7.14
“... and know when you slay me that you do not slay one empress! But also many- much? Myriad! The myriad souls who follow me!
*tsk* I screwed it up. Assassin! Stab me again! My last words need to be memorable!” - the last recorded words of Madelyn the Conqueror, later found with over seventy-nine stab wounds.
A whirlwind of teeth erupted from the earth, ripped apart the cobbled road and tore away the face of the Hearth Church with its several neighbors as the demon chewed its way out of the earth. The scene in which the Toy Dragons and Scarlet Samsara arrived at was one of chaos.
“Set down the barrier!” Dustin yelled out as he threw out his Sporages, beside him, Noam and Utoqa sprinted in opposite directions, dropping more Sporages as they circled the affected area.
The World clapped his palms, “No need to tell me twice! See my Path, the way of Hospitality! Be our Honored Guest!”
Golden barriers slammed down around them as Eleanor screamed commands to the rest of Scarlet Samsara. Noam and Utoqa closed the circle and Dustin slammed down his staff, “Fairy Circle! Justice Domain!”
Blinding light lit the floor, burning the demon’s flesh as it screamed a sound akin to teeth on chalkboard. The light moved like a living thing, forming chains that trapped the demon under its burning Domain. They rushed to attack it while it was weakened.
Only for a giant needle the color of tarnished silver flecked with rust to stab through Dustin’s chest.
Noam tried to dodge, a futile effort as a needle appeared through his throat, followed shortly by a third that disabled Utoqa’s leg.
The Fairy Circle broke, the light receded, and the demon was freed.
----------------------------------------
Blood soaked into the hand Tai used to apply pressure to Celine’s wound. Glascoin got her in the gut, and though the girl had applied her own silvery stitches, her pained lack of concentration meant the effect was minimal. She could barely walk while leaning on Tai.
So the swordswoman instead focused on the path ahead. Past the circular stairwell were pitch black perfectly tubular passageways, which her elven eyes could see was an unused part of the city’s sewers. They lost Glascoin in this maze, though Tai wasn’t sure they could confront her. Her darkvision couldn’t discern color though texture told her the walls were clay bricks.
There was a rumble, like a giant eating stone. The sound emanated from the wall to their left and ambled upwards towards the surface in a slanted fashion. They briefly froze at the noise, but lacking options, Tai threw Celine into a piggyback, “I’m going to be a bit rough.”
Celine couldn’t protest, her face pale, and not the healthy changeling pale, but the bleeding to death pale. Thus Tai steeled herself, and stomped her foot into the brick floor, cracking it as they shot forward. The path blurred beneath her feet, for though Tai didn’t have Utoqa’s freakish constitution, nor Noam’s quick reactions and speed, she made up for it plentifully in strength and muscle. Each step was a leap that left her footprint in brick. Tai followed the sound of the demon’s chewing, a desperate gamble through myriad identical turns and crossroads.
One that paid off, as the chewing noise led them to a piece of wall that was smooth clay as opposed to brick. She punched through the several inches thick barrier and found a stairwell leading upwards.
Tai rushed up, painfully aware of the blood soaking into the back of her burnt shirt. She kicked open the secret door, finding a room with half the walls and ceiling ripped off, “Dustin!”
Only golden barriers answered her, locking down the street ahead in a house shaped box. She briefly saw Dustin’s distinct silhouette slam down his staff as Utoqa and Noam rushed to engage the same horror she had saw beneath. Her head darted around, “Healer! Anyone! I have injured!”
“Here!” a woman in white robes waved at her, then beckoned a pair of guards carrying a stretcher. All around them the city guard were mustering an evacuation effort. Tai went with them, stayed beside Celine as her wounds began to close under healing light. The witch, flittering between unconscious, grabbed Tai’s arm and pulled her close. Celine’s face morphed into an exact copy of Tai’s, just as needles the color of tarnished silver speared the changeling’s arm and chest.
The healer panicked, pouring more mana to heal the new wounds, Tai barely noticed, she glanced at her sword arm, completely unharmed. Celine whispered with a hoarse breath, “…My magic… it just activated…”
Glascoin was still loose.
Tai gently put down Celine’s hand to rest before she rushed off.
The place that was once the Hearth Church was in ruins, the destruction had reached even here. The roof had completely caved in, somewhere, a fallen candle had lit parts of it aflame. Washing the place in an eerie fire light that seemed… cold.
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Despite it all, Tai found a clear circle where the rubble had all seemingly avoided. At its center was Glascoin, gently hugging the many orphans of the Hearth. The cold fire seemed to cast them in a holy warmth.
Tai reached for her sword, but it wasn’t there. She instead tightened her fists. “Glascoin!”
The woman looked up at her with a slight smile. The flames around them howled in cold rage until Glascoin placed her hand on the small of a child’s back, and the fire quietened, for it was of the Hearth, though it still seethed with impotent wrath.
“Children!” Tai yelled, “You have to get away from her! Glascoin is a bad person!”
They turned to her, hearing her words, yet Glascoin’s smile only turned more smug.
“She’s been lying to you!” Tai yelled, “She’s been hurting a lot of people!”
“Sister?” one of the children, Prea, asked. “Is what she saying true?”
Glascoin wrapped the girl in a warm embrace, “Of course not! I don’t know what she’s saying!” The former Sister’s face was one of innocence, “We need to get out of here, it isn’t safe.”
Tai stepped forward as Glascoin rose, yet paused as the woman dusted herself off, dropping shards of clay around the orphans.
Glascoin raised her hand, her face one of practiced calm, “Hold hands, form a line!”
A child grabbed Glascoin’s hand, then another his, until the children had all formed a line around her. Glascoin took a step forward, but the child holding her hand did not move an inch. Her smile wavered, as she turned to look at the boy holding a doll.
A doll of the Weeping Child.
“You never bothered to do a headcount,” Johnny Joymoon said.
“Jojo, I hope you don’t believe what she is saying?” Glascoin said, “Tai speaks nonsense, she is injured and delirious, this is a dangerous place, we must all move.”
Johnny tilted his head, “Only my friends get to call me Jojo.”
A shard of clay shot towards Johnny’s head, only to be stopped in midair by an invisible force. Glascoin threw off Johnny’s hand, a shield of clay formed around her before it was instantly covered with hand prints.
“Please,” Johnny whispered, “Melinda told me to ask nicely, so please, save us from the danger.”
And just like that, the ghost that had haunted him in life and death, obediently and gently raised the children of the Hearth Church. Carrying them away even as they kicked and screamed.
Jojo’s small smile only lasted for a moment as Tai roughly grabbed his shoulder and pulled him out of an incoming clay spear.
“See them to safety!” Tai ordered, “I’ll handle her!”
The boy nodded and Tai leapt into a spinning kick, shattering an impromptu clay shield and missing Glascoin nose by a hair. The clay did not fall, instead it clung to her leg, weighed down her step, so Tai smashed it with a fist, yet the shattered shards sharpened in midair. Dozens of spikes speared into her leg, trapping her foot to the ground like a bear trap. Glascoin clapped her hands, forming them into a cone pointed towards Tai as clay compressed within her fingers. Yet as she stepped back to aim, her foot hit a piece of loose rubble and she tripped and fell. Narrowly avoiding a crossbow bolt aimed where her head was and a blade that slashed where her body was.
Tai recognized Yone and Mist, the Travelers of Scarlet Samsara who had defeated Noam and Utoqa respectively. She tried to move her foot, yet the clay spikes only dug deeper into her calf. She couldn’t pull them out, so instead smashed the hardened clay at their base.
Ahead, Glascoin flipped a coin in midair just as Yone sheathed his sword. The coin fell, Yone moved, and Glascoin dodged according to the coin, avoiding Yone’s slash dash entirely.
Tai stepped forward, suppressed a wince as the movement agitated the clay shrapnel in her calf.
Glascoin and Yone repeated their dance, a flipped coin, a sheathed sword. Yone missed again, slashing through nothing, he turned to try again, yet as he did so his sheath hit a pile of rubble, knocking down a burning plank which hit his head and knocked him out.
Glascoin threw her coin again, this time the flying coin hit the incoming crossbow bolt in midair, pushing it just the slightest amount so that it missed Glascoin by a hair. The bolt ricocheted off a stone wall and into the air. As Mist reloaded his crossbow in his hidden position, the bolt fell and pierced through the back of his neck, killing him instantly.
Tai arrived fists swinging, but the weakness in her leg threw off her punch. Glascoin didn’t even need to dodge, she kicked Tai in her bad leg, knocked her down, then shot the gathered clay in her hand like a pressurized water jet through Tai’s liver.
Tai fell amongst the burning rubble, clutching her stomach as the clay spear hardened within her, teeth grated with pain.
“This result was an inevitability,” Glascoin said. A ball of clay gathering above her palm. “The remnants of the poison I used on you, your wounds, being disarmed. All these little coincidences, each a lever for my luck to push on. Each of you three alone would’ve easily been able to kill me, yet all three together couldn’t. This is proof of my hard work.”
“Don’t compare me to those third rates,” Tai spat between gritted teeth. “That idiot didn’t even know how to use a sword.”
Glascoin blinked, too late realizing that the flames surrounding them had obscured a very simple thing.
The light of a dead Traveler dissipating as they died, a light that was right where Tai had fallen.
Glascoin flipped a coin.
Tai grabbed Yone’s sheathed katana.
The coin fell.
Tai moved.
Glascoin dodged perfectly out of the way. Yet as the blade missed her neck by a hair, Tai twisted her wrists, lowered the blade and stabbed.
Glascoin looked down to see the blade protruding from her, its hilt guard pressed against her stomach. Tai’s hands tightened around the hilt, twisted the katana in as red spread from the wound.
“I learned that draw technique when I was thirty-five, barely a stupid teen,” Tai spat. “Learning to draw your sword is the most important step for any swordsmen, yet that idiot didn’t know what to do with it once it was out! He just kept putting it back in!”
Tai tore the blade out, taking a good chunk of Glascoin’s stomach as she did so. The woman staggered back, clutching feebly at the air where her side once was.
“Same spot where you got me and Celine,” Tai chuckled as she stepped forward. She raised the sword for the coup de grâce, blade slick and shining crimson under the Hearth fire.
Yet a still standing frame of the burning building finally gave out at that moment, crashing down between Glascoin and Tai. Tai instinctively shielded herself, yet as she opened her eyes again, Glascoin was gone.
“FUCK!”
Elsewhere, as Johnny tried to comfort and explain things to the orphan children, Prea sat in a huddle. Stuck on her back, a single piece of clay began to move.