Lindon knelt first, running his hand along the side of the cloud. As he'd expected, the cloud was slightly smaller than it had been the previous day, its sides wispier. One day of missed maintenance wouldn't affect its performance much, but one weed wouldn't overrun a garden either. It was better to take care of the problem while it was small than let it grow larger.

He let his pure madra flow into the construct, feeling it seized by the script at the cloud's center. Madra pulled from his weaker core, and there was a slight delay as the construct processed the pure madra and used it to nourish its Forged cloud madra.

Like a plant growing a thousand times faster, the cloud grew thicker and perhaps half an inch larger. He even thought it may have bobbed higher, though that could have been his imagination.

The effort drained that core dry, as it had been mostly exhausted already, but he switched to the other and climbed up behind Yerin.

“You're a fussy one,” she noted.

“I've always found that a little work up front makes things easier later on,” he said, climbing onto the cloud and securing his pack between them.

He hadn't quite finished when she kicked the cloud up to speed, sending him lurching back and grabbing onto her shoulders for support.

“I think you may have seen hard work sometime in the past,” Yerin called back, “but you never came close enough to shake its hand.”

She blasted through the forest, faster than they had usually gone on their way down from Mount Samara, black-leaved tree branches whipping by Lindon's ear. He leaned down behind Yerin so her Iron body could protect him, though her small back offered little shelter.

Only once he'd adapted to the speed did he recognize their direction. “Apologies, but...are we chasing the monsters?”

Branches whipped her as they passed by, but she ignored him as though they were nothing more than a gentle breeze. “Aura's heading this way for a reason. May as well find out where that is.”

“We know one thing about where it's headed: there's an army of monsters there. That we know.”

He felt her laugh. “Where did we leave the guy who spilled blood to leave the only home he'd ever known? You're weak, but I didn't suppose you were a coward.”

That prickled his pride, and he straightened. A foolish move, as he immediately took a branch to the face.

Spitting out leaves that tasted of copper and rotten vegetables, he responded. “I'm not saying I won't go, I'm saying I'd like to be somewhat cautious.”

“Oh, I'll be cautious.” She steered the cloud to leap over a bush, rolling down a small hill as he clung to her arms for support. “Somewhat.”

Chapter 4

Iteration 217: Harrow

In the first strike, she exterminated humanity.

Suriel’s weapon activated as she whipped it down. It expanded in a microsecond, expanding from a meter-long bar of blue steel into a skeleton of blue metal containing a web of light. It looked like a bare tree, each of its branches arcing with power.

While it was sealed, Suriel called her weapon a sword. Now that it was released, the weapon regained its identity as Suriel’s Razor.

It had been handed down to her from her predecessor, along with the identity of Suriel, the Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court. More than a tool for destruction, the Razor was meant as an instrument of healing. An infinitely complex, incalculably powerful scalpel.

Her mind ran along its familiar pathways even as she struck. First, she isolated the bloodline she intended to target. That feature was intended to remove pests in a home or a strain of virus in a body, but she could just as easily expand her focus.

To mankind. They were corrupted now, fused to and altered by the same chaos that destroyed their world.

Once her target was selected, she simply provided the energy, and the Razor did the rest. The Mantle of Suriel, a river of raging white flame that hung from her back like a cape, rolled with power as it drew on the Way. She funneled that power to her weapon, which flashed so brightly they would see it on the surface of the burning planet, kilometers beneath her.

Millions of lights blinked into existence all through the atmosphere, a blanket of tiny stars. Each light flashed, spearing down to the surface, and then was gone.

Her connection to the Way slackened immediately, like a sudden flicker of weightlessness in the center of her stomach. Humans anchored a world, their lives and their minds tying it to the Way, and when they were gone…chaos reigned. She had cut this world adrift.

[Targets eliminated,] her Presence informed her, the voice feminine and impersonal inside her mind. [Ninety-nine-point-eight percent population reduction. Proceed with manual elimination?]

In her vision, points of green ignited all over Harrow, indicating those that had survived her purge. These were the scraps that remained pure, even with their world corrupted. The last remnant of Harrow’s population.

Abidan regulations stipulated that she complete the elimination, as the chaos could infect survivors at any time, but she was Suriel. She had fought her way to one of the highest positions in existence in order to save the lives that couldn’t be saved.

She denied her Presence’s request.

All told, there were two million, one hundred six thousand, three hundred and forty-four survivors scattered all over the dying planet. A huge number of lives, but only a speck of dust next to the number she’d just killed. Days ago, there had been five billion people on this planet. After the violent merge of Limit and Harrow, only twenty percent of the population had survived. Now? A scarce fraction, a handful of sand, easily swept away.

A weight settled onto her spirit, another slab of lead in a tower that was growing too high to manage. She knew the elimination was necessary, but she had still taken so many lives. How many had she killed now?

Her Presence could tell her, but she didn’t ask.

The previous Suriel, her predecessor, had not died in the line of duty. He’d passed the Mantle and Razor on to her when they grew too heavy for him, and then he’d walked away. He lived the life of a mortal now, his power forcibly veiled. She hadn’t heard from him in millennia.

The things he’d done in the name of his office had burdened him, broken him, and he was the Phoenix. His job was to save lives, not to take them. How much heavier was the weight borne by Razael, the Wolf?

Or Ozriel, the Reaper?

The world’s problems had not ended with the destruction of mankind. If they had, the Reaper’s job would not be necessary. Anyone with the power of an Abidan Judge were capable of eliminating a planet’s worth of people, and most Iterations only had a single inhabited planet.

Beneath where she floated, high in the outer atmosphere, the planet rolled in visible turmoil. Seas appeared and disappeared, caught between Limit and Harrow, continents flickered and boiled as though trying to decide on a shape, cities crumbled to dust and were rebuilt in seconds. Clouds spun in rapid circles, taken by chaotic winds, and fire raged across such a vast territory that it was visible from space.

Now, the difficult and painstaking part of her task began.

Gadrael, a compact and muscular man with dusky blue skin and tight-packed horns instead of hair, hovered nearby. His arms were folded so that the black circle on his forearm, the Shield of Gadrael, was pointed out. He wore the same liquid-smooth white armor as she did, and a Judge’s Mantle burned behind him as well.