“This is ridiculous. I should have just dragged the whelp off and given him what he needs. Now I’m tied up in a possibly dangerous fight.” The weasel in particular is making thinking hard. Every little shard of metal that lodges itself in me seems to keep sapping my strength. When my attacker was revealed, I knew it was going to be something, but a capped weasel bearing one of my banes wasn’t in any of my wildest predictions.
“Too dangerous to let exist in this conflict, and probably full of usable information about the whelps allies.” I focus, carving away unneeded phantasms at the edge of my mind that have been providing guidance. None of my collective memories have any experience fighting a foe like this, so it’s time to form my own memories for the first time in a while.
The little creature moves around me, repeatedly trying to get at my back and is moving fast enough to do it reliably. I need to corral it.
[Tion’s Wondrous Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Manifestus]
[Tion’s Wondrous Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Manifestus]
[Tion’s Wondrous Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Manifestus]
[Tion’s Wondrous Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Manifestus]
[Tion’s Wondrous Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Manifestus]
[Tion’s Wondrous Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Manifestus]
When the rat tries to dart around to my left again, I quickly conjure the memories of that terrifically annoying wall magus and rip the spellshape out of the memory for immediate use. It’ll make it harder to recall later, but I want this thing dead.
One by one a series of nearly invisible walls, magically hardened with the essences of Lux and Structura, appear. The first one stops the rat in its tracks as it collides with open air. It looks around confused for only the briefest moment before opting for a different route. That one also hits a wall.
As much as I would adore savoring its end — I do so love “the box trick” — I need to take from it. So its death will be by consumption.
More walls manifest fore, back, top and bottom. They begin to close in, phasing through one another, making the containing space smaller and smaller. A part of me can’t resist watching for just a moment as it starts to suffocate: These “wondrous walls” are aptly named even if made by a fool.
It continues to thrash for a few moments, flanks heaving but no sound makes it out of the solid barriers. It wobbles a little bit before falling on its side. Good.
I reach out and dispel the fields, absorbing their formative essence back into my cores. “Waste not, want not…” The little weasel — no, stoat — falls limply into my hand and I try to take its essence.
I am assaulted with garbled nonsense that floods my mind and vision. The only coherent information that comes through is the word “stoat” and vague sensations of very familiar violence and…something else. Something cunning. What’s more, I’m not getting anything out of it. No essence. Something is obscuring everything and preventing the collapse.
I rasp out of my wildly altered throat, “What are you?” My tone incredulous, trying to comprehend this enigma that seems to sit beyond classification in all but the most broad terms.
One eye opens, and I instantly squeeze down on it with every bit of force I can muster. Nothing that can’t be understood should exist. I can correct that right now. It locks eyes onto a row of three of my own, gurgling a strained response. “Male…since you…asked…” There’s a pause.
“This is ridiculous.” I squeeze harder and feel something give — it’s taking far too much force to crush something this small.
It squeals in pain for a moment before going quiet again. “Backpack, eject bomb.” I hear the whisper as the backpack on its back flaps itself open and a primed essence grenade launches out of it with force, colliding with the side of my head, bursting my rearmost eye on impact.
I try to recoil, to conjure another barrier, but there’s no time. It goes off with a flash and a bang, sending shrapnel and a combination of distilled essence fluids that all bring agony in unique and interesting ways off in every direction. Acid, fire, frost, and a dozen others spatter across my face along with the explosive force. The stoat is sent flying by the force of the blast, leaving me staggering around with half of my damned head torn off.
Tak Foundries Containing the necessary essence to form sixteen distinct harmful essential fluids, the Tak Foundries have created a device able to be used in almost any situation in order to trigger most common and uncommon banes in a single use. While expensive and limited in overall effect, the ability to effectively guarantee striking a Bane renders this tool a must have for most freelancers.
The pain is exquisite. Sensory data of interacting essence types intermingling on my skin, interfacing with the Akasha that makes up my body to form dozens of short-lived compounds that are quickly absorbed. The damage, though, is quite real, so I call upon a Victus Slime’s regenerative abilities — the little monsters can recover as long as a single mote remains and I’ll be no different.
Victus Slimes are rare creatures imbued with and made of concentrated Life essence. Essentially harmless, they are hunted for their valuable cores full of one of the rarest types of compound essences that can be found in a naturally occurring state.
The sensation of the right half of my head rebuilding itself is fascinating. It’s been some time since that sort of wound was inflicted upon me, and I revel in the information that comes from it. Most interestingly, the specific ways that the slimes’ regeneration abilities counteract the ongoing sources of damage at an intuitive level despite not having a soul vessel to reference as a template for me — unlike how most mortal kyn’s healing magics operate. It sits comfortably among the most useful abilities I’ve acquired over the years — not just for the obvious benefits, but also for experimentation on myself and the chaff that I get my hands on…
I lose track of the situation for a moment and feel the bow wave of an aura of wind and fire approaching. As I turn to meet it, I regain vision on the right side of my head. Which grants me an excellent view of a gale of cutting wind with a ball of roiling fire streaking in behind it in a sort of “one-two punch”. I have to hand it to this girl. For being so young and negligibly trained, she has good instincts and an abnormal amount of power. Is she better left to cultivate into a beautiful and experienced flower or taken now to learn how and why she feels so different from gate bearing creatures?
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Well, he’s on my mind already, so why not?
I cast a hand forward, calling one of the wall magus’s other spells into my mind and releasing it.
[Tion’s Mirrored Wall]
[Projectile | Wall | Reflexio]
The shimmer appears before me just in time for the wall of wind to strike it and be rebounded back at the trailing fireball. There’s a whoosh and a boom as the spells collide, spending their energy on one another instead of me or my prey. She doesn’t slow down, though, I’ll give her credit for that. Very adept at courting suicide. How will she react to the mirror wall, I wonder?
I brace myself subtly, wanting to keep up this act of nonchalance that seems to enrage her so. Every moment she’s fighting, she’s becoming a better and better source of essence.
Ineffectually beating her wings to gain speed, she spins her glaive(An affectation that was surely gained by a bored teenager keeping training interesting) in a wide arc, sweeping the tip of the weapon through the edge of the shield. Oddly, the tip slashes through the barrier as if it weren’t there and as I watch, the essence that went into forming it is absorbed into the weapon. Curious. I want to see the runes.
I take a performative surprised step backwards, swinging my striking tail into what has proven to be the girls consistent blindspot for the duration of this conflict. She capitalizes on my apparent stagger, leaping through the gap created by the dissipating shield and ramming her weapon forward towards where a heart should probably exist on a lesser creature.
I let it strike, I want to teach a lesson and gain some information about the weapon.
Oathkeeper Glaive
Bearing singular and unique enchantments, the origins of the weapons and armor of the Oathkeepers are shrouded in mystery.
It plunges exactly fourteen inches into my carapace and immediately starts trying to steal essence. What I glean from the weapon itself is abysmal. No runic configurations, no blueprints for its spell construction, no understandings of its metal makeup. I get virtually nothing beyond it being ‘shrouded in mystery'. The Akasha has never given me such a useless identification of something, let alone in such imprecise terms. Which would mean that those words must be objective fact. They are unknown to any and all.
That means I need to experiment. The idea of a true unknown is exciting above and beyond anything I've felt in decades, so I set to work in this moment of contact in my accelerated thoughts.
What happens if I let it steal from me? Does it have a maximum capacity? Will it explode?
Before I can force a deluge of essence into the object, the girl does something new that I did not expect, and I pay the price for my lackadaisical approach after removing what I’d deemed the only actual threat.
She punches her clawed fingers into the softer carapace under my chin with one hand. Then releases her weapon and uses that hand to drive her claws into the side of my head and right through my newly formed eyes and leverages my maw open even against my resistance. She’s been flooding her body with ever more essence this entire time and she has now upgraded herself to a threat because of it.
There's nothing I can do to stop her. I see essence rush from her core and manifest in her throat and what’s about to happen dawns on me. I can’t do anything about it. But that’s one of the downsides of accelerated thought. Sometimes thinking fast doesn’t do much more than give you more time to think about how badly something is about to hurt.
[Breath of Khana]
[Projection | Solaris]
She looses a roar that’s cut off as she breathes her damnable living flames down my throat. Damnable flames comprised not of Ignia like I would expect, but another essence I've never heard of. Too many unknowns. This fight was a mistake.
I’ve experienced being on fire a great many times. Especially today. Fire being inside me is worse in every single conceivable way. That fire being functionally alive and self-sustaining is just that much worse.
The pain is overwhelming. It’s a constant flood of new information as I experience parts of me getting burned and scarred and reburned that have never been exposed to touch, let alone an attack. I react on instinct and little else, striking out at the little salamander that’s continuing to breath more and more flames over and into me. No more chances.
I reach to grab her ankle to absorb everything she is and ever will be — entirely out of spite at this point — but something arrests my arm, taking hold of my hand and striking at my elbow, snapping it backwards. It’s just more data atop the flood coming from within me, but the arm being disabled is problematic in the extreme.
I thrash my tail at whatever just broke my arm from my blindspot and feel an impact. But I can’t draw my tail back. I do feel who’s snagged hold of it though. My little spawn is back on his feet and rejoining the fight. Delightfully tenacious for such a malformed creature.
I wrench my body to try to tug him off of his feet to fling him away at the same time I thrash my neck to dislodge the flaming tick on my face. I succeed in removing the girl, who fails to arrest her fall and goes skidding and rolling down the roadway. Allanius, however, stays firmly planted. He managed to regain his Mineralis infusion ability again, somehow. An inconsistency even to his own memori-
I feel a source of information disappear from my body: severed. Where a moment ago I was passively soaking in information in contact with Allanius. Surface thoughts, essence concentations, emotional states, along with memories he was trying to recall.
No longer. My tail is gone, and it was cut through without me even registering it… Something disrupted my connection. A bane?
I crane my neck around while my head recovers from the abuse, seeing the fire-breathing whelp starting to rise, my spawn bracing himself and starting to concentrate essence into spines on his arms, and….
Another piece of searing pain. Actual pain. Not pain data, not the diffuse information I normally receive. This time in my ribs. I twist and see the missing member of Allanius’s party, the one who hurt his feelings so thoroughly. Looking calm, controlled, and focused. Her glittering golden hair draping around her as he cricket wings flutter with an agitated red dust spraying off them.
In her hand, the thing that hurt me. I see my essence boiling on the blade. A bone rapier of some kind wreathed in an essence that’s making it impossible to resolve in my minds eye. It makes it hard to tell the exact length of the weapon, and I can’t make out any runework on it. That must be the other bane. The one the squirrel was using.
She is a serious threat. She is meek compared to the others, but whatever enchantment is wreathed on that blade is elevating her danger far above the others. She deserves my full attention.
With focus I call another instance of the slimes healing to drop atop the other ongoing effect. They’re lesser when stacked up individually, but the dimishing returns still are a net gain for now at least. I feel the fire raging in my core starting to die down as my body naturally adjusts to those living flames and starts to smother them on its own.
A reset. Less a tail, at least. I’ll get a new one later.
First… I launch myself at the bewinged girl, who betrays her confidence and level of experience by screaming and diving to the side. I adjust a hair and, instead of grabbing her with my one functional arm, aim a solid kick. My foot is nearly as big as her torso, so this should realistically be a one and done situation.
Midswing, I abruptly lose balance and see my whelp interposing himself between me and the girl, grabbing my leg and heaving upwards.
“Now, Ayre!” I lost track of her in my focus to kill the girl. As punishment, I feel a sudden weight on my back which, already off balance, drives me to the ground. The whelp starts to rain down alternating hammer blows with balled fists and ripping tears with open claws into the back of my head, each one knocking loose shards of this body’s carapace. Impossible strength behind each of the blows.
Each hit is knocking me dizzier and dizzier. I’ve expended nearly everything I gained from that mosscale creeper corpse over the course of this fight, and have gone into a deficit on essence expenditure. I don’t think absorbing these three would offset that. This has been a waste of time and energy. I’ll leave my spawn a while longer.
Allanius jumps forward with an arcing fist — another ability he should have lost. I took it from him. Being pummeled, though, I am unable to stop him as he slams the punch into my flank, and it sends the coruscating Fulmina through my body again. I need to work on defenses for this.
They’re more than gnats or pests. They’re something special as a group. Allanius’s behavior is abnormal. He’s retained nearly all of his humanity but none of his memories. This scaled brat is well beyond what anything her age could or should be, and the other winged girl…
Runs her rapier through my skull.
