Aide wasn’t able to provide the creature’s exact location; the cameras didn’t cover the right areas. They were all pointed at the sphere, not the hallway. They had some coverage of the hallway but not enough; they didn’t have a good view of anything past the watch room and none of the side rooms were covered by cameras at all; Serenity simply hadn’t thought to put them there since there was nothing he was interested in in them.
Worse than that, three-quarters of the cameras were visual light only. As Rissa had seen, the entire area was covered in darkness. Serenity couldn’t tell what had happened to the lights, so he kicked the question over to Aide to investigate while it showed him what it had from the cameras’ history.
The cameras showed even less than what Rissa saw; there was no claw or teeth, only shattering stone followed by darkness. The darkness flowed out of the broken area in spikes, like the shadows of an object that wasn’t there. The darkness spread slowly, but in what little light there was, Serenity could see texture to the darkness, areas where no light at all passed. There was something there, but it was impossible to make out what.
The remaining light in each scene disappeared over the next five minutes of the recording as more and more pieces of the stone sphere were split off the sphere. Serenity couldn’t make out what did it, so he switched to the other sensors.
The vibration sensors were essentially useless; yes, there was vibration, but the readings spiked irregularly, going far beyond the sensor’s limits. That was to be expected with the sphere being broken apart.
Infrared was next; Serenity expected to see something from the heat sensors. He wasn’t disappointed; there was definitely something there and it was warm. It seemed to be four-limbed and was likely bipedal, though it was entirely possible that it was actually a quadruped. The front limbs seemed to be what was tearing at the sphere, while the rear or lower limbs were for support and stability. Serenity couldn’t get a great idea of what it looked like, but he was reassured to know that there was only one.
It seemed to be cooler on its upper and rear surfaces than on the inner ones in the few glimpses Serenity caught of them. Serenity looked for more, but the heat seemed to disappear before the shell was open enough for the creature to get it; it was like the darkness blocked the heat as well, if not as well. That had to be a stealth skill of some sort, so he’d definitely have to watch out for that. It made the evaluation that there was only one a little weaker.
The other sensors were similar. Some of them, like the single sensor that detected the oxygen level of the room and the vibration pickups, continued to report but were useless for locating the creature. Others, like the ultrasonic motion detectors, gave a vague idea of what was going on after the creature stepped into the room. Light sensors, even the infrared ones, simply reported darkness at that point. Sound from the microphones was also muffled, very much like the ultrasonic sensors.
Serenity was relatively confident there was only one whatever-it-was. There might not be much in the way of information but it was all consistent. It seemed to be headed down the hallway, just like Serenity wanted.
“The lights are still receiving power,” Aide reported quietly. “I can’t guarantee it, but it looks like they’re still on.”
Serenity nodded at that. It matched what he knew; the creature had a stealth skill that was actually blocking light and probably muffling sound. It wasn’t a particularly good stealth skill, because it erased more than the creature it was trying to cover. It was probably a skill designed for combat, to prevent someone who knew you were there from knowing what you were doing instead of the more standard stealth skill, meant to prevent people from even knowing you were there.
Serenity was sure he was going to hate it when he had to deal with it, no matter what the intent was.
Serenity was still at least five minutes away from that section of A’Atla’s corridor when the red display in front of him changed again. A wall had been breached and the toxic air was moving into another area. It was good news; it was past the door he’d held open. He immediately told A’Atla to close that door; that should keep the bad atmosphere as contained as possible.
If he was lucky, A’Atla might even be able to clean it up now that the ship had access to the area. If only he could count on that. At a minimum, however, he should be able to fight the creature now without risking weakness from the mana-drain when it resumed.
Serenity could still feel Gaia, so it clearly wasn’t a problem yet.
Before Serenity could catch up to it, the creature smashed through another wall, then a third. He could track it by the damage it caused; A’Atla was very thorough about warning Serenity about damaged areas. It was surprisingly fast; Serenity would definitely need to avoid being hit by it unless he wanted to be hurt. He couldn’t have gone through A’Atla’s walls at that kind of speed as easily as this creature seemed to.
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It was still significantly slower than Serenity’s movement through open hallways, even if he did have to pause a few times for a sealed door to open. Serenity caught up to it as it started to crunch its way through a fourth wall. The damage noticed from A’Atla told Serenity where the creature had to be, so he sent his ax towards it; he wanted to draw its attention and stop it from moving closer to the surface.
The ax hit something; Serenity knew that not because of the noise but because of the lack of noise. If he’d hit the stone wall, it would have been loud. Serenity quickly evoked the remaining infused spells; he hadn’t prepared for a fight that morning, but he always made some each day. A Quickness and a Slowness were first, since he’d triggered the shielding spell on his run in.
He wanted to trigger one of the death-runes he’d etched into his body, but he didn’t have enough of a target. This thing certainly seemed worthy of the nastiest spell he could manage, but he couldn’t see it. Even with Eyeless Sight, all he could see was shadows.
Stealth Skills could be really, really annoying.
Serenity dropped a Death Field over the darkness and tried to use it to find the enemy. As long as it was within his aura, there was a chance; he’d be fighting both the opponent’s aura and the stealth skill, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. It would be difficult; it was a good thing that the Death Field would harm the enemy, drawing it closer to death, even if Serenity couldn’t target it.
Three sharp lines of darkness extended from the blur; they merged together behind the three lines in a too-small imitation of a hand and an arm. Serenity dodged out of the way; he doubted they were the actual creature’s claws, but they might well hurt like them. Whatever his enemy was, it seemed to have darkness-based abilities.
That meant it was empowered by its own darkness. No wonder the stealth Skill created a region of darkness; it wasn’t really a stealth skill at all. It was an empowerment Skill. With that knowledge, he needed to change his strategy.
Serenity danced back a couple of paces and pulled out a wand he hadn’t planned to use for this fight. Unlike most of his wands, this wasn’t a miniature made from a dower rod and infused with a spell he created; instead, it was a full wand created by an actual enchanter. Serenity had found the Wand of Severing on Asihanya while he was looking into the attacks on Takinat. He didn’t get to use the wand very often, but when he did, it was impactful. Breaking others’ spells could completely change a fight.
Serenity stared at the mana moving through the darkness Skill. It was meant to hide things, even if that wasn’t its primary purpose, but there was still mana moving. Its purpose wasn’t to hide itself, fortunately; it was instead to spread darkness and hide whatever was inside it. That left the spellform completely open to Serenity’s manasight even though he couldn’t see what was actually inside the spell.
Serenity called his ax back to him as another set of shadow-claws ripped towards him from the shadows. He was going to have to do this from a distance; if his enemy could see him coming and he couldn’t see it, it would catch him. Serenity didn’t want to be hit with anything that could bust through A’Atla’s walls.
The spell was solidly built; most of the failure points would knot up part of the spellform but wouldn’t actually end the spell. It raised the maintenance cost a little and the initial casting cost a lot, but it made the spell far more resilient against competing spells as well as harder to dispel. There was rarely a reason to build such a strong structure for a simple attack; the cost increase was rarely ever worth it.
As a way to make a maintained spell last longer, however, it was an idea Vengeance also used. That didn’t mean it was invulnerable, fortunately, it just meant that he either had to repeatedly shred it or find somewhere vital that hadn’t been reinforced. There was almost always somewhere.
Serenity had to dodge several more attacks and give up about twenty feet of hallway while he searched, but he counted himself lucky at that: he wasn’t hit. He had plenty more hallway he could retreat through and he wasn’t going to tire out.
When he saw the weakness, Serenity took only a quick moment to confirm that it was real before he used his ax to block and dissipate the next set of shadow-claws, hopefully surprising the enemy. He didn’t give any ground this time; instead, he pointed the Wand of Severing at the weakness and pushed Arcane mana through it.
The artificial darkness faded away as though it had never been there.
The creature within the darkness stood far away from Serenity, well out of range of Serenity’s ax unless he threw it. It was taller than he was, probably about eight feet tall, and looked almost like someone had simply taken a human, dyed his skin a mottled blue-purple-black like a really bad bruise, and stretched him in height. It was covered in a strangely spiky patchwork of bruised-looking scales on the backs of its arms, all over its head, and on its shoulders and legs. Serenity suspected its back was covered as well; all the areas that were commonly armored in animals seemed to be covered by scales turned to spikes.
Its hands narrowed to blue-black points like the shadowy claws; Serenity realized he could have been wrong about the attacks earlier. Some of them might well have been the creature he saw in front of him, with its too-thin, stretched out limbs.He didn’t quite believe it, but it was clear that its shadow-attacks were shadows of itself.
No, it wasn’t a “creature”. It was a demon. Serenity found he’d muttered the word without even realizing it.