Chapter Twenty-Four

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Cassiopeia hung suspended in the blown out window as the bodies she control spread over the walls and down toward the floor. The area below where Peter had suspended the rock with his webs had emptied out. All of the civil servants were already at the door to the throne room trying to get out into the hall to safety.

Reinhard looked to Peter as the Inquisitor hung in front of them several feet away. "Do you think you can get her away from those people she's controlling?" He asked.

"I can try," Peter said.

"Do it then, I don't want to risk killing all of them when I attack."

Peter flipped up onto the ceiling, sticking himself there and taking aim to fire twin jets of web at her body. If he could hit her he could snatch her out of their grasp—that might be enough.

Before the webs could find purchase on her, the hands from the people she controlled slapped out to block them. They were caught by him and stuck, maybe this was something else he could do, Peter would just pull them free and rescue them. Even if they were controlled it seemed that she needed them around her.

He yanked the pair back so that they sailed through the air, their eyes were dark and the expression on their faces vacant. One of them couldn't have been older than twelve if that—and she just had them like this?

Then his tingle flared to life, Peter dropped from the ceiling and webbed himself backward out of their range just in time for them to explode like missiles when they neared him. The ceiling where he had been was scorched black and he eyed Cassiopeia and then looked to Reinhard.

"Th-the people are bombs somehow, she's made them into bombs!" Peter shouted.

"I fear it may be too late for them. It seems that whatever she's done, she had to kill them or find them dead first to do it," Reinhard said. He touched his blade, only for a second as if asking permission and then he released the hilt of it.

"Not yet," the young knight said. "We have a few other choices."

A moment later Cassiopeia fired another couple of people at the rock suspended above the ground and they exploded, severing the webs and sending the rock plummeting to the floor with Reinhard on it.

He probably could have survived the fall, he made the jump up there with enough ease. Peter wasn't willing to risk it, he webbed the rock from his spot on the ceiling and held it up. As he brought it up he pulled it back to steady its swinging.

"You got this you got this you got this you got this you got this..." Peter drew Reinhard and the boulder back just as ice spikes formed on all sides of Peter, these weren't the usual rounded ones that he had seen in the past they were razor sharp and meant to do the maximum damage possible.

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Left to their own devices the candidates for ruler had mostly stayed frozen at the front of the room with their knights to protect them. Though the immediate threat was no where near here and their numbers consisted of three of the most capable combatants in the room.

Priscilla pressed her fan to her lips, watching the mass of people gathering at the door as the controlled mass of bodies crept down the wall toward them. She glanced to the other women around her and to Al. "Are you going to run for that door?" She asked.

"We could be caught by those things and trampled," Anastasia said.

"We can hold a number of them off of the civil servants and the others in the room, see if we can clear a path," Crusch said.

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