Teuila made it back, and by the sounds of it, she brought company. A small group of villagers from The Brook, the best armed ones, seem to be out and about swinging to the south to battle Felgres making it past my elementals. I telepathically send towards Teuila to ask if she knows what’s been happening, if anyone caught her up. Thankfully Tiktik did while I was busy with that last bit of channeling my willpower against the elementals. Apparently Tiktik’s almost ready with the weather control ritual.
I choke out, “Te, Te please, save her, get Keeley to the others. Please. She tried to protect me, foolishly. She, she’s going to die, and Bud’s dying from having helped try to save her. I have elementals, sort of under my command, it’s not safe for you on the battlefield yet. Please, save her first, then come back to me, My Wings. Please. I love you. I’m begging you. Don’t, glp, don’t let me be responsible for her death. Please.”
I can sense the fury Teuila feels at my request. An intrusive thought flashes to the fore of her brain momentarily. One way to satisfy my request would be if Teuila killed Keeley herself, but we’re both horrified at the thought. It’s okay Te, I know you wouldn’t do that. Intrusive thoughts are intrusive, they’re not who we are. Go, please, quickly but gently, the ice patch won’t hold long.
I stalk back towards the fight, limping occasionally from the pain in my right thigh. I utilize electrokinesis to keep my iron-rich blood from seeping out of the gaping hole in my arm or thigh by basically emitting a magnetic field within the wounds. Instead of cauterizing the wounds, I can let them heal at my Can’Z’aasian rate with the aid of Kozzurth’s dragonforce. It’ll still take a couple of days to regenerate wounds this size, but it’s better than the weeks to months a human would end up taking, if they could ever even do it. Wounds like these might have to simply be stitched closed around the missing flesh, leaving a hole through someone, I’m not certain. I’m a cryptozoologist, not a physician, remember?
Returning to the fight, I find myself bending and gathering dozens of Felgre bone spikes. I wearily continue approaching the line of combat in the hopes of keeping everyone in The Brook safe for as long as possible. Despite my weariness and wrath, and my desire to launch myself back into the thick of things, I’m forced to pick off stragglers that make it by my elementals. There are likely entire platoons that make it west of me down south beyond my sight range. I have at least enough sense left about me to know I still don’t want to let any of these things through, but I can’t be in several places at once. At least not in this timeline, at least not yet.
I launch their own fallen allies’ bone spikes at the oncoming Felgres and Felcuns like throwing daggers or javelins depending on their size. My excess electricity aids my muscles in continuing their rapid tossing of projectiles, despite the weariness burning within them. I’m certainly no expert marksman without the aid of my space skill, but their own implements of destruction prove to be the Felgres’ undoing.
Teuila, if you’re still in telepathic range, if you brought any plains Colossi back, have them start setting up gorges to block the path towards the evacuation route. Then have them begin to prep the entirety of The Brook to become a sinkhole. If she’s not in range, Tiktik, please relay that to her.
A Felcun closes in on me, whirling like a dervish with two kama weapons. It leaps high into the air as it lunges towards me but I simply kick a Felgre corpse, snapping another bone spike off. As the bone spike spins into the air, I launch it upwards with a backward flipping kick, despite the pain of using my right leg so strongly. I don’t even both watching to see its impact as I continue stalking to the east. An instant later as I’m caving in another attacking Felgre’s skull, I hear the thump of the Felcun’s corpse landing behind me.
Teuila’s telepathic avatar looks ashamed as I can sense her physical self nearing me. She can barely send the message due to the torrent broiling in the depths beneath her surface emotions. She gulps out, “I got her to the far edge where Tiago’s set up. Keeley, she, she’s not, I don’t think. I don’t think she’s going to make it. I tried to help, I did. Air, I, I swear—. I just, I can’t use the potion for her, it’s for you. We already used the one on Daffy—.”
Everything drains from me and rage begins to replace it all. Te quails lightly, worried slightly that she’s the target of my ire. While I still have a grasp on my senses, I try to send my love and acceptance to Teuila, to let her know that I understand and don’t blame her. I only manage to choke out, “Te. Get to the far side of the field. Kill everything you see! Meet me in the middle. Don’t you dare get hurt.”
Te takes off like a rocket, and now that I know Tiktik is awake, I cast my psychic link senses about for her. Telepathically I growl an order to Tiktik wrathfully, “Hold off on the sunspot until you get my signal.” I regret how I’m addressing Tiktik and Teuila, but I don’t have full control over myself.
What I’m about to do could definitely kill me, and it will most certainly use a significant chunk of Kozzurth’s dragonforce to keep me alive if I do live through it. I stalk up to the elementals battling Felgres for us, and I rip the wind elemental away from the battle as I command it to take me high into the sky. It submits before my fury as the electricity bleeding from me rises to unprecedented levels. The wind elemental takes me straight up, ignoring any dangers in the sky, taking me directly through the path of several lightning bolts. As my wrath intended. I’m turning myself into a living capacitor with a far higher volume for energy than likely has ever been seen on this planet, or possibly any other. This is a stupid risk, and yet I can’t stop myself. I’m not piloting any more, I’m only observing Reggie Shellcracker acting with brazen foolishness driven by wrath.
As we enter the acid clouds, it becomes evident that they’re enchanted, heavily, and are a far, far stronger, far deadlier acid at their location in the sky. My neckchain of the ever breathing keeps my lungs from being melted, but my skin immediately reddens, and begins to lose cohesion and layers by the moment. My wrath at least has some survival instincts. I immediately work at crafting and quickening the runes for my Steely Body spell, though it will bring me over my safe S P limit for the day. Ending in the latter half of my S P limit means I’ll barely be able to move, if at all. I’ll be a sitting duck. Even my wrath knows I’m instants away from perishing though, as I’m welting and melting within the storm. It’s pure agony each fraction of a moment until I’m finally enchanted into a metallic state, but I’m drawing all lightning in the region to me once more. The spell uses up the rest of my Valkyrie dagger’s blade, and hilt in its entirety to complete.
Even with the additional protection of my Steely Body, the enchanted acid clouds are far too strong for the two of us. Even the wind elemental is seemingly beginning to lose cohesion, however that works. So I have the wind elemental pull us down from the clouds so that I stop being dissolved by hydrolysis of my biomolecules. We remain just beneath the cloudcover while still collecting lightning. While the acidic drizzle is still stronger nearer to the enchanted clouds, it’s far less potent than in the clouds themselves.
I’m beginning to understand why dragons are rarely seen, and why Kozzurth didn’t take to the sky. Because if they attempted to fly for any distance, they’d be rent asunder by lightning strikes. Or, if they wanted to break through the cloud cover to get high out of the reach of the lightning, they’d likely die before they made it through, or die on the way back down through. Who even knows the height and depths of these soupy cloud banks? They could stretch upwards for miles. I certainly wouldn’t live long enough to find out, nor would the elemental giving me a lift. I’ve got acid resistance from Can’Z’aas, and I nearly melted within a few short moments of entering the clouds. I’m sure dragons’ scales are resilient, but their eyes, nasal passages, mucus membranes, and lungs likely wouldn’t fair well in a torrent of enchanted acid.
Since lightning stops streaking across the sky, Tiktik understands that the signal is about to occur, and needs no further prompting. When there isn’t even another single spark in the sky apart from me, I order the wind elemental to throw me eastward. The elemental complies before rejoining the battle below. It sends me sailing at a rapid clip, and I make minor course corrections with short bursts of electrokinesis out my fists and feet. Two more active Fel Portalspawn are visible from my location in the sky as I’m falling, so I aim between the two hill-sized creatures.
I accelerate towards the ground in anger, despite knowing I should pull up. Struggle against it as I might, I can’t wrestle down my wrath to act more sensibly at the moment. I notice a small cluster of Felcuns gathering where I’m going to land. That’s fine by me. Crashing down in their midst, weapons converge on me as my bones almost buckle. Or rather, the metallic facsimile of my bones begin to fracture, but I release the hundreds of stored up bolts of natural lightning in a titanic wave. The bolts that streak across a sky are generally hundreds or thousands of times greater in power than my magical artificially emulated lightning.
Upon releasing all that’s stored within me, a cascade of energy bursts forth from me in a shockwave that reaches out as far as several hundred meters. The edge of the shockwave is chased by relentless arcs of lightning. The shockwave itself isn’t exceedingly damaging, but the lightning strikes so hot that it dehydrates the mud, and glasses the soil where it strikes, creating impure fulgurite. It similarly breaks down any Felgres into pure carbon, they’re left as little more than charcoal statues. While it doesn’t outright slay the Fel Portalspawns at the edges of the shockwave, it does render them immobile.
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The two Fel Portalspawns come crashing to the ground, becoming impaled on the remains of trees, and the bone spikes, or fossilized corpses of their fallen comrades. The electricity continues to flow in arcs and waves for several moments yet, finally ending the two of them, just as I collapse, completely drained of everything.
The most power I could possibly muster, pushing myself beyond my limits into wrathful territory, power that could end me entirely, slew hundreds of Felgres, and two Fel Portalspawn. Using power that pushed me far closer to death, which cost me a huge chunk of Kozzurth’s dragonforce to even live through using did all this. And yet, it’s one small swath amidst miles and miles of the hordes of Hell. I couldn’t do that again if I wanted to right now, or possibly ever again. I give up for the moment, since my muscles are barely responding due to being in the latter half of my total capable S P for the day. I rest, collapsed in a fetal position, nursing slim fractures along most of my bones below my waist and along my left arm and hand.
Thankfully, the Steely Body spell took the brunt of my foolhardy crash-down strike’s impact. I also think ejecting so much electricity, after siphoning so much from the atmosphere has finally brought me to some sort of electrical equilibrium, at least temporarily. Or perhaps the Steely Body spell interacted with the magic splinters embedded within me as it transmuted the whole of my being to metal. Either way, at least for the moment, I don’t feel as if electricity is trying to kill me from the inside. Whatever good that will do me. On the plus side, my eyes are no longer agonizingly filled with splinters. It seems that somehow being transmuted several times over the last few hours has caused them to fully merge with me in some fashion, the splinters, not my eyes, obviously. Yes Reggie, I know what we meant. Ugh, personality fracture.
I let my eyes roll back in their sockets as my head lolls weakly against the momentarily dry rocks beside me. I think perhaps an hour or two passes, and four or five Felgres are beginning to realize that I’m alive in the center of this destruction, so they’re headed this way. Teuila lands nearby as the Felgres approach. She launches her spear at one, whips out her bow to fire upon three more, and barrels into a fifth with a skull-crushing haymaker, ending five Felgres in the blink of an eye before retrieving her spear. Based on the amount of gore she’s covered in, she has been relatively busy fighting her way this direction.
Teuila hesitantly jokes, “I couldn’t make it to the far side of them. I don’t think there is one. Heh? Erm, yeah. Sorry Air. So, um, since when could you do this?” Te indicates the circle that’s hundreds of meters wide, peppered with smoking remains and arcs of glassed earth.
I struggle against the pain of my fractured limbs to attempt to stand, but crumple again under my own weight. My eyelids begin to sink. Despite wanting to answer Teuila, my brain is barely responding to me at the moment. Suddenly, light begins to pierce the clouds as they slowly part. Tiktik’s doing it! It took her hours of attempts and ritualistically casting a carefully crafted spell over a massive region of the city, but she’s doing something I definitely couldn’t do by being able to cast it at all before mastering each individual rune. What shines through is an early, near-noon sun, bearing down heavily over The Brook itself. I’m in no shape to continue harassing the Fel hordes, so I crawl towards Teuila, who sits on her heels next to me.
Te strokes my face and recoils her hand as she’s met with a jolt. Blushing, I apologize, “Sorry My Wings, I sorta got embedded with lightning laced wood shrapnel coated in cursed blood. That uh, that’s where this came from. I lost it, the, the thunder stick. It exploded. It’s gone, my reminder of Staff Ninja, pretty much the first person other than Lil who seemed to be a good, friendly person, a potential ally or friend. I guess it’s a part of me now, but it’s not the same.”
Trying to redirect my saddened reveries, Teuila pouts, playfully pleading, “How long are you going to be all zappy though?”
I join Te in pouting, “I’m really not sure. For a while it was killing me, but it seems to have stopped doing that at least. I made some stupid choices, and some wrathful choices today Teuila. I leaned hard on Kozzurth’s dragonforce. Worse, I asked Bud for that barrier, and for help trying to save Keeley. Bud’s been unresponsive, and his aura is the weakest I’ve ever seen it. I’ve got some ideas on how to stop being zappy, but, um, new super power like my old super powers, I guess. Yay I guess?”
Teuila grins at me and braves another shock to ruffle my hair and shove me, rolling me sideways several feet. I chuckle and crawl back to her, taking this brief respite as a stampede forms around us. Many Felgres had made it past me, and were working at destroying the barricade Bud had raised. Now, these Felgres that the elementals haven’t slain yet are retreating from the sunlight, while the elementals chase after them.
I wish we could make that hole in the clouds permanent, and heck, apply another patch of it every few miles for people to have a break from the stupid acidic drizzle. I don’t know what kind of gem dust it would take to make this break in the cloudcover permanent though. I don’t even know where one would apply the permanency. Would I have to levitate the dust in the edges of the acid clouds? Could I paint a small runic circle on the ground? Would I have to surround the entire city in a large permanency enchantment that would probably take more gem dust than currently exists on Rayileklia? I only hope Tiktik isn’t hurting herself to maintain it.
I query, “Te? Do you think we should just be done with this? I’m worried about Tiktik, Tiago, George, Harriet, Daffodil, hell, the whole town, but, but I’m just so exhausted. The elementals are going to be chasing the Felgre horde for a long while. I think somehow I intimidated them into continuing to obey my fire elemental, or at least leave us alone, despite the protection scroll wearing off. Maybe I convinced them I was a lightning elemental. Heh.”
Teuila scoops me in her arms and immediately leaps us westward at an incredible pace. I forgot that she tripled her horizontal jump speed with a ring she’d gotten from Milbert of Navica’s kleptomaniacal hoard. Despite not being able to engage her energy based leaps, she’s still incredibly fast. Definitely at least motorcycle speeds. No wonder she got back earlier than I thought she would. Wait, did she sleep at all?
I poke Teuila, sending a small jolt into her bicep accidentally. I can sense her answer forming already as I ask, “Te, did you get any rest at all since the crap that went down at the Keel Over yesterday?”
She shakes her head while flashing me a weak smile. The three of us are spent. No, the four of us are spent. We’re adventurers, maybe mercenaries, maybe even heroes on a good day, but we’re not an army. Even Teuila is flagging. She’d keep fighting til her last breath if I hadn’t asked her to be done with it though. I don’t know how many Felgres made it past me and my mana construct forces as several swept south, far outside of my sight range. I’m sure that the ones that did are probably powerful and cunning, a disaster waiting to happen for anyone not yet evacuated. The idea breaks my heart, and I momentarily weep for the possibility of yet more innocent lives lost.
Today has been a terrifying failure on so many levels. Once again, I have the panic attacks, but someone else pays the price, while I survive a deadly encounter. I failed to protect a strong, proud woman who is likely bleeding to death as we speak. I lost my sentimental memento of Staff Ninja. I tore through vast quantities of Kozzurth’s dragonforce. I used up my fallback plan’s nuclear option.
And the list of today’s failures goes on. I may have messed up my ability to use mana construct conjuration spells by preparing and casting too many at once. A summoner is only supposed to be able to maintain one of them at a time. But I linked so many to subroutines in my Can’Z’aasian brain that I think something snapped within me. I don’t know if I’ll even be able to summon a single mana construct ever again, let alone multiple at once. My right leg is nearly ruined, along with my right arm. Thankfully those last two are recoverable due to my otherworldly biology. The rest though—. My eyelids drop heavily as I suck down a ragged, sobbing breath.
Teuila tries to take my mind away from its currently doomed train of thought. While she has me in her arms, she catches me up on a few things, “So, the Colossi are definitely smaller than they were the last time we were through here. You were right about them needing dragon blood to maintain their size and power. They’ve been rationing it pretty tightly apparently. Helena and Reg, you know, the ones that you appointed chieftains—.” I grimace at the reminder of the action that got Harriet to berate me as Teuila continues, “seemed pretty reasonable when I said I thought the Colossi should join the Autumn Brook evacuees. I was sure you’d convince Harriet somehow. I didn’t think you’d summon an army from Hell to do it, but hey, different strokes for different folks.”
I snort a laugh before chuckling so hard I cough. I know Teuila knows I’d never do any such thing. She flashes me one of her mad-as-a-hatter, mile-wide grins as she rocks her head side to side in joy at having brought me a mote of the same during such a dark occasion. I’m about to express how much I love her when Teuila continues, “So, Meredith, Clint, and Dodge, are of course the ones that were closest to The Brook. It seems like the town and the Colossi hadn’t quite patched things up yet, there’s a lot of forgiving that needs doing. When Tiktik told me your plan, I asked the three of them to start in on it. Hopefully any of the weird Hell creeps that got past you run into that trio. I think they can handle themselves. Hopefully. I mean, they’re big and hard at least. Wait, let me re—.“
Despite being amidst so much tragedy, I can’t help myself as I snirk, laughing through my nose so hard that I end up sneezing before enjoying a full belly laugh. It’s nice not being the one getting teased for those kinds of slip ups. I know she meant they’re large and have stony, craggy skin, but it’s hilarious all the same, since Teuila somehow knows euphemisms and still slipped up. A deep breath becomes a yawn though as my head lolls weakly to the side. It’s eerie seeing Autumn Brook so empty. It was always such a lively, bustling city.
I’m suddenly being passed off to Tiktik. It hadn’t even really registered to me that I was viewing The Brook from within, as apparently we’ve already made it back to town. I feel slightly dazed by the day’s events, so I barely realize it when Teuila doesn’t warn Tiktik about my new condition. When Tiktik feels the zap, she drops me to the ground in surprise. I feel abashed, but Kitten simply plays up the shocking jolt she feels for laughs in a cartoonish manner. There’s a twinkle in her eye as she gets a smirk from both of us. Wait, her eye color—.
Telepathically Tiktik sends, “Don’t tell me you don’t even know about —. Eh, some other time. Are you going to be okay Tiger?”