Defilers curse, p.39
Defiler's Curse, page 39
part #8 of The Magician's Brother Series
They were soon huddled together, holding hands or one another. I stood only close enough to maintain my Illusion, giving them as much privacy as I could manage.
It was then, though, that I noticed something strange. I couldn’t feel Proteus moving anymore. Nothing. Mage Sight showed that he was just sitting there, down at the bottom of the chamber, sprawled across the stone. His tentacles weren’t even twitching.
That was odd.
He hadn’t even reattached any more legs.
I decided to have a look with my actual eyes, maybe I’d see an explanation.
I almost screamed.
It turned out that Mage Sight was not as infallible as I’d thought, that was for damned sure!
The horror had crept two thirds of the way up the damned wall!
Its body was surrounded by some sort of energy, something foreign, something slick that made me want to ignore it and anything under it. A shimmering image of the creature as it had been the last time I’d seen it move was projected into the air and chamber. That was what I’d Seen.
Not good.
A great wave of tentacles covered the inner surfaces of the cavern, but the vast majority of his otherworldly mass was creeping up on the exact spot where the Angels were huddled.
I cast my Fortress Shield.
The perfect sphere expanded until it was thirty metres across, jutting out into the chamber. Some of Proteus was hurled away from the wall, but he was soon reattached and charging for my Construct.
The Angels came to my side, gasping as they looked down. The energy streams immediately vanished.
“Right!” Anha growled. “Time for a little repayment.”
“Commander... we can’t,” said one whose name I didn’t know. He was more lithe than muscular, tall and graceful like a dancer. His wings were a lighter grey. “We can’t win here. Not now. We’ll just be recaptured.”
“Then what do you suggest, Brother? That we simply leave the monster unpunished? Free to go about its poison?!” Barazel snarled.
“We are unarmed, we have a fraction of our power and we are still recovering. The bindings haven’t even completely faded, yet!” That was said by a different one; a heartbreaker of a man, all chiselled features and piercing eyes. I was pleased to note white feathers, though I didn’t know what aspects he represented.
Anha’s eyes darted to me. She looked conflicted.
Oh...
Figures than an Angel would be reluctant to leave me to a fate they could escape.
I went over to her.
“You’re in charge, I take it?”
She nodded.
“You give the orders?”
Another nod.
“Then it’s time to go. I presume that you can, or there wouldn’t be a discussion?”
She looked away.
The other Angels stopped talking, almost as one. Surprise flashed across many of their faces.
“Our connection to the City is restored,” she said gently, “so yes, we can leave. But we aren’t going to.”
“Yes you are. I’ll be fine.”
“You forget, I’ve seen into your mind, Magician.”
“Then you know I’ve got a shot.”
She shook her head.
“Look, I really don’t have time for this,” I said. “If you stay, the creature will almost certainly recapture you, granting it regeneration at a time when I really need it to be killable. Your presence also forces me to split my defence, which will cause it to fail. You’ll be recaptured, I’ll be taken and then thereafter consumed. If you go, you’re free and I have a chance.”
“I know you’re just saying that. I know you don’t want us to go.”
“Of course I don’t want you to. What man in their right mind would want to face something like Proteus alone? I’m saying that I need you to go. Apart from anything else, if the worst happens, I won’t have died for bloody nothing.”
She closed her eyes. Tears fell.
Not good for my morale, by the way.
I winced as Proteus started digging at my Shield. He’d covered every exposed segment and was starting to conjure his otherworldly energies. My defence would begin to buckle before too long.
Anha took my hand.
“We will be waiting at the Gates for you,” she said softly. “We will bring you forth with honour.”
I felt a lump in my throat and repressed it in that good, old-fashioned way that all Britons do when they’re scared out of their damned minds.
“Don’t wait around, I’ll be a while,” I replied with as much confidence as I could fake.
She actually sobbed.
Again terrible for the morale.
She let me go and went to stand with the others. Each nodded to me in turn before they linked hands... and vanished.
The attack on my shield paused.
And then Proteus roared in absolute, horrible fury.
I smiled.
Anything I could do to make the monster that mad just had to be a good thing.
Right. So, part one of the plan went far better than I could have hoped.
I hadn’t planned on Angelic assistance going forward. I’d assumed that their rules would have prevented them from lifting a finger, and it was nice to see that they’d actually been willing (and able) to pitch in.
Still, it was better that they’d escaped. The last thing I needed was the guilt over Angels getting recaptured just to save my arse.
Anyway, on to part two. I started creating a new Spell, feeding it more Magic as it became available. I could have reinforced the Shield, but that would have been a waste. It couldn’t last forever and winning would require my going on the attack, not hoping for a monster to get bored of whacking at a ball of energy.
Now, when dealing with a colossal monster, or any generally un-killable thing, really, your best bet was to go for the brain. The problem was, I didn’t think that things like Proteus had any one organ of that sort. Certainly there didn’t seem to be any centralised intelligence. It was all spread out.
So, no headshots, I’d have to do this the hard way, destroying it piece by piece, eradicating mass kilogram by kilogram.
Which would take time and effort. Effort, I could provide. It was time I was concerned about. I would have to attack, hard and nasty, and keep it on the back foot, not letting it recover, but there was only so much destructive power I could leverage with my current stocks of Magic.
Simply, I didn’t know if I had enough, not against an entity that was, by my estimation, about twenty percent larger than Behemoth had been in terms of pure mass.
I fingered my Suppression Cuff. That was an option, if everything went to hell...
But I’d really rather avoid that, what with the death that would likely come along with it.
Well, maybe it wouldn’t come to that.
I pulled a Lancelot from by Void Ring and made my way to a convenient arch. I adjusted my Mage Sight until I could get some impression of Proteus’ energy, which left me mostly blind, in fact, but at least I could see where the bulk of its mass was.
Right underneath me. Wonderful.
The legs were splayed (and all reattached, annoyingly), acting as a base for the monster rather than a hanger. The connection was thicker, too and stronger, the flesh harder and more densely packed. It had learned its lesson, apparently.
Well, a lesson.
I had more to teach it.
I aimed my weapon and fired.
Hundreds of tentacles were vaporised, vast swathes of flesh were burned to dust and two of its legs were cleaved off at the base... again.
Proteus howled, but not in pain, in rage. It adjusted its stance, even changing the way its legs were attached to the main body. That was irritating. It could probably stay upright as long as there were three legs left, it would just keep shifting them around.
Still, I’d bought myself a little breathing room.
I continued shovelling power and additional constructs into my Spell while I dropped a Mordred towards the writhing mass of flesh.
I misjudged the timer, though; it bounced off the monster and was a solid chunk of the way into the pit when it went off.
The blast severed two legs, but way down. A poor use of the item.
I adjusted my growing Spell, adding yet more complexity and power. I was only doing so when my Amulet was full, and then only using half of it, in case of a calamity, which was somewhat inevitable.
Almost on cue, Proteus rearranged himself, with a dozen thicker tendrils shooting into the air. Their tips were aimed at me, mouths full of eerily-human teeth opened.
I felt the otherworldly energy gather an instant before it was hurled at me. I had just enough time to swear and start sprinting for the back edge of the Fortress Shield. I knew what was going to happen next, and I was ready for it.
You see, a Fortress Shield isn’t just a sphere in shape, but also in action. The barrier it created went through matter, literally cutting the interior off from the outside world, though holding it perfectly in place.
However, when the Shield failed or ended, Sir Isaac Newton would soon come along to claim his due. In this case, in the form of about four or five thousand tons of stonework that would suddenly cease to be attached to much of anything at all.
Proteus’ green-tinged energy slammed into my barrier... which actually held for a while, much to my immense surprise. Seconds passed: ten, twenty, more. I was actually starting to feel a little pleased with myself... when it finally burst.
The Entity’s attack carried on into the ceiling, smashing away yet more chunks of stone, quite large pieces, too, but nothing compared to what fell next. I stepped off the slipping edge almost casually, raising a new set of shields in time to watch all that stone slide away... and drop right onto the eldritch horror trying to slither its way up the wall.
It actually tried to dodge.
But the monster was too big and the chunk of cavern was way too big... it was hilarious.
Oh, all that additional weight on those spindly legs...
Proteus was slammed into the lip of his pit before being dragged downwards.
I dropped another Mordred after him, which further complicated his attempts to right himself.
I went back to work on my Spell, dropping my rapidly-dwindling supply of Magical bombs on anything that looked vaguely squirmy.
There! The abomination had started to regenerate. It was glowing, energy was flowing, it was getting smaller!
Have another Lancelot...
I split it in two, sending three legs and a solid chunk of torso spinning away.
That created an interesting effect. The severed chunk was also trying to regenerate, but it wasn’t being guided by the central intelligence. It started warping and mutating until it began to move on its own... at which point it attacked Proteus.
The original, and much larger, monster instantly lashed out with tentacle, leg and energy beam, soon overwhelming the fledgling horror and absorbing the pieces, but that had cost it, and not a small amount, either!
Oh, that was lovely.
Disgusting. But lovely.
I gave it another Mordred, then a blast of plasma from my Staff. By the time it was done regenerating, it was down by a third of its mass.
A good start.
But now it was seriously ticked off with me.
It all but leapt off the bottom of the pit, which the flickering lights revealed to be lined with human bones. Countless thousands of them. Some still meaty.
The column of flesh came right at me, uncoiling into ten massive tentacles that sprouted more and more, like a squid coming for a goldfish.
It was time. I cast my Spell.
Chapter 50
As you might imagine, a place like that wasn’t short of Spirits. Terror, fear, hatred, even joy. Hell, even I’d left a Spiritual impression.
And so had Proteus.
He’d been there for a very long time. He’d gone through the whole gamut of emotions over the years, leaving impression after impression in the Spirit Realm.
I’d picked the meanest, nastiest, hungriest of them, given it power, and brought it forth.
It took work. A lot of work. That Spirit was as complicated and monstrous as the thing that birthed it, and almost incomprehensible aside from its emotions.
It took every ounce of my developing Ectomancy skills to bind it, command it and get it moving in the right direction.
But, I hear you say, what use would an emotional attack be against an alien intelligence? Surely that would be a bad bet?
And you’d be quite right. So too would it have been largely useless as a ripper. No Spirit I could summon at that time was powerful enough to get through Proteus’ otherworldly hide. That required Power.
That didn’t stop me from making it dangerous, though. You see, the vast majority of the work I’d done was all about giving that Spirit just that little extra oomph.
An infusion, you might say.
Of Entropic Energy.
Of Death, itself.
Spirits were one of the few things you could do that to and not have them collapse. Well, if you did it right. It was very tricky to create a Death Spirit that was in any way useful.
Once again, Master Usbryd saved my life.
I’d been poring over those books he’d left me every chance I got, seeking an advantage, a trick, something that would level the playing field, and I found one.
I hadn’t had the chance to practice it that much—I just had so much on my plate—and then only with a tiny, little Spirit.
Truth be told, I gave it a forty percent chance of blowing up in my face.
Only it didn’t; it worked!
A horrible mass of squirming, hateful Spirit-monster emerged from the Realm and dropped onto its progenitor, surrounded by a dreadful, deathly nimbus.
Everything it touched rotted. Not very much, the energy didn’t get in very deep, but the Spirit was huge, bigger than Proteus after the regeneration. And it was very angry.
It tore into its living twin, slashing and biting feebly at the flesh; not doing much physical damage, but spreading Entropy everywhere, causing rot to cover everything in sight.
It was all a fantastic... distraction.
Even that wouldn’t be enough to polish off Proteus, and it wouldn’t work twice. Already, the Entity was opening more mouths and blasting pieces of the Spirit away. It was huge, so it would take a bit of time and effort, but the result was foregone.
I started casting. I threw Gravity Spells that yanked parts of the monster down, but left the Spirit unaffected (no mass, no effect from gravity). Tentacles were pulled out of the way, sending their attacks off in the wrong direction, legs were shattered, chunks of flesh were pulled off...
Even so, the Spirit was torn to pieces.
But most of Proteus’ skin and many of its appendages were rotten or mangled by the time it was.
He started to glow again.
Regeneration number two!
Plasma, lightning and coherent light rained down on the creature along with my very last Mordred. I sent Chaos and kinetics at it. I drained my Staff down to nothing to cleave off another two legs, which went the same way as that first separated chunk, attacking their original owner.
When the creature finally stepped back into the attack, it was half the size it had started at!
Not a bad bit of work, I think you’ll agree.
But still not enough.
I was down to three Lancelots and my own power. There was just too much monster and not enough me.
Again, I fingered my Cuff.
I swallowed and pulled out another Lancelot.
I blasted two of the massive tentacles away, along with a leg, but as it wasn’t regenerating, it could simply reattach the pieces. It was getting closer.
It seemed to sense that I was running low, and it picked up its pace squelching up the wall, stretching towards me like a spider would after a fly.
My last two Lancelots were enough to throw it off the wall and back into its pit, and even into a third regeneration, which, again, I interfered with, but then I was out of big guns, and it was still coming.
Damn it.
I yanked my Suppression Cuff off my wrist and started making alterations.
Using the collapse of a Void as a weapon had all been theoretical until now. I hadn’t had a chance to prototype, much less test what would happen when I tried to bend the laws of physics this hard, but I was out of alternatives.
Making the Construct do what I wanted was not easy. I had to jam in an energy matrix and reinforce it ridiculously. Thankfully, I doubted that anyone but me, or maybe Hopkins, could have messed with a Void like that. The Spellwork required incredible finesse and an instinctual understanding of energy that was very hard to come by. That was a good thing. If this was something easy to do...
I shuddered and made ready to throw it.
Then I paused. Wait... ten thousand litres of water weighs ten thousand kilograms. E=mc2, convert that into kilotons...
I squealed.
In horror.
My plan had been to exploit what happened when a Void pocket’s anchor was destroyed. Mater-energy conversion, or, to put it simply, BOOM.
Only I hadn’t quite thought that one through. Like I’ve said, there were ten thousand litres of water were in there. If I converted that all into energy...
I won’t take you through the calculations, but, simply, several orders of magnitude more than the energy released if you detonated every nuclear weapon ever made by man... at the same time.
So, a slight adjustment was required.
And also a complete rethink. Letting off the equivalent of even a small nuclear bomb underground? Not a great plan. Depending on how deep we were, I could crack a tectonic plate, certainly kill thousands, if not millions of people.
And, incidentally, me.
Oh, that was a close one...
Desperation makes stupid, that was for sure.
I had a think, though a quick one (probably not smart bearing in mind what I was handling), and I decided to try and collapse the pocket slowly; a little at a time. That should keep the energy release somewhat manageable and also more concentrated.
