They each deployed their helmets and linked their internal comms up. Then Amara triggered the invisibility potion, and the pair rippled out of view to the marines. As they flew out of the beachhead position, Akamori visually scanned the station as it opened up in a large cylindrical area. It looked as though someone had taken a city and rolled it up like a pizza. All the building tops pointed to the center.
“This could take way too long. The spell won’t last long enough to track the shackler down,” Amara said.
They came to a halt as they searched the area. It was quiet in here. Devoid of all the sounds, one might expect a small floating city in space to have. “It’s quiet in here. You could hear a pin drop…”
“Sure, but how does that help us?”
“Well, Father used to take me hunting, and sometimes the manka cats were extra cagey. They would know we were hunting for them, so they would hide from us regardless of how well we stalked them.”
“So, how did you catch them?”
“We tricked them into attacking what they thought was us, then we capitalized on their mistake.”
“And since you’re telling me this, I’m assuming that’s the plan here. So what do we do?”
“Can you make an illusion of us? Flying around and looking? They’ll probably start flinging attack spells at the illusion and we’ll spot our enemies’ position.”
Amara closed her eye and started executing the hand signs for weaving the spell. A moment later she finished, and aetheric energy rushed from her, resolving into exact replicas of themselves. She gestured with her hands, and the replicas turned and rose above the rooftops to an obvious height. Then she began a sweeping search pattern with them. Her eye glowed with pink energy as she moved them from channeling the spell. Akamori watched as she continued to make hand gestures and the Replicas’ flight patterns would change. It reminded him of a puppeteer.
The false pair of them flew into a lazy low orbit around the interior of the station, searching for the shackler. Akamori watched Amara’s expression tighten and her eye glowed with pink energy.
A flurry of sickly pale green soul missile spells shot out from the tallest building in the station. When the bolts hit Amara’s replica’s, she cursed, adjusting the spell on the fly to look as though the pair of them could barely defend and fell away from view. The shackler approached the edge to peer down and sneered, satisfied with his handiwork. The draconic necromancer returned to the building from which he’d ambushed the spectral images.
She turned to Akamori and gave him a nod as the motes of mind magic drifted from her eye. She gestured for him to follow her, and the pair made their way directly to the shackler. The shackler sat in a rather fancy office. Lots of dark wood book shelves packed side to side. It also held a wide old desk. It looked like the desk someone in an important position handed down would have. It reminded Akamori a lot of the Clan Chief’s hut back home on Hoshun. Atop the desk, a pallid, ethereal glow surrounded it.
The shackler didn’t notice them outside so Akamori folded his arms, puzzling out how to approach this. Since they routed their comms through their helmets internally, they didn’t have to worry about being heard.
“Well. We’ve got the drop on him. Question is, what do we do with it?”
“You’re best in your target's face. I’m better off at a short remove. You engage up close, and I’ll provide support.”
She withdrew her pistol for emphasis. In response, he drew his blade from its scabbard fastened to his armor’s hip. The blade was silver, with two sets of runes etched into the base just above the guard. An Air and a darkness rune. They both glowed with their respective energies. The blade’s uncomplicated mind pulsed an eager greeting to him. He squeezed it firmly hello back. It had grown slightly longer than he’d initially been used to. Ever since the trip to Xanofex’ mind, it’d become a little more than it was. It had grown.
Amara’s pistol was a standard issue pistol that bore no special distinctions. Akamori appreciated that as well. The simplicity and effective craftsmanship. Built to purpose, and sturdy to boot. Yet it lacked the distinctiveness of his blade possessed. There was no consciousness to be sensed. Just the shell of a tool.
They exchanged nods with each other when ready, then blasted forward. Akamori rode a surging wind as he fed his blade a portion of air energy and brought it down in a diagonal slash that hurled a nanometer thin blade of air that cut cleanly through the window. The shackler rippled away in a swirl of pink energy, leaving Akamori and Amara both staring blankly.
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“Did we just ambush an ambush?” he asked, reaching up to scratch his head, but stopping when he jammed his fingers into the armored helmet.
Amara whirled in place and fell back as a series of spirit bolts slammed into the desk. Splinters and shredded bits of polymer from a keyboard flew into the air. Akamori fed his armor an extra bit of air magic, swiftly dodging the spell bolts. However, as he banked away and twisted, they swerved to match his movements. He felt them calling out to something deep within him, as though being tugged along by him. At an instinctual level, he felt them locked onto his soul. In a panic, he fed his blade dark energy, and it wreathed the sword in black energy.
Akamori swung the blade, trying to chop through the bolts. His blade cut a tight arc across his torso, devouring the first, its ethereal green bolt dissolving into nothingness with a keening sound. Did that spell bolt just scream when he destroyed it? Figuratively flat footed by the sudden question, the other clipped his leg, bursting into a sickly green cloud that made something deep inside him cringe and go cold, like someone had walked over his grave and kicked over his headstone. Nausea overcame him, and he fell to the floor behind the desk. His helmet snapped back, and he threw up on the floor, ruining the plush crimson carpet. He doubted the owner would come back anyhow.
Amara responded by returning fire with her pistol, the mind energy bolts, before darting down next to the desk for cover. Her helmet snapped back in a series of folding plates until her face was visible. Even with only one functional eye, she still managed a concerned expression.
“Are you ok?”
He nodded, trying to steel his nerves. “If I had to guess what death feels like? I’d say it’s getting hit by one of those. My stomach flipped upside down, and everything went cold, and it felt like that bolt dragged my soul out of my body for an instant.”
She peeked over the desk until to duck back down behind cover again as more shards of wood and computer clattered off their armor. Beyond the broken window, they could hear the amused cackling of the shackler.
“Oh come now, surely you can’t have expected it to be that easy?”
Akamori shrugged with his back to the desk. “I actually kind of did.”
The laughter stopped for a moment, and Akamori allowed himself the stray thought to wonder if that caused the dragon confusion.
“No matter. Devouring, you will make a delicious end to an otherwise tragic day. Losing my older brother Tomek in orbit to your ship is an injustice that must be answered with your end.”
Amara gave him a questioning look. He took a slow deep breath and felt his stomach slowly untangle itself and the feeling return to the center of his chest. He had no intention of ever being struck by one of those bolts ever again.
“I’ll pin him down and keep his attention to get you time to close in,” Amara said, pink mind energy swirling in the barrel of her pistol. Her helmet faceplate rippled back into place, snapping shut at the eyes, which then illuminated. In a blur, she’d popped up from behind cover. Her pistol belting out shot after shot of pink mind bolts. Akamori waited for a three count and then burst out of cover on a gust of wind that kicked up debris in his wake. He cut a wide path to close in the shackler’s flanks.
Amara’s pink energy bolts slammed into the concrete and steel rooftop edge the shackler was using for cover. Once he’d cut around wide enough, he aimed himself and fed the armor as much air magic as he could spare as he raced in for the attack. At the last minute, the shackler jumped up away from Akamori and flicked another spirit bolt at him. This time Akamori was ready, his blade bathed in a mix of air energy wrapped in a cover of dark energy, and he swung the blade in an arc that would have cut the dragon in human form in two from right shoulder to left hip. The Air slash attack launched from his blade, cutting a nanometer thick path through the distance between them. The spirit bolt crashed into the razor thin blade of dark and air magic, shattering into sickly green shards of wispy aether. Another keen cry, another tortured soul sent to the hereafter. At the last moment, the shackler teleported away from the attack. Popping back into existence on an adjacent rooftop to Akamori seated on a large piece of machinery. Some kind of device to move air, perhaps?
“Not bad for a wiry little air, mage. You’re pretty good with a blade. But I don’t think you’re quite up to taking me down. Now, what say we dispense with the preamble and skip right to the part where I kill and bind you both, shall we?”
The shackler’s eyes narrowed to thin slits, and Akamori quickly understood he was squaring off against a full grown dragon in morphed human form. His armor zoomed in on the man enough so he didn’t have to squint for details. The feat done with the armor's small reserve of fire magic. The man’s overall appearance was close enough to pass for a human. But the eyes were wrong. Sporting reptilian slitted pupils. His irises were a muted, sickly green and aether seemed to billow out of his eyes like lazy fog. He also had a mouth full of small pointed teeth instead of the mix of molars and incisors. The armor even opened a small inset zoom window that showed it pitted his skin, but by scales, not by pores.
“Admiring my work, are you?” The man smirked with a wink of the bald eyebrow. Akamori realized just then that the man’s appearance had no hair. Either on his eyebrows or on his head. “It’s a work in progress. Your mammalian hair is such a fine and difficult detail to master. Only a few of us have really been able to master it. I’m still learning.”
Akamori understood the danger in a dragon who could shackle souls and wills able to freely walk amongst his prey. That kind of camouflage could end civilizations. He gripped his sword tighter. It’s desire for combat resonating in his mind. He sensed its hunger for violence.
Sauridius Necromancer
Divinty: Mortal
Challenge: Difficulty Threshold 4
To be continued...