Wicked War of Mine (Overworld Chronicles Book 9) by John Corwin Read Free Book Online

said.
    "Oh, my." Takei shook his head. "Where's your sense of Arcane pride, Harry?"
    Elyssa took a page out of my book and face-palmed.
    "Let's prime the arches," I said, and headed for the control room without further ado.
    The control room door led to a raised platform with a large map of the world spread along the wall. The continents only roughly matched those found on the globe today. The stars indicating the locations of Obsidian Arches didn't always line up with cities or civilization of any kind since the arches had been built long before the rise of man.
    I turned left from the platform and walked down a long, wide aisle. Smaller arches, each one about the size of an elephant lined the large room. The ones to my left each bore a Cyrinthian number inscribed on the floor in front of them. The numbers correlated to a series of buttons on the side of the map. To the right was an alcove with the omniarches. Unlike their numbered counterparts, these could be used to travel anywhere a person could visualize.
    "The second one and the last one," Shelton said, pointing to green markings on the floor in front of two arches.
    I stepped inside the silver circle around the first working omniarch, fixed an image of one part of the Dark Forest I remembered well in my mind, and willed a portal to open there. The air between the black columns flickered and a portal split the space. Dense trees and foliage appeared across a short grassy span. One large tree in particular stood out, thanks to a giant bite missing from its trunk.
    "Is that the tree the tragon bit?" Elyssa asked.
    I nodded. "That monster almost took off my butt."
    "Ah, the tragon," Takei said with a fond note in his voice. "We used to steal sheep from Queens Gate and throw them into the forest just so we could get a look at the fabled beast."
    "Poor sheep," Elyssa said.
    "I'll be right back." I stepped through the portal and paced off a good thirty feet from it, snapped a picture of the woods at that point, and returned through the portal. I walked to the last omniarch and used the picture I'd taken to open a portal. I turned to Michael and Captain Takei. "Prepare your troops for infiltration."
    Takei turned to Michael. "No cheating, now."
    "No need," the hulking Templar said.
    Elyssa, Shelton, and I returned to the front of the room while Michael and Captain Takei rounded up their soldiers. Within a few minutes, two neat double-file lines of troops sprinted through the control room door. The black-clad Templars took the first portal while the Blue Cloaks entered the second. Shelton waved his wand and a holographic timer hovering in the air started for each contingent.
    At first, the Templars moved nearly twice as fast as the Blue Cloaks since they were gifted with supernatural physical attributes, but the Arcanes must have cast a fleetness spell because they began to outpace them. Eleven minutes and thirty-two seconds later, both forces were through the portals.
    "Yes." Shelton pumped his arm. "Templars barely edged them out by two seconds."
    "Well, what did you expect?" Elyssa said in a curt voice.
    "Hah, you were rooting for them, weren't you?" he said.
    She shrugged. "I couldn't help it."
    I would have chimed in with a smartass remark, but anxiety gnawed at my stomach. I went through the portal. The troops remained in a quad-file formation, two columns of Templars next to two columns of Blue Cloaks, hugging the curving forest fringe. Once we left the cover of the trees, a wide grassy field offered no cover between here and our objective.
    The Dark Forest was a foreboding place anyone with common sense would avoid. Naturally, I'd been in there a couple of times, once to save Shelton, and once after I'd thrown Aunt Vallaena into a tree. Many of the trees had trunks as thick as a bus standing on one end and towered several stories high. Smaller trees and thick underbrush took up every other square inch of space. I'd only seen a few of the creatures lurking inside that