Chapter 29

The wall held. That was the good news. I knew I was cutting it close with my math. If the builders cheaped out on materials, or if I misplaced a decimal with the charge, it wouldn’t be able to withstand the blast.

The bad news? The tower I was in was now on fire, and on the verge of collapse.

Maybe I should have thought of that when I was doing my calculations.

To be completely fair, my building wasn’t the only one on fire. Every structure not protected from the blast by the shadow of the wall was actively burning. The heat was so intense that wood flashed to charcoal in an instant. Steel glowed. Copper and lead ran like water.

I was protected by a wardstone, a relative of the keystone that the old man sent with me. It wasn’t much good for physical attacks, just magical. Kaze had its twin. It was entirely possible that her stone was the reason why the wall held. She had more mana than me to pump into it.

Mine bought me a precious few seconds to get the hell out of my burning prison, and exactly one second to take stock of the carnage down below.

The entire enemy formation was gone. Just…gone. Anyone up behind the ridge was still safe. Anyone caught between the wall and the ridge was safe in the sense that it’s hard to do further damage to ash on the breeze. A crater spread out for a hundred and fifty meters in every direction from the blast site, some thirty meters deep. It was rapidly filling with water from the river, steam billowing as water hit the superheated ceramic that now lined the crater walls.

There was nothing green and growing left within easy sight. It was all blackened charcoal and drifting ash.

Sometimes, I scare myself.

The screaming in my earpiece reminded me that I was, in fact, on the verge of being trapped under several thousand tonnes of rubble. Burning rubble, at that. By the time they dug me out from under it, I’d have died several times. That sounded painful, so I opted for the next best option: I jumped.

In my defense, my jump wasn’t completely unplanned. There was always a chance the tower would come under attack and I’d have to leave in a hurry. I just didn’t plan on the whole cursed thing getting set ablaze by my own bomb. Kind of embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as splatting into the cobbles would be, which was a very real possibility if I didn’t hurry.

I had enough rope coiled up with me to make it to the bottom. I just had to arrest my fall enough to avoid breaking anything I’d need later.

The coil went over the side before I did, one end tied off to a structural pillar. I unbuckled my belt, looped the rope through and rebuckled said belt, and, after an experimental tug that was more for my own assurance than anything, hurled myself into thin air.

Two things became immediately apparent: firstly, my gloves weren’t up to the task of mitigating the heat generated by friction. Secondly, there was a wall of flame separating me from the relative safety of the street. I was gonna have to pass through that with a boatload of high explosives strapped to my chest, and I wasn’t sanguine about the rope’s chances of surviving, either.

You would think someone with my longevity would have found a better way to jump out of burning buildings by now. How I’d gone this long without when I set so many on fire was the gods’ own mystery.

There was nothing for it but to grin and bear it. I grabbed the rope in both hands and squeezed with all my might.

In less than a second, friction burned blisters into my palms. Two seconds, and I burned through the leather and started tearing into the skin, leaving a streak of blood on the rope in my wake.

The pain was excruciating. Nothing hurts quite like hand injuries, and especially burns. And still I squeezed. Meter by painful meter, I started to slow.

Just when I was starting to worry about the curtain of fire licking at my feet, the rope went slack in my hands.

There was no time to scream or curse my luck. All I could do was wrap my body around my musket and hope it didn’t break with the rest of me.

Heat, searing and awful, wrapped around my body, clawing at exposed skin and crisping hair to ash. The scent of burning hair filled my nostrils. I wanted to scream. Every instinct cried out to scream. I clamped my jaw shut as best I could. If I inhaled, I’d take in a lungful of flame. There are more painful ways to die, but waltzing into the afterlife with charcoal where your lungs should be is definitely up there.

And then I was through. I had about a second of relief before I crashed into the cobbles.

Total time spent in free fall? Less than two seconds. Those two seconds felt like an eternity. It was nothing like the eternity that awaited me as I lay on the cobbles.

I couldn’t breathe. Stunned diaphragm? Flailed ribcage? Collapsed lungs? I couldn’t tell. My spine wasn’t broken, at least. That much, I knew because I could feel the intense, awful wrongness of a knee bent ninety degrees in the wrong direction. I tried to move my left arm. It hurt, but functioned, more or less. My right refused. I looked over and found the reason why. There was a bone sticking out of my bicep. Which bone? No idea. The whole limb was so badly twisted, I couldn’t make heads or tales of what I was looking at, only that it hurt like hell.

But hey, at least my musket was okay, and my pistols seemed to have survived. None of my cartridges were crushed. I took the fall on my back, so all the really important stuff made it intact.

I would have breathed a sigh of relief if I could breathe. Nope. Lungs still not working.

Damn. That was going to be bad. Should I fight to stay awake? No, no point. There was no healing this mess. Best to let go. I’d be back again in short order anyway.

The last thing I remembered before it all faded to black was someone shouting in my ear, begging me to hold on.