Smoke hung thick over the northern shore, stinging the eyes and turning the sunset blood-red.
The beach was a charnel house. Bodies of merfolk and radiant knights lay tangled in the surf, swept back and forth by the tide. The great leviathan and the three thunder drakes had fallen together in a final, blazing collision, their charred carcasses half-buried in the sand. Deep sea wraiths and lightwardens had torn each other apart in the dunes, until barely a handful of either remained. The drowned revenants had detonated their lightning cores in the heart of the Covenant's infantry, carving great smoking craters into the ranks. Both sides had gambled everything on this one battle. Both sides had already lost more than they'd ever expected.
At the center of the field, the last two champions faced each other.
Sir Valerius, captain of the Radiant Knights, stood with his holy blade drawn, golden light seeping from the cracks in his dented armor. Across from him, the Drowned King hefted his barbed trident, his waterlogged skin glistening, barnacles crusted along the edges of his crown. The fate of the whole continent would be decided between them.
The Drowned King feinted left, then turned and bolted for the waves.
Sir Valerius did not move.
He stood perfectly still, watching his enemy flee toward the safety of the sea, and made no move to give chase. He simply turned his blade toward the remaining Tide Pact infantry scattered across the beach, and began cutting them down one by one.
High on the cliffside, Soren Shaw slammed his fist on the command stone.
"Coward!" he snarled. "Fight him! Chase him! What is she doing?"
Murong Xue, standing silent at her own command post, did not even blink.
She knew this trick. She knew it very well. She had chased tunnel rats into empty valleys and found cave-ins waiting for her. She had sent companies after fleeing raiders and watched them vanish into the earth, only to be picked apart one by one from the dark. Chasing a retreating enemy into their own territory was a fool's game. The rats had taught her that.
"Hold the line," she said, calm as still water. "We do not pursue. We finish what's left on the beach. Then we take the shore. Let him run back to his empty city."
Soren ground his teeth. His gambit had failed. The luring trap he'd spent weeks preparing was useless. The Covenant princess was too cautious. Too careful.
"Fine," he spat. "Plan B. Full advance. Throw everything we have left at them. Break their lines before nightfall."
The battle roared back to life. Neither side noticed the faint, thin line of ice stretching out across the open sea, far to the east, glinting in the last light of the sun.
The Tidal Citadel, capital of the Tide Pact's island holdings, had stood unchallenged for nearly two years.
Its garrison was small—barely two hundred old veterans and young trainees, all the fighters too old or too young to march with the main army. They'd spent the war napping on the walls, playing dice in the barracks, and laughing about the land-dwellers who couldn't sail and would never reach them. No ships had been spotted in weeks. The war was far away. The citadel was the safest place in the whole realm.
Then the frost came.
A bridge of solid, glistening ice stretched from the mainland cliffs straight to the citadel's western wall. Five hundred frost wraiths glided across it, silent as shadows, their robes whipping in the sea wind. The sentries on the wall stared, dumbfounded, convinced they were hallucinating. Land-dwellers didn't cross the sea. They didn't walk on water.
One sentry opened his mouth to sound the alarm.
A meteor of roaring, condensed flame struck the gatehouse before he could make a sound.
The great iron gates blew inward in a shower of molten metal. The wraiths poured through the breach like a flood of silver and ice. The garrison broke in less than three minutes. They were guards, not soldiers. They had never fought anyone who could melt stone with fire and freeze blood with a touch.
Lirael stepped through the broken gates, her black staff tapping softly against the stone courtyard, and smiled.
She'd been right. No one brings every storage bag to a battle. No one leaves their treasury completely empty.
The vaults beneath the citadel were stacked to the ceiling with spatial pouches, rune-bound crates, enchanted sacks of holding—all the spare storage the Tide Pact had accumulated over two years of scavenging and raiding. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Enough to hold every last scrap of grain and meat and preserved fruit their underground vaults contained, twice over.
"Load everything," she said, her voice carrying through the vault. "Every pouch. Every crate. Every enchanted sack. Leave nothing but the dust."
Her wraiths moved like ghosts. Pouch after pouch vanished into the folds of their robes, stacked and nested and packed full. The treasury emptied in under an hour. By the time the last guard stopped screaming, there was nothing left but bare stone shelves and a few scattered copper coins not worth picking up.
Lirael paused at the vault door, glancing back at the empty room, and nodded with quiet satisfaction.
Their storage problem was solved.
And the battle on the beach? It was still going strong. Neither side had any idea their whole war had just become irrelevant.
The sun had dipped below the horizon when the messenger reached the Tide Pact's command post.
He was half-drowned, bleeding from a dozen cuts, and he collapsed at Soren's feet before he could speak.
"Sir—" he gasped, choking on salt water. "The citadel. They hit the citadel. Everything is gone. The vaults. The stores. All of it."
Soren stared at him for a long, silent second.
Then he laughed. A sharp, bitter, disbelieving laugh.
"The rats," he said. "It was the rats. They crossed the ocean. On ice."
He turned, wild-eyed, toward the Covenant lines. Murong Xue had gone very still. A second messenger had reached her too, pale and shaking, whispering in her ear. Her face had gone as white as her robes.
The Covenant capital had been stripped bare too.
Every storage pouch. Every last reserve crate. Every sack of grain they'd left behind in the vaults, every bundle of medical supplies, every spare weapon and piece of armor. Gone. Cleaned out. While they'd been busy trying to kill each other on the beach, the rats had walked into both their homes and taken everything.
The battle on the sand had ground to a halt. Soldiers on both sides had lowered their weapons, staring confused at their commanders, waiting for the order to charge. No order came.
Murong Xue stepped forward, away from her command post, until she stood at the edge of the tide line. Soren Shaw walked down from the cliffs to meet her. For a long minute, the two greatest commanders in the tournament just stared at each other across the blood-soaked sand.
"They hit both of us," Soren said at last. His voice was raw. "Took everything. While we were here trying to kill each other over crumbs."
Murong nodded slowly. Her eyes were cold, but there was something else there too—respect, almost. For the enemy that had outplayed them both so completely.
"They want us broken," she said. "Tired. Hungry. Fighting each other until there's nothing left. Then they come out and pick up the pieces."
"So what do we do?"
She looked inland, toward the rolling plains where the tunnel network stretched for miles under the earth. For two years she'd hated the rats. For two years she'd wanted to dig them out and crush them. Now, for the first time, she looked at them like what they were: a real enemy. A worthy one.
"We stop fighting each other," she said. "We combine what's left of our forces. We march on the central tunnels. We dig them out. Together."
Soren barked a bitter laugh.
"An alliance between the Covenant and the Tide Pact. To fight a bunch of tunnel-dwelling scavengers. Who would've thought."
He held out a hand, calloused and salt-stained.
"Deal. But after we bury the rats? We finish this. Properly."
Murong took his hand. Her grip was firm.
"After we bury the rats."
Behind them, the last embers of the great beach battle guttered out. The two broken armies stared at each other across the sand, then slowly, grudgingly, lowered their weapons.
The old war was over.
The new one was about to begin.
Up in the observation spire, Headmaster Corvin watched the two armies merge into one long column and turn south toward the central plains, and sighed.
"Finally," he murmured. "It only took them two and a half years to figure out who the real enemy was."
The examiner beside him shook his head, still scrolling through the score updates.
"They're sitting on more supplies than both alliances combined. They've got better fortifications. They've got traps all through those tunnels. Even together, this isn't going to be easy."
"Of course it isn't," Corvin said, smiling faintly. "That's the point. The easy battles don't teach you anything."
He glanced over at booth seventy-three.
Laia was leaned back in her chair, fast asleep, an empty pastry tray balanced on her stomach. She'd eaten her way through nine full platters over the course of the battle, and apparently decided the final act could wait until after a nap.
Corvin shook his head.
Some gods commanded their armies with iron will and brilliant strategy.
Some gods just took a nap while their subjects won the war for them.
He was starting to think the second kind might be the most dangerous of all.
Down below the earth, three clan leaders stood over a table stacked high with thousands of newly stolen spatial pouches, and looked up as the first distant tremor of marching feet rolled through the stone.
Borgul bared his teeth in a grin.
"Took 'em long enough."
Korg cracked his knuckles.
"Took all their food. Took all their bags. Now they're coming for us. Perfect."
Lirael traced a finger along the tunnel map, marking every trap, every dead end, every collapse point. Her eyes glinted in the moss-light.
"Let them come," she said, quiet and cold.
"They wanted a war. Let's give them one they'll never forget."
The final siege was about to begin.
And the rats were ready.