The cacophony of demonic screams hit Lucas like a physical force. It was more than sound; a dark resonance pierced right through him and shook the foundations of his soul. He stumbled back as his mana system roiled, the very pathways themselves trembling, and from there his body became a distant, muted thing.
His mana itself darkened, turning gradually from golden aurora to dim honey, and it seemed to thicken, becoming more physical than it had been. At the same time, his pathways twisted around on themselves.
Lucas expected agony. He’d anticipated the burning, like his mana had been turned to acid and was eating through his pathways. He’d foreseen the ache of his pathways themselves distorting. That much he could have handled, on its own.
But what he hadn’t predicted was the transformation. There was malicious intent behind the warping of his pathways: the beastly resonance was vibrating through his soul, and it was gradually corrupting his mana. Parts of his system were darkening and splitting off into a flow of darker, thicker mana. The darker mana was lurching all over the place, seemingly at random. One moment it formed a network of pathways that resembled a horse’s leg, the next it shrank into a tiny tree, and a moment after that it was outlining the skull of some kind of long-nosed fish. The form kept shifting, moment by moment, and Lucas’ golden mana was warping with it.
The screams were like a corrupting signal, and Lucas realised they were trying to turn him into a beast. It was happening so fast he could barely believe it, far along before he’d even realised what he was looking at.
Lucas let out a yell of distress and dove into his mana, gripping everything he could in a metaphorical hand and forcing it to flow how it was meant to, following his pathways. He frantically summoned his image of himself in his mind’s, just as the Skycloak had said, and interposed it over the mental map of his pathways. His mana brightened, strengthened, if only marginally.
The screams were still ringing in his ears, biting at his soul. His entire mana system gave a shudder. The darker mana parasitizing off his soul was beginning to form a shape, but Lucas refused to even consider it. It wasn’t him. That wasn’t his mana. That wasn’t what his body was supposed to look like, and he refused to accept it as the reality.
Lucas finally lost his temper. He grit his teeth as he took his entire mana system in hand and ordered it to obey him or else. A growl tore out of his throat. His mana flared, shining through the dark mana. Jamie yowled in his heart, the monstercat’s own mana blazing like the sun, setting Lucas’ heart aflame.
He was sick of this shit, sick of this place, sick of constantly getting taken off guard and having to react too late. No more.
The beasts screamed, and Lucas roared back. Mana erupted through his pathways and exploded out of him in an omnidirectional wave. The screams went quiet, muted. The world was finally at peace, the screams far away. Blissful, serene.
Lucas’ soul was anything but.
Mana burning in righteous indignation, Lucas’ eyes snapped open, and he charged. He raised his stick high above his head, then brought it down in a savage slash just before a beast could meet Wick’s shield. The gnarled wood crashed down on the monster’s long, sinuous head, shattering its three fanged beaks. Its momentum carried it forward, crashing into Wick’s shield and tumbling limply to the ground. Lucas didn’t give him time to recover, hefting his stick and lashing out once more.
There was no finesse to his following strikes. There was only rage, the impact of the blows thrumming through him and grounding him in the moment. Each strike affirmed him, cemented his soul. He only stopped when a hand grabbed his shoulder and dragged him back.
“Well met, Ser Rian,” Wick bellowed with a manic grin, his face inches from Lucas’.
The party of four had formed up as a wedge ahead of Lucas, protecting him as he waged an internal battle against the beasts’ chaotic corruption. They moved as a group, their teamwork exemplary, always keeping Wick at the tip of their formation, with the Skycloak filling in any gaps in his defence with her deadly white blade, the two close quarters combatants giving Rena and Jyn the freedom to launch their ranged attacks at the onrushing beasts.
Lucas had stepped out of their protection to vent his fury, and Wick had dragged him back. “I admire your tenacity, but ‘tis the Shieldmaster’s role to stand afore his comrades, not the other way around.”
Lucas nodded his thanks to them. “I’m okay now,” he said, his voice a quiet rasp. It hurt his throat just to do that much. Roaring like a madman probably hadn’t been the best idea. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” Wick rumbled as he eyed the beasts prowling ahead of them. “It happens to us all. Even the most experienced warrior can be taken off guard by the call of the beasts.”
“Does your floramancy have any ranged techniques?” asked the Skycloak without looking back, her eyes watchful of their onrushing enemies.
Lucas took the time to look around now that the screams weren’t as much of a problem, taking in the battlefield. There were less of them than before, with multiple rapidly rotting corpses strewn across the ground. Fires covered the party’s flanks to either side, and the beasts seemed unable or unwilling to try and flank, just attacking head on from wherever they landed whenever one of the party’s attacks repelled them. In the rare moments where they did manage to get close, Wick’s shield was impassable. They attacked over and over with reckless abandon, but none were threatening to break through the party’s guard.
“I can figure something out,” Lucas said, rubbing his throat. There was a constant pressure on his entire being, the chaos screams of the beasts trying to find purchase. It took active will to resist, but with Jamie’s help it was manageable.
Something tugged on his attention, drawing his gaze back to the beast he’d just pummelled. A dim white mist in its approximate shape was gently rising from its pulped form like a ghost. It was just as with the beast back in the abandoned village, but brighter this time, and larger, with little sparkles like starlight twinkling in the wispy cloud. The beast here had been thrice the size of the one from before; its long, worm-like body was covered in beaks that had been snapping at anything that got in their range, and its legs were long and were so thin they shouldn’t have been able to hold its body up. His stick had pulped its body into lumpy black chunks, and the legs were mangled and broken.
None of the others gave any reaction as the pale smoke reached up from its still body and, just as with the beast back in the abandoned village, speared straight for his heart.
This time Lucas was ready, barely reacting beyond a sharp inhale and clenched fists as the beast’s mana surged into his channels. It came with the sensation of his entire body being full up, engorged. He briefly felt too hot as the mana assimilated into his system, but it soon passed.
Lucas frowned. That felt too easy. A trifle, compared to what he’d experienced after killing a much smaller beast. That made no sense.
And then it did. Lucas couldn’t help but give a wry smile, noticing that Jamie’s mana system, still nestled in his heart, had gotten much brighter, and the monstercat appeared to have gone back to sleep, radiating satisfaction.
You greedy little shit, Lucas thought, you’ll get fat if you keep that up.
Lucas didn’t have it in him to scold the creature even if he’d felt inclined to. Jamie had helped him enough already to earn a tasty snack.
Hefting his stick into a ready stance, Lucas returned his attention to the present.
The battle was still raging, eight beasts remaining on the field, charging back in over and over. They were disgusting, terrifying creatures, but a sense of calm was settling over Lucas as he beheld their ineffective tactics. The party appeared to have their situation in hand, though they were a bit haggard, unkempt. Grimacing, Lucas wondered how long he’d burdened them.
No more.
Wick’s shield was impassable, and he wielded it with skill. He seemed to always know where the beasts would strike and be ready to interpose it at just the right time. The opalescent light was still streaming over his armour and the slab he’d summoned, and it would flare every time one of the beasts struck, creating a wall that curved around the group’s front. He was the fulcrum of the formation, everyone else moving according to where he went.
The Skycloak stuck close to his shoulder at all times, lunging in to beat back the beasts as they collapsed at the foot of Wick’s shield, ensuring they couldn’t get hold and grapple him. It forced the beasts to charge rather than pile up, which played to Wick’s strengths. Judging by the moon-white light glowing on five of the beasts’ corpses, she was still the most deadly of the party.
That wasn’t to say Rena and Jyn weren’t contributing.
The Bowmaiden’s arrows never seemed to miss, and the variety in their effects was staggering. In the span of five heartbeats, she fired as many arrows, each striking true at what appeared to be a different beast’s weak spot, delaying their attacks.
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The first arrow hit harder than it should have, launching back a fur-covered spider-thing with tentacles instead of legs. It tumbled back down the hill, scrambling at the grass in futile attempts to arrest its momentum.
The second was the same ice arrow she’d used earlier, and it froze a good number of the countless legs of the many bovine-faced thing that had been one of the first three to attack, tripping it again before it could lunge back into the fray.
The third seemed to pass through a creature with the body of a horse with multi-armed headless primate at either end of the torso, all held up by eight four-jointed spindly legs; a moment later the creature was pulled backwards as if it had been lassoed, following the path of the arrow all the way to the adjacent hill. It rushed back towards the fight immediately, but its absence brought the others breathing room.
The fourth stuck in the eye socket of an emaciated pig-like thing with translucent skin showing eel-like skeletal creatures swimming around inside its stomach; the arrow immediately duplicated, then again, and again, until dozens of arrows were pocking the beast’s flesh, and it collapsed, its inner eels writhing in agony.
Lucas initially thought the last one had missed after all, striking the ground not a few paces ahead of Wick's shield. But it quickly became clear it had hit precisely where Rena aimed it. The first beast to come near it—a worm with three animal skulls at either end—was drawn to the arrow like it had an inescapable gravity pull, holding the monster in place long enough for the Skycloak to bisect it with a slash of her sword. Both sides kept moving, skinless skulls gnashing their crooked, broken teeth.
Jyn was acting more as battlefield control at this point, creating walls of fire that herded the beasts to their front, trying to force them into attacking head on so Wick didn’t have to reposition himself too much. He waved his arms around like a conductor guiding an orchestra, and the roaring fires ahead of them danced to a tune only he could hear, constantly shifting and repositioning, harassing the monsters. Grasping limbs of white-hot flame rose from the inferno, impossibly long, snatching at anything that came near. There were faint images of predatory animals stalking through the fire, hungry to feed on anything that strayed. Many of the beasts bore burn marks, but the fire didn’t appear to be deadly to them.
The party coordinated with precision, speaking only in clipped words, knowing their roles without needing to be ordered around and trusting in their comrades’ competence. The Skycloak was very much in the lead and thus was the most vocal, pointing out which beast Rena and Jyn should allow to attack next so Wick could be prepared to block it, opening up a chance for her to strike. There appeared to be some limit to her blade’s deadly light attack, as it seemed to dim and lighten up according to rules Lucas couldn’t identify and wasn’t going to ask about. Even when it was dimmed, her strength, speed, and skill were incredible; her blows never seemed to miss, launching beasts through the air before they could react.
Lucas tried to slot himself into their formation as best he could, taking up a position in the middle, halfway between a close combatant and a ranged one. Determined to contribute, desperate to take out his fury on these disgusting things, and, he had to admit to himself, craving to feast more on the beasts’ power, he reached out for the surrounding plants with his mana.
The grass and weeds and flowers and fungi were struggling just as much with the chaotic effect of the screams as his own mana system had been—the quaint traps he’d set up beforehand had all wilted without his will sustaining them—but his mana shored them up with order in an instant, drawing on the template of the unaffected grass from elsewhere to reinforce the chaos-afflicted plants. With that done, he crouched down, running his fingers along the plants, threading his mana into them directly and shaping them to his needs. Blades of grass stiffened to sharp points, and he picked them out in a bundle, rising once more.
The grass blades couldn’t take as much mana as his stick, so they weren’t as strong, but they didn’t need to be. This was just a test run. Lucas slowed the mana of his entire right arm until it felt appropriately heavy, then pinched a single blade of grass between two fingers. Now came the hard part.
Watching the rampaging beasts, he waited for the right moment. The battle was chaotic, and he didn’t want to get in anyone else’s way, knowing he was a new, untrained element in their dynamic. Only when a beast was downed by one of Rena’s arrows and the others were focused elsewhere did he attack, taking aim and snapping his arm out, letting loose a single blade of grass. It sliced through the air like a knife.
To his utter bewilderment, it struck the translucent pig beast in one of its too-skinny legs and sank right in. Which, admittedly, wasn’t where it had been aiming, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Fluid spurted from the wound, the pig stumbled just long enough for a more effective attack—the arrow that hit far too hard for its size—to take it in the flank and send it tumbling back down the hill. Lucas was absolutely elated.
The ensuing moments devolved into the closest thing Lucas had ever gotten to what he’d heard called the ‘high of battle.’ He lost himself in launching blades of mana-enhanced grass at the snarling, snapping beasts. The vast majority didn’t hit at first, but those that did stabbed deep into the beasts, the life and order in his mana rejecting their chaotic bodies. And he improved rapidly. Over the course of minutes, he went from one in ten hitting, to two in ten, to three in ten.
His contributions weren’t huge, compared to Rena’s harrying arrows, Jyn’s battlefield control, Wick’s stalwart protection, and the Skycloak’s decisive, deadly slashes, but any difference meant something. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, his heart pumping pure ecstasy. His body fell into a rhythm, crouching to pick more grass, imbuing them with his mana, then launching. He felt like he could do this forever. It was his life’s calling, he was sure of it.
And then something went wrong. Lucas didn’t even know how it happened.
One moment, their formation was holding as it had been, the five of them moving like a well-oiled machine, working to pin down whichever beast the Skycloak called out so she could slice it apart with her moonlight blade. The next, Wick was bellowing a curse and slamming his shield down, his armour and shield glowing brighter than ever, opalescent light streaming out of him. He’d seen it before anyone else; for no apparent reason, all six remaining beasts had rallied and were charging at once, ignoring the ranged members’ harrying.
Wick went down to one knee and let out a cry as all six smashed into his projected shield wall at once. His prismatic light flared until it hurt to look at, then shattered like glass, sending him stumbling back. The Skycloak swept forward to bat away three of the beasts, but her blade hadn’t had time to build up light, and it only launched them back, dealing no real damage. The other three beasts lunged past her guard, descending on Wick like a crashing wave.
“Wick!” Lucas acted without thinking. He heaved himself forward with all the strength his mana could bring him, baring his stick like a sword. He lashed out with a backhand attack, catching a furry tentacle before it could slip past Wick’s shield and wrap around his ankle. There was a crack, and the tentacled creature was sent spinning.
After that, things got too hectic for even Lucas himself to understand. He descended into instinct, the stick guiding his movements, wielding him rather than the other way around. His world was nothing more than him, his stick, and his foes. It twirled ahead of him with a mind of its own, deflecting claws, parrying spikes, batting away sharp fangs. It countered with savage blows, drawing on his mana almost without his conscious input, drinking hungrily of his soul and converting it to violence.
Mana flowed through him like molten lava. He felt like a burning rock. His stick struck true over and over, the beasts moving in slow motion. He was dimly aware of others around him, playing their roles. Arrows sailed past him, finding openings and keeping beasts at bay so he wasn’t outnumbered for long. Fire roared nearby, though he couldn’t see what it was doing. There was even a moment where the woman in the shining white armour was at his side, the two of them moving together like they were partners in a dance, raining down ferocious force on their freakish foes. Her blade lit up and carved the beast in half, and the two split apart to focus on new enemies.
He barely registered which beast he was fighting, or how many were left. His entire focus was on whatever weapons they wielded, and how his stick could best handle them. At times he had to take small wounds in order to deal greater wounds in return, and he made those trades gladly, as long as it meant destroying these monsters, these blasphemies, these violations. He’d never felt so alive.
They made him sick. Their warped bodies, their maddening screech, their rotting stench. Everything about them was wrong, and they had to be purged.
A distant part of him noted that he’d succumbed to a different kind of madness to the one the beasts had inflicted on him with their screams, but the rest of him was perfectly fine with it. Better berserk rage than the violation they’d tried to inflict on his soul.
The impact jarred his arm as the stick crushed one of the skulls of the worm creature. It kept coming at him, and he kicked it back to give himself space, pain lancing up his leg, flaring in his ankle and knee. A roar rumbled in his chest, and he charged in, smashing another skull. The creature coiled up, then lunged, and his stick rose to meet it. Its weight was unexpected, and he went tumbling back, the beast landing atop him. The last skull snapped its teeth inches from his face, and this close its scream was deafening, the chaos creeping back in on his soul, shaking his mana pathways.
Lucas punched it as hard as he could, mana thick in his arm, cracking its lower jaw, but it just started trying to stab at him with the twisted horn atop the skull.
And then a spike of moonlight speared down through the top of the skull and carried through into its body. The moonlight flared, blinding, burning Lucas’ eyes, painting a white line through the centre of the world.
It took a long time for his vision to return to normal. Long enough for his breathing to even out, for his mana to settle down to normal, and for the adrenaline to subside. By the time he’d blinked the light away, all the aches and pains he’d been ignoring made themselves known.
His knee and ankle were throbbing, already feeling stiff. His muscles were sore like he’d run two marathons back to back. Even his mana pathways ached, rubbed raw by overuse.
The stars were so bright, so beautiful. He could have appreciated them a lot more if the Skycloak wasn’t leaning over him, blocking half the view.
“You’ve returned to us, Ser Rian?” she asked him. Her eyes were scrutinising, and he didn’t like that one bit.
He tried to reply, but only a dry croak passed his lips. His throat felt like sandpaper. He just about managed a single nod instead.
The ground rumbled as heavy footsteps approached. Wick’s face appeared next to the Skycloak’s, covered in dirt and sweat. There was respect in his golden eyes as he searched Lucas’ face, and he grinned when he saw Lucas was lucid. “Well fought back there, lad. A bit reckless, and as a Shieldmaster I can’t condone how many hits you took, but I’m hardly going to scold you when you came to my rescue like you did. Chances are I only would’ve been injured, but you never know with beasts.” He paused, kneeling down, and spoke more softly when he continued, “So I’ll happily call that saving my life, and I owe you accordingly, lad.”
Lucas attempted to shake his head, but only succeeded in sending the world spinning. He groaned. He felt like a living bruise.
“A bloody stick! Mad as a sack of rats, you are. Always the shit you least expect in this line of work!” He chuckled, shaking his head. “You can tell us all about how you got so good with a piece of wood in the morning, eh?” He clapped his gauntleted hand on Lucas’ shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Get some sleep. The day is won, and we’ll watch over you.”
After all that, Lucas was more than happy to oblige.