cursed purple fluid." Teclos said as he shuddered at the painful memory.
Regulus tightened his grip around his sword. He expected a fight, four against one now.
But at the same time, Tepesh’s expression also darkened.
Dallion and Alvira narrowed their eyes as they studied him. They could not explain it, but something about him felt wrong to them.
He should have felt like an ally, not a neutral variable... they should have rejoiced now that he was free and they could finally push Regulus back.
But standing there in the ashes, Teclos did not feel like an ally.
He felt unbound and dangerous.
Tepesh sensed it the most, though he did not fully understand why he felt that way, as Teclos was ultimately still Luther’s thrall.
He commanded Teclos and simultaneously probed his reaction with suspicion. "Enough standing around. If you are free, then prove your usefulness to our Master and help us kill him."
Teclos turned his gaze toward Regulus.
For the first time since he had been dragged into Alta, he truly looked at the paladin captain. But instead of the armor, his scars, face, or sword, he looked deeper.
At his shadow.
It stretched like an endless and silent abyss, and that abyss looked really angry right now.
His power was deep, vast, and heavy.
Teclos stared at it for only half a second, and then he started laughing because he could not believe it.
He was amused by their stupidity.
Dallion’s jaw tightened. "What is so funny?"
Teclos wiped at the corner of his eye, though there were no tears there.
"Oh, nothing," he said. "I was just wondering how badly you three misunderstood the situation."
Tepesh’s sword flashed downward, and he gathered his lightning for another attack. "Move," he commanded.
Teclos shook his head and obliged.
"Sure."
Darkness burst from beneath his feet.
In an instant, he vanished from the crater and appeared closer to Tepesh, his body slipping through the shadows like dark smoke. At the same time, dozens of dark tendrils erupted around Regulus, twisting up from every side.