Nathan was disappointed. Specifically, he was disappointed in himself.
Not warding the floor of the building was a rookie mistake. A massive, avoidable mistake. What had he been thinking? he thought to himself pointlessly, already knowing the answer: he had been treating the upcoming combat like a game, and while he had accounted for the obvious angles of attack and environmental effects he hadn’t thought about dealing with three dimensions.
Computer games, and roleplaying games as structured on a computer, are a weak reed to pin your expectations for a fight on. So it has always been; the gamer, the reader, the dreamer, they are all armchair generals and warriors. Have they tasted blood in their mouths and braced for another blow? Have they found their plans fouled and broken, with all of their cleverness come to naught and nothing to do but to wade through the mud and accept another blow, to come to grips with someone stronger, faster, and more skilled for the chance to hurt their opponent before they are laid out flat?
Nathan had not. His had been a cushy life, as was quite proper—it is a failure that someone should experience those things. This is the sick truth of the schoolyard bully, of every thrown punch outside of the ring or the practice court. Every strike that has not been accepted before it is launched is not the sin of an individual, since humans are nothing more than bags of mostly water and some degree of flesh being driven about by the flora of their gut microbiome; rather, it is the failure of an institution, and of the institutions which oversee those institutions in turn.
Nathan had, on occasion, been in moments that required quick thinking in the face of physical harm. He had taken down a sail and thrown his boatmates overboard in the moments before a mast fell; he had chosen to wipe out on skis rather than strike someone who fell in his path; he had, by reflex more than anything, caught a thrown frisbee that would otherwise have knocked over the drink of a friend.
Planting his staff in the center of the cobbled street, he struggled to his feet. His breath caught in his chest as he did so, with the feeling of spikes of bone digging into his lungs. He suspected that it wasn’t actually real, that he was incapable of having internal pain disambiguation on that degree of granularity—but regardless, he had no time to waste on acknowledging it.
He had an error to fix before it killed a woman who’d saved his life.
He could give her shit about breaking his ribs when they’d both survived, and after he’d confirmed that she actually had broken those ribs.
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He focused his attention onto the carved end of his staff. Pushing away the sight of Wek’s maul on the ground, of the blood dripping through her chainmail, he murmured a quiet request and tightened his grip on his staff.
Raising it into the air, he closed his eyes and poured every iota of mana and willpower he had into the intake rune that capped the carvings at the staff’s tip. At the same moment, a runic circle bloomed beneath his feet, complex far beyond his ability to comprehend even had he been possessed of the time to study it—dozens of interwoven links and loops of script danced across intricate geometrical shapes, and barely-visible wisps of light ghosted up from the blazing blue lines on the ground as they formed secondary rune-sets within the air itself.
“Teleport us, or at least her, back to the Hall,” he had just murmured, and then: “And lights out on the way out.”
He slammed the staff into the ground, butt-first, and Saucer’s spell exploded outwards.
The first thing that happened was that the demolition glyphs went off. They were simple things, those glyphs: a blast of directed, intentful mana which disrupted standing enchantments, imparted the intent of implosion onto the world, and reinforced each other when they met going inwards. The three elementals that were still inside the building were caught in that combination of disruption and implosion as the false brickwork of the nest collapsed into itself as though there were a singularity in the center of it, though the actual behavior of that hypothetical would have been different in every particular, making it a truly terrible analogy.
Regardless, the three of them were first disenchanted, which killed them, and then crushed into a fine powder, which would have killed them if the first part had not done so. It also destroyed their cores completely, which ruined a great deal of value for whoever might have pried those prizes out of the wreckage; but this was not a concern that Nathan granted a great deal of consideration.
If he had done it all a few moments earlier, all might have been well. Unfortunately for his desires to have the mission go smoothly, he was too late. One last elemental-mole hybrid had earthmelded out of the nest, waking up just in time to get out before the building collapsed and it became nestizen dust.
That same creature emerged out of the ground just close enough to Nathan to disrupt Saucer’s teleportation rune, and the ancient and impossibly skillful, absurdly flexible assistant was momentarily stymied. The additional variable, something that it was not able to see coming due to the interference from the demolition runes and the nature of the nest’s walls, had thrown too much of a wrench into its plans to proceed as planned.
But… there were fallback provisions in the structure of its wielder’s command.
Nathan smiled a sad, contented smile as Wek blinked out of existence from next to him and, he was fairly—and correctly—confident, back into existence at the Hall. He smiled a little wider as Saucer lit up blue and the last target of the quest crumbled… and he looked down to see his heartblood, pumping strong into the dust. And so did Nathan die.