The nice thing about being specialized is you always know what to do. When your options are limited, it’s not that hard to choose your next move. I, on the other hand, had any number of ways I could’ve faced the situation with the cultists. The thing was, I didn’t want to give away too much of what I could do. The looks I was already getting were bad enough, I could only imagine what the chatter would be if I started showing off all my tricks.
I mean, I knew I couldn’t hide it forever, but I wanted to try to fly under the radar for as long as I could. Just a little longer without all the attention, that wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
The worst thing I could do was overthink it. I’d probably just start trying to get fancy and blow it and that’d be the end of it.
I clenched my hand into a fist, thrust it out in front of me, then dove out to one side of the rubble I’d hid behind. A staccato burst of simple bolts of Fire shot from my fist, hammering into the cultist’s cover. As each one hit, it exploded into an impressive-looking but pretty harmless fan of flame. The intent wasn’t to cause much harm, rather only to keep the cultists pinned down. I was just buying time for Achmed and his team.
I kept launching a steady stream of small but flashy missiles at the cultists. Annabelle took the opportunity to duck out and be more selective with her shots, sniping at any of the cultists who dared show their heads. At least two of them got blown back behind the rubble by a blast of purple power to the face. When I hazarded a glance over toward Achmed, I saw there were fewer people behind the wall with him, and one of his guys was helping a handful of people escape into the open safety of the town square.
Something pinged off the rubble beside me, kicking off a spray of pebbles and dust next to my head. The bits of debris flickered as my shield stopped them just short of hitting me. My eyes shot back to the cultists, and I saw one of them taking a bead on me with what looked like a crossbow without the bow part across it: in other words, a rifle.
A dark plume blossomed from the end of the rifle and a small projectile of pure darkness shot toward me. I had a moment of panic wondering if my shield would be effective against this unknown attack, but there was no time to even attempt to dodge. All I could do was watch it come. The projectile, or whatever it was, zinged past my face, missing by mere inches. Good thing the cultist was a rotten shot.
But what was that weapon?
> Demonic Darkslinger
> This insidious weapon has the ability to fire bullets of dark energy indefinitely, or at least until the wielder runs out of life energy to power it.
>
> Powers:
> Bet Your Life - Fuel the Darkslinger with the wielder’s life force
> Dark Bullet- Shoot a projectile of pure darkness
So every time they fired it, they hurt themselves. In a battle of attrition, they’d probably end up doing themselves in before the enemy could. So why did these cultists seem content to simply hide there and shoot their life away at us? Unless they didn’t believe their lives were worth as much as what they were guarding down in the catacombs. It still didn’t make sense for them to try to drag things out, though. They had the numbers, if they truly didn’t care about dying they should’ve used their suicide guns to charge us and end it quicker.
Unless it wasn’t about ending things. What if all they really cared about was delaying us until whatever the other demonic cultists were doing in the catacombs was over? Were they just buying time too?
I didn’t know what their mysterious Thaumaturgy skill did exactly, it could have potentially meant a few different things depending upon how the game implemented it. I’d have to see it used first to know for sure, but I couldn’t help thinking that given the whole cultist thing, ritual magic would be my first guess. And I got a bad feeling about that.
In the split second it took for me to think all this, a bolt of purple energy struck the cultist who’d shot at me in the chest, knocking them back and out of sight.
“You’re welcome!” Annabelle shouted to me. I looked over to give her a thumbs up and saw her grinning at me. The proverbial kid in a candy store would not have looked that delighted. She spun away from the rubble she hid behind and hosed the cultist’s area with more purple blasts of destruction to keep them pinned down, her grin never once faltering.
Then I saw them. In the distance behind her, a new group of cultists had crept out from a still intact area of the church. They had a direct line of sight on Annabelle, and the one in front had his darkslinger aimed straight at her. He also had a name: Joe Median, the cultist who’d shaken me down when I was strung out on jackalope venom.
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A flash of darkness erupted from his weapon, blocking out everything behind it with an instant of pure black, then Annabelle was thrown back when the darkness bullet struck her on the shoulder. She dropped her staff and it clattered away, far from where she lay injured and out in the open on the floor.
I had to do something now, right now, before the whole group of them opened fire on her.
What to do? What to do?
First, get Annabelle to safety. I extended my hand toward her, fingers splayed, then clenched into a fist and pulled my hand back. In the heat of the moment, I didn't even think about whose telekinetic power I was copying, I just needed it to work. As I pulled, Annabelle slid along the floor like she was connected to me by an invisible string, coming to rest at my feet behind the safety of the roof chunk I hid behind. Just in time, too. A hail of darkness bullets from the enemies’ darkslingers chewed the floor where she’d been sprawled a moment earlier into splinters of marble tile.
Annabelle lay beside me behind our cover, her hand pressed to her injured shoulder, her eyes following my every move with a curious expression.
Next, take out those cultists. I copied a different power, and this time I remembered exactly where it came from. It was Galahad’s gravity power. I’d only ever seen him use it a few times, and he’d always used it directly on an opponent to crush them in place. But that wasn’t the only way it could be used. I looked up at the ceiling. About a quarter of the Cathedral’s roof had collapsed, but the new group of cultists were under a part that was still intact. Not for long.
I’d never been bad at math, but with the skills I’d picked up when I became Grand Architect I’d become a lot better. It was a piece of cake to judge distances and angles, and the engineering skill I picked up even let me identify structural weak points, so I easily pinpointed what section of ceiling I should increase the gravity on to bring it tumbling down directly on top of them.
I looked at Joe. According to Petal, when NPCs die, they die-die. Killing generic cultists was one thing, but named NPCs were different; as far as I was concerned, if they had a name they were just like us. I tried to remember if I’d ever killed a named NPC before as I struggled with whether or not I was okay with squashing Joe under a few tons of Cathedral. My moral conflict lasted for all of about half a second before I remembered that he was dirty demon worshiping cultist scum. For all I knew, he and his coven had been sucking the life from orphans and making potions out of it, which they’d then sell to us for exorbitant fees. Sounded about right for this kind of demon cult storyline. Orphans always get the shaft.
As for Joe and his pals, they literally never knew what hit them.
Once the dust from the massive chunk of roof I brought crashing down on Joe’s group had settled enough that I could see we wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore, I turned my attention to Annabelle. I knelt down to check her wounded shoulder. It wasn’t as bad as it had looked, so I kept my cards close to my chest and used my least invasive technique to heal her. As I was Laying On Hands, she kept staring at the pile of debris that had just fallen from the ceiling onto the cultists, burying them completely.
“Pretty lucky the ceiling collapsed at that moment, huh?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, looking away from the cloud of dust and up at me. “Quite lucky.”
I finished treating her shoulder and gave her a hand to her feet. She slapped some dust off her clothes, then looked back and clicked her tongue.
“My staff,” she said.
“No worries,” I said. I still had telekinesis copied, so I waved a hand at her staff and it came flying into my grip. I held it out for her.
That amused/confused look was back on her face as she took it from me. “Just what are you able to do?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “A bit of this, a bit of that.”
The new group of enemies had been neutralized, but the ping ping of attacks hitting our cover reminded us that there were still cultists blocking the way to the door down to the catacombs. No longer pinned down by Annabelle’s attacks, and no longer blinded by the dust cloud, they’d started shooting back again.
Over by Achmed, everyone had been cleared to safety. We could keep this shootout going until the cultists killed themselves powering their darkslingers, or...there was a nice big section of roof over this group of bad guys too.
The Cathedral building creaked and groaned, then the roof collapsed on top of them. Unlike last time, though, it wasn’t just a small section that fell; I had underestimated the extent of the cumulative damage suffered by the building’s structure. Although I only used the gravity increase on a small area, what came crashing down was a much larger section of ceiling, along with a few walls. More sections of roof fell like dominoes in a cascade of destruction, leaving barely half the structure still standing.
When the dust finally settled enough, I could see the entire area where the cultists were had been buried, and quite a bit more besides.
“Well,” Annabelle said while the dust was still clearing, “that was lucky. Again.” She gave me an accusatory look that told me she knew darned well that luck had nothing to do with it.
“Yeah,” I said. “What’re the odds, huh?”
Achmed chose that moment to come scurrying over to join us.
“I’m not even gonna ask how you did that to the roof,” he said, “but thanks.”
“What makes you think I had anything to do with it?” I said.
“Dude, I was watching you.”
Busted.
“Let’s not focus on the past, there are catacombs calling,” I said.
“There’s only one problem now,” Achmed said.
“What’s that?”
He coughed and waved at the dust still wafting around us, then pointed over toward the enormous pile of rubble.
“How the fuck are we going to get through that door now?”