We weren't getting in on the ground, that much was obvious. That was why we'd started talking about tunnelling in, but the other option was even more appealing and even more impossible.
About half of the team could fly in some capacity. Karu, obviously. AEGIS and Taglock had enough mobility that they may as well. But most interestingly, Tower could affect forces on himself, including negating gravity. Karu and AEGIS were loud as hell when engaging their engines, but again, Tower could glide along silent as anything.
It would have been simple to say all eight of us just climb on his back and he float us across, but the problem was, in his words 'I still have to carry you assholes, you know.' Meaning, while he might have been weightless, we weren't. At the proposal that he simply reverse the weight we applied to him, he informed me that would make trying to stick to him like putting together the positive sides of two magnets.
So the plan wasn't completely awful, but the fact was he could only carry two or maybe three of us at a time, and that was only on account of his huge stature.
What we really needed, then, was two Towers.
And that's how we wound up straddling both Tower and his purple, hazy Moon-created echo, the two copies of Tower holding hands, with me, Karu, AEGIS, Tem, Jack, and Moon's unconscious body clinging to the two huge, clearly uncomfortable men on the rooftop opposite the castle. The Moon-cages provided solid handholds, and the Towers' backs were crowded with us clinging on them, but they were still able to take some staggering steps, and that's all we really needed. Just had to be able to support our weight and launch us accurately over the living/not living wall of golems ringing the castle.
"I feel like a damn magic carpet," Tower complained.
"Well you look fantastic," Lia said, with a shit-eating grin, sitting and watching us pack with her rifle on her lap. "Look at all the ladies you have climbing on you. You're such a stud!"
"And what does that make Jack and myself?" I asked.
"Uh. Gay, obviously?"
I felt Tower tighten under us. "Maybe you two should be on Moon instead," he said.
"Maybe Lia should stop making this even worse than it has to be." I glared at her, and she laughed.
"Okay, everybody's clear on this?" I tried to bring focus back to the objective. "As soon as we launch, Tem makes us invisible. If we're veering off-course, Karu gives as little thrust as she needs to correct. We're aiming for the crack in the dome. Jack jumps off as soon as he has a clear line to the rooftop. Everyone else, hang on, and make sure you thank your driver when we land."
We'd been over it a few times already but I wanted to shut Lia up. Again, everyone assented, and now that we were all clinging on securely, I let Tower and Moon know they could go whenever.
"On three we jump?" he said.
"This is fine," she replied in his voice.
"One, two, three!"
Their feet left the rooftop in a leap which never curved back towards the earth. As soon as they stepped into the air, their feet vanished, followed by the rest of them, and then us.
The jump hadn't been perfect. He'd pushed off with slightly more force than she had, and as a result we were all slowly spinning like a frisbee. Before we were over the guards, Karu righted us with a few quick bursts of her jetpack and we began sailing true.
It was like being in a dream, feeling myself flying over the hundreds of stone soldiers below, with no body to see. Even though I could feel the bars of the cage in my hands and Tower's broad shoulder under me, I couldn't see it. I felt insubstantial, like I was at the top of a roller coaster just hanging there with the drop never quite coming.
"Oh this is weird. This is weird. This is weird…" AEGIS was saying.
"Shh. They can hear us," I said, and she stopped. I could imagine her face next to me, looking down at the ground directly through Tower. It struck me as a little funny that she of all people would be commenting on the weirdness of not having a body.
The launch was good, and it looked like we'd make it to the rooftop. We were slowing very gradually, and the jump hadn't exactly been with supersonic force, so instead we had a leisurely, surreal float up and away across the plaza, an entire minute or two of just silent non-being. Time to take in just how big this castle was, just how many golems there were under us, just how extensive the city seemed to be, stretching a couple miles in each direction, each structure carefully shaped by the Exhuman, each stone plant and each stone leaf and flower.
I had another pang of guilt that we were sent here to destroy it all.
We sailed over the rectangular lip of the roof onto a huge stone square from which the dome emerged, and began to dip downwards as the two Towers let gravity gradually retake us. In another moment, they touched down, and Tem let us see ourselves again.
We climbed off and both Tower and his echo collapsed on the ground sweating and panting. I guess it couldn't have been easy for them to carry all of us that long. Tower rolled on his side, unstrapping the cage and rubbing at his shoulders where the straps for it had bitten into him, and tapped Moon's unconscious body through the wide bars.
The ghost vanished at once and her eyes fluttered lazily as she came back to herself, rubbing her own shoulders in an approximation of Tower.
"Thanks guys," I muttered, and the group echoed me. Tower just waved it off with a smile and a wave, and Moon didn't respond at all. We let them rest while we approached the dome and the crack in it.
It was even more stupidly huge up close. It had to be the largest stone dome in the world, maybe a hundred feet tall. The crack that looked so small when Karu had made it was an enormous gash, easily five feet wide. Through the hole, we could see an immense chamber below. The throne room, I guessed, where we'd face God-King Vytar and end this.
I was banking an awful lot on that, I knew. For the moment we still had the option of drifting away, but once we entered that crack, it would be impossible for Tower and Moon to float us back out again. We'd be revealed and surrounded, and all those soldiers we just worked so hard to avoid would be coming in for us the second they realized we'd breached the castle. If we killed Vytar, his powers would cease to function and we'd be able to escape, but that was only if we could kill him. If he ran and put a few hundred guards between us and him…
I felt bad asking Tower and Moon to do it again, but we climbed back on them in order to make the final descent. Karu and Jack stayed on the roof at least, able to enter on their own after us, so the load was a lot lighter.
"Get in, kill the Exhuman," Tower summarized the plan.
"And don't die if the castle starts crashing down." Lia added. Right. Almost forgotten that the buildings were being held up with his powers too. What a disaster.
Kill. Don't die. The basis of every good plan. And in we went.
Almost as soon as we had, I realized this was a terrible, terrible idea.
It was a throne room all right, with a tall ornate throne, the back of which contained a perfect sphere, a green gemstone as large as a fist, the only ornamentation not made purely of stone I'd seen since coming to this place, the back of the chair wrapped around it helically, as though implying everything, even the occupant of that throne was centered around the green orb.
Between us and the throne was a line of stone soldiers, standing at the ready with arms raised. Each wielded a weapon of a different type, each in a stance which said they were deadly proficient with it. I'm sure AEGIS could give me an hour of backstory on all twelve of them and the miracles they had done with those weapons, but for now I sufficed to know this was the elite circle of knights.
Beside the central throne was a smaller one, beautiful, helically twisted, but missing the green gem. If anything, it looked like it leaned towards the main throne. A golem girl sat impatiently in it, looking human save for the horns almost invisible sweeping back in her hair. That would be the adopted daughter of a magical race, I presumed.
On the opposite side, a wizard. Nothing really dramatic about him except that he had a hell of a beard. Court wizard, check.
And finally, seated in the twisted throne, under the orb, God-King Vytar himself, and the reason I realized this was a mistake. He was a narrow man, with slender, elegant hands, and seemingly the left half of his body a darker and rougher substance than the right, almost like he was half-burned. As we descended, and he followed us with his eyes despite being invisible, I realized that on that dark half, there was power shimmering around him, expressed as much as possible with shimmering, floating rock, as the barrier had been.
And most troubling, he was a golem, too.
"Where's the Exhuman?" I hissed at AEGIS.
"I don't know," she said, sounding worried. "Jack, do you see any humans in here?"
"This room is so large your vision is probably better than mine. I can't make out anything in the corners from up here."
We landed and Vytar rose and greeted us with a lifted chalice.
"My unexpected guests," he said.
The fact the rest of the golems were looking at him strangely did confirm that we were still invisible, but somehow he had us utterly made.
"Well? Do not enter my house and remain hidden like mice. Come into the open and speak like men, or die like roaches." His voice was friendly beyond reason, elegant and powerful at once, with only a hint of the golem-rumbling. No hint of the vaguely-British which seemed to permeate the rest of the kingdom.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
"Chariot? What do I do?" Tem whispered.
"Go ahead and drop it," I said, and we materialized. The knights froze, steady in their guard, and the princess sat up slightly at attention.
"My word, my lord," said one of the knights. "Stand back and--"
"That is quite enough of that, Ralleforth," Vytar said. AEGIS perked up imperceptibly and began to scan the room. Wasn't sure how she could manage to take her eyes off the impending doom in front of us, but if she was figuring out an escape route, more power to her.
Not that there was much to see. The room was immense and the only real features were the elevated platform in the middle with the thrones, a circle of pillars near the edge which held up the circle of the dome, and high walls and narrow windows. The only decoration aside from the thrones themselves were where we stood, some incredibly ornate pattern on the ground, possibly depicting Altaura holding some apple or something. There was a door waaaaay behind us which led back to the rest of the castle and one waaaay behind the thrones which presumably led to private quarters and junk.
Like, maybe if Karu put some blast charges down we could go through a wall, but otherwise, there were two exits and I doubted either of them were going to be usable.
"Guys, attack Vytar, now. We need to distract him. And don't lay a hand on Ralleforth." AEGIS said.
I nodded. That's what we were here for...in a way. And if AEGIS said so, I'd trust her judgement. "P-Force, engage!" I shouted.
The air filled with echoed roaring as AEGIS and Karu both kicked their engines into gear. Jack appeared behind the old wizard, and before he could do a thing, both of them had vanished. Before the knights took a single step, I saw the air shimmer gloriously, and then a laser easily fifteen feet across tore through the room perpendicular to us, blowing a hole in both walls and eradicating half of the knights in an instant.
"Amusing," said Vytar, as he floated into the air. With a snap of his fingers, the ground rose and the knights returned to being, looking a little shaken but mostly mad at their spontaneous destruction and subsequent resurrection.
He didn't have time to gloat as missiles screeched through the air and exploded all around him, but faster than I'd even seen Karu move, he was elsewhere, appearing almost like Jack did. "Hoh!" he said, with a delicate flick of his wrist like he was tossing a rose.
The air glittered and I saw motes of dust and dirt moving towards his gesture, and then from seemingly nowhere, tiny pebbles. I only had an instant to take them in before with a series of sonic cracks, they vanished.
And one of them absolutely passed through my arm. So fast I don't think my shield even knew it was there.
It sounded like I wasn't the only one, based on the yelling in my comms. Tem was screaming inarticulately, and Karu was reporting vitals damage in a controlled voice. The knights started moving, two approaching me at once while I clutched the hole in my arm which was dripping blood, and before I could even take a ready stance, one with a poleaxe had already swept my feet. I rolled and he slammed the ground next to my head. It was all I could do to get my feet under me, but the other with a mace and tall shield was pinning me down, controlling the space around him to force me back into the poleaxer's longer range.
From nowhere, AEGIS roared in, every joint on her body glowing with thrumming yellow circles, and kicked the shield knight into pieces. Before she'd even finished with him, her head snapped around and she bounded off to assault someone else on the other end of the battlefield.
The knight only stayed down for a few seconds before Vytar was pulling a new one out of the ground again, and the two of them continued to bear down on me.
And then the little princess stood up, smiled, and fucking turned into a goddamn dragon.
Tem blasted it down, but with a gesture, Vytar pulled her back to wholeness again, all while zipping around the room with Karu chasing after him with two blades out.
In the air again, dozens of stone needles materialized, pointed downwards. The aching in my arm from getting shot once was already slowing me down, I didn't want to think about having a dozen new holes, but right before they fell, Jack and Tem appeared at my side, with Tower and Moon standing above us, blocking the rain of needles with their own bodies.
"This is not going well," Tower commented as the needles hit him with enough force to create little explosions as they bounced off.
"AEGIS had a plan," I said.
"HEY AEGIS HOW ABOUT THAT PLAN?" Tower yelled.
"WORKING ON IT!" she yelled back. We had comms, guys.
The constant roaring of engine stopped for just a second, and then there was a whining noise and a crunch as Karu slammed into and slid on the ground next to us, holding her gut. Obnoxiously triumphant, Vytar hovered in the air with his arms crossed as though this was the only possible way fighting a god could end.
There was a boom which rattled my teeth and a foot-wide hole in Vytar's chest. He looked down, his stone face unbelieving. I guess the Kingdom of Eryendria had never seen an anti-materiel rifle with .95 caliber penetrator rounds.
It felt like time froze. Nobody moved, our enemies paralyzed where they stood, just turned to look at their king, even the dragon just wavered uncomfortably as Vytar slowly floated to the ground and stumbled. He gasped and panted, clutching at the monstrous hole which was essentially his entire torso.
And then, with apparently massive effort, the hole slowly filled itself in, sealing itself shut before our eyes as good as new. Vytar took several deep breaths and then looked at me with malice in his eyes.
More than making him bleed in front of his people, I had made him bleed in front of himself, and Vytar disapproved. And now he was pissed. I realized that if things were going badly in this fight before, they were about to get a hundred times worse.
And then.
Vytar's head fell onto the floor with a crack. His body stumbled one step, before turning to ordinary rock and toppling over, shattering across the ornate pattern of the floor.
Behind him, green orb in one hand, the sword with which he'd just beheaded his king in the other, Ralleforth.
"Ralleforth the Fallen. The dark betrayer, killer of kings," AEGIS introduced us. "In his hand, the Orb of Ancestry, used to create the Earth, and made from all the tears Altaura wept in sorrow and loneliness before all of creation. An all-powerful magic item which is what allowed Vytar to ascend the steps of godhood."
AEGIS turned and looked at me with a sly smile. "A bit like an Exhuman event, don't you think?"
"Is...he going to...become even stronger than Vytar now?"
"Upon that, you may wager your pitiful life," Ralleforth said, his voice thrumming with power. "Strength a thousandfold greater, strength unknowable in this world or the next!"
"Only one problem," AEGIS said, and walked to the ornate design on the floor. "In the game, Ralleforth doesn't betray Vytar until after Ceredona attacks, which hasn't happened in this world yet because the Sunset Wall is still standing, and it's not revealed until then that the Orb of Ancestry on his throne was a fake. The real one--"
She stood over the 'apple' being held by the goddess in the floor's mozaic and punched through the earth, her body thrumming and glowing. When she withdrew her hand, she held a crystal identical to the one in Ralleforth's.
"Was right here the whole time." She smiled broadly. "And now, betrayer, I think it's time I fucked you up for a few deaths you caused me a while back."
It was all I could do to watch. It was all any of us could do. With the orb in hand, AEGIS was a terrapath by proxy, anything she commanded the world to do, it did. The attacks Vytar had rained down upon us, summoning her own soldiers from stone, even bizarre tricks like making the ground move faster under her feet so she could move around the room with impossible speed, in just a handful of seconds, she effortlessly crushed not just Ralleforth, but also the remaining knights, and then the dragon for good measure, finishing it off with a brutal attack where thousands of narrow spears erupted from the earth and impaled it from all possible directions, before opening like the teeth of a venus flytrap, tearing it apart right down the middle.
She flicked a pebble almost nonchalantly at the exposed heart and it shattered into a thousand fragments, before the dragon's body did the same.
"Holy fuck," I said.
"Hehehe," AEGIS sidled up to me and giggled. "That was a hell of a lot of fun. I might go take out everyone in the city while I've still got this kind of power. Being an Exhuman is kind of a rush."
"Kindly...do not...let it go to your head," Karu said nervously.
"Or you'll have to hunt me down? Hahaha." AEGIS began to laugh, but for far too long. "You? Fight me? Ha ha ha! HA HA HA! AHAHAH!"
She was hysterical, laughing fully maniacally. Before I knew what happened, a throne erupted from the earth, fashioned to look like it was sitting on a pile of human skulls. She sat atop it, crossing her legs while still laughing down at us.
"You think you can dictate my actions? You presume to impugn on my will? I am God-Queen AEGIS! I am the goddess Altaura manifest!"
She jumped down and landed amongst us, doing a three-point landing which made the ground tremble, while clutching the orb to her chest with her free hand. Everyone recoiled a few steps back at this sudden horrifying change in demeanor.
"Something like that? Is that what you expected me to say?" she said flipping her hair casually back over her shoulder.
"AEGIS, do you remember a certain someone telling me we're here to kill an Exhuman not to be a dick?" I asked.
"Hmm."
"Don't be a dick."
"Gotcha," she said and laughed again in a much less terrifying manner. "Hey, anyone else want to try this thing? Karu? Ever wanted to be an Exhuman?"
"I would presume kill myself first," she said eying the orb like she'd like to smash it right now.
"I'll try it," Tower said.
"You're already an Exhuman," I commented.
"Never been a terrapath!"
"This is extremely inappropriate...I think," Cosette said over comms. "Should we be encouraging this?"
"You're asking me?" I said.
"How do you...make it go?" Tower was palming the orb in one of his huge hands, waving it around to absolutely no effect.
"Just envision what you want it to do," AEGIS explained.
"Uh. Okay. I'm envisioning."
Nothing continued to happen.
"Okay, what are we envisioning?" AEGIS asked.
"A big bowl of ice cream," Tower said with relish.
"You know...the Exhuman is a terrapath. It'll be...rock."
"Yeah sure."
"Well, envision it happening. Visualize the earth under you moving upwards and forming itself in the shape of ice cream. Drag it out of there by the force of your will."
Tower's brow furrowed and he looked a little constipated as he focused his 'will'. Bit by bit, we saw the ground move like it was being disturbed by a very timid gopher, and then abruptly, a semi-smooth ball popped out of the hole and rolled on the ground.
"That looks nothing like ice cream." Tem said, helpfully.
"Okay, you try it!" Tower said, thrusting the orb at her. Before she even reached for it, AEGIS, Karu, Jack, and I were all between her and the orb. AEGIS laughing ruefully, the rest of us just kind of...not.
"That shit is hard," Tower said, handing her back the orb. "Did you practice this while playing the game or something?"
"Nah. I'm just a super-genius, if you haven't heard." A perfect grecian pillar erupted from the ground with an intricate oval bowl filled with scoops of ice cream, each one a different shade from being a different kind of stone, each with little creased wrinkles like they had just been freshly scooped.
"Wow, haven't heard that one in forever," I said. "What was that, when you were first hooking up the mass-fab?"
"Hey, you remembered!" AEGIS said, seeming improbably happy.
"So um," Jack said, appearing next to us with a waning smile. "Is this really the time for this conversation? We have yet to find the Exhuman, and are standing in the corpse of these people's king…"
"Is that how you speak to your new GOD?" AEGIS boomed, raising an identical throne sitting on a pile of skulls as the one already right behind her. "I mean, I just got this new toy, can't I play with it?"
The answer was apparently no, as with a scream and a boom, an artillery shell exploded on the dome of the castle at that moment, and distant gun and laserfire could be heard starting outside, while explosions began rocking the city.
As the dome cracked above us, chunks of rock the size of cars falling towards us like hail, I realized we might have fucked up just a little in taking so long here.
I checked my holo for a second as we all bolted towards the door. Seventeen-hundred hours. The combined assault was right on time. Fuck me.
There was another boom and then another and the dome fractured and the whole hall fell towards us, the doorway in front of us imploding as thousands of tons of rock collapsed from above.
Okay. Now fuck me.