The traitorous Archmage tried to activate every single one of the arrays that he had developed to defend himself in the case Jirni had one or more aces in the hole, but nothing happened.
"Please, stop doing that. You're just being pathetic." Zogar Vastor, the god of the battlefield, said as he channeled his mana through his Yggdrasil staff and into the arrays' network, hijacking them thanks to his Highmaster's skills.
"As I said, this has never been your trap nor did I ever fell for your trickery. I simply used your plan as a framework for mine so that the more it progressed, the more entangled you got in a web of your own making." Jirni said.
"What? How?" Deirus said to buy himself some time while he weaved a new spell.
He had already called reinforcements via the prism and until his enemies found his heart's location, he still had a chance. Night herself was rushing there to get even with the Mad Professor and the god of death for fooling her.
"After countless failed attempts to eliminate you from the political scene, I realized that you were too patient and smart to make a stupid mistake that would incriminate yourself and allow me to bring you down by the law." Jirni said.
"Once I understood that our battle could go on for years, forcing my family to live inside a cage of fear, I decided that if I couldn't beat you, then I had to let you win. As I predicted, after losing so many battles, the overwhelming victory went to your head.
"You started to act sloppy, like during the funeral, where you risked your life on the gamble that the Royals wouldn't pardon a grieving father. At that point, you only needed one last push to throw yourself in the grave you dug for me.
"That's why I broke into your house and let you play with my puppet. To either kill you or get a confession that will end this squabble once and for all." Jirni said.
"What? Are you telling me that everything that happened until now, even Quylla's death, was your doing?" Deirus asked.
"Exactly. Right after the gala, the moment when you thought that I would lower my guard, I created several openings for your hitmen to exploit. After all, it was just of matter of when, not of if." Jirni replied.
"I may be an undead, but you are a monster. How could you sacrifice your daughter just to bait me into revealing my dealings with the Undead Courts? If you were willing to sacrifice her, why didn't you just give Quylla to me in the first place?" Velan's mind spun so fast that he almost lost focus of the spell he had just weaved.
"Oh, please. Do you really think I had only one meat puppet prepared?" Jirni said with a soft chuckle while pointing at her own corpse that lay on the ground. "I knew that you wanted to make me suffer, so I had a puppet prepared for every one of my children.
"Why do you think I didn't let them out for months? I needed to buy the time for my project to be completed and to make sure that not even my husband could distinguish the copies from the original."
"That's forbidden magic! By exposing me, you are exposing yourself. We'll die together." Deirus said while unleashing a tier five spell that generated a hail of ice spikes and air blades.
Yet none of them reached their target as the shield of Orion, the god of the forge, generated a pulse of light that protected the whole group.
Velan stared at the grieving father in horror, not only because Orion's fury had only grown since the day of the murder, but also because he was wearing a Royal Fortress armor.
"You can thank Zogar for the meat puppets." Jirni said while stopping the recording. "When Manohar told me about the light clone that he used to fool Night, he gave me an idea.
"Of course, he's too unreliable to make a copy that anyone can use even in his absence. That's where Zogar came into play. He and Manohar are the greatest experts about Arthan's Madness in the Kingdom and they both saw Thrud's meat puppets in Othre.
"All Vastor had to do, was to take a few death row inmates and use his Body Sculpting abilities to kill their minds while leaving their bodies ready for use. This is no forbidden magic because our test subjects were already dead for the Kingdom.
"We executed them in an unusual but lawful way with the permission of the Royals." Jirni said as her plan quickly come to its fruition.
"That's impossible! I saw Orion cry. I watched him at the funeral. He can't be that good of an actor!" Velan said.
"I'm not! She kept everything hidden even from me." Orion's eyes blazed in the darkness like violet torches as he stepped forward.
He hated his wife almost as much as he hated Deirus for manipulating him like that.
Yet seeing Quylla, or what he thought to be Quylla, die and Velan do such horrible things to Jirni, looking at her with a bulge in his pants, had made it easy for Orion to pick who he would use to vent his anger.
A series of quick flashes of his blade cut off Deirus's limbs, revealing the position of his heart. His left leg recovered more quickly than the other parts, betraying the vital organ's presence.
"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way." Jirni stopped Orion's hand before he killed his hated enemy. "Tell me who's the man behind the Balkor cards and where I can find Night. With her siblings gone, I need to take her down to end the war."
"Fuck you." Velan's severed head spat toward Jirni, but Orion blocked the corrosive saliva with his shield and crushed the thrall's gonads, making him scream in agony.
"I can play with you run out of juice for regenerating your wounds, fucker." The god of the forge said. "You have no idea what I have prepared for you."
Usually, Jirni was the master inquisitor, but she wasn't familiar with the biology of Baba Yaga's children, let alone their thralls. Orion, instead, knew nothing about questioning but a lot about pain.
He released a swarm of small golden spheres that crawled with little spider legs on Velan's body before digging through his flesh. Each one of them latched itself to the strongest mana source they detected, unleashing small bursts of darkness at the same time.
Deirus had one body, but he suffered as much as if he had six, one for each severed body part, and darkness fusion couldn't help him against Orion's creations now that the limbs had been separated from the prism.
Night realized what was going to happen and shattered her prism from a distance, killing Velan Deirus before he could reveal her location. Their bond was a double-edged sword that allowed her Chosen to find her just like Night could always find Baba Yaga.
"I know that I can defeat Balkor and Manohar at the same time, but facing also Vastor, Orion, and whatever that madwoman has prepared for me would be plain suicide." Night said before ordering her army to turn around.
"Deirus's loss is more than acceptable. I had already squeezed everything from him. He would have made an excellent general, but I can always find more like him. He's no Balkor, after all."
