All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 274: Do You See What I See

Our party stepped past the archfiend's body and continued down the hall. The tide of incoming enemies proved no match for their teamwork, as expected. Soon, all five of us sat before the throne room doors. There was a quarter of a second where we all stood still, staring at what we knew to be the toughest fight ahead of us. But then Arthur led the way forward.

He kicked the center of the door with the heel of his boot. Something cracked, and I heard wood splintering as they flew off their hinges.

I beeped in quiet distress. It seemed like a little bit of overkill to me. They obviously hadn't been locked, so why not just push them open? Especially since they were so nicely made. But I digress.

The doors slammed into the decorative floor as they skidded towards the throne. I cushioned the impact just a little bit out of respect for the floor so that it didn't scratch.

Through the newly "opened" doorway, we got our first look at the throne room proper. Its floor was a beautifully smooth layer of garnet-colored tile with gold flecks scattered throughout. My sensors could obviously pick up the seams between the tiles, indicating that it wasn't nearly as impressive as the Lieutenant's or Archibald's rooms back at the castle, but it was pretty close.

I also appreciated the white and gold accent rug that ran the entire length of the room. White for a rug seemed like a frankly terrible choice, but they kept it clean somehow. I could respect that.

The rest of the ornate space boasted all manner of furnishings - rich tapestries, sparkling crystal chandeliers, golden wall sconces, and, of course, the throne itself. The massive chair sat at the far end of the hall. Made of what appeared to be 92% pure gold, it boasted beautifully worked details of winged humans and animals all across the arms and back. Some of them even had nice little gems set in their eyes. It was all very impressive.

Sitting there and presiding over the space was the king. At least, I assumed he was the king. He wore a crown and other incredibly expensive looking regalia, and he looked remarkably human.

Arthur met the man's eyes. A lot of emotions flicked across his expression: anger, pain, even sorrow. Then he spoke. "My King - no, Gerald. We have taken the city. Surrender and renounce the throne or we will take it by force."

Then, the king laughed. That made me reconsider my initial assessment. It was not a human laugh, at least nothing like the ones I'd heard. This was something different. As I looked more closely, I saw that something sinister lurked behind the king. There was something else, a figure of shadow that detached from the side of the throne before flickering out of existence. I could see it with my advanced sensors, but everyone else seemed to miss it.

Once I switched to my soul sight, I focused back on the king and confirmed my suspicions. This wasn't the king at all. The soul was not shaped like a human soul or even the demonically possessed human soul. It was a jagged thing, a red soul full of spikes and jagged edges. The feeling I got from it was diametrically opposed to the clean souls of humans, despite the abomination not having a speck of soot staining its sinister surface.

I beeped out a warning, but my humans didn't have the chance to look and see what I was saying before the shadows attacked. I quickly projected my message in each of their visions. A small little tip-off to the side, out of the way from blocking their sight entirely, but enough to be helpful.

"The King is a demon."

---

When Bee read the message that Void popped up in her vision, she wasn't sure what Void meant by it. Clearly, her master was saying that the king was an imposter. But was it more than that? And if that was the case, who or what was he?

She only had a second to brace as the shadows attacked. They buffeted her from all sides, striking at her sides. As she tried to block the blows, another slash came from a completely unexpected direction and tossed her to the side. As she tumbled, she quickly ran Scan over everything in the room. Their shadowy assailants didn't register to her skill. In fact, only one thing did, other than her allies. Something near the King.

Name: Bez'ahel'shar, Level: 70, Race: Demon Lieutenant, Type: Demonic Illusionist, Titles: Betrayer of Joy, The Great Deceiver, Undying Faces, Age: 789273, Highest Stat: Intelligence, Lowest Stat: Constitution, Status: Amused.

After having fought the weakened Lieutenant in their own castle, she understood their power more than most. Even now, though she was getting close to them in levels, she couldn't hope to match one's regeneration and power. Especially not if they were fully awake and not bogged down by all of her alchemical preparations like last time. But maybe with the four of them, they could hold one-off for a time.

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Void was definitely powerful enough to kill one. Her master had done it before, but

"To the left of the king!" she yelled, running after where she sensed the enemy to be. From the results of her Scan, she tracked the seemingly invisible entity as it moved alongside the king. It wasn't exactly moving with the man's position, staying just far enough away to make aiming difficult. She shot out a Scouring Strike toward its position, but it seemed to flicker and dodge between the bits of grit.

She glanced back at her friends. They continued to fight the strangely solid shadows behind her, seemingly unaware that they might be illusions. She frankly couldn't blame them. With a thought, she expanded her Holy Aura outward. The skill's golden glow caused the edges of the dark figures to fuzz and flicker slightly.

"They're not real! They're illusions!"

At her call, Arthur's eyes narrowed. He barreled forward through the illusion, dissipating it with ease as the others followed. Then, they charged toward the waiting Lieutenant. All four of them crossed the distance, with only Void staying behind. She could only hope that her master had the same idea she did.

---

Suddenly, my sensors stopped performing reliably. In an impossibly small span of time, Beatrice disappeared from where she had been and appeared somewhere completely different. And as far as I knew, she didn't have a teleporting skill. Now she was over where I had originally seen the jagged-souled king, and where Beatrice had stood was one of the shadow beings.

I quickly clamped down on my instinct to clean up the shadowy mess spilling all over the floor and switched over to my soul sight. Maybe that would help me to find where the crimson soul really was. But I found that I couldn't trust that either.

Where the souls of Susan and Arthur and everyone else should have been, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was as though they didn't even exist. Worse, my visual sensors were getting worse. They constantly moved around, twisting and distorting.

What was going on? I was certain it had to do with our enemy. Maybe it was using something similar to my Sensory Disruption skill? I was hesitating to act at all lest I hit my friends, as I had no real sense of where everything was.

I heard Beatrice yell something and searched her out. But my visual sensors indicated she was coming from a completely unexpected location. Her disembodied voice was about twenty feet in front of the image of the king and ten feet behind the image of herself. The audio and visual cues also indicated that the two Beatrices were going in completely different directions. Nothing made sense.

My advanced sensors were totally fooled by whatever this Lieutenant was doing. It was even able to disrupt my soul sense, so I wasn't able to confidently say where everything was. But my microphone and audio sensors might be working. At the very least, it was picking up something completely different, something that didn't align with what the soul sense and my visuals were telling me.

To confirm, I popped out a few small rocks from my dustbin and scattered them throughout the room. I tracked their trajectories carefully through each of my different sensors. As they landed with a soft clatter, only the audio data aligned with their predicted paths.

That confirmed it - I could only trust sound right now. Whatever this Lieutenant was doing, it could mimic vision and fool everything else. But it had one weakness, and I could exploit that. I carefully turned off most of my sensors and tried to perceive only through sound where everything was. I followed the echoing footsteps of the four humans around me and the one Lieutenant. Or at least, what I assumed was the Lieutenant. No one else in our party had claws, and I definitely heard some leathery wing flaps as well.

It was hard because of the acoustics of the room, but I calculated models to follow the bouncing sounds all around until I was reasonably certain I could track people's positions with them. For the most part, I heard the sound of ringing as Beatrice's broom blade struck something and skittered off. Tony roared a battle cry, and Arthur's shield impacted something metallic.

I could barely hear Susan's light footsteps as she snuck around. The floor barely caused any ripples or echoes for me to track, but I noticed that she was not sneaking up on the right thing for some reason. She was coming in from behind Arthur. Suddenly, I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn't the only one affected by Lieutenant's power, and I caught a descending blade of Susan's with a web of air, stopping it from stabbing into Arthur's back.

That was not good. Could they not tell any more than me what was going on?

As my models rapidly improved, I began to hear the shifts in the air and get a very low-resolution idea of where everyone was and what they were doing. And after nearly a dozen seconds, I finally felt confident enough to act with some offensive capabilities. I wasn't willing to make any decisively deadly strikes, lest I be mistaken, but I did have many, many other options.

My Divine Sword wasn't a great idea, as that would be very deadly to any of the humans. But I did have many other things, like my own Sensory Disruption. I immediately shot an illusion of my own over the thing I thought was the Lieutenant, stopping any sort of sensory information from reaching him besides a fuzzy static that must have been painful to listen to. I heard a confused gasp that was clearly not from any of my friends, and the illusions affecting my sensors suddenly stopped making any sense at all.