My tarot deck activated, and I saw three cards pull themselves out of the deck and reveal themselves.
The Priestess. Death. Cups.
I had no idea what Cups or the Priestess would do, but Death sounded like a very promising curse to throw at an enemy moments before combat started.
Unfortunately, my attempts to curse the creature didn’t go unnoticed. The shadowy silhouette animating the pile of rocks turned towards me and glared. I saw shadowy strings and tubes of energy snake out of the creature’s body and into the pile of rocks, before some type of manifestation essence flooded into the pile of stone, giving me my first good look at how the creature interacted with our plane of reality. The human-looking face that had been carved out of stone disappeared moments later, to be replaced with a giant pile of rocks shaped vaguely like a human fist.
The creature was done trying to be diplomatic.
The human shaped fish flew through the air towards us, its fist-like shape collapsing as it tore towards us.
Sallia grabbed Anise and then leapt to the side, and Felix grabbed my mother and rolled away. Felix also tried moving a disc of metal in front of him, in order to block the giant pile of rocks, but it was about as effective as someone trying to stop a train by punching it. Felix’s roll saved his - and my mothers - life.
I glanced at Anise and Sallia’s parents, and was grateful for the fact that Old Mo had moved them out of the way before hostilities broke out. They were positioned away from the fighting, and as long as we dodged away from them we wouldn’t have to worry about them getting caught up in the fight.
And the creature definitely didn’t seem interested in the adults at all. I can see the shadowy figure behind the creature was still focused entirely on Anise. As far as the creature seemed concerned, the rest of us might as well have not even existed. It wanted one, and only one of us dead. The rest of us were just obstacles.
I growled.
Nobody hurt my friends. If this shadow manta ray wanted to kill Anise, I was going to send it back to the ocean or die trying.
I focused even more intensely on the space the creature was occupying, trying to figure out what to do. I still couldn’t see its real body without both my soul-sight and spatial sight activated, which made me think that the creature was somehow hiding in a sort of… pocket dimension that overlapped with this one, or something like that. I didn’t know exactly how that worked, but I also didn’t know much about all of the different kinds of spatial magic that existed in the Multiverse. And right now, I desperately needed to figure out how to interact with the creature’s body.
The pile of rocks it had launched at us clearly wasn’t its real body. It was like a puppet controlled by a puppeteer - if we attacked the pile of rocks, we wouldn’t accomplish anything at all. We needed to hurt its real body somehow if we wanted to get it away from us.
I hesitated for a moment, before trying to shoot a lightning bolt at the creature using {Breath of the Storm}. I was hoping that it would prove similar to Aplos, where its body had been vulnerable to essence-based attacks. If essence attacks could hit it from across dimensions, the creature wouldn’t be much harder to kill than a regular human - after all, our group’s combat style was built almost entirely around essence.
Instead, the lightning bolt whizzed through the creature as if it weren’t even there.
Clearly, essence attacks weren’t going to be enough. Which also made me feel very worried - if ordinary essence attacks couldn’t hurt it, Sallia and Anise might not be able to defend themselves against these creatures at all.
And more importantly, I also didn’t have a good way to hurt the creature if its body didn’t exist in the same layer of reality as I did.
The creature looked at me, and then jiggled mockingly, its oval-shaped body wobbling from side to side as if it were laughing at my futile attempt to hurt it.
“........ Should have …. …. … …….. kill the…. … ……. Zelyrian,” said the creature, its voice echoing strangely through the area around me as it laughed in a strange, hissing sound that resembled oil frying in a pan. Without the stone head to project its voice, it seemed to be difficult for the creature to make words that I could hear - but it still did its best to mock me for trying to keep Anise alive.
Rage made my ears ring as I looked at this thing that wanted to kill Anise, and I reached out towards my other ability.
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Extinguish.
A drop of water materialized right above its body, containing nearly a quarter of my remaining alteration essence. Right now, I didn’t care that I might need the essence later to fight off other enemies - this thing wanted to hurt Anise.
And I wanted it gone.
The creature stopped laughing at me the moment the extinguish appeared - and true to my hope, the extinguish seemed to exist in the same sub-dimension that it did. Even though I couldn’t see the drop of water that contained my extinguish with my regular eyes, I could see that the drop of water was somehow right next to the creature. But unlike when I created extinguishes in the regular world, the drop of water seemed to fall very… slowly this time.
The creature seemed to be afraid of the extinguish touching it - but it also didn’t seem that worried about actually getting hit. It just seemed surprised that I could potentially hurt it at all.
The creature turned back towards me, and created a mocking smile entirely out of strings of black manifestation essence, as if to let me know just how little it thought of my attempt to kill it. The creature created a hole in the middle of its body, and the drop of water that contains a huge chunk of my alteration essence and my desire to wipe this creature off the face of the planet fell harmlessly through the hole in the center of its stomach. A moment later, my eyes started to hurt, as my vision insisted that the drop of water was both in front of me, and insisted that there was no drop of water at all.
And then, I felt a tarot card activate.
Cups.
My eyes started to hurt as the drop of water that contained my extinguish shifted. One moment, it had already fallen through the creature’s body, missing it entirely - and the next moment, like a drop of water sliding to the bottom of a cup, the drop of water reversed directions and sped up, tracking the creature’s body as if it were a heat-seeking missile.
The creature seemed shocked as the extinguish slammed into its body, wiping out over half of its life force in a quarter of a second.
I blinked in surprise. The fact that the creature had lived through the extinguish at all was shocking - I had thought I packed enough alteration essence into the attack to kill it on the spot. Perhaps it had some sort of resistance to alteration essence?
“@*#$7* @*#$#&%*#@&$*# @*#&$*#@$!” The creature shrieked. Its words were no longer even remotely close to the ancient Zelyrian language - it sounded like a bunch of angry hisses and clicks instead. The sound grated at my ears.
But I was much more focused on the fact that extinguish had hurt it. The creature seemed nearly dead - losing half of its life force in less than a second was enough to incapacitate it, even if it hadn’t died outright.
I glanced around, and saw the hundreds of other manta-ray creatures that lived in most fragmented cracks in reality. I had enough essence for three more extinguishes like that, and then I would be out. We needed a better way to fight them if more of them turned hostile. None of them seemed to have reacted to our fight yet - perhaps their vision of what was happening over here wasn’t very good?
Felix threw a rock at the spot where the shadowy soul-manta ray’s figure overlapped with reality.
And then Felix’s rock passed right through it as if it didn’t even exist. I sighed.
I had kind of expected that - once my lightning bolt had passed through the creature like it didn’t exist, I had suspected we would have issues using physical attacks against the creature.
The soul creature struggled to right itself, but it looked like a floppy pancake instead of a manta ray right now. Its body was desperately quivering as it tried to right itself, but losing so much of its life force had still left it very close to dead.
Felix carefully held a small spike of metal in his hands, and began trying to stuff alteration essence inside of it. The alteration essence resisted being stuffed into the item - I got the sense that while the essence wasn’t quite sentient, it still innately resisted being locked into the metal spike the way Felix was trying to do it. But through sheer force of will, Felix managed to get everything crammed inside of the piece of shrapnel, before launching it at the shadowy manta-ray.
Since the creature could barely move, Felix’s projectile slammed straight into its body. It didn’t even have the energy to try to make a hole in its body and avoid the attack.
The alteration essence inside of the rock spilled into the creature’s body, and a moment later, I realized what Felix had done.
Felix may not be able to see the sub-dimension the creature was hiding in, but he also had a reasonable understanding of how dimensions and spatial manipulation worked, since every single dimension we had lived in so far had some sort of spatial manipulation ability present in it. So Felix had just loaded up the rock with his best idea of ‘disrupt other dimensions’ energy, as far as I could tell.
It seemed to work, and moments later, the creature flicked into view of my regular, totally unaided eyesight. Felix followed up with a second, entirely normal spike of metal, which cut directly into the creature’s shadowy body. Once the creature had been pulled out of its home sub-layer of reality, it was just as vulnerable as a regular enemy.
Without either of my two remaining curses activating, I saw the creature die, and a System notification appeared in front of my eyes moments later.
But before I could rejoice at the fact that we had found a way to let the others participate in future battles against the shadow manta-ray like figures, I noticed that our battle hadn’t gone unnoticed.
Several more shadowy figures had finally noticed what was happening, and were starting to make their way towards us. And they did not look happy.