And died.

Eyes still open and on his foe.

Gard screamed in simple, ancient, human anguish.

And Marcone slid around his dead friend’s back, seized the automatic shotgun from its harness on Hendricks’s chest, swung the barrel up into the Titan’s face, and emptied the magazine.

Ethniu reeled back, shielding her face with her arms and screaming in fury. She was showing more weakness—she had ignored fire that had come at her earlier, but Marcone’s rounds had caused her pain. She swung the spear to one side and back, slamming Marcone with Hendricks’s limp body with a hideous finality of impact. Then she whipped the spear free, sending a column of lightning tearing into the Archive’s position. Ramirez grabbed the girl and yanked her out of the way, but Ethniu had regained her footing.

A needle of fire so bright that it hurt my eyes lashed into Ethniu’s body at the waist, where she had to twist and bend, and where the armor just couldn’t have been as thick. It drew a hiss of discomfort and annoyance from her, and she whirled the spear and smashed back at my grandfather with more lightning. The old man got a shield up in time, but Cristos had been a half heartbeat slow. He was flung to one side, burning, body going limp and rag doll in the violence of the explosion.

Then, as my grandfather recovered, Ethniu bounded forward, superhumanly agile even mostly on one leg, and struck him with the butt end of the spear.

My grandfather was a quarterstaff fighter with lifetimes of experience. And he was in damned fine condition for a man who had seen birthdays in four different centuries. But he was about five six and mortal. She was a nine-foot protogoddess. He pulled two deflection parries he should never have survived, much less made cleanly, and then she kicked him with her wounded leg.

She didn’t break his ribs. Her virtually invincible shin hit him with a low roundhouse in the hips, the side of the pelvis.

It was like a kid snapping a stick.

My grandfather went down hard. Unmoving.

The Titan’s lips twisted in disgust. She bent down, tore a head from a corpse with about as much trouble as me plucking a grape, and flung it at the Archive. Her aim was perfect. The girl was just struggling up out of the mud when the flying head hit her at the top of her sternum and hammered her back down.

Hell’s bells.

There was a bounding sound in the darkness, and River Shoulders flew through the air at Ethniu. She slammed at him with a bolt of lightning, but the bespectacled Sasquatch had evidently watched some home improvement videos or something. He was still airborne as the lightning hit, and he had timed it perfectly. There was nowhere for the current to latch on and ground out, and he passed through the bolt of lightning with little more consequence than some of his hair being set on fire.

The flaming Sasquatch hit Ethniu like a runaway truck—hitting a runaway truck barrier.

The Titan simply dug a heel into the ground and accepted River Shoulders’ charge. She arrested it completely. Then she got ahold of his good arm and dislocated it with a twist.

River Shoulders screamed.

Lightning struck, a hawk cried in fury, and then a goddamned grizzly bear fell out of the night sky and onto Ethniu’s head.

Don’t care how Titanic you are. No one expects an orbital-drop grizzly.

The bear’s fangs and claws raked at the Titan, leaving smoldering, glowing marks on her armor, but she simply hammered the thing with the butt of her spear until it dropped away, stunned. She swung the spear like a club, screaming in mindless rage, and broke the bear’s back like it was made of balsa wood.

The bear screamed in pain and fear—and suddenly Listens-to-Wind lay where the bear had been, prostrate and racked with obvious agony.

In seconds, she had killed or crippled virtually every other major hitter on the field.

Hell’s bells.

Divine combat. Heavy-duty magical combat. Physical combat.

We were playing rock, paper, scissors with the Titan, and each of us could only do one. She could always pull scissors to our paper, paper to our rock, rock to our scissors. And if she got bored, she could always pull out Even Better Scissors, Rock, or Paper. God, from what I’d seen and heard about her, she wasn’t even an experienced warrior. She was a noob. She was simply a power an order of magnitude beyond anything facing her. And she was beating us.

But she was breathing hard now. She was paying a price for her victory.

How do you eat a Titan?

One bite at a time.

Sanya and Butters didn’t speak to each other. Simultaneously, they simply flew forward at the Titan as we finally broke through the troops and had a shot at her. Butters went right. Sanya went left. The light of the Swords could have illuminated a stadium.

But here’s the thing about the Swords. The thing no one had told me, that I’d had to learn through years of observation.

The Swords could work miracles when it came to facing off against the forces of darkness. But it wasn’t their job to decide the fight. The Swords, and the Knights, weren’t given power to crush their enemies wholesale. They existed to level the field—to create a choice where one wouldn’t have otherwise been possible. The Swords gave the Knights an absolute power to contest the will of darkness.

But the Swords could not give them victory.

Swords don’t do that. Swords have never done that.

Victory comes from the mind, the heart, and the will. From people.

What is the sword compared to the hand that wields it?

All around us, the battle hung in the balance, poised. It could have gone one way or the other, and a feather’s touch could have made the difference in which way it fell.

I lifted a hand. I had retooled the top of my staff weeks before. It had been fit very closely, so close that you couldn’t see the seam when it was closed. The svartalves had used lasers when I commissioned it. I unscrewed a four-inch section from the top of the staff, where a simple bolt and socket had been set.

Then I drew the dagger from my belt.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears.

The handle of the dagger had been set with the same size socket as the cap of the staff. I set it on the end and spun it, and the well-oiled bolt whirled into place and locked with a simple hinged hook over one side of the dagger’s hilt, to keep it from unscrewing.

Then I gathered power. The runes of the weapon’s haft flared into green-gold light that pulsed in intensity along with the thunder of my heart.

The knife at the head didn’t burst into flame or anything. It just became . . . colder. The edges harder, sharper, more real—so real that anything that you looked at in the background beyond the spear seemed . . . blurry. Symbolic. Transitory.

That weapon carried reality woven into it, dark and hard and unalterable. I felt my will and the weapon’s head vibrating in harmony, along with my heartbeat.