CHAPTER 666: HANDS THAT PUSH BACK (3)

"Noted," Mikhailis said, finger raised like a student making a solemn promise. "I promise to bleed only in fashionable shapes."

Thalatha snorted. She didn’t mean to. The sound bounced off the bone scrollwork as they turned the corner and stepped into the nave.

The space made them all small. Bone arches held the roof the way a ribcage holds breath. Half the ceiling had dropped and someone—something—had tried to fix it with root and resin threads. The fix looked like a child’s weaving project: brave, uneven, surprisingly strong in places where it had no right to be.

Light lived here in thin layers. Amber. Blue. A cold white that came from no lamp. Dust made its own weather, a slow snow. The air did not change temperature, but the idea of cold walked into her sleeves.

At the far end, two figures hovered like ideas someone refused to forget. Robes hung off them the way fog hangs off cliffs, never settling into a shape. Their crowns were not metal; they were grown. Tines of root curled around skulls, leaning as if listening to a song only they could hear. Around each ribcage, bright shardlets orbited in calm paths. Phylactery pieces. Thalatha didn’t know the scholar word, but she knew a weak point when she saw one and knew a trap when she saw that the weak point moved.

Mikhailis breathed out. "Liches," he said, his voice doing that careful thing where curiosity and caution live in the same sentence.

Each lich lifted one pale hand. A shard split from its orbit like ice snapped from a river edge. The one became two. They drifted apart, little suns no bigger than a thumbnail. Where they drifted, the air obeyed. It thickened and folded like a cloak. From those folds, thin figures clawed themselves into shape—rib cages first, then arms, then a suggestion of faces, all wrong, all fragile.

Two echoes. Then four. Then six.

Thalatha rolled her shoulders and checked where her bow would sit if she drew. She did not draw. Not yet. "They can split and split," she said. "We will drown in brittle glass."

Rodion drew a small circle on the floor with light, tight and neat, as if reminding them that order still existed.

The pressure behind Thalatha’s eyes rose with the echo count. She could feel the fight wanting to be a mess. She did not like mess fights. She liked lines. She liked plans. She liked watching someone who loved plans.

Mikhailis bounced once on his heels. He tried not to. He failed. Party-only fight, he thought, giddy. Finally. Finally let them show what they can do while I shut up and cheer. He managed to keep the first part and lost the second. His hands were already drawing patterns in the air.

Rodion’s tea spout slid out like an exasperated butler’s eyebrow. A cup bumped Mikhailis’s knuckles.

Sip. Watch. Coach only.

He pinched the cup like it might bite him. "Yes, coach." He did not sip. "Silk Guards, cones at the first wave! Crymber, ready the temper. Scurabons, go for wrists! Hypnoveils, drown the urge to split!"

The cohort moved, and the nave learned a new kind of order.

Silk Guards fired cone nets that opened like flowers midair. The mesh wasn’t just silk; Thalatha realized it carried small knots at the intersections, like beads that could be heated. The cones dropped on the first wave of echoes and hugged the thin bones and the space they occupied. The echoes struggled and made no sound because they had no throats. The cones sinned white when Crymber Frost breathed on them. The knots glowed when Ember tapped them. The whole net turned brittle, clear as spun sugar right before it breaks.

The first five echoes shattered when they tried to move. It sounded pretty. Thalatha hated that it sounded pretty.

Scurabons sprinted not at skulls like heroes in cheap tavern stories but at wrists. Three taps. A slice along a seam. Thalatha saw it—the way the blade found the place where tendon would have been if tendon had lived here. One prime lich’s hand jerked. Its casting pattern went ugly. The spell hit the floor and woke nothing.

The Hypnoveils, kind and cruel at the same time, lifted their mantles. They did not invent fear. They held up a mirror. A last breath. A last smell—smoke? flowers? sweat? A last thought—oh— And for one heartbeat the split reflex that made the shard become two had to pass through the memory of ending. The lich stumbled in its own script.

But the liches were old. Old things adapted or died the first time. These had not died the first time.

Two echoes fused midair like two drops of dirty water meeting. The bones joined wrong but held. A thicker echo walked. The liches staggered their splits—a shard here, then there—so no net could catch them all at once. The floor filled with thin bodies. Thalatha’s eye measured distance to herself, to Mikhailis, to Rodion, to the lotus. It would be very easy for a brittle rib to decide to be a knife.

The Aeriform Striders’ plumes vibrated into a single urgent note. The air in the nave changed—not in smell, in weight. Pressure about to pop.

Rodion’s optic narrowed.

Rot vent imminent. Five seconds.

Slimeweave rolled forward like it had been waiting for that line. The first spray coughed from a side grate, dark and wet and mean. The Slimeweave took it in its glossy belly, swirled once, and its plates went dull instead of sizzling. It slid that neutral gel across a chalk circle where a lich’s foot had marked a casting point. The circle looked normal after, but when the lich tried to pull power through it, the circle burped a spark like a child’s prank and died.

"Oh, that’s rude," Mikhailis whispered, delighted. He finally remembered he held tea, took a sip, and immediately sucked air through his teeth. Burned, of course. He loved it anyway.

Echo ribs scraped the floor. The sound got under nails. Thalatha measured lanes. She could have put two arrows into the near cluster and one into the skull of the left prime, but she kept her bow low. She had agreed to coach-only. She kept the agreement because it made them better.

The Silk Guards split their fire, and for the first time a net missed. The echo that slipped the cone scraped close to Thalatha’s thigh. The bone was cold. It felt like being brushed by a memory you didn’t want. Before she could lift her dagger, a Scurabon flashed in and smacked the echo’s knee the way you pop a coconut spine. The joint collapsed. The echo went down. A second net found it. A small nod passed between Thalatha and the ant without a word.

The liches tried a new thing—drawing a line of five echoes across the floor and then splitting three shards at once to send fresh ones leaping over the line like runners. Mikhailis tracked it with his eyes and then with his mouth before he could stop himself. "They’re making a relay—hand-off on the fourth beat—watch the fourth—"

Hypnoveils caught the rhythm and threw a mirror at exactly the wrong beat for the liches. The reflection was small—a shard not splitting clean, a hand faltering. It didn’t stop them. It made them hesitate. Sometimes a half-breath is a year if you use it right.

Scurabons ran a pinwheel, four blades marking points at knee, wrist, hip, and elbow, tapping just hard enough to be felt, not hard enough to break. It forced the liches’ casting hands into a timing that wasn’t theirs. The liches hated that. Their crowns flared with a sick pale light.

The nave’s vents coughed again. Crymber Frost put a small white kiss on the grate before the cough became a vomit. Ember tapped and the cough swallowed itself. Slimeweave slid its gel across a row of sigils drawn in old blood; the gel fizzed and then went clear. The sigils looked like drawings children make when they try to write, and Thalatha felt a strange pity she did not have time for.

Mothcloak ghosted behind the right prime as if it were the lich’s own shadow. One gentle brush of a wing softened the glyphs carved on the orbiting shard. Not erased. Blurred. When the lich tried to split it, the cut stuttered and stuck. The baby echo came out wrong—half-boned, half-not—then folded back into nothing. The prime hissed without breath.

"Beautiful," Mikhailis breathed, letting himself feel it. Please keep working. Keep working. We can do this with craft, not with bodies.

He lifted his chin a little and couldn’t stop his grin. He burned his tongue a second time on an automatic sip and winced. "Ow. Worth it."

The floor looked busy now, but not chaotic. The cohort had drawn paths through it like chalk arrows in a drill yard. Echoes going there, not here. Nets arriving on two. Frost on three. Ember on four. Thalatha’s fingers loosened. Her shoulder didn’t ache as much. She let herself breathe through her nose and taste the air. It tasted like mint-tea and dust and the edge of something dangerous that had learned their names.

The liches didn’t run out of tricks, but their tricks got uglier. They spiked a shard down into a crack in the floor and the crack tried to be a hole. A Tanglebeetle threw a line across it before it could widen and the line held like a prayer strap.

A new vent at the wall spit not mist but little black flakes that made the lamps stutter. The Myco-Archivist fanned its gills hard and snapped a small jar open with tidy hands. The flakes stuck to the gel inside like mosquitoes in syrup. The Archivist paused long enough to pat the jar’s lid like a polite clerk closing a file.

An echo got too close to the lotus. The chain around the seed vibrated once and the echo recoiled like a dog shown a broom. Mikhailis set his palm gently on the sling and felt the hum under his skin. "Easy," he told it. He did not know if he was talking to the seed or to himself.

The Aeriforms shifted their tune. Lower. Slower. The pressure in the nave eased a hair. Thalatha could feel it in her ear bones. Relief tasted like metal. She rolled her shoulders again and found her posture without thinking.

Her eyes tracked the left prime. Its fingers were faster than its partner’s now, trying to recover dignity. The Scurabons’ pinwheel made its wrists jitter. It tried to split a shard on the off-beat, out of spite. The shard burr’d. It split anyway, messy, and the newborn slipped the first cone. Thalatha took a half-step forward, then stopped her own foot. Trust. The word sat heavy and new again.

Silk Guards adjusted. Their cones shifted shape midair, not symmetrical anymore, like a fisherman throwing a net into a wind. The messy newborn got caught on the edge. Crymber Frost breathed a thin line. Ember traced the same line. The echo broke clean down the center, like a dry biscuit pulled by two careful hands.

The prime on the right lifted both arms to double its call. Rodion’s optic blinked.

Hands above shoulder line. Probability of area effect rises to sixty-seven percent.

"Copy," Mikhailis said without thinking, falling into the rhythm of labs and field drills both. "Hypnoveils, flare now. Make it honest and recent."

The mantles brightened. They didn’t show the lich its old life this time. They showed its last thirty heartbeats—the stutter, the miss, the way power slid off a gelled circle like oil off glass. The lich hesitated, offended by its own failure. It lowered one hand.

Scurabons needed no more invitation. They cut the open wrist seam again, three precise strokes like a signature.

Rodion’s light-circle ticked on the floor and pulsed once.

Rot vent in three.

"Crymber, mark the grate," Mikhailis said. "Slimeweave, shoulders." He meant the circles. The crew already knew. It was still nice to be told. People liked to be told when they were needed. Ants too, it seemed.

Heat brushed his cheek. He turned his head and watched an ember line trace the frost kiss. He looked back to Thalatha and found her looking at him.

"You are vibrating," she said, deadpan.

"I am a professional," he whispered. "Professionally vibrating."