For the first time since their arrival, it seemed truly real. Alan’s body was screaming for food. His mind was struggling to deal with the increasing inputs from his senses, which seemed to be slowly ramping up. He was hearing a lot more sounds, smelling more smells, even starting to see colors he hadn’t seen before. Not visible light spectrum, it was more like thermal imaging. Whether it was his brain adapting or the senses themselves literally ‘coming online’ or whatever, he didn’t know.
Now those senses were all tuned on this veritable monster before them, still perhaps a hundred feet away. Like nine feet tall, bulging with muscles like a body builder, wielding a big-ass hammer that had to be almost two hundred pounds. The face was like it was chiseled out of stone as a parody of a ‘barbarian’, the jaw looked almost like it would rip through the skin pulled taught against the bone. The eyebrow ridges looked like something out of a homo-erectus depiction.
If this guy got on the bus looking angry… You’d get the hell off that bus.
Plus he had this crazy looking scaled tunic of wood scales that were fucking glowing and making a sort of heat haze effect. Just looking at it was giving him an intense headache. He felt his eyes start to lose focus, his brain just shutting down from the stimulus. It was like when he’d had bad optical migraines as a kid and his vision would actually black out.
Weirdly though, his vision did not actually turn off, it was more like his mind just set it aside, no longer processing details from the input. A different, internal vision was brought to the fore. He got the intense feeling that there was someone else there too, that he wasn’t alone.
Alan found himself inside a strange space, without form or body, looking at golden, glowing star surrounded by a spherical boundary. It was both infinite and small at the same time, all sense of scale failing to capture any real sense of what he was seeing. Sensing. Whatever it was.
Kid was there, though not in any way he could identify with the ‘visual’, more as a feeling of someone that had a very strong identity behind it. She felt both vast and diminished at the same time. He had the sense that she had once been immensely powerful and now was the barest spark of that former glory. Maybe she really had been some kind of god-thing.
“My vessel can only provide this much. Fight, my Summon, protect yourself, your friends, and your Summoner. If you can’t defeat the opponent…” Fight? What? Fight that huge beast of a Talor with the glowing armor and the fuck-hammer?! Oh hell no. “FIGHT!” Thin, almost invisible strands of golden energy wove itself into the spherical barrier. The pattern populated with thousands of lines of instructions. Briefly, he thought to read them, but..
“Don’t try to understand it now, the
“Most importantly, don’t let me die, even if it means you have to sacrifice yourself!” What?
Guardian #0A4722 watched in amusement as the little broken Sentinel realized the utter futility of her attempt to escape. As if any Sentinel had ever escaped their obligations except by death. It was not for him to pass judgement. It was very likely that the Arcanes would spend their time dissecting her, both to examine whatever transformation had been enacted to get those ridiculous ears as well as to determine how the Compulsion was broken.
The party with the Sentinel was so weak as to not even bear acknowledgement, yet the Combat Overlay, one of many enchantments writ directly into his flesh, was highlighting one of them with a warning.
-WARNING: Essence Detected!-
Essence? The level was so low, not even a tenth of the energy a single healthy lifeform would produce. His armor alone was enough to deflect an artillery spell, the work of at least a dozen strong casters working together. The beast-Man was thin, looked half starved, and was just staring into space.
Oh, how cute, it was starting to run… towards him? Oh, this was going to make it so much easier. Nothing intimidated Sentinels like a Guardian splattering someone across the landscape in a single strike. With casual disdain, #0A4722 lifted his maul and swiped at the foolish… he missed?
His armor registered a deflected hit. No threat. He had to give the beast-man some credit though, the Guardian could barely track the movement. This deployment might be the first fun he got to have in a very, very long time.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Inside of his head, Alan was screaming. His body was practically moving on its own, contorting impossibly out of the path of the maul. The metal head had passed so close to him that it had slid along the synthetic fiber of the sweatshirt and tickled bit of an eyebrow as it passed. Frantically he’d struck out with his claws that now so easily obeyed his demands, scoring them along an invisible barrier just above the surface of the glowing armor.
Shit, it burned! He kept screaming in his mind. Not in excitement, or rage, but in utter fucking terror. Whatever that bitch had done to him inside that weird place was using him like some kind of battle puppet! Consent damnit! She didn’t know anything about consent!
His body scored deep ruts in the soft forest floor, shifting its weight to the side just enough to avoid a blast of air that exploded a tree further past him into splinters. Time seemed to be moving much slower than normal, maybe a quarter speed, even so, the movements of the huge Doom Talor were almost incomprehensibly fast. It was probably good that Alan wasn’t controlling his body. Or his bowels.
Whatever was currently in charge was probably related to the little sparks of energy flooding his tissues. They seemed to be modifying and tweaking bodily functions, structurally reinforcing his musculoskeletal system, organs, nerves, cushioning in his brain. His heart was pumping far more blood than should be possible at the rate it was moving. His lungs were robbing almost all of the oxygen from the air rather than just a small portion of it.
No… no, no, no! Don’t get close to the crazy! Dodge, good! Oh crap! Nice! How the hell can I twist like that? Ouch, crap, I think that ankle is broken. Note to body-controller, stop kicking the armor OUCH, shit, those fingers are definitely not supposed to bend that way…
Whatever was piloting his body was really going for broke on the in-your-face melee and while the maul was probably slower to swing around than a clawed hand or a kicking foot, the big guy seemed completely impervious to the strikes and the damage had added up very, very fast. His body was avoiding putting weight on his left foot and half the fingers on his right hand were bent at weird angles.
It hurt and yet was muted. The goddamned Nightmare Talor was smiling, revealing his big pearly whites. His off hand reached out again and his body hit the floor, the blast of wind ripping the sweater down his back, the vacuum left behind lifting him off the ground and clear of any purchase. The maul whipped out again and was released, flying through the air. His body twisted like a cat’s, reorienting itself and contorting around the maul.
That was smart. Impressive. Goddamned amazing. Plus he didn’t get turned into jelly! What wasn’t so smart? Grabbing the handle of the maul as it went past. The thing weighed more than he did and it was flying at a ridiculous speed! There was the cracking of bones and a tearing sensation in his left shoulder as his left hand refused to release its grip, his body being jerked along with the flying mass.
They landed dozens of feet away, the maul only cracking a large branch off of a tree before they plowed into the soft leaf litter. The little sparks of golden light were starting to fade and he had the definite sense that in any moment, whatever Kid had done was about to fail. He would probably… no, hopefully, black out from the pain.
Ugh, then he would probably die. Everyone would die. Why? Why damnit! Why couldn’t Kid have fought on her own? It was her power or whatever. What about Elean? She was some kind of ‘Sentinel’, didn’t that mean she could fight? Could she do this same ridiculous kind of physics breaking super-human shit?
His body wasn’t going to give up though, even if its rightful owner wanted to do so. Muscles twitched and pulled bones into re-alignment. Little silvery blue motes of light started erupting through his body now, brighter than the golden ones, though there was definitely a sense of them being weaker even so.
Bones didn’t actually heal, rather they were bound back together by the light. His muscles were shaking and he could feel dozens of tears in them being pulled back together and glued with the silver-blue energy. Where was this coming from and why wasn’t it there from the start?
The maul. It was glowing with that same energy, almost like a blazing sun. How had he not seen it before? It wasn’t even like a visual thing, more like he could see it in his brain and yet not with his eyes. Whatever. Fucking magic.
In either case he could now ‘see’ that his body was sucking the light out of the maul. That and there was an angry looking He-Talor hauling his six hundred pounds of muscled ass at them like a two legged freight train. The maul whipped and slammed into the earth, a veritable tsunami of the silver-blue blasting from it through the leaf litter.
Dirt, roots, half-rotted pine-needles and leaves, masses of white mycelium, hell he could even see beetles and worms… all erupted up into the massive man. Six hundred pounds of soil met six hundred pounds of death and death was sent sailing up and over Alan. Barely. If his ears hadn’t flicked back at the last instant, the outstretched hand that was big enough to palm his entire head would have been able to grab them.
This time Alan’s body decided to take one from the Talor’s playbook, heaving the maul around at the airborne target, only it didn’t let go of the maul, instead sending a searingly hot burst of the silver-blue through his legs. Whatever it was doing, the ground firmed up and his muscles audibly creaked as he accelerated himself and the heavier weapon forward, the world momentarily blurring until the maul’s head struck.
The sound was deafening. No, literally, his eardrums ruptured. The skin on his palms where he gripped the maul’s thick handle sheared off from the vibration, blood slicking the handle and the maul being flung from his grip. His vision swam. He was… flying backwards through the air.
Thankfully no tree stopped his flight and he was instead painfully buried into the soft soil, body no longer able to sustain the magic or consciousness.