Amara hissed out a breath of pain as she impacted against the courtyard’s inner walls, or rather the Speaker’s shield. She’d hit him so hard and so fast that she’d overwhelmed his kinetic defences. On a lesser mage the shield would have popped and she’d be brushing gibblets off her robe, instead the shield had simply moved with him.
As the dust cleared she saw they were almost alone in the courtyard, those few mages still there taking one look at the two pyromancers about to throw down and simply running for their lives.
It was a good call. While a lot of time and effort had gone into a so-called ‘friendly fire’ spell that only hurt the intended target, none had ever been found.
The Speaker wasn’t even winded, sneering down at her as he floated slowly back to the ground, “The Daywalker. It was a fell day for Vulcanus when they allowed one of the night’s misbegotten get amongst their ranks.”
“I’d threaten to feed you your entrails but you’re all hollowed out.” Amara observed, fingers of her remaining hand twitching in anticipation. The other hand was nothing more than dust on the scorched forest floor, consumed in the spell that had turned a dozen pyromancers to drifting ash. “How long until your precious Charigris discards you for a new vessel? A week? A day? By the looks of you I’m not even sure you’ve got hours.”
“It matters not. Our Lord shall endure, as he always has, if a new vessel would serve him better then it gladdens me.” His smile was genuine, if somewhat creepy where part of his mouth had flaked away.
“He’s not going to get the chance.” The vampire assured him, slowly circling him with a predatory confidence she certainly wasn’t feeling.
She’d never, not in life or undeath, not travelling nor on the duelling grounds, come across anyone this powerful.
His every breath put fresh mana in the air and it rolled off him like body heat, possibly even as body heat. His very presence was heating the air to somewhere past boiling point. Amara had seen elementals that didn’t have that much raw strength. No wonder he was falling apart, Charigris had given him a truly absurd amount of power.
And the terrible truth was she had no idea how to fight him. Even with her mana devouring flames… that was a lot of mana to eat through, and she wasn’t sure she had anything else that even could hurt him. Normal magical fire, if there was such a thing, would be little more than oxygen to a flame. Raw heat the same. And for all her superior strength and speed, she’d likely achieve little more than burning her hands… well hand anyway.
In hindsight this had been a terrible plan.
The Speaker made the first move, a ball of blue fire forming between his hands before he clapped them together.
The fireball detonated, the shockwave throwing Amara from her feet and rattling the remaining walls of the courtyard.
She landed in a crouch, and it was fortunate she did for the Speaker nearly ended her in the time it took her to leap once, bounding for a wall and bouncing off of it, the Speaker’s flame following her the whole while.
People often forgot that fire had a kinetic component where it expanded the air rapidly. The Speaker certainly hadn’t forgotten and the second detonation just about ruined her hearing is it battered her against the bricks. She wasn’t going to win this fighting like a vampire.
Amara rolled away from the spear of flames sent to impale her, rising unsteadily to her feet, hand raised in a warding gesture barely in time to catch a second spear on her shield.
“Is this all there is to you?” The Speaker asked, scornful as any jilted lover as he prepared to crush her with an unending conflagration. His intent to just pour flames upon her now she’d stopped running until her shield buckled and she cooked alive. “I expected more.”
“You’ll get it.” She promised through gritted teeth, then flung her own fire at him as he unleashed his final blow. His fire was searingly bright, practically an assault in itself, and she had to look away and even then she could see it through the back of her skull as it rushed at her at the speed of a diving falcon.
Her own fire was simply orange and moved lethargically by comparison. A single candle against a sun but two flames met and her fire won, the mana eating fire racing up his own spell, devouring it and burning it for fuel. Faster and brighter than any fire she had ever cast herself.
For just a moment she saw the alarm in his eyes as his own spell came back at him before he cut his fire off, stepping out of the way for it splash against the wall, the fire chewing through it with a roar like a giant clearing their throat to yell.
Amara didn’t let up the pressure, redirecting her fire to chase after him even as she stepped forwards to close the distance. The Speaker’s glare contained nothing less than hate, finally taking her seriously now.
With a snarl he raised both hands, more of that impossibly hot fire pouring from his fingers like water from a waterfall, his strength deep as an ocean.
This time it was Amara’s turn to be surprised as her fire met his, and it stopped hers dead, feeding on her spell even as hers fed upon his.
“Did you really think you were the only one who knew that little trick?” Her foe sneered, his more powerful flames starting to eat their way up her spell.
In truth she had but if there was anyone else who might have access to how to make a fire consume another person’s mana and magicka it would have been a wildfire elemental. Wildfire elementals consumed everything.
That knowledge didn’t help her here. He’d simply been ready for every weapon in her arsenal, and now, as the fire got steadily closer it sunk in to Amara that she was going to die.
But if she was going to die then it was going to be on her terms. Vampiric flesh when set alight burned hotter than the surface of the sun. A skilled pyromancer could easily amplify that heat tenfold. Amara was both. It was what let her, at the cost of her own flesh, burn through just about anything, as the pile of ash on the bridge testified to.
She couldn’t kill the Speaker or Charigris with mere heat or flame. But the other cultists? The fortress? Their armoury and siege weapons? The top of the mountain itself? She wondered how much of it would be left if she simply ignited herself in her entirety… Not very much she imagined.
Something of her thoughts must have been betrayed in her eyes because the Speaker’s flames now absolutely raced towards her as she prepared to turn the Cult of the Argent Wildfyre into little more than a crater. With just Charigris and the Speaker left she had every faith her friends could finish the job.
Perhaps she should have had more faith in them? A quiet voice in her ear whispered, “Down.”
On reflex she dropped to the floor and the stream of fire passed over her, missing her by several feet.
It was a closer miss than it sounded, with those sorts of heat she was still getting mild burns. When she didn’t die a second later from the Speaker adjusting his aim, she looked up.
The grotesque figure was covered in perfectly black threads, particularly on his arms which were being pulled up by every ounce of strength in Weaver of New Tales’ body as the arachni wove another loop of shadow thread and tossed it around his neck, trying to choke him out.
It was never going to work, Amara doubted he even still had lungs with which to breath, kept alive solely by Charigris’ will, but she appreciated the effort.
The Speaker’s eyes burned, literally burned, with outrage, the empty sockets leaking a slurry of offwhite juice that was rapidly boiling away.
There was a ripple across him as the mana devouring fire rolled over his own body, Weaver’s threads burning up in moments.
The arachni didn’t seem too fussed, not even as he turned that same flame upon her, simply stepping back into the shadow of a wall and vanishing as her voice whispered to Amara. “You don’t kill a fire with heat. You starve it or you smother it. You starve… I’ll smother.”
The vampire’s grin had far too much fang in it as she faced down the Speaker. She might be overpowered but the arachni had reminded her that she wasn’t outclassed, and as for the Speaker?
He was outnumbered.
*
Erebus was getting a little bit tired of being outnumbered. It had been fun at first but just a minute into the fight, after he’d redirected a magma cannon shot centred on Nat’s position without so much as dropping a step, he’d found himself more than a little bit bored with it.
Yew’s staff was holding up incredibly well against the enchanted maul. It turned out that the heartwood of an elder dryad was almost indescribably durable and there were dents in some of the flanges of the maul head that testified to that fact.
The problem was that whilst he could hold off the pyromancers’ flames until the sun exploded, and possibly a little while after that, he had no way to actually kill them. Or rather he had no way to put together a spell of that magnitude without dropping his shield. Even the orb of annihilation was useless. Annihilation did not play well other magics, even a hint of it would have resulted in him becoming, at minimum, medium rare.
The vermilion knight was also depressingly competent if unimaginative, keeping up the attack safe in the assurance that Erebus couldn’t hit him hard enough to hurt him or put together a spell.
The necromancer was using a skin tight shield, something of a risk but he didn’t want to chance the maul getting a glancing blow and it was impossible to live in the Hells for any length of time without being able to control one’s body temperature so he wasn’t as at risk of being roasted by the air as his compatriots.
He needed something to break this stalemate but he had no idea what to use. Part of him wondered if he should have given this fight to Amara, the vampire would have been perfect for it. Her flames overpowering the other pyromancers and more than fast enough to take the knight to pieces but it had been much more important to put her against the Speaker, her mana-devouring flames doubtless making short work of him.
What he needed was something the shields wouldn’t register as an attack. The problem was that he had to get it right the first time or he’d get flambeed where he stood. Fire was very obviously out and he’d already tested lightning. Air blades were just kinetic force by another name, same with most of the quick and dirty geomancy spells.
Entropomancy would certainly crack the shields but it was unlikely to get through to the mages behind them. In other words certain death. Simple raw kinetic force was, not to put too fine a point on it, exhausting. He could probably rend two of them, shields and all, but four was beyond him without putting vitae into it, and he had precious little life left to give.
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But perhaps force was exactly the right answer. Of the four fundamental forces that bound the physical universe together two, the somewhat boringly named strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force, were simply inaccessible by any magic he knew. Not even his vaunted master had known how to bring them to bear in combat.
Electromagnetism had half a dozen arts that touched on one aspect of it, ferromancy, magnetomancy, galvamancy, even pyromancy was technically an expression of it. There was no unforeseen avenue of attack there. Which just left gravity. Humble, stalwart gravity.
Gravitomancy had never had much of a following on Reath, the gods had, wisely, made sure of that. There were ways to manipulate it still, but they amounted to artificially increasing either the mass of the subject or of the gravitational field affecting it. Both hideously inefficient methods of achieving what could be done by the average kinetomancer.
Nonetheless gravitomancy did have a seat on the Council of Mages and would likely find their strength waxing in the near future for one simple reason. One of the aetheric chains affecting gravity was broken.
“Pondus.” There was a sickening crunch as all five of the Argent Wildfyre’s elites collapsed. That wasn’t to say they fell to the floor. Bones cracked, spines popped and joints folded in directions never intended as for a brief moment mere mortal flesh was subjected to the kind of gravity usually found on the surface of large stars. Blood sprayed in all directions, and one spurt caught Erebus in the chest hard enough to leave him gasping.
That had been from the knight, with the armour containing most of him inside, his visor had practically been turned into a high pressure hose as most of the liquid in his body was ejected at speed.
Erebus had seen gorier sights but not many, and he found himself fervently grateful that his robe was waterproof.
It had been terrifyingly easy. And when Erebus thought that he meant it, he’d scared himself with how easy that had been. Once news got out that it was now possible to alter the gravitational constant, the intrinsic number that determined how much mass translated into a given amount of force, it would be carnage on a scale he could scarcely imagine.
Silently he resolved never to cast that spell again. If word got out that for little more mana than needed to boil a kettle it was possible to turn a master mage into little more than a smear on the ground… he failed to suppress a shudder. He prayed the gods would find the strength to make a new chain to constrain gravity.
‘Of course we will. We’re not idiots.’ Pheus’s sneering voice echoed in his mind for just a moment.
Erebus sighed, choosing to pray instead that the god of dreams would go fornicate with a cactus. Unsurprisingly that prayer went unanswered.
His own foes defeated, the unacknowledged archmage took a moment to take in the state of the battlefield. Lana was simply missing. Presumably she’d been keeping fire off of him for most of the fight but he couldn’t swear to it. As much as he remembered the demoness fondly from his torture training in the hells, he had to admit her mind was a mystery to him.
Certainly there weren’t any stray fireballs now. The mages on the bridge were almost all dead and the few that weren’t were desperately trying to hold at bay their ghoulish comrades who were tearing into their former friends with a near-atavistic joy.
If there were any cultists still alive in the rubble they were showing uncommon amounts of common sense by pretending to be dead. Sadly that would prove a poor deterrent to a hungry zombie.
Going by the incredible streams of fire and the occasional explosion in the courtyard, all that remained of significant threat was the Speaker. Once he fell they could take their time carving open the fortress, carefully disarming any traps or failsafes, then drag Charigris into the light of day so that Alice could crush him underfoot.
A brief search showed that Alice, Holly and Alec were still roughly where he’d left them, the trio sheltering against one of the ruined trees.
Holly sensed him first, looking up to meet his eyes and give him a shake of her head. No flankers. Good for them but almost disappointing. If he’d been in charge of the fortress he’d have set up a mirror network to get troops surreptitiously out to flank any foe. Though then again if they’d been expecting an attack mirror-side that would explain the lack.
Now he thought about it he’d bet his soul that there wasn’t a single mirror or shadow in the entire fortress, and the chances of someone stumbling upon wherever Avalon overlapped with them was vanishingly small.
But still he’d have at least gone for tunnels. Some people simply lacked imagination.
Alec also turned to watch him, Sato’s phials, filled with whatever mysterious and unlabelled concoction the precognizant had selected, remained unthrown. That was for the best really.
Having made sure those in his charge were safe and secure he headed for the bridge. It was time to finish this.
*
Now she had a little help, Amara was finding the fight far easier. Weaver was proving an able ally, always striking from odd angles as she wove darkness again and again around Charigris’ Speaker and, whilst the elemental empowered pyromancer always burned the stifling threads, it was certainly annoying him. Especially as it allowed Amara to get some free hits in, her fire burning away a small, fraction of the magicka animating the barely alive Chosen each time.
That might have made it sound like it was just a matter of whittling away at the incandescent mage until his body tore itself apart in a conflagration of flesh and magic but it wasn’t quite that easy. The Speaker kept drawing mana out of the air to refuel himself and though he wasn’t replenishing himself fully it meant the fight was dragging out a lot longer than was comfortable.
It was simple mathematics. They had to get it right every single time. To avoid, neutralize or redirect every single far-too-powerful spell he sent. He only needed to land one once. And where most of the cult had been good with fire, he was downright masterful.
That shockwave of his was particularly frustrating. It was simply too fast to properly prepare for, the kind of practiced motion that he’d clearly done thousands if not tens of thousands of time. The hands would open for just a moment to form a fireball, then compress it and detonate it in the span of a second. Followed almost immediately by a torrent of fire in one of several flavours, be it a superheated blue, mana-devouring blue (a point that annoyed Amara more than she’d like to admit – it rankled that his version of her favourite trick burned hotter) or in a couple cases a literal plasma.
He hadn’t pulled that trick more than twice, the superheated and highly ionized matter did not like being forced in a single direction and had taken enough out of him that the glowing cracks in his flesh had dimmed for a moment.
Both times had nearly been the death of Amara. There was no holding a shield against that kind of insane heat and just being close to it would have been enough to turn her into little more than a shadow on a wall.
Nonetheless very slowly they were winning and she could see the dawning realization in his gaze as he got steadily more desperate and his tactics more varied.
Random pockets of superheated air were forming all around them, and while they would be a sincere threat to her they’d be a death sentence for Weaver, his true target. Frankly the entire area was starting to heat up.
Part of it was simply the side-effect of so much pyromancy being used but there was a more purposeful aspect to it. Mana was no longer rolling off the Speaker like bodyheat, now it simply was heat. No mana to speak of.
There was a dull thump behind her as Weaver fell out of her shadows, too hot to function outside them the arachni feebly crawled back in. Beneath her the ground glowed cherry red as their foe redirected some of the heat to her location.
“And back to just you and me it seems.” He bellowed, having to yell just to be heard over the growing stifling of the air. “A formidable ally. I’ve never had the pleasure of killing an arachni before but they certainly merit their reputation. But now to finish this. You were as serious a threat as I’ve fought, but a dangerous ant is still at the end of the day an ant and…”
The Speaker paused, looking confused where a rather polite hand was tapping his shoulder to get his attention.
“I don’t take kindly to people threatening my wards.” Lana informed him curtly, before driving her thorned blade deep into his gut, twisting it slowly. “Please desist.”
There was no retort from her foe, simply staring at her in empty-eyed disbelief, the flames in his sockets dulling and dying, because nothing should be able to stand that close to him without so much as a mana barrier. Lana pulled the blade free and slowly he dropped to his knees, clutching at his stomach as lava slowly oozed out of the wound, blackening swiftly into stone to clot the cut.
“I advise you stand back child.” The demon of pride told Amara, “This is butcher’s work I’m afraid, too much magic to live yet not enough sense to just die in this one. It will take a while.”
That said she planted her blade in his chest again, and again. A steady, near monotonous stabbing motion as she waited for him to simply use up the elemental power sustaining him.
“How can you be that close to him?” Amara demanded, her own disbelief almost as great as the Speaker’s “I’m a pyromancer and I can barely stand over here right now.”
“I was born a succubus my dear, we are born of fire and chaos.” Lana explained, still stabbing, there weren’t the wet sounds of flesh against steel but a crunching as if she were driving the blade through rock. “Reath’s mages are terribly unworldly. If you wish to truly understand fire you should take a tour of the Hells. Hellfire can burn us. Your mana-eating flames would certainly prove a trial. But mere heat? Never.”
“Okay, next question. Why the Hells was I the one given the Speaker to fight when you’re outright fireproof?!” The vampire demanded, a touch irate, and just a little giddy on the joy of not being dead.
“Oh that’s simple. My ward is an idiot… or at least slow to change how he thinks. You he knows as a master duelist and the person who taught him fire magic. He still sees me as a librarian and occasional torturer.” She shrugged slowly, “It’s made being his bodyguard more than a trifle difficult I must- Oh.”
The stabbing stopped, the Speaker’s hands wrapped around the blade as he held it off with what strength he had left. “I am not some mageling you can just ignore. I am the Chosen of Charigris, Speaker of Wildfire and you will-“
Lana covered his mouth with one hand whilst wrapping his entire head in a silencing charm, “No. You’re little more than an unexploded bomb. Now either explode or shut up while I kill you. Some people, no manners whatsoever. Where were we dear?”
“You called me your ward?” The vampire suggested tentatively.
“Ah yes. I’ve been having a bit of a rethink since events in the Underreath. Erebus and I came to blows over his tendency to risk his life and it occurred to me that he will never accept me looming over his shoulder until the day he dies, so I must go about this differently. More proactively.” She explained, whilst carefully breaking the Speaker’s fingers so he’d let go of her sword. So far he was proving to have quite the grip, most people would have let go by the third finger.
“How does one proactively bodyguard?” Amara asked, genuinely curious and beginning to relax a little.
“Traditionally by eliminating threats to one’s charge before they have a chance to threaten, but Erebus’ case requires a different approach I think. I’ve chosen instead to protect the people he is liable to throw himself into deadly situations over. Had you died he likely would have attempted to duel the wretch himself. Exhausted as he is there is certainly a chance he would fail. Ah, speak of the mortal and he shall appear…”
Amara followed her gaze to see that Natalya and Erebus were indeed approaching them, the two weren’t as relaxed as they were, still scouting for potential threats in case any of the cultists that yet lurked got an acute and fatal case of bravery.
Erebus stared at the rather slow execution, taking it in before shaking his head to clear whatever he was thinking from his mind, “Any problems?” He asked.
He certainly didn’t look exhausted. He looked murderous, his gaze drifting down to the Speaker again with something for which contempt seemed too small a word. Something about the charred ruin of flesh repulsed him, and Amara suspected it wasn’t his appearance. Necromancers regularly dealt with rotting bodies, a little roasted flesh shouldn’t be enough to turn a stomach.
“Plenty of problems.” Amara admitted, “But we handled them.” Not that she was entirely sure that ‘we’ was accurate, she certainly didn’t feel like she deserved credit for this.
“The vampire and arachni discharged themselves commendably.” Lana declared, “This miserable flesh heap expended much power in the battle and was sufficiently distracted by the vampire’s magics for me to come to blows with him.”
It was a technically accurate reading of the battle, or perhaps, Amara realized, she was being too harsh on herself. Egos (the technical term for a pride demon) couldn’t lie, so Lana it seemed had been genuinely impressed by the battle.
Erebus sighed, still staring down at the Speaker as if he were so disgusting he’d rather burn his shoes than scrape him off them. “I wish I could say I enjoyed this bit. All the plotting, the murder, the ambition, and it all ends here and now. But the sad truth is that you’ve already done so much damage we’ll struggle to heal it in a lifetime… but we will heal it. Soon you and the master you serve will be less than a distant memory, unmourned and unmissed. I want you to know that.”
“Careful Ere’ you’re dangerously close to monologuing.” Natalya chided gently, stifling a laugh as she did so.
“I am aren’t I? Very well.” He pressed the orb of annihilation against the Speaker’s chest, and while Charigris’ Chosen might have been able to heal from a plethora of stab-wounds, he couldn’t contend with having his flesh and mana turned into pure light. There was a silent scream from with the muffling charm and then the Speaker went limp, front little more than a hollowed out ruin.
Rather predictably the corpse exploded, but all three of them had been ready for it, the sudden heat washing harmlessly over them. Partly because it simply wasn’t interested in them, the elemental energy surging into what remained of the now deep red glow of the fortress as it returned to its owner.
“I didn’t think we threw around that much heat…” Amara said tentatively, not liking the way the glow was getting brighter as they watched.
“We didn’t.” Erebus assured her, stepping forwards, a spell already changing on the top of his warstaff. “It seems Charigris isn’t going to wait for us to come to him.”
“Well we just killed his cult, his Speaker, and destroyed all his wards without him raising a finger. My guess is that he isn’t much of a fighter. This should be easy.” The vampire noted
The fortress, and much of the mountainside, burst with all the flair and debris of a pumpkin dropped from a great height as Charigris rose from it, and rose, and rose. Their worst case prediction had had the elemental at no more than ten metres at the largest. The real thing could put another zero on that number.
Slowly Erebus turned to face his pyromancy teacher, “You just had to say it didn’t you?”