Chapter 117: Do You Take This Healer as Your Curse? (3)

Regulus didn’t wait for an answer.

He extended his free hand toward the center of the hall and the golden energy surrounding his sword broke away from the blade as if it had been waiting for exactly that permission. It didn’t scatter or dissipate. It pulled inward, dense and deliberate, condensing in the air with the speed of something that already had a shape before it was summoned.

In less than three seconds there was a lion standing in front of Ebony.

Three meters of pure energy, solid enough to cast a shadow, with eyes that burned like embers pressed into a face made of compressed light. It didn’t growl. It didn’t need to. The presence it filled the room with was enough — that dense, still heat that arrives before something that isn’t going to stop on its own.

The creature lunged without warning.

Ebony raised both arms, put the shield between them, and caught the jaws with the metal and her damaged palm before they could close all the way. The impact drove her back two full steps. Her boots scraped against the stone floor. The energy teeth pressed against the edge of the shield with a force that was constant and mechanical, like something that didn’t understand the concept of fatigue because it had no muscles to tire out and no will that could waver.

"(Purification would dissolve it in seconds,)" she thought, feeling the familiar pulse of her magic rising to meet the danger the way it always did when the situation got bad enough. "(A few seconds is all it would take. But if I use it here, in front of everyone still watching...)"

She didn’t finish the thought. The answer was already there and it didn’t need words.

She gritted her teeth, pulled together everything she had left in both arms, twisted from the hips to put her whole body behind it, and threw the lion sideways with everything she could load into the motion.

The creature shot across the room like something launched rather than thrown and slammed into the nearest cluster of guards still tangled up with the masked figures along the far wall. The impact scattered them in every direction, weapons and bodies and noise going out like a wave from the point of collision, and the chaos that had already been running loose in the hall found a fresh reason to get worse and took it immediately.

Ebony didn’t look at the result. She grabbed Kanary’s hand and pulled her hard toward the exit.

They ran.

The temple corridor opened up ahead of them, long and vaulted with columns spaced evenly on both sides and stone floors that made every footstep louder than it needed to be. Behind them, through the door they’d come from, a sound arrived that Ebony already knew how to identify — the same tight concentration of energy she’d felt a minute ago, building twice at once.

"What’s the plan now?" Kanary asked without breaking stride, her voice level in the particular way of someone who has decided that panic is not a useful option and is committing to that decision in real time.

"I have no idea," Ebony answered.

Kanary looked at her sideways without slowing down.

"They only told me to show up, say that nonsense about being in love with you, and run," Ebony continued. "Nobody explained what came after that."

"I genuinely hope the others are more competent than you."

"Don’t count on it." Ebony turned down a side corridor without reducing her speed, navigating by something between memory and instinct. "What comes next isn’t going to be simple either, just so you’re prepared."

Kanary opened her mouth to ask what that was supposed to mean, but the hall door at the far end of the main corridor answered the question before she could form it. It exploded outward with the sound of heavy wood giving way all at once, not breaking gradually but failing completely in a single instant. Two golden lions tore through the opening like the door had never been there and landed in the corridor with a weight that traveled through the stone and up through the soles of both their feet.

They ran faster.

The lions were gaining ground. Not because they were built for speed over short distances — they weren’t — but because they didn’t need to account for anything. No angles to read, no obstacles to dodge, no calculations to run. They had one direction and they followed it without interruption.

Ebony spotted the window before she’d made a conscious decision about it. Large frame, thick leaded glass, the kind that was meant to let light in and keep everything else out. It faced the exterior. She took in the height from the floor, the angle relative to their momentum, the distance to the ground on the other side, and stopped calculating because there wasn’t enough time to finish.

"Hold on," she said.

She didn’t wait for a response.

She went in shoulder first, pulling Kanary along with her hand still locked around her wrist, and both bodies hit the glass together and went through it to the outside with the sound of something that breaks completely and has no way back to what it was.

The open air hit before the ground did.

They came down hard in the street, impact spreading across knees and palms on the cobblestones, and before either of them had fully registered where they were or which way was up, the two golden lions came through the broken frame behind them. They landed with a force that fractured the stone where they hit, and then they started moving, circling, cutting off the space around them with the unhurried certainty of something that knows its targets aren’t going anywhere.

The jaws found fabric first, then closed. The claws came down. Both women were pinned against the ground under a rotation of bites and swipes that didn’t leave a gap wide enough to stand up in, clothing tearing, bodies pressed flat every time one of them tried to push up off the street. Around them, the people who’d been passing through the square fell back in a wave, the crowd thickening at the edges as more people arrived to see what was happening and immediately wished they hadn’t.

The screaming started the way it always does in a crowd — one voice, then three, then too many to count individually.

From above, in the ruined window frame, Regulus appeared.

He stood at the edge of the broken glass and looked down at the scene in the street below. The sword was still in his hand. The golden energy along the blade had dimmed but hadn’t fully faded, and the expression on his face was that of someone who has run out of patience entirely and is now simply deciding what to do with what’s left.

The crowd below kept screaming. People pointed up at him, pointed down at the lions, pointed at the two figures on the ground who weren’t getting up, and somewhere in the noise a voice cut through clearer than the rest.

"That’s Miss Kanary!" It came from somewhere to the left, sharp and certain. "The foreign prince is killing Miss Kanary!"

The name hit the crowd the way names do when they mean something to the people hearing them. It passed from mouth to mouth faster than anyone could stop it, and the screaming that had already been happening found a new shape and got louder.

Regulus set his jaw. He looked at the two figures on the ground, at the lions still working, at the crowd spreading outward through the square. For exactly one second, the idea of ending it right there — revealing everything, using the full weight of what he could do, silencing the noise the direct way — sat in the front of his mind as a real option.

Then a voice arrived from somewhere in the crowd that sounded nothing like the rest.

"Look at the lions!"

No panic in it. No fear. Just a direction, stated plainly, as if the person saying it already knew what everyone was about to see.

The crowd looked.

The golden lions pulsed — a green that didn’t belong to anything Regulus had summoned, edged with something that moved like fire but burned a color fire doesn’t burn — and came apart. Not gradually. All at once, the way a held breath releases.

What was left on the cobblestones where two women had been a moment before was wood and cloth. Splintered pieces of something that had been shaped to look right from a distance. And in the center of the wreckage, tilted at angles against the broken stone, two painted doll heads looked up at the sky with fixed expressions that had never been alive.

The crowd went quiet for two full seconds.

Then, from the opposite side of the square, a different voice.

"The prince took out an impostor!" It had the tone of someone announcing something that should have been obvious from the start. "He’s a hero!"

The crowd didn’t move immediately. There was a beat, the kind of collective pause that happens when a large group of people is updating what they think they just saw. Then the update finished, and the square that had been screaming in horror a moment ago started cheering instead.

Regulus swept his gaze across the crowd, moving fast and methodical, looking for the source of the first shout and then the second one. The voice that had pointed everyone at the lions. The voice that had given them the conclusion to land on. Two different points of origin, two different moments, delivered with a timing that didn’t happen by accident.

He found nothing. Faces. Open mouths. The sound of his own name going up from people who hadn’t been inside the hall, who had no idea what had actually taken place, who had seen the end of something and been handed an interpretation that fit neatly over it.

He stayed in the window frame without moving, sword in hand, the last of the golden energy cooling along the blade until it was gone.

"(It wasn’t a trap to kill me,) he thought. The thought arrived flat and cold, stripped of anything that wasn’t just the fact of it. (It was a trap to leave me here with no way out that doesn’t make things worse.)"

A city that had just watched him destroy what looked like its heir in public. A wedding ceremony with no bride standing at the end of it. A crowd in the street that would remember his face and the story they’d been given to go with it, and would still be telling it tomorrow. Every thread in place before he’d arrived, pulled tight the moment he’d moved, holding him in a position he hadn’t chosen and couldn’t leave without confirming exactly what someone had designed this to look like.

He looked down at the cheering crowd one more time.

Then he sheathed the sword slowly, the sound of metal settling into the scabbard carrying further than it should have in the sudden quiet between one wave of noise and the next.

Below, the crowd kept shouting his name.