Retribution, p.51
Retribution, page 51
“I wasn’t panicking!” Mica practically shouted, followed quickly by, “And you didn’t save me—”
I jumped so hard I nearly fell off Boo’s back as a flash of violet light suddenly filled the zone, accompanied by a bonfire roar. I looked away, but not quickly enough, and suddenly found myself blinking rapidly as tears came to my stinging eyes. Boo grumbled, backpedaling away from the light and bumping into Regis, who had been walking just behind and beside us. The huge shadow wolf was knocked sideways, sliding down the edge of the raised lip of dirt we had been following until his paws hit the burning goop that filled the pool.
I turned back in time to see dozens of wriggling bits of exploded tentacle dissolving back into the acidic pool, blown away from Lyra by Arthur’s aetheric blast.
“I’m sorry!” I said immediately, the words directed somewhere between the cursing Regis and glowering Arthur. “I should have seen that those bits were still moving and alive.”
Regis was grumbling as he crawled back up the slope, his paws sizzling. “What a total cluster—”
Arthur shot a glare his way, and the shadow wolf’s jaws snapped shut.
Boo gave a quiet grumble, and Regis shook his head in response. “I know, right?”
Mica had already landed back on the ground, and both her and Lyra were looking at Arthur sheepishly.
“For some reason, Ellie is the one apologizing even though she’s actually doing the task she’s been given,” Arthur said pointedly. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Lyra, you’ve been in the Relictombs before, but never with me. And Mica, you’re used to the Beast Glades, where there isn’t much you can’t handle. This place is different. The strength of the monsters grows with the people inside, and this whole place has adapted to my presence. You can’t rely on just brute-forcing your way past every encounter. You have to be strategic, fight smart. The Relictombs is designed to test you…or kill you.”
Mica lifted her chin and met my brother’s eyes unflinchingly. “I’m not afraid of anything this place can throw at me.”
Lyra scoffed but cut off at a warning look from my brother.
“But that’s part of the problem. You have no idea what this place can do, and I need you to understand why you’re even here. Ellie is travelling with me so she can practice her new ability, and Lyra needs to be kept close to me because I can’t leave someone as powerful as her locked up anywhere—”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” Lyra said under her breath.
“And so I need you to keep an eye on them both.”
Mica’s brows rose so high they vanished into her hairline, and her mouth hung open. It seemed like a rare thing for the dwarven Lance to lack any words, but I was too tense to see the humor in it at that moment.
As Arthur was speaking, I watched another blood slug start to crawl up the back of Mica’s leg. “Um, Mica? You’ve got a…”
She grabbed the pulsating red lump in one hand, gritted her teeth, and squeezed. Crimson pulp oozed out between her fingers. “I understand,” she said, tossing the mess into the closest pool of acid with a heavy splash.
“All right, let’s get moving again then,” Arthur said, gesturing for Mica and Lyra to take the lead.
Moving together, they started off in the direction I’d indicated. Arthur immediately lit up with a dim violet light, his blond hair floating up from his head. I watched him curiously. Even though I’d seen it several times now, it was still kind of eerie. Arthur already looked so different than from before he’d disappeared, and the strange runes only highlighted his alien nature. With Realmheart active, his head turned from side to side and up and down, scanning our surroundings.
As we passed the pool, I was distracted by something strange.
My arrow, the one I’d shot at the tentacle grabbing Mica, was floating on the surface of the acid. Boo, sensing my attention shifting, stopped and let out a grunt.
“What’s up?” Regis asked, staring hard into the pool, perhaps expecting some other monstrous manifestation to jump out at us.
“Nothing, it’s just…” Mentally, I reached for the arrow. I could feel it, sense the mana still compacted into that form. My regalia tingled, and I realized the arrow was still tethered to me by the spellform. I purposefully released that tether, and the arrow dissolved, the mana dispersing. “That’s weird.”
Boo whined, informing me that the others had moved on ahead. “Go on, catch up,” I said, but my thoughts stayed with the arrow.
I’d always had a talent for forming my pure, elementless mana into shapes outside of my body. Although I didn’t do it often, practicing making shapes with Arthur had really helped me to extend the range and power of my arrows. And Helen had taught me how to shoot a mana arrow that formed into a protective shield around the target instead of harming them. But all the abilities I’d ever learned required me to focus and keep channeling mana, otherwise the effect ended.
Holding out my hand, I pictured a ball. As mana flowed from my core to my palm, the ball appeared, formed of glowing white mana. I tossed the ball aside, where it splashed into one of the pools. It bobbed up and down for a moment, then was batted aside as a tentacle slithered across the acid’s surface.
“Don’t disturb the pools,” Arthur said over his shoulder, his voice vibrating with the energy channeled by Realmheart.
“Sorry,” I said immediately, biting my lip.
In my hands, I conjured another ball, taking my focus away from the first, but I was careful not to actively dismiss the innate connection my regalia maintained with it. Even though my focus was on the ball in my hands, I could still sense the other one floating in the acid.
Somewhere up ahead, Lyra shouted out, and Mica struck down a terror leech with her huge hammer.
Dismissing the sphere in my hands, I twisted around on Boo to better see the other ball, which was now about fifty feet behind me. The draw on my mana was barely noticeable, but the form seemed unaffected by my lack of focus. Curious, I attempted to manipulate the physical structure of the sphere.
The mana imploded, causing a burst of energy that sent acid spraying up in the air like a miniature geyser.
I spun around, my gaze jumping guiltily to Arthur, but he dismissed the noise after a perfunctory glance, apparently mistaking it for one of the many natural geysers that were going off constantly.
“That was pretty cool,” Regis said, plodding up to walk next to Boo as the path widened briefly. “You were using your spellform, right?”
“Oh, um, yeah,” I said, feeling awkward. “I’m not really sure what it’s doing though—or what I’m doing with it.” The rotten-egg smell intensified, drawing my attention to small bubbles forming on the surface of the pool next to us. “On our left!”
An earthen wall sprouted from the ground, curving over us in a half arch, and I heard the spray of sludgy water on the other side. “Thanks,” Mica shot back over her shoulder.
“Try again,” Regis suggested after the noise had passed.
I thought about what I wanted to do for a moment, then began shaping the mana. When I was ready, I tossed it onto the path behind us, but maintained active focus on it, attempting to continue to manipulate the shape so that it moved with us.
A small blob with four stubs for legs trotted stiffly after Boo and Regis, glowing white in the dim light.
I turned around so I wasn’t looking at the conjured figure and scanned our surroundings. When I found what I was looking for, I drew my bow, conjured an arrow, and loosed. The white beam of mana thunked into a fat blood slug that was hunkered at the edge of the path, ready to latch onto the first thing to get close enough.
“Nice shot,” Lyra said, kicking the remains down the ledge.
Quickly looking behind me, I saw that the four-legged blob had stopped moving. It was still there, frozen with its stubby legs lifted as if it was in the middle of taking a step, but it was no longer following us. I tried to start it moving again, but like the sphere in the pool, it burst, creating a nova of mana that expanded outward for several feet before dissipating.
“The mana holds its shape after I stop focusing on it, but I don’t seem to be able to reconnect with it. When I try to change the shape again, it collapses,” I told Regis, glad to have someone to bounce my ideas off of.
“Collapses…or explodes,” Regis shot back, giving me a wolfish grin. “Maybe it’s just because I’m a walking, talking weapon, but I wonder…can you make something burst with more energy than that? Maybe if you compact a larger amount of mana into the shape? Or forge it with the intent that it, y’know, goes boom?”
I giggled at the excitement in his tone but went quiet when Arthur cocked his head, turning his ear back toward me.
Is right now really the best time to be playing around with your power? I asked myself with Arthur’s voice. What if I draw in a bunch more of those monsters? Or something goes wrong, like Lyra said, and I go into backlash?
As I considered this, I noticed the golden glow emanating from Arthur’s lower back glow brighter. “What’s he doing?” I asked aloud, mostly to myself.
“Meditating,” Regis answered. “He’s been focused on Dicathen and hasn’t made much effort to continue improving himself lately. This isn’t just a chance for you and the insane dwarf to train. It’s his, too.”
I set my jaw. That made sense. And if even my invincible god-killing brother was doing what he could to train and become stronger, I had to too.
I didn’t worry much about the physical form, just shaped the mana into a kind of very dense disc.
When I was satisfied, I tossed the disc behind us. It landed on the hard dirt with a quiet thud. Inside my head, I disengaged my focus from the mana but left the tether with my regalia intact.
This time I waited until we were almost a hundred feet away from it. There was a dull aching sensation coming from the spellform by then. I was nearing the outer range of the tether. That’s good to know.
Instead of just trying to change the mana’s shape, I specifically attempted to force the mana outward, imagining it as a violent explosion—
A huge boom shook the ground and tore the raised lip of solid ground apart, collapsing it into the acid pools on either side. Three geysers went off one after another, set off by the explosion, and several terror leeches and huge tentacles burst out of the acid to slither toward the wreckage.
“What was that?” Mica asked, flying back over us and hovering between me and the site of the explosion.
“S-sorry!” I squeaked, my heart fluttering in my chest. “I didn’t think that it would be so…so…” Panicking, I pointed at Regis. “It was his idea!”
The shadow wolf barked out a gleeful manic laugh. “Hell yeah it was.”
Arthur was beside me, one hand resting on Boo. He’d stopped channeling his godrunes, and the alien light that had infused him was gone. “You did that?” he asked, his piercing golden eyes tracking over the collapsed patch of trail. “How?”
A little haltingly, I explained what I had noticed about the arrow and the discoveries that had spiraled from that observation.
As I talked, Arthur activated Realmheart again. “Create something,” he suggested, watching me carefully.
I formed another ball but paused before I did anything with it. Tilting my head slightly to the side, I listened. “Does anyone else feel that?”
Suddenly the ground where my mana mine had gone off ripped apart, churning as if being swarmed by Darvish sand sharks. The handful of terror leeches still milling around the spot disappeared into the ground, where their bodies were pulverized by something I still couldn’t see.
Lyra hurried to Mica’s side between me and the cacophonous noise. Regis started forward with them, but he stopped, shot Arthur a questioning look, then shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
As the ground gave way, something started to surface from beneath it. A wormlike body rose up and up, rivers of muddy acid running down its shining crimson carapace. It was as tall as an Elshire tree before it stopped growing, and I had to wonder how much of it was still hidden beneath the ground. It didn’t have a head, only a huge hole for a mouth, filled with rows and rows of triangular teeth that rotated around within the chasm of its mouth like one of Master Gideon’s crazy inventions.
Even Mica didn’t have anything flippant to say as we all stared at the humongous monster.
The gaping maw bent toward us, unleashing a roar so loud I had to cover my ears with my hands. Three tentacles slithered out of the mouth, each one covered with dozens of smaller, tooth-filled sets of jaws, just like the terror leeches. The tentacles swayed back and forth, each one letting out a low, irritating hissing noise.
“Work together,” Arthur said. “Ellie, you stay back. Regis will be at your side.”
“Let’s get it done then,” Mica said. Cocking back her arm, she hurled her hammer with incredible speed. It hit one of the leech-tentacles and burst straight through, only to turn in the air and zoom back to her hand. “Huh, maybe this won’t be too hard after…all…”
As Mica’s words trailed off, the severed tentacle—Is it a tongue? Or maybe a head?—began to grow back, its stump dividing into two at the base and forming twin leech-tentacle-head things.
“Oh, great,” Mica muttered.
As one, the four heads reared back and sprayed streams of swampy green acidic slime from all their mouths.
Jagged black lines scored the air with a noise like nails on glass, shielding us from the attack. Wherever the acid touched the black lines, it sizzled and seemed to be pulled apart into its base components, steam rising and clear water falling as the mana was destabilized.
But all the noise was drawing other things, too. More terror leeches and blood slugs were swimming through the pools of acid in our direction, coming from all sides.
With a battle cry, Mica threw herself into the air, moving like a ballista bolt. She spun midair, her hammer swelling with mana as she enhanced gravity’s pull on it until she collided with the two freshly grown leech heads.
They burst apart like sacks of half-melted butter, spraying acid in every direction—including all over Mica herself. She gasped in pain but didn’t slow down as she redirected her hammer, swinging at one of the two remaining heads. But it slithered away from the blow, which missed, while the other head snaked around behind her.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a black slash bisect the attacking head so that it peeled apart down the middle, flopping grotesquely. But I had my arrow trained on one of the terror leeches speeding toward us. Waiting for it to crest up out of the thick acid, I aimed for one of the many mouths and loosed. My aim was precise, and the arrow sank into the rubbery flesh and out of sight, but the leech kept coming.
“Boom,” Regis said, an unnerving gleam in his eyes.
Following his meaning, I focused on the tether of mana connecting me to the arrow and pushed outward on the mana.
Inside the terror leech, my arrow burst apart with a bass-heavy whump. The monster’s sides swelled with the force, then collapsed inward like a deflated waterskin, and it tumbled end over end for a couple of seconds before splashing to a stop, floating on the acid’s surface.
But all I felt was a growing dread as a dozen more followed behind it. “There are too many!”
To compound this, the giant hydra worm had gone from four heads to seven. Mica was flitting around between them, dodging spraying acid and snapping mouths, striking instead at the towering wormy body, but her blows hardly seemed to do any damage.
I released arrow after arrow, each one bursting within a terror leech body and stopping it in its tracks. On the other side of the path, Arthur had started unleashing aetheric blasts to fend off the swarm of monsters from that direction.
A scream drew my attention back to the hydra worm.
One of the heads had finally caught Mica, several mouths biting down on her legs and torso. When she drew her hammer back to strike at it, another coiled around the head of the hammer, holding it fast.
Lyra slashed her hand through the air, but yet another head moved to intercept the spell. The black slash sheared the tentaclelike head from the body, and two more grew in its place.
My heart was racing, and I could feel the panic start to cloud my mind. Drawing my bowstring, I conjured two arrows and used my index finger to part them slightly, giving them different angles. Focusing on maintaining both arrows separately, I took my shot.
The bright white beams flew just inside the two newly formed heads. One sank into a mouth on the trunk holding Mica, but the second missed its mark, impacting against the thick flesh of the second head, which had pinned her hammer.
Both arrows burst in a shockwave of mana.
The head biting Mica shivered and went limp, while the second was jarred forcefully enough that it released her weapon. Wasting no time, Mica shot straight up into the air, only to be followed by several arcing streams of acidic slime. Spinning, she hurled her hammer straight down. Even from a hundred feet away, I felt the swelling of its gravity, and watched as it flew faster and faster until it vanished into the writhing mass of tentaclelike heads.
The ground shook as the hammer impacted somewhere deep inside the hydra worm’s body. It squealed, the humming of its many heads taking on a sickening resonance as it was amplified several times over. My stomach churned, and I distantly felt my body wobble atop Boo’s back.
With unfocused eyes, I watched as two more heads grew, splitting off the trunk of the limp head that I’d shot to free Mica. There were so many I could no longer count them…
Lyra spun, sending a vitriolic glare at Arthur. Her voice was barely audible over the continued screeching. “Lesson’s will help none of us if we are all dead. This beast is matched to your strength, not ours!”
The ground shook again. The hydra worm was lunging upward toward Mica, growing taller and taller as its many heads strained after her. She flew straight up until her small form disappeared into the gloom and the fog. The beast on her heels was sixty feet tall, then eighty, then a hundred…
