"If we don't shut him up, she shatters!" I argued. "Just thirty seconds! Keep her heavy!"
I didn't wait for permission. I ripped my hands away from the energy flow.
The loss of connection was physically painful, like tearing a leech off raw skin. Aria gasped on the slab, her heart stuttering.
I spun on my heel, drawing my daggers. They felt light in my hands, eager.
Three hounds were still active, circling Apollo. He was toying with them, blasts of black light erupting from his fingers to melt their legs or fuse their jaws.
I didn't run. I moved.
I pushed theMotionaspect into my own legs. I became a blur, a streak of shadow and violence cutting across the forge floor.
Apollo turned, sensing the rush. The black pits of his eyes locked onto me.
"Little Wolf," he crooned, raising the lyre. "Always biting at heels you cannot reach."
He swept his hand across the strings. A wave of force, thick and suffocating as a physical blow, hammered toward me.
I dropped.
I hit the floor in a slide, the oil-slicked metal carrying me under the blast. The silence roared over my head, shattering a stack of cooling ingots into dust behind me.
I came up from the slide inside his guard.
He smelled terrible. Up close, the rot was overwhelming, masking the faint, lingering scent of the brother I had sparred with a thousand years ago.
"Shut up," I snarled.
I drove my left dagger toward his gut.
He moved with supernatural speed, catching my wrist. His grip was ice-cold, dead weight.
"Predictable," he whispered, the myriad voices in his throat laughing.
"Am I?"
I headbutted him.
It was dirty. It was crude. It was exactly what he didn't expect from a divine duel.
My forehead slammed into the bridge of his nose. There was a wet crunch. He staggered back, his grip loosening just enough.
I spun, bringing my right dagger around in a slash aimed at the lyre strings.
The blade of the dagger bit into the shadow-stuff of the instrument. Three strings snapped with the sound of breaking violin cables. The resulting feedback screeched through the room, a backlash of chaotic magic.
Apollo howled, dropping the lyre as the energy burned his hand.
"Hounds!" I roared. "Take him!"
The two remaining automatons didn't need to be told twice. They lunged. One locked its bronze jaws onto Apollo’s leg, the piston-driven bite crushing through the greaves. The other tackled him from behind, slamming him onto the floor.
"Back!" Hephaestus yelled from the Anvil. "Wolf! The heart is failing!"
I felt it. The bond was screaming. Aria’s pulse was a flutter, a dying bird in a cage.
I abandoned Apollo to the dogs and sprinted back to the circle. I vaulted over the debris, sliding back into my position at the West point.
