Few light sources remained within the large stone complex of the Adventurers’ Guild that had not been extinguished or destroyed. Bodies lay half-consumed by gloom as the few sources of light left flickered feebly or were carried from place to place by frantic men and women simply trying to escape the building. Something moved in the darkness as it slowly and methodically cleared its way through the building in sectors, striking from the ceiling, the walls, and around corners; always from behind or above, and never when there was any chance for its prey to escape to alert anyone else. The air warped and blurred weirdly as it moved, almost invisible in the gloom even if you knew what you were looking for.
Hobbs was livid. No matter what he did or tried, he couldn’t seem to pin the creature down. He couldn’t even sense it, and he could barely track it when he did manage to corner it several times. The Guild Master wasn’t sure what it was, much less how to counter or stop it. It emitted no aura, left no tracks, and moved as freely along the walls as the ceiling. Hobbs was positive that it could fly, at the very least glide. What he wasn’t positive of was how it was killing his men, and the wounds it left varied between ‘cutting weapon’ and ‘something ate them’. He gritted his teeth as he maintained his Static Barrier, as he slowly walked through the spacious, gloom-drenched halls and stepped over bodies with grim regularity.
Hobbs whirled in the flickering light generated by his wards and blasted a column of lightning down the hallway behind him as something probed his shield’s radius for the dozenth time in the last candlemark. Stone chips exploded from the wall at the end of the hallway and a few corpses jolted and kicked on the floor grotesquely as they caught some of the charge while it passed by. The Guild Master tried not to think about it as he gathered mana in his fists and vanished, only to reappear with a roll of thunder a few feet past the corner he had been approaching. He released the attack the moment the world resolved from the smear of teleportation, smashing his hands together and flooding the corridor with electrically charged mana that exploded through the cramped space like a bomb. Rugs, furniture, and corpses were all blown out of either end of the hallway in the aftermath, small electrical arcs forming along the ground as the charge in the air equalized over a few seconds.
“What the hell are you?”, Hobbs growled into the silence of his shattered guild.
He wasn’t even sure what had happened. The first report that someone had gone missing was almost immediately followed by several more, then a dozen. Then the first messenger went missing and it was decided they would switch to mental communication. All within an hour of the first report. Immediately after that, Portal Command had begun to shriek with pain and terror through the mental net as the poor magus maintaining the spellwork faltered and let it collapse in shock. The response teams made it to the Portal Hub only to report they were butchered, most stricken down as they attempted to flee. No further reports had come in, and when the second response team simply vanished the moment they were into what people were starting to call the ‘dark zone’ Hobbs had decided to investigate personally.
That had proven to be the worst mistake of his life, as he played straight into the creature's plan. He’d made it all the way through to the Portal Corp HQ past the Portal Hub only to find the same savagery. All of their logistics and non-combat personnel were dead in the doorways they attempted to flee through, killed as much by the press of bodies as the brutal strikes to their necks and throats. Then the mental net collapsed again as the magus maintaining it had his neck snapped shortly before whatever it was had broken straight through the door into the main assembly and all hell broke loose. It destroyed everything that emitted light as it went, leaving only a few sources barely functional with such regularity that Hobbs was now sure it was intentional, the creature preferring low light to total darkness. Every survivor the Guild Master encountered was either too young to wield any real power, a laborer from the farms, or not strictly affiliated with the Adventurers Guild.
“I know you’re the ascendant’s creature. I haven’t failed to notice all the dead wear our colors. Can you even understand me? Answer me, damn you.”
Hobbs’ voice was muted by the size of the room as he walked out into the darkened promenade, light flickering ominously through the vegetation and branches of the small indoor park. Bodies floated in the pond like trash and entrails hung almost decoratively from the trees, visible in silhouette against the far wall. Hobbs spun as he heard many running feet and turned to see a group of kitchen staff simply flee straight down the middle of the walkway and out the corridor that led towards the entryway. He couldn’t understand how the thing was picking its targets. The non-combatants of the Portal Corp had been slaughtered, but other staff were allowed to live, and even some of the weaker combat personnel had been allowed to flee. The Guild Master could only assume that it was simply killing anything that might contribute to a confrontation with the ascended currently in contention with them.
“WHOA SHI-”, the scream cut off mid-sentence as it boiled out of the far end of the miniature park and Hobbs simply surged mana into his shield and willed himself as closely to the sound as he could, relying on his intimate familiarity with the Guild itself to emerge in the right space.
The man was dying but mercifully still alive as Hobbs materialized almost on top of him and immediately triggered the runes carved into one of the many rings he had retrieved from within his sleeves the moment it had become apparent that something formidable had infiltrated their headquarters. The world’s colors inverted for a moment as the powerful spell took effect and simply erased the man's wounds as if they had never existed. The man sucked in a huge breath and began to scream mindlessly, over and over, as he continued to clutch his throat and thrash on the ground. Hobbs frowned and deftly twisted lighting-infused mana into dense knots, scattering them like birdseed into the air before they began to fill the area around them with a dense cloud of electrical mines.
Hobbs then bent down, grabbed the man by his blood-drenched tabard, and delivered a resounding slap with his other hand. The screaming man's eyes unfocused for a heartbeat with the force of the blow and he paused between screams as he drifted back up from the depths of his terror. He began to say something and instead collapsed into a coughing fit so severe he began to retch as the Guild Master continued to hold him by his tabard.
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“What was it? Hurry, it may be life and death for anyone who still has a chance. SPEAK!”, Hobbs roared into the man's face after a moment when he deemed remaining stationary would soon become a risk to his life.
“Hccgkk…Snake….Wings…”, the man choked out before he began to cry and the Guild Master released him. He collapsed onto the ground and buried his face in his hands while he sobbed hysterically.
“Get up or you’ll die for sure. Run as hard as you can for the entryway, when you pass through the cloud it’ll follow you. I don’t care what that thing is, if it touches one of these it’s doomed.”, Hobbs said gently to the Adventurer as he pulled him to his feet and transferred the anchor of the defensive effect to the man, “Ready? No? Doesn’t matter. On three. THREE!”
Hobbs seized the man and shoved him roughly in the right direction as his eyes grew huge, darting about above himself in horror before he began sprinting flat out for the entryway with a shriek. The dense cloud of mines kept pace with him, providing a mobile bulwark as the man vanished into the corridor still screaming. Silence quickly returned to the darkened garden as the Guild Master stood alone once again. He spun on his heel and a thick fog billowed out from the ground below his feet and quickly filled the entire promenade with a rapidly darkening stormcloud. Streamers of lighting flickered randomly through the room as thunder growled and rolled with the building mana, the air bristling with unreleased charge. Hobbs poured more and more mana into it, filling the adjacent rooms and even part of the hallway he had entered from before he finally deemed it sufficient.
With a twist of will the cloud separated almost imperceptibly through the middle of the room, obscured almost totally by the density of what was now two rolling clouds themselves. Ice crystals within the clouds began to gain their charge, rising or falling within the clouds as the power continued to build. Invisible to all but Hobbs, thin streamers of electricity began to worm out from the clouds as they sought to ground themselves and were prevented by the Guild Master’s magic. Hobbs surged the power in his shield as he permitted himself a vengeful smile for what he knew was sure to happen soon. He did not have to wait long.
A figure flew down from the ceiling at such speed that he barely saw it approach before it hit the leading edge of the clouds and provided an extremely convenient outlet for an excessive amount of captured electricity. Hobbs had dutifully slammed his eyes shut the moment he caught the movement and was still almost blinded through his eyelids by a bolt of lightning thicker than a tree. Thankfully, Hobbs’ shield deadened the thunderclap that followed, the sheer volume of the noise sending cracks shooting through the masonry and blowing the branches off the surrounding trees. He cycled mana through his eyes and opened them quickly, the wash of energy chasing away the spots from his vision. The corpse before him on the ground was nothing but mangled flesh, smoking and charred beyond all recognition, bones shattered from the heat.
“How clever, I acknowledge you, Guild Master of the Adventurer’s Guild. I am quite sure that even my Master would have been suitably impressed by that spellwork. I shall relay it to him, perhaps he shall be more lenient towards you.”, a bright and happy voice cooed from right behind his ear as hot breath tickled the hair on his neck, “It is no fault of your own that I have flown through enough magical storms to recognize it. You are the first I have seen to intentionally weaponize intercloud lighting, however. Bravo.”
Hobbs froze instantly. His eyes widened as the realization that the creature was inside his shield and had him dead to rights hit him harder than the thunderclap that had destroyed the park. Sweat began to pour into his eyes and his blood ran cold as the being continued to hover behind him, muttering to itself, likely communicating the details of the attack to its Master wherever they were.
“I cannot help but wonder why we were given until dawn to return your Master’s possession only to be attacked in the night. We still had time to return the Blade. Why have you done this?”, the Guild Master’s voice was bitter as he spoke.
“Hmm? Oh. I see where the misunderstanding was. You have until dawn to present Master with his Blade or Verren will burn. The city can be spared. Not this Guild.”, the voice replied with exaggerated sweetness before continuing, “Nobody ever said anything about sparing you.”
The voice continued as a scaly, clawed hand patted his shoulder comfortingly from behind while the claws shed bloody streaks and tiny chunks of meat on his robes, “I will though! I left the fat one and that weasely little man alone down in the vaults. I know it’s in there, I can sense Barthalas’ aura. I expect they’ll be returning with it shortly. I even left the lights on for them.”
“You’re a vile demon.”
“Well, yes, in point of fact, I am. Better go meet them, it’ll save you some time.”
And just like that the sinister breath on his neck was gone, the only traces of the demon left being the mess upon the shoulder of his robes and the obliterated corpse that the creature had hurled into the room with all its might. Hobbs felt as though he might vomit as he processed the damned things words and realized it was correct. No terms had been given regarding the Guild itself nor its members. He took a moment to center himself and drew in huge gulps of air to combat the nausea as he wove the spellframe to take him directly to the Bottom Vault. The shattered promenade vanished as everything smeared and ran together for several seconds before the matte-grey metal walls of the deepest chamber of the Guild faded into view.
Tiare made a startled noise and the quartermaster screamed, throwing himself bodily behind the large pitch-black cube they had placed upon a pillar of metal with a rainbow sheen. Hobbs stumbled to one of the benches and sat heavily as Tiare took in his appearance. He was drenched in sweat, sleeves scorched from the sheer intensity of the spells he had woven, one hand still crusted in blood to the elbow from the tabard of the man he had saved, and thoroughly disheveled in every way. They held each other's gazes for several long seconds before the large burly woman spoke, her scratchy voice oddly calm.
“Whoever decided that these fucking things needed to have timers and codes just got a lot of people killed, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad is it?”, she continued as she carefully continued to monitor the Cube as the pillar below it gained a prismatic hue while it slowly matched mana patterns with the Cube to unravel it.
Hobbs stared blankly at the Cube as he probed it with his mana, immediately detecting the similarities to the threatening aura that still hung over the city, “I don’t know. I can’t find anyone to ask, and more than half of our elite forces are either in the city or completely unaccounted for.”
“What happened?”
“We didn’t read the fine print.”