Chapter 101: The Trap
At the start of our trip, I would’ve shouted a warning and I would’ve needed to.
Now, by the time Mask snapped his hands up and his darkness rippled backwards toward the opposite edge of the field, Erin and Michelle were already dodging in opposite directions. They didn’t need a word from me.
Which left Lena and I free to continue our attack.
I took the momentary respite to use Earth to reshape my Iron into a more aerodynamic, triangular form, like a big metal version of those napkins on Benji and Sandy’s counter. Then I switched back to Air to take advantage of it. It zipped past Mask's cloak and sent him skidding back.
That left him exposed to the next object Lena conjured, another glowing missile that crashed into his back and sent him tumbling.
He abandoned his attack on the girls to try to hit Lena and I while we were overcommitted, but my Iron was a shield once more, now at my side, now at Lena’s, tamping down the darkness.
Suddenly, there was a lot less of that darkness in the field.
Light bloomed behind Mask as Erin activated Third Eye. Between her sourceless illumination and Lena’s flames, our battleground glowed. Instead of blending into the surroundings, the darkness spreading from Mask's cloak stood out in sharp contrast.
If anything, it made the details of Mask himself harder to see. I didn’t have time to let my eyes adjust, so I concentrated on his broad, sweeping motions.
His style of Third Eye control didn’t sync up with what I’d seen from anyone else. For most of us, the process was a bit like puppeteering, but he made it look more like conducting an orchestra.
Assuming we made it through this fight, I’d have to see if I couldn’t make that work for me, too.
First, I had to help make sure it didn’t for him.
Fortunately, we seemed well on our way to doing that.
Mask tried to strike Erin, but her conjured Iron first stopped his blow, then turned to mercury to engulf it, then hardened again. The black tendril thudded to the ground, trapped, while Erin conjured another plate.
Mask tried to strike Michelle, but she clamped her hand around her conjured Plastic and zipped away from his strike. She couldn’t quite fly, anymore than I could, but between her natural dexterity and four Air, she glided around the battlefield.
Mask tried to strike Lena and I; I batted aside two hammer blows and ground a swarm of needles into the dirt.
And while he tried each of those things, Lena’s attacks sizzled through the air around him.
Some, he blocked. Some, he dodged.
One after another crashed into him, though. I’d felt enough of those blows in practice to know how much they hurt. Not to mention how much HP they took off me.
Mask tried shifting all his focus to Lena. Tendrils bubbled from the ground, lances whipped out, needles snaked around.
I smashed every one of them flat. Only when the shadow of his cloak darkened the dirt beneath our feet did we even have to dodge, and for that, I could focus on my own footwork and scoop Lena out of the way with a nudge from the same shield I used to block Mask's attacks. She never had to so much as pause in jabbing her missile at his defenses.
Better yet – not so much for the sake of us winning this fight, because I still felt pretty good about Lena and I doing that on our own, but for what it said about how they’d improved – as soon as Mask stopped trying to pressure the girls, they switched to offense of their own.
Michelle’s Plastic whipped around Mask's legs. He managed to stomp on it before it could tangle him and drag him down, but that still pinned him in one place, unable to dodge.
Erin extruded her Iron into a wire that whipped across the field. Mask caught it on his cloak and hissed as it glowed with a sudden influx of electricity.
He twisted to face her. I caught a glimpse of his hand moving, and the wire seemed to fall forward into him.
“I suppose that’s a defensive use of your Key?” Erin asked.
Mask didn’t respond, outside of the distorted sound of his heavy breathing through his voice changer.
Not that I thought Erin expected him to. Her speculation was more about making sure our team understood what he was doing. Through our headsets, her voice came through as clearly as if we’d been standing side-by-side.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Handy way of telling which of our attacks are serious enough to be worth repeating, huh?” I said.
She bobbed her head. “Mmhm!”
Depending on how much of a resource expenditure it was for Mask to use his Key for defense, I supposed he could’ve been bluffing. I didn’t buy it, though. He’d clearly treated Erin’s electrified wire and Lena’s most powerful missile differently from everything else we’d tried to hit him with.
Speaking of those worthwhile attacks, the missile Lena was guiding glowed brighter and made a feint for Mask's head. Erin conjured another wire and launched it at the same time. Michelle’s Plastic yanked at Mask's leg, holding him in place.
He made an awkward pivot. His Key swallowed up Lena’s missile, but he had to take Erin’s wire on the chest instead of on his cloak. The wire glowed and I waited for the screech of feedback as her electricity shorted out his voice changer.
It never came.
“Crap,” Lena said. “He must’ve upgraded the insulation on his costume after I zapped him the first night.”
“Target his cloak instead,” I said.
I didn’t know why a jolt to his cloak would bother him if the clothes under it were insulated, but he’d clearly reacted when Erin hit him there and shifted to take her next attack on his chest.
Erin’s hands twitched, swapping Reactants so she could move her wire more precisely. I’d noticed her defaulting to Earth instead of Air. More flexible, but a little slower. It might not matter in this case, but something she couldn’t tighten up in the future.
Maybe it did matter in this case.
Mask's darkness slammed into Erin before her wire could worm its way around to his cloak. The blow rocked her back, and I knew damn well how much one of those could hurt.
Worse, she deselected her wire to conjure a new shield. She got it in the way of Mask's next attack, but that bought him time to gobble up another missile from Lena.
“This is getting expensive,” she said. Each missile she’d lost cost her at least two MP, one for the Earth to shape it, one for the Air to move it. I didn’t think Mask would bother using his Key on them if they didn’t have at least enough Fire to make them glow. Three MP or six? Either way it would add up.
I nodded. “Michelle, cover Erin.”
“Got it.” Michelle let go of her Plastic and conjured Iron. She interposed herself between Mask and Erin. The next time he tried to strike, she parried. She didn’t knock his attacks away with the ease I did, but the only point to my doing so was to try to demoralize him. As long as Michelle’s parries connected, they sufficed.
I kept up my own, mashing darkness into dirt with twitches of my finger. It amazed me how easy it was compared to working with my previous Air total. Trouble was, it also amazed me I still had to do it.
How the hell did Mask keep up his offense against two groups of us at the same time, even under constant attack? How did he control whatever Material he used for that darkness at all? His motions didn’t seem detailed enough to direct its subtle and rapid shifts.
However much I might dislike his personality, however bad his actions were, I couldn’t help but admire his play.
Admire, however, didn’t mean worry about.
So far, he’d only landed one hit on Erin, none on the rest of us. Sure, he’d managed to sap quite a few of Lena’s MP, but the fact he chose to soak small hits rather than disappearing any object that got close to him suggested his Key cost enough resources he couldn’t use it for everything.
We, on the other hand, had just started our routine.
Lena and I had no need to discuss anything out loud. We’d gone over our plans and contingencies often enough to swap between them in unison. Beside me, she conjured another piece of Iron. She left this one as a simple plate, unheated, and flung it at Mask with Air.
She didn’t have enough to prevent him from dodging now that he no longer had to worry about the Plastic at his feet, but she pushed him back. While he was distracted, Erin’s new wire struck his cloak and he snarled a curse. The darkness writhed.
He spun and grabbed the wire, which didn’t accomplish much because it just snaked around his grip. While he wrestled with it, Lena’s plate caught him in the legs and dropped him to his knees.
The next time the plate dipped low, a pseudopod bubbled from the darkness to pin it. Naturally, Lena switched to Fire, and Mask’s cloak recoiled from the suddenly red-hot Iron.
He managed to disappear Erin’s wire again, but by then she’d abandoned it to conjure another and it snaked across the ground toward him.
Between his distraction and the speed I could propel my Iron shield across the field, I launched an experimental attack of my own. It pummeled his chest. Rather than try to lose it through his Key, he retaliated with another attack on Lena.
Wrong choice. Long before the darkness reached her, my Iron blocked its path and hers, unimpeded, smashed into his side.
The four of us advanced.
“Satisfied, Mask?” I called. “Is that enough of a show of strength? Are you willing to talk?”
Our conjured objects swirled around him. Not quite the tornado of weapons Albie had deployed against the creature at the construction site, but not, I thought, too bad for a bunch of ordinary players.
It was almost enough to make me proud of our practice, but I noticed Michelle had added hers to the storm. I tried not to frown.
If she felt confident she could switch from defense to offense as fast as me, good for her. As long as she was right.
If she thought we’d finished the fight and just needed to intimidate Mask, she was wrong. He clearly still had HP.
“It’s enough, yeah.” He tapped the phone strapped to his shoulder and a plane of Iron appeared in the air before him.
I didn’t see how using normal Materials represented an escalation for him, but rather than give him a chance to demonstrate, I smashed my Iron into the new object.
It flashed white hot along the edge and cut right through. His hand twitched with the same motion I used when I swapped to Air, and his object swirled over the shattered pieces of mine.
“Enough,” he said, “that I’ll take you on myself.”
His cloak roiled at his feet. Its surface rose and fell in a rhythmic motion, almost like –
Like the cloak was breathing.
As its “cloth” wings stretched into the air behind him, and its “porcelain” face spread with a silent laugh, Mask commanded his Daimon, “Phantom? Let’s play.”