Chapter 799: Chapter 800: Sonar Damon watched Matia kill and kill until the entire plaza was nothing but shattered sheets of ice and frozen blood. The broken remains of the stillborn littered every inch of stone, their bodies piled so high they nearly reached the balcony where Damon stood. Matia had slain hundreds. If Damon’s true body were here, he would have devoured the remains without hesitation. Too bad he could not. His shadow had taken the shape of the formless flames that guarded his heart, and those flames found nothing here worth consuming. Not that he could move them here anyway. He was no closer to reconstructing his body. Nothing Matia left behind appealed to his shadow, and even if it had, he would have needed far more. The sun was sinking lower, bleeding its cold light across the ruined plaza, yet the stillborn kept coming. More than before. Far more. Matia did not stop. Frost poured from her wings in waves, each gust freezing the swarming horde. But she was not limitless. Damon could see the slight, subtle falters in her movements. Her mana was immense but not infinite. If this continued, exhaustion would swallow her, and then the tide would bury her in sheer numbers. "This is not going how I expected. The mother of stillbirths is not showing up." Damon felt his shoulders tighten. Anxiety prickled at the back of his skull. Lazarak sat calmly on the balcony rail, legs dangling and swinging lightly through the air as if he were resting at a lakeside rather than a battlefield of corpses. "A sound strategy. Not facing a dangerous opponent is safer." 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂 Damon groaned as a dull headache throbbed behind his eyes. "I thought she would show herself. What kind of mother just sits back and watches her offspring die." Lazarak raised his hands and began shaping magic seals in the air. Damon watched closely. The magic was unfamiliar to him. The symbols were older, more primitive, carved with intention that modern mages did not comprehend. "Then we find her," Lazarak said. He pushed off the railing with a graceful hop. Dust slid off the ancient stone. He lifted his hands like wings. A soft pulse of mana rippled out from him. The wave hummed gently, slipping through walls and stone like a whisper. Damon flinched at the strange resonance. "What did you just do?" Lazarak smiled in that calm, unhurried way of his. "I may not be someone who takes life, but I am a grandmaster of magic. I call this spell sonar." He snapped his fingers. "It uses waves to map everything it touches. And you know what also has waves." Damon answered slowly, unsure. "Mana." "Exactly." Damon followed the concept enough to appreciate its usefulness. "So you found her then." "Deep beneath the castle," Lazarak replied. "But the tunnels are full of stillborn and discarnate souls. The lowest levels crawl with shades. Nasty entities." "How many shades." Damon leaned forward slightly, a strange interest flickering in his eyes. Lazarak hesitated. Damon’s eagerness did not match common sense, but he answered anyway. "Many." "How many is many." Lazarak closed his eyes, his expression tightening as he stretched his senses downward. "A few thousand. And several thousand discarnate souls of other types." Damon took a long, steady breath. A stillborn collapsed below, frozen solid. Another slammed into a wall and shattered into glittering fragments. "I was worried we would need an army to break through." "It would be great if we had one," Lazarak said softly. "Sadly we must make do." Damon smiled, his expression sharpening. The wings of the mirror seraph unfurled behind him, glittering coldly. "Will an army of shades do?" Lazarak narrowed his eyes. "You have an army of... wait. You can control shades." Damon could. Under the right conditions. With shadow energy. With his soul conduit skill. And if he abandoned the mirror seraph’s body, operating as a soulless was easier. Shades followed shadows like him. Still, the time limit was merciless. He did not have enough shadow energy to sustain it. "Five minutes," Damon said calmly, that was the most he was willing to risk with the shadow control skill and soul conduit. "That is how long I can hold them. You cannot kill her, but you can subdue her long enough for Matia to land the killing blow." Beyond that time, his soul’s shadow energy would run dry. And with thousands of shades, five minutes was already pushing it. There was also the staff of carnage. Damon’s silent trump card. If necessary, he could wipe out everything in one obliterating strike. A weapon made for massacre, a tool of mass murder. He crossed his arms. "How do we get past everything to reach the tunnels under the castle." Lazarak’s smile softened in a confident, secretive way. "Leave that to me. Did I ever tell you I dabble in a little spatial magic." Damon stepped toward the edge of the balcony, glancing down at Matia as she tore her sword from a stillborn. One of the ice-blades protruded from her opposite side, cutting through another monster like cold scythes. The storm around her raged, flurries of ice and blood swirling in a deadly dance. He reached out and seized Lazarak’s arm. "Prepare the spell. I will grab Matia. The moment I touch her, get us out of here." Black light with a faint golden shimmer gathered in Lazarak’s hands. The glow carried a strange, ancient weight, something more than mana alone. "Leave it to me. Worry only about surviving." Damon exhaled, spread the glass wings on his back, and dove into the blizzard of frost and blood. His sword cut through freezing air in a sweeping arc as he descended. He landed amid the storm of ice, stepping across stillborn corpses as they lunged with snapping jaws and clawing limbs. "Matia. Let’s go." He shouted over the howl of the frozen wind. Her cold eyes turned toward him. An armored fairy stood atop a hill of corpses, every inch of her plated in frozen blood. A phantom duplicate of herself impaled another stillborn with a spear of ice. She nodded and spread her wings. Damon reached for her. Her hand, cold as glacier stone, touched his. Lazarak opened his palm. A sphere of darkness swallowed them whole.