Splinter angel book 1, p.17
Splinter Angel: Book 1, page 17
“That depends entirely on what you’re fighting. They swell and twist as the demon settles in and gathers mana, so a possessed fox, for example, will be far larger and more grotesque than you’re used to. Much more resilient, too. They don’t seem to feel pain. But it will also be dumber. More aggressive and single-minded. That makes them easier to destroy than you might think, as long as you can avoid being hurt too badly yourself.”
“And the… corpses?” Ana had been tempted to say “zombies” but wasn’t sure if it would translate.
“Well, revenants are a little different. They don’t bleed, for one. Otherwise they tend to be weaker than an equivalent possessed creature, since weaker spirits can create them. As for revenants created from sapients, you’re unlikely to ever see one. We rarely lose anyone on this Splinter, and when we do, it’s in areas far more dangerous than anywhere Kaira would take a Casual group. Besides, everyone knows to burn the bodies if they can’t take them with them, so it only happens when someone’s alone, or a whole Party gets wiped out. But if you were to see one, again, it depends. A larger body will naturally make a stronger revenant than a smaller one. So will a fresher one, compared to an old, decayed one. And, of course, the corpse of a high Level person will make a far more powerful revenant than that of someone with a lower Level. What makes them truly dangerous is their Skills and Abilities. They retain some of them, you see.”
“The revenants?” Ana said, tasting the word. She wondered what that meant for the bodies she’d left behind.
Shit. What about Nic?
“Yes,” Sendra continued. “We don’t know how it works, not really. Perhaps the residual mana in a body retains some kind of imprint, or perhaps some of the soul lingers and the demon can co-opt that. revenants made from fresher corpses certainly retain more. And if a demon is so powerful it can possess a person who is still alive, of course, it can use all of that person’s Skills and Abilities, besides whatever the demon itself brings. Extremely nasty, I hear, but hopefully this Splinter will never see one.”
“Yeah, Omda said that if I ever see one, I should run.”
“Good advice,” Sendra said, nodding. “It probably won’t help, but we must always try, right?”
“Right.” Ana had not actually tried her physical capabilities all out yet, so she wasn’t so pessimistic. She’d had a decent sprint and 5K time before. With her Strength something like 60% higher than it had been, and her Endurance increased by more than a quarter, she should be capable of some impressive feats of speed.
She hadn’t really considered that before, only literally lifting and hitting things. Well, those, and jumping. It just hadn’t occurred to her. But all of a sudden, Ana was eager to see what this Class of hers would let her do.
She probably shouldn’t go all out around her temporary companions, though. Even Kaira. Logically, she was far beyond what a “civilian” of her Level should be able to do, no matter how genetically blessed she might have been — if genetics was even a thing in magic-land — and she wasn’t ready for that conversation. It was bad enough that Drisa at Administration knew, since Ana had to take it on faith that she wouldn’t spread it.
Sendra was moving on. “Now, Delves are the main thing we’re going for,” she said. “If we don’t find any where we’re going, I’d expect Kaira to move on until we do.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ana said, snapping back. “I’ve heard people call going out at all ‘Delving,’ though?”
“That’s how important the Delves are,” Sendra said. “Every time I’ve gone out, the Delves have been where most of our Crystals come from, by a large margin.”
“So what are they?”
Sendra paused and sucked her cheek in before saying, “Think of a Delve as a space within a space. A hole in the Splinter, that we can enter without going anywhere. When you get a locus, a gathering of mana, that is, that mana has to go somewhere. And it kind of… drains into the Delves, I guess, where it crystallizes into, well, Growth Crystals. And a Delve draws lots of demons, because of the mana concentration. So we go in, clear out as many demons as we can for their Crystals and whatever we can harvest from them, and then we loot the Crystals at the bottom, or the center, or wherever the Crystal chamber has ended up — it’s not exactly obvious. You’ll see. Anyway, that makes the Delve collapse. Then we either look for another Delve, or we go home and enjoy our share of the loot. Exciting and lucrative,” she finished with a satisfied nod.
“And what if you’re in there when it collapses?” Ana asked. She didn’t like the sound of that at all.
“Oh, we will be. It takes a little while, but it’s usually much faster than running out. It just drops you somewhere nearby. Don’t worry about it!”
That was about when Ana noticed that they hadn’t heard from the women in front for a while. Listening closely, she could hear lowered voices, and as she and Sendra got closer, they saw that Rayni had joined the others. Rayni noticed them pretty much the moment they came into sight, and nudged Kaira, who looked up, a frighteningly toothy grin splitting her face.
“Time for you two to show what you’ve got,” Kaira said, taking Ana and Deni aside. “Rayni found a wandering demon, and you two are dealing with it!”
Chapter eighteen
“You’re gonna do just fine! Just stay behind Ana and focus on your Shaping, like I’ve showed you, yeah?”
A few feet away from everyone else, Kaira was talking softly to Deni, the youngest and completely untested member of the group. Deni’s excitement had turned into a severe case of performance anxiety the moment the time came for actual fighting, and all the women except Ana and Rayni were doing their best to boost her self-confidence. Ana would have been with them, for the sake of appearances and team cohesion if nothing else, but she was at the front sneaking along behind Rayni.
The scout was leading them to where she’d last seen the demon, stopping them all to look, listen, and even sniff the air sometimes before continuing, sometimes changing their direction slightly.
Ana and Deni would, in practice, be acting as a two-woman team. Ana would be “frontlining”, meaning that she’d be staying between Deni and the enemy, taking the brunt of the demon’s attacks and trying to hold its attention. Deni, meanwhile, would be “backlining,” doing as much damage as possible at range. She didn’t have any of her actual Craft Skills yet, but she knew a Shaping or three, apparently, and trying to get her a Skill was part of the purpose of this whole exercise. Ana wasn’t sure how it all worked, but Kaira seemed confident that Deni had what it would take, and that was good enough for Ana.
The other purpose was, of course, to see how effective the newbies were. And possibly that the more experienced women thought it was funny to throw them at a demon to see what would happen. Ana might have been annoyed, but the fact that no one seemed worried, and that Deni was well liked among the others, was reassuring.
“There!” Rayni stopped them with a whispered word and a hand signal. She crowded in close to Ana, nearly cheek to cheek, and pointed. “See? The gray and purple blotch there. It’s moving. Stands about two and a half feet tall. That’s your prey.”
Ana looked carefully. At first she didn’t see anything, but then it moved, just like Rayni had said, and Ana saw it. No details, just a smear of color in the distance among the trees. It must be 200 feet away, Ana thought, but when she knew where to look, it was impossible to miss.
“What the hell am I looking at?” she whispered. Even without detail, it was just wrong. Offensive to her eyes in a way that nothing had ever been.
“Used to be a badger, until some spirit or other got into it and made it into… that.” Rayni waved her hand vaguely at the thing. “Badgers can be nasty, and this is gonna be worse. But it’s not too big, and not too high Threat. The two of you’ll be fine.”
“Got it,” Ana whispered back and nodded, then turned her head. “Deni? Ready to go?”
Deni closed her eyes and swallowed. “Y-yeah,” she stuttered. She took one hesitant step forward, the others pushing her gently along, then another, and another, becoming steadier as she went.
“We’re all right behind you if anything goes wrong,” Kaira said softly. “But it won’t, because you’re both stone cold bitches with death in your eyes, right? You’ve got this! Deni, once Ana has its attention, stop suppressing your aura and focus on shaping. Now go! Get that little shit!”
Ana checked her straps, grabbed her buckler tightly, and drew her sword. She’d drilled with this exact same equipment most of the previous day, but now, wearing it, standing there, it felt… odd. Odd, but not bad. Exciting, mostly. It was like stepping up on the mat against an opponent she’d never faced before, not knowing if she was about to kick ass or get her ass kicked.
“Follow me,” she said to Deni, her voice calm and sure. “I’m going to go piss it off.”
With that, she broke into a jog. Perhaps she should have been more careful; more methodical. She didn’t really know what she was going up against, she didn’t know what Deni was capable of, and for all her practice, she hadn’t actually fought using a sword before. But the confidence the other women in the Party had shown them, and the fact that she’d been asked to deliberately draw out the fight to let Deni get more hits in, made her feel like the outcome was a foregone conclusion. They’d trounce this thing. That knowledge didn’t stop adrenaline from rushing into her veins, though, as she got closer and got a good look at the thing.
It had been a badger, like Rayni had said — ‘had been’ being the operative clause there. This wasn’t one of the friendly-looking British badgers. This looked like a cross between a honey-badger and an alligator that had suffered some kind of horrible, mutating accident.
Rayni’s estimate of its size had been a little off, but not by much. The demon stood just over waist high to Ana, and was moving along with a slow, twitchy kind of walk. It was nauseatingly bloated and twisted. Its fur was slick and matted with… something, its skin covered in lesions, and it looked like it had too many bones with knots and bends and ribs twisting out of its skin to point redly in every direction.
Demon was the right description for it. It started to turn when Ana was about sixty feet away, showing her a face full of too many twisted teeth, and too many eyes rolling madly and hatefully as she sensed it focusing on her. She felt a stab of fear deep in her gut, but fought it down. She needed to do this.
Thirty feet out, she saw a label. [Possessed Badger (Threat: Serious)]. No Class or Level, was all Ana had time to think before the thing shrieked, a warbling, cutting sound that Ana’s brain tried to reject as impossible. The thing twisted unnaturally and lurched forward, and as Ana’s senses screamed Danger! her bonuses kicked in.
The world came into sharp focus and seemed to slow down as the weight of her gear became negligible. Whatever training Ana had from Tor fled her, and she did the first thing that came naturally to her. The moment the demon got close, she kicked it.
She barely saw or felt her own leg move, but she felt the heel of her boot connect with the badger’s snout in a textbook push-kick. She could have gone for damage, but in the split second between deciding to kick it and actually beginning the movement, she’d remembered that Deni was supposed to be the one to destroy the thing. Her back foot dug in, then slid in the loamy soil of the forest floor as the creature’s momentum was canceled out, and then all hundred-plus pounds of the thing flew back with a terrible, frustrated yowl.
With no one but the demon to see, Ana grinned wildly. “Come fucking get some!” she screamed at it, then turned to look behind her. Deni was fifty feet behind, looking shocked at how easily Ana had knocked the thing back. “Come on, Deni!” Ana shouted. “Light it up!”
Deni looked at her, then answered Ana’s wild joy with a weak smile of her own and leaped forward, her lips moving silently. Ana would have loved to keep watching, to see what would happen, but a furious scrabbling alerted her that the demon wasn’t done.
The twisted thing was getting to its feet. Blood, red and streaked with blackish purple, ran freely from its face, but it showed no sign of being affected by the kick and came lumbering in again. This time Ana forced herself to remember her weapons, and when the demon lurched forward she slammed it with her shield, stopping it and knocking it sideways. She was raising her sword to strike, intending to go for joints and tendons to slow it down, when a blindingly bright marble flashed in from behind her with a tearing, screaming noise, passing just barely to her right. Ana felt the heat of it as it went by, in almost the same instant as it hit the demon.
There was a cracking pop as the putrid flesh where the marble hit superheated and exploded outwards, leaving a fist-sized crater. Scorched flesh and burning fur joined the acrid stench that already hung around the thing, and the demon staggered, then looked past Ana with a hunger that made Ana’s stomach twist.
“Oh, shit!” Deni exclaimed from behind her. “Oh, no! Sorry! I’m so sorry!”
The demon launched itself forward again, this time trying to get past Ana to Deni, but it was frustrated when Ana got between them, buckler up and sword flashing. The steel bit into the creature’s shoulder, but while it staggered and that leg buckled, it still tried to power through.
The fight would be easy to finish, Ana realized. The demon seemed completely focused on Deni now, and barely even reacted to Ana’s own attack. But that was not what they were there for.
“Angle!” Ana called, not taking her eyes off the demon. “Move around so you get a better angle!”
She couldn’t see Deni, but she could see the demon tracking her, trying to get past Ana as she stabbed, bashed, and kicked to slow it and stop it from getting anywhere. The thing never touched her, but its drool stung when it spattered her bare skin, leaving pink welts even if wiped off immediately. A second marble came in and missed, blowing a smoking pit among the leaves, then a third and a fourth that hit. The last caught the demon in the back leg, blowing the limb apart below the knee and reducing it to dragging itself on its two functioning limbs.
The cheering and whooping from the onlookers told Ana that the fight was, indeed, over. “Finish it off, Deni!” she called, kicking it down as it managed to get unsteadily to three feet.
“Out of my way!” Deni answered. “I wanna try a Shaping but I can’t have anything in between it and me!”
Ana looked at the downed demon, then back at Deni, who already looked like she was Shaping, and hastily moved back and to the side. As her lips moved, Deni’s hair began to stand out from her scalp, and she threw her staff down, reached out with both hands, and screamed.
A jagged flash connected Deni’s hands to the badger, and the upper half of it simply blew apart. The tiniest moment after that, there was a literal thunderclap so loud it made Ana drop her sword and shield to reflexively cover her ears.
Good God, Ana thought as she blinked against the flashing purple streak in her vision, if that’s what a complete newbie who doesn’t even have a Class can do with magic, what can Kaira do? Forget that the physics of it seemed all wrong — a teenage girl, a Level 6 Clerk, for God’s sake, had just blown a creature up with magic!
Deni, breathing heavily, looked at what she had done. Shreds of fur and meat and bone were scattered across the forest floor, sticking to and sometimes in the bark of the surrounding trees. She turned her saucer eyes at her hands. And then she fell over.
Congratulations! Your Skill Inspect has improved to Level 2! You have been awarded: Growth Crystal (Lesser).
Congratulations! Your Party has defeated: Possessed Badger (Threat: Serious). Based on your contribution, you have been awarded: Growth Crystal (Lesser). For fighting in the defense of your Object of Devotion, you have been awarded: Growth Crystal (Least) as a bonus.
Ana quickly looked at the notifications as her bonuses left her and the world returned to normal, together with a stinging sensation on the right side of her head. Then she joined the others in rushing over to Deni. Being closest, she reached Deni first, but there was nothing to worry about. Deni, while showing every sign of being exhausted, was laughing, half delirious as she rolled and kicked among the leaves. When Ana leaned over her, Deni locked eyes with her and started repeating, “I got it! I got it!” in a croaking giggle.
“What did you get!?” Kaira asked, almost feral with excitement as she joined Ana on her knees by the laughing girl.
“Lightning! Craft-Evocation-Lightning! Didn’t get Fire yet but I got Lightning! I could never do that Shaping before but the moment felt so good, so right, I don’t know! I just went for it and it worked and I got it!”
“You got it? You got it!” Kaira exclaimed, then grabbed Deni by the front of her padded jacket and hauled her off the ground and into a hug. What followed was that Ana stood back, feeling awkward as Deni was passed around like a giggling doll, being embraced and congratulated by each of the women in turn. Except for Rayni, who stood next to Ana, looking uncomfortable with the outpouring of emotion.
“So… big deal?” Ana asked.
“Very,” Rayni said. “She’s got all the Skills she needs now. She can Reset and become an Evoker whenever she wants.”
“She’s already pretty effective. I mean, she turned half of that thing into mince. Will the Skills and the Class make that much of a difference?”
“That thing was already worn down, and pretty badly hurt. That Shaping wouldn’t have been nearly as effective on something at full strength, but I’m guessing she knew that.”
“Alright, good to know. One of my Skills improved, too. Inspect. Is that common, getting a Skill on your first real fight?”
“Eh,” Rayni wiggled her hand in the air. “Not uncommon, I guess. Being under a lot of stress seems to help. But Deni almost killed herself with that Shaping, and I’m guessing you Inspected enough powerful shit with that badger to cross the line.”
Something had been a little off about Rayni. She was fidgety. But then Rayni turned to face Ana directly, and said, “By the way…”
