It was hard to ignore that the man felt so much like him, but he fought no less than Harlan to get to Adina.
The man hung back for a moment, letting Harlan move ahead and take more focus from the enemies.
When he rushed forward again he struck one of the soldiers, splitting his body in two, but at the same time, the blood between the two halves was turned to crystal.
As the man’s corpse flew down the hall the blade made from blood crystal cut down the other soldiers, and when it did break, the shards kept going forward.
With the hall clear, it was a straight shot to Hellon, though enemies came from the halls to her left and right as well.
He cast a spell to reduce friction and then put his hands behind his back, letting out a stream of air to speed down the hall.
He slid left and then right, then as he reached the mouth of the hall he went left again, holding his arms out to the side.
When he turned his hover off suddenly he was two tons of flesh and metal moving at high speeds.
Men simply splattered against him.
He could’ve made his way through more of them by taking a sharper form, but his intent was to slow himself down rather than slam into the wall.
When he came to a stop there were only a few soldiers remaining, they stared at him, dumbstruck by the sudden turn of events, unable to react to the first assault or to what came next.
The man, still dripping with blood, used water magic to form cutting blades from the bodies of the freshly dead.
Waves of slicing red finished the last of the men.
The blue man turned his attention to the soldiers on the other side of the hall who had more time to react, and quickly began pulling moisture from the air to create the ice and then carving into it.
With the incredibly high levels of ambient mana in the area, it took only moments for the simple enchantments to activate.
Yet they did nothing to stop the man’s attack.
He drew a sigil, beam, and it harmlessly passed through the wall, then harmfully passed through the men.
As he flicked his finger in different directions the beam would shift left and right.
They tried to move the ice wall forward as an attack, but as they tried to push, he crashed into the wall and the force combined with him fighting for control over the spell caused him to push the wall back towards them, crushing the remaining soldiers.
Harlan reached the entrance to the medical wing as the black faded away from the man.
He fell to a knee and his sweat began steaming off of him.
“I need cooling magic.”
“How cold?”
“Freezing.”
Hellon remained in front of the door and recovered.
Ever since the last batch of students made their way to safety the enemy realized that she was trying to amass them, either for safety or for a counter attack, they couldn’t let that happen either way.
“Who’s this?”
“The Darkness sent him.”
The tall man laid naked on the floor under an array to cool his core temperature.
“Turn into a monster, something is coming.”
“I can’t just do that anymore, I need time to prepare.”
“I have the solution. You do know how to separate your soul like a Fenrir, yes?”
“In theory, but I abandoned the method.”
“You can do it, let me explain.”
Once the man put his clothes back on Harlan couldn’t help but ask.
“Your clothes and armor, they are just like mine.”
“Now, I will draw a sigil, breathe in the mist. When under the effects of the sigil you will feel far less pain, enough that you can safely remake your body. But you must be able to remove the sigil from your soul, otherwise you will overheat, and your soul will burn up.”
“Do it.”
The man smiled, to Hellon it seemed threatening, but to Harlan it seemed like they understood one another.
Harlan felt the heat in his chest, and he tried to shift himself.
It hurt, but it was like a pinprick, a cut, holding his hand to the fire for a moment, he could bear it.
He shifted his body into the form he used during the training camp so long ago, that he used against Amber and her squad.
Though now he replaced the nerve agent with an acid.
The man admired the form, running his cool hands along the black boneplate that covered his back in a stripe.
“This will work. Woman, is there a way for you to turn the wards and arrays back on?”
“My name is Hellon. And yes, they are held in items in the walls, they can be turned off but by being anchored they wouldn’t possibly have the time to actually dispel them.”
“On that note, may I know dispel? It would be a great help now.”
She looked nervous.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Dispel isn’t a normal magic.”
“Very well, how do we turn the academy's defenses back on?”
“I need to use my ring to enter the main security room and then I can use my personal passcode to turn them back on. Unless they were shut off by someone higher ranked than me, the arrays, the wards, and the golems will all turn back on.”
“Hmm. I did notice they did not roam the halls, and I saw no bodies. Champion, go with her, once this gate disruption array is gone I can get your wife away from here.”
“You go with her, I’ll go see my wife.”
“No, I need to hold them off.”
“Who?”
“You can’t feel them?”
The man looked down the hall which they came from and a figure slowly moved forward.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Its shape was human from a distance, but despite it being midday, the hallway was dark, and all one could make out was its alabaster skin.
It wore no clothes, but it also lacked any distinguishing sexual traits.
“Go.”
Harlan followed after Hellon, leaving the tall man to face down the slowly approaching thing.
They run down the halls with Hellon shouting directions and them trying to help as many of the students as they could, but only those directly in their path, both of them knew that they would save more lives by turning the defenses back on rather than getting caught in a chain of seeing one person and then rushing to save the next and the next until they were far from their destination.
Still, Harlan sent bolts of lighting down the halls to give the students a fighting chance better than they had before.
The security room wasn’t marked, from the outside it seemed like it was a janitor's closet.
But outside of it stood one of the Ascended, it had a dozen arms of different sizes, some limp and frail to the point they were unusable.
Around the Ascended were a few dozen soldiers, making it clear that they were defending this room quite harshly.
Hellon and Harlan flew up to the ceiling and Harlan put them under an invisibility veil.
“I thought those things couldn’t leave Reino’s true border?”
“I don’t know, but that thing looks like one of them. The thing we left that man to fight was probably another one of them.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Frightfully little. They very greatly in strength, most have either unique or just rarely seen abilities. That thing might toss out a hundred spells in an instant, it might flip the gravity in the entire hall, or it could make damage dealt to it go back to whoever hit it. Even the appearance of it doesn’t mean anything.”
“So I need to either drag out a fight to learn how to beat it, or hit it with something so powerful that it doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t see how you read that from my words.”
Harlan had a rather simple idea.
Life was for the living, the dead had no right to flesh.
Five minutes later a featureless giant slug-like being started to crawl around the corner.
It wasn’t long before they noticed what it was made from.
Not fully absorbed faces and limbs stuck from the mass of flesh, they had the same look as when they died, terror.
The soldiers began to hit the abomination with acid and fire, the Ascended rapidly grew from its weak form and into a mass of rippling muscle, but it cast no spell.
It stood there and watched.
It just moved closer and close, until eventually it cross some threshold and the Ascended decided that now it needed to be involved.
It punched and kicked at the thing to get it down the hall, and as it kept going the thing started to balloon.
Finally, one of the strikes pierced it, and the halls became flooded with a black smog.
Harlan and Hellon moved several halls down and around another corner, he warned of the likely damage from what he was doing.
His chest was distended, the slug was not his body, but rather, a lung, one which was generating the explosive gas he gained by taking the lungs of a wyvern.
Dragonfire had certain anti-magic properties, and could break down the defenses of the Ascended, in theory, depending on what the source of the power was, or what the power was.
As Harlan was ignorant of both, he simply wished for the best, and that this would at least hurt it and kill all of the soldiers.
“CLOSE THE SHIELD, NOW.”
Harlan sent the signal and set off the smog, and as he did he also severed his distended lung and moved it out of the ice dome with telekinesis.
Black flames filled their sight.
After a full minute, the fire instantly vanished as if it was never there, the only signs being the the scorch marks on the floor and the smell of fire so strong in the air that they had to use air purifying spells just to breath.
“What in the hell was that?”
Harlan was huffing and puffing as he removed the sigil from his soul, the black boneplate on his back turned to scales and he leaned against the ice dome.
“The sigil… I was stronger… not normal dragonfire…”
He pulled the heat from the ice dome somewhat slowly, too much too fast and he would just send his body into shock and cause more damage.
After a few minutes they made their way down the halls.
The marble and stone was enchanted by Marigold herself around the original academy, before it was repeatedly expanded, so while it survived Harlan’s attack, nothing else had; the halls were nothing but bare stone.
Where once there were bodies and blood and weapons that fell to the ground, there was nothing, not even slag from the metal.
As Harlan trotted forward, unable to really sprint anymore, they heard a loud crashing sound from back nearer to the medical wing.
“Should we head back?”
“I trust that man. We should just focus on the defenses and find out how they are blocking communication and gates.”
When they rounded the corner they saw the only thing that had survived the flames, the Ascended.
“How in the hell did Breken kill one of these things?”
It was reduced to little more than charred flesh and bone, many of its limbs had been completely destroyed, and it was in no state to stand under its own strength let alone fight.
Had he not mental senses, he would’ve assumed that it was dead.
He put his paw on its head and turned hover off.
With the core in its head destroyed, the Ascended turned to dust.
The door to the security room was gone, Marigold had built the skeleton of the academy from marble and stone, but the door itself was something added later and even with her enchantments it was wood.
But It had slowed down the fire, considering some of the bodies inside of the security room remained.
Hellon pushed one of the bodies out of a chair and used her ring and passcode to start turning everything back on.
Then a presence entered the room.
Harlan struck at her with his stingers, but they vanished.
They were not cut off, they were not unshifted, they simply weren’t.
He could feel them moving around, he could flex them, but they weren’t there, the blood inside of the limb leading to the stingers flowed normally.
“Nemain, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Let us confer.”
“Leave this place you Fae warmon-”
“Silence.”
Hellon’s voice was gone, but only for a moment, and when she tried to speak again, Harlan shook his head.
There would be little sense in sharing words with a Fae that were not in the form of an exchange.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“A deal.”
“Of which sort?”
“Let this happen.”
“Clarify.”
“Without the next, those before shall be thrown to chaos, the nation which survives only on mercy of its neighbor shall take what blame is rightly given, and shall fall. In these free days of weakness in nations, new shall spring from the blood, those of the night, those of fur and horn, they might rise to equality.”
“Or I could save as many as I can here and then make a plea to Rosewell myself that False Undead should be given direct positions of nobility.”
“And what if I would promise safety for you and yours on this day? A release from this place?”
“Harlan, you know she is tricking you, if she hasn’t just taken what she wanted there is a reason.”
“Mayhaps I’ve simply plans which this child may help?”
He didn’t say no, so she looked him in the eyes and forced him to sight dozens of possible futures.
There could be thousands where he succeeds, and these are the only ones which he failed, but, seeing Adina’s death, or the death of his newborn, they couldn’t be ignored.
Harlan paced back and forth, the only thing holding Hellon’s tongue was what Nemain would do to her if she spoke too freely.
“How will you keep us all safe?”
“You would be granted a royal welcome in the land of my people for 24 hours, and not a second more.
Once this deal is concluded, you would return to your home.”
“What guarantee do I have that you will do what you say?”
“Shall we seal this with a kiss? My word is bond, but a pact of lips and tongue would not be broken.”
“Harlan, don’t do this.”
“Everyone has a choice, but how many of those choices are real? We can do whatever we want, but we cannot choose the consequences for our actions. I won’t make the choice to gamble the life of my wife and child.”
Harlan returned the void mist to his soul and shifted back into a human.
He walked right to Nemain confidently and grabbed her by the chin, leaning into a deep kiss.
She put forth the pact, and he could feel it waiting to be let into his soul, every clause was laid out before him.
But instead, he grabbed her by the head, forcing her still as she fought back, and a clicking was heard.
Nemain turned to a flock of crows, but void flame burned her lungs and throat, his attack weakened her enough that she wouldn’t interfere again, not for some time.
With her gone Harlan coughed up blood and smoke.
His body was starting to burn up, and he stumbled over to the bodies in the room, subsuming them.
They slowed the fire, but this body was still going to die.
He moved to Hellon and gave her a short message through soulspeak before he left this body.