Cece was scared. She did her best not to feel that emotion, but it was funny how it popped up from time to time. Nonetheless, it was a good motivator for her sprint. Her feet ached as the lumbering form began to gain ground.
“What is a feral angel?” Lotte asked as they ran.
Cece pushed down her feeling of annoyance at the golem’s poorly timed question, and pulled out a mercury scroll.
“ZW74S” She intoned, as the scarlet paper burned up with magic. Her and Lotte began to float, and more importantly were accelerated forward at the same time. Cece had to carefully weave them between the trees before they managed to ascend beyond the canopy.
As their movement was taken care of, she finally had the mental bandwidth to answer Lotte.
“According to the church it is an angel that has “lost its way”, I’m not particularly well read in theology unfortunately. There wasn’t supposed to be one here though.”
“I see, thank y-” Lotte began, when the terrible winged form burst from the treetops, its wings moving at strange angles to keep it afloat.
“Jesus christ!” Cece exclaimed, as she pulled out her revolver and shot at the monstrosity.
Predictably it did nothing, but enrage the creature, or at least she thought it was rage. It made a noise that sounded completely alien to her ears. Deciding that this was an emergency worthy of one of her very expensive teleport scrolls, she pulled one out and activated it.
“GR5T7.” She said, as in a flash of metallic light, she and Lotte, disappeared. For a brief moment, something she could only perceive thanks to her mind’s increased processing speed, Lotte and her where surrounded by the sight of stars, in a cold void. The angel was there too. One of it’s gnarled hands closed on itself, as if the angel was dragging something. Just as soon as it happened, it was over, and Cece did not find herself at the coordinates designated by the scroll, no she was right where she started, floating almost a hundred meters above a Datsk forest.
“How-” Cece began, but was interrupted by the angel’s terrible discordant cry. She moved her left thumb upwards pushing Lotte and herself a few meters higher, as the angel clawed at where they once were.
Cece had no idea how it stopped the teleportation, matters of god were not really her forte, but still it was unnerving. The church possessed certain powers, but not even their most venerated clerics were capable of stopping teleportation. She shouldn’t have assumed an angel would have been so limited, but in her defense she also wasn’t expecting an angel to be here in the first place. Cece gritted her teeth as she considered her options.
“There’s no other choice… SQ7W3” She said ruefully, throwing a ruby over her shoulder. It was a vicious waste of money, but only a cataclysm would kill this thing.
The ruby glowed so bright she could barely look behind her, it had immediately formed two plated salt shields around itself, along with an abjurative barrier. The angel swiped at it, but the small gem had been loaded with mercury magic inscriptions for movement, and it swiftly evaded the horror. It began to create an orb of concentrated oxygen and phosphorous, and although it was capable of doing so while remaining on the evasive, Cece decided that shooting the angel to distract it was better than relying on that. Still moving several meters a second, Cece twisted her body and took aim. She pulled the trigger and managed to shoot one of the strange hands before it could claw at it again, aiming was coming much easier to her now that her mind could feed the appropriate angles to her. The creature roared and began pursuing her again, although she was comforted by a bit of a lead now.
The angel began flying even faster in an attempt to catch up, but it simply didn’t have enough time before an extremely flammable and explosive bubble was detonated right underneath it. The explosion was deafening, Cece had been far out of the blast radius, but still her ears were ringing, and if she was not actively being propelled by magic, she would have fallen out of shock. She allowed herself a bit of hope after coming to her senses, but of course when the smoke cleared, the awful abomination was still flying, although it looked like it had lost a bit of altitude. Cece fired another shot, however this time the angel ignored her, its attention seemed to be fixed on the floating ruby grimoire, although it was hard to tell, she hadn’t seen anything like an eye on the beast so far.
The angel swiped again at the grimoire, and missed. At the same time another explosive bubble was launched at the creature, but this time at point blank range. Cece had managed to put her hands over her ears in time for this detonation, and when the smoke cleared she saw that the grimoire had one less shield and had been knocked back quite a distance by the explosion. She couldn’t see the angel, and out of caution prepared to move Lotte and her, but after a moment she saw motion on the ground, beneath where the latest explosion had occurred. The monstrosity was still alive. Cece was enraged by its sturdiness. The best combat mages in Europa would be dead twice over by now, most people didn’t even try to use phosphorous magic it was so destructively powerful, in the entire world there are only a few families that practice it because most people just kill themselves on accident before they can have children, but yet this abomination lived. Cece was tempted to keep running, it would have been the wise thing to do, but Cece was not wise, she was smart. Smart enough to consider the possible uses of an angel’s body. She wanted, no needed, this thing dead, because she wanted to know what she could do with its corpse.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She pulled out an oxygen flame burst scroll, she would have to modify it, but it should work. One of the most rudimentary magics someone can cast is the simple manipulation of an element. This of course extended to oxygen, the fuel of fire, the closest humankind could ever get to manipulating the primal element of fire. The spell was simple, she rerouted the oxygen controlling components of the spell to simply draw as much of the element towards itself as possible. Although she would be able to designate a specific area for the spell, it wouldn’t move with the angel, which was a problem. To fix this, she simply had to move the spell inside of the angel. She ripped her eyepatch off, and the daemonic circle in her eye glowed with crimson light. It flashed several times as the scroll was methodically rewritten for her purposes.
“YT56R” She whispered. At once the scroll burned into being a series of inscriptions into the air. A collection of complex geometry floated in front of Cece, and formed a circle in front of her. She raised her pistol to the circle, and shut her daemonic eye to take aim.
“The angel is approximately 147.3 meters away, 11 degrees to my left on the horizontal plane and 45 degrees below me on the vertical, accounting for windspeeds of 10.87 kilometers per hour, I need to aim just so…” She thought to herself, moving her arm slowly. She was unused to the calculation boon still and her head began to ache, but she was grateful for it, as she fired.
The bullet passed through the inscriptions, anchoring the magics to the small metal projectile. It was slightly off course since her boon wasn’t omniscient, but it still managed to hit one of the mottled dirty wings. The angel seemed too preoccupied with trying to destroy the grimoire to even notice, which Cece was happy with for a moment before it managed to claw the grimoire, hard.
One of its shields instantly broke, and the other cracked slightly. Cece was disturbed by the creature’s raw strength, the shields weren’t flimsy by any means, and were designed to take a phosphorous blast from a modest distance, and to at least have one remaining shield from a point-blank blast.
Cece started floating her and Lotte farther away yet again, before using a salt scroll, to physically protect them and to prevent the oxygen spell from stealing oxygen away from their location. She doubted it would actually be necessary, but the spell would be funneling a lot of oxygen the angel’s way, and she would have no way of knowing if it was taking hers until she passed out, at which point she would fall a hundred meters and die. Better safe than sorry.
It took Cece a moment to realize that the grimoire hadn’t cast another spell yet, and for a moment she was scared that it had somehow broken. Then she realized what was actually happening and got even more scared. She pressed down on her thumb and had Lotte and her move even faster, even farther away. The grimoire was designed to alter its attack patterns and types based on how the enemy fared against them. She hadn’t put a lot of nuance into the grimoire, it was made to be a blunt instrument, so besides varying attack speeds, it really only had two modes, regular and siege. It had entered siege mode, something that was more geared towards taking down buildings instead of mages.
“Lotte, brace yourself.” She told the golem. It was a nonsensical command, because she was incapable of doing any real movement currently and there was nothing to brace herself on, but Cece felt she should warn the thing.
“Understood.” Lotte replied, wrapping her arms around herself and bringing her knees up.
Cece turned her back and could finally see it, a bubble of explosive force, that looked just like the ones before, but with scribe’s eye, Cece could see the magic radiating off of it. The angel had finally tried to take flight again, as the grimoire had moved slightly upwards, but it barely had a chance before the bubble impacted. The explosion was… immense, hundreds of cubic feet of oxygen, compressed around the creature ignited all at once with an explosion that had already been destructive enough to level a weaker mage family’s estate. All sound stopped for a moment, and Cece felt the salt barrier around them quiver at the force, she was sure if she hadn’t cast it her eardrums would have ruptured. She almost wished they had.
The angel had begun screaming, a strange and awful noise, it was hard to describe. Somewhere between an orchestra and a human man wailing with a thousand voices. Just hearing it made part of her mind come undone. She put her hands over her ears, but the sound persisted as if she had done nothing at all. Everything began to feel fuzzy, her connection to reality strained. She assumed at first that it was somehow targeting the daemonic parts of her mind, it made sense after all. God was espoused as the enemy of devils, so it wouldn’t be strange for the creature to interfere with her diabolic gifts, but it wasn’t her daemonic mind that was being affected. The strange and cavernous library that formed her memories and the otherworldly crystalline structure that infiltrated her grey matter, were the only reasons she could think at all in this state. For a brief moment Cecelia Silva lost any understanding of who or what she was.