The fragile tension of the spirits and undead snapped once the others landed behind Akamori and Helios, the temporarily allied void dragon from an alternate future. New Xinjia once sported a burgeoning thirty million people. The city sprawled countless miles in every direction and rose into the clouds. That provided the Sauridius with ample fodder to work with. Fodder that now regarded Akamori and his squad like chicken nuggets and tater tots on a child’s plate.
“Sir. What sweet hell did we just drop into?”
“Another Tuesday.” Akamori replied as he shot forward like he’d been fired from a cannon. A thunderclap of air snapping behind him.
Sirsir shrugged, popping a cork off a gourd and taking a swig. “If this is a Tuesday, what’s a Monday?” He let the gourd go. It fell away before dissolving into nothingness. Hefting up the spell cannon he’d bought from the Adventurer’s Guild using the marks Akamori had earned them, he filled the weapon with raw light magic. The cannon bucked as he fired a bolt of plasma that exploded like a grenade, ruining zombies and revenants alike. He continued firing for effect. Between his training as a Spell Soldier and the family recipe potion he’d just taken, he could keep this up indefinitely.
“Mondays are dragon slaying in the void.” Yasiin said as he punched golden white bolts of light magic through lines of undead and ghosts.
Sala’s golden aura flared, and his skin shifted into a cracked stone hue. His massive fists smashed, shambling corpse and spirit alike.
Helios’ void axes sailed into the mob assembled before being summoned back to his hands like they were called back by magnetism. He moved in a purple and black blur. Dissolving opponents’ limbs as quickly as he removed them.
“You people are seriously weird.”
Akamori chuckled as Thanaton whipped about several times to send Burning Wind Slashes that raked large canyons into their enemy. With Sirsir acting like a mounted artillery piece, that freed up the skirmishers to run havoc on the enemy ranks while Yasiin went ham, dropping multiple targets with casual ease. The throng of death continued to press in despite their efforts, forcing Sala and Helios to fall back to Yasiin and Sirsir’s position.
Akamori let go of Thanaton, and the blade continued slashing and casting of its own will while he went to work with his bare hands. Using a martial combat style very similar to the one Amara used only instead of infusing his opponents with regular aether, he was striking with radiant light aether, which had catastrophic effects on his targets. Jab, jab, hook, kick, leg sweep, double palm thrust, bounce back, jab jab jab, hook, uppercut, spin kick. Everything Akamori struck caught fire like it’d caught the ire of a god.
His battle focus allowed him to supervise the melee from a vantage point that would have required him to leave the fight to see. The dead pressed in with relentless vigor. Even though he trusted his team could hold a position like this for months, he knew it’d be a waste of their time and resources. They weren’t saving anyone slaughtering shambling corpses.
“Yasiin, I need those eyes of yours to find me where the leadership is hiding.” Akamori said between rearranging some zombies’ face so poorly, it looked like he was striking a hamburger.
“Damnit.” He muttered.
“What?” Sirsir shouted between lobbing explosive light rounds into the mobs.
“I just reminded myself I was hungry.” Akamori said with a pout as he kicked a zombie backward. It shattered to pieces as it bowled over another seven more behind it.
Helios’ axes swirled around him in a tornado of void magic as he paused his charge to regard Akamori. “You stopped to think about food in all this?”
Akamori executed a three strike combo and finished it with a light bolt to the chest of a zombie before turning back to casually shrug at Helios. “Yep!”
Helios sighed, yanking his twin axes out of the sky and resuming his chopping spree. “So weird…”
A shudder rippled through the waves of enemies and Akamori caught the spectral tug of numerous strands of aether connecting the thralls to their masters. They were now being ordered to hurl themselves upon the squad. Good. Leave the people alone and give them a moment to breathe. It was all he could give them for now.
Cold leathery hands latched onto him multiple times, forcing blows that would have connected to miss and counter spells to spark out. The seething rage that had been building within Akamori slowly over the fight now spilled out in an explosive wave of aura, radiant light, and fire. Everything immediately near Akamori charred to ash and blew away to dust on an astral breeze. Even Helios was partially singed being the closest one to Akamori when he pulled his stunt.
“Yasiin!” he barked for his scout’s attention.
Yasiin wove several hand signs together and cast a void clone of himself to continue firing. Satisfied, Yasiin used his spell armor to fly up so he could scan the area through his scope and swept the entire horizon line left to right. When he finished his scan he pointed before descending to add his fire to the void clones fire.
“That direction. Two hundred fifty klicks. Underground bunker at the foot of a mountain range that blocks the city off.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Akamori punched, kicked, and chopped his way through the horde. Each strike causing a target burn to ash or pop into spectral goo. It would have been a soul magic artificer’s wet dream to gather all this magical material for crafting and enchantment. Given none of them besides himself shared the magic and he was more of a breaker than a maker, he saw little user in the resources.
“Squad up. Helios, I need you in dragon form. We roll for the bunker. Yasiin, give Helios the coords.”
Akamori waited for his troops to gather at Helios’ back, who roared and poured raw void energy into the masses, dissolving a massive chunk of the enemy as though they’d never existed. Once everyone was gathered, Akamori used his air magic to fly up next to Helios and pointed into the distance, beyond the burning city scape, and packs of specters tainting the night sky sickly green. There beyond the hell that had once been one of the larger Brotherhood of Man colonies, New Xinjia, was the Fortress bunker housing the colonial leadership. There, the squad could make a difference.
“We ride the hells and damn anything that gets in our way. Understood?”
The void dragon’s head bobbed in understanding and took off. Akamori hung back to provide cover and agile support. Revenants and specters flew after the squad like ethereal green comets shaped like upper torsos. Akamori casually flung low level light spell bolts, bursting the angry ghosts easily.
Initial conflict in the air was light at first, but as more spirits rose from ground level to greet them, the skies soon became choked with spiritual death. Helios fired a cone of void magic directly ahead of him like a dissolving field that evaporated ghosts on contact. The tortured and malevolent cries of the undead echoed in the squads, ears just beyond hearing.
Sirsir sat comfortably on Helios back, bracing the spell cannon on a knee and firing it as soon as it would allow him, making himself something of a mounted weapons position on the dragon’s back. With each shot to hurl into the masses and detonate, Sirsir gripped the cannon assembly to brace for the recoil. Yasiin was rapidly targeting and firing. Small spectral green clouds erupted in the air, every other second signifying another elimination of a ghost.
Still, the throng of death pushed in on them, shrinking the area they had to maneuver in even more. Sirsir snatched another gourd off a strap, slapped the cork free, and drank the contents of the bottle with a pleased sigh. It was a grape-flavored speed potion. Special family recipe.
Now the cannon sounded more like a machine gun compared to its usual slower paced tempo. Brilliant orbs of glowing light and fire filled the sky like small stars blooming and dying in a sea of ghosts. All the while, Sirsir whooped and hollered gleefully.
“Fuck yeah! Get some, you pasty dead fucks! THIS is big man shit!”
While the squad lobbed rounds into the spectral horde, Akamori plowed straight through the undead host like a divine javelin that speared clean through its targets. Misty clouds of ectoplasm and gobbets of soul magic remained in his wake as his grim expression and spear tip like aura blasted through scores of enemies at a time.
Sala had his spell rifle in the high ready, taking shots rather than weaving bolts. He sighted up on a revenant ready to take the shot before it exploded into a misty pale green cloud with a brilliant line running clean through it. He sat back slightly and glanced at the others.
“You guys ever seen the eltee this pissed?”
Sirsir continued firing as quickly as the cannon would allow, which was alarmingly quick, given its size and purpose. “Nah. He’s in a mood, I think. Being here let him cut loose without it costing anyone. In fact, he probably needs to cut loose here or we may not be going home.”
Lines of radiant light began to trace and weave themselves around the Dragon as it continued its flight. It bobbed and weaved as it did its best to avoid the thickest mobs of enemies, but the skies were becoming too choked now. Their forward momentum arrested itself to avoid colliding with the spectral horde. The writhing mob of spirits soon congealed into one baleful face. Thousands of spirits gave the squad of mages a hungry, contemptuous look.
Akamori channeled the nascent divinity that floated around him like golden rain drops frozen mid fall, and summoned them into his body. It was slow at first, but sped up quickly. It wasn’t a lot at first. With his worshippers numbering so few for now, but he could feel the total growing. New voices added to the fold. New covenants requested. More exchange of power.
He blazed through the sky, his skin turned to fire, radiant golden white and orange flames wreathed him as he lanced through ghosts until he came to a halt in front of Helios. He cupped his hands before him, weaving the runes for a massive up-scalled light bolt, adding power to it. Not his own, but all the divinity that had accumulated to him. Was it foolish to waste it now? Perhaps. But this was practice. If he was going to fight gods, he needed to understand how this stuff worked. Normally Thanaton would chastize him with some kind of recrimination, but he found the sword supportive of the effort.
We must explore our limits so we might surpass them , Thanaton counseled.
The power continued to grow in his hands, threatening to burst like an overfilled water balloon, struggling to contain the pressure of its contents. He grit his teeth and focused ahead at the massive spectral head that was slowly looming forward, as if to devour them whole. Akamori drew in a slow breath as all sounds faded away.
There was only himself and his power. Then opened his eyes, and they were glowing red embers that radiated divine fire.
“You want it? THEN COME AND GET IT!”
The massive ghostly head opened its mouth and crashed forward. From a distance, any onlookers would have seen the giant, ghostly head devour a small star and a black dragon. Then there was a hush, followed by a flash, and they unleashed a shockwave as all that divine power. For several minutes after, as anyone who could see slowly regained their vision, a second dawn shone on the horizon of New Xinjia at the foot of the Second Great Wall. That quarter of the city was conspicuously empty of any undead, flesh, or spiritual. The second star remained in the sky, escorting the black dragon to the bunker’s entrance on the ground. As they did, more worship flowed to Akamori, this time from New Xinjia.