Mark lowered his gun and returned it to its cylindrical resting state, extinguishing the flare light that he had extended. He sighed as the last vestiges of the identical light on the ground vanished into the cloud cover, grateful that it was now somewhat easier to not think about high up he was.
Horan gritted his teeth as he clasped his hands together. “You… done…?”
“Yeah, sorry.” Mark pushed off from one of the ropes that affixed the Voidfish 1½’s sail to its basket, floating towards where Horan was seated. “Just needed to do something. I’m back. No more thoughts about the edge. Just you.”
“Good,” hissed Horan, “Because I’m just now noticing… that it’s a lot harder to push air around your bubble… when there’s stuff in it.”
“Yeah, and these are some pretty dense clouds too,” said Waia, as she placed both hands on the currently active anti-gravity plate and leeched the building heat from it (for what little practice she had with the trick), slowing down the process of the magic flow overheating and melting it. “There’s ash and stuff in there.”
“Well,” mumbled Quet, who was busy checking the Voidfish 1½’s heading on a compass display being projected out of one of her glyphs, “we can probably head back down beneath the clouds by now. Would help in figuring out our location, and we’re probably out of range of anything the Servants have.”
Waia looked at the perfectly circular tunnel that the Voidfish 1½ left in the cloudstuff it passed through. “With one exception.”
Quet sighed and turned off her compass-glyph. “Okay, fine, barring you-know-who, who we’ll deal with when they inevitably show up, the Servants are long behind us. And as long as Horan keeps the air around us steady and keeps the wind pushing us forward, we’ll probably keep accelerating until… what even stops us, terminal velocity? From a college-physics-textbook standpoint, we’re functionally in space. As far as I know. I never took physics in college.”
“Great to hear it,” growled Horan, who was already angling the wind funnel above the four of them so that the Voidfish 1½ began to turn downward. “You know, Quet, for all your talk about… humans being such giant sources of magic power… Mark isn’t exactly living up to the hype right now…”
Quet nodded at the Egyptian. “I’m sure you’d be feeling a lot better about things if you were a rock specifically designed to channel his ambient magic. Unless you can reach into his soul-guts and get straight to the secret sauce buried deep in there, you take what you get. I– Look, considering that we’re basically a flying exponential graph right now, we can probably cross half of Washington state in… what, an hour? Half?” She looked at Mark with the expectation of clarification.
Mark, unsure of what else to do with his hands while they were on Horan’s shoulders, semi-consciously started giving the Primus a massage as he glowered at Quet. “What? I’m not the one in charge of what parts of this process I suddenly know things about.”
“Of course you don’t,” muttered Waia, as she stared out at the frigid wilderness that had been revealed now that the Voidfish 1½ was back beneath the clouds. “Whoa, we’re going really fast now…” A mountain almost directly in their path, a massive crater where its peak would be, caught her eye. “Oh hey, Mount St. Helens. I’ve seen it on the news a couple times. That makes us, what, halfwa–?”
From the opposite direction Waia was looking in, a shard of something shiny pierced through the clouds, too fast to be identified as it snagged Waia by the collar of her vest like a hook piercing a fish’s lip and yanked her over the edge of the Voidfish 1½.
Quet shot to her feet and pulled herself to the edge of the basket. “Waia!”
Before Quet could present her gloves to avert Waia’s fall, Torch appeared aboard the Voidfish 1½ in a split-second flash of blue light and kicked Quet in the small of her back, sending her tumbling after Waia.
Torch balled their re-gauntleted hands into fists and turned their head to look down at Horan, their mask now free of the cracks that Quet and Horan had left in their last encounter. “These masks are a valuable resource, Egyptian.”
Mark leapt to his feet and drew his knife. Despite using his novel lack of any weight to push himself forward with increased speed, Torch grabbed Mark’s wrist before it could plunge the bowie knife into the curve between their neck and their shoulder. “Mundane,” noted Torch.
“I’ll hand it to you, you at least get to the point.” Mark pulled his gun out of his pants, transformed it into a sawn-off shotgun in the space between grabbing it and holding it up to Torch’s stomach, and pulled the trigger.
The ear-splitting bang and flash of light threw off what little remained of Horan’s focus, and the multiple effects he was sustaining ended all at once. The sudden rush of wind threatened to throw off the three remaining people on the Voidfish 1½ as the air around it was no longer held still, and the craft itself quickly began to slow to a halt. Quet’s still-active anti-gravity matrix was now the only thing keeping the Voidfish 1½ aloft, and it was already beginning to radiate heat around it. Lead had a surprisingly low melting point.
Mark was thrown away from Torch as the Voidfish 1½ was rocked back and forth by the sudden onslaught of wind. He landed on his back against one of the ropes and, drifting back down to the basket, looked up to see Torch successfully maintain their stance, if not without difficulty. Bright blue glyphs spanned the surface of the interlocking plates of their form-fitting chest armor, which spat out the buckshot of Mark’s gun as they popped back into their original shape.
“You assume I did not learn from the previous time you incapacitated me without my consent.” Torch glanced away from Mark and towards Horan. “The Hawaiian and Aztec are still falling. You may still have time to catch one of them if you leave.”
Horan looked to Mark. It was clear from his sweat-covered expression that the question of whether he could make it down in time was not the only concern he had with the idea.
“Go,” muttered Mark. “I’ve killed worse.”
“False,” replied Torch.
“Shut it. Go. Now.”
Once Horan had reluctantly leapt over the edge as well, Mark steadied himself and stashed his gun, leaving his knife fully available. “I’m sure you’d love to maintain this whole air of mystery, buddy, but I know your game. I heard all of it from whatever that was on Rainier; I paid them a trip an hour ago.”
Torch, arms raised offensively, froze for a moment. “…A fabrication. A poor attempt at intimidation. I am the only party on the planet privy to any significant portion of my creator’s intentions.”
Mark snorted. “What, you don’t know about that thing?! Out of all people…!”
“You are stating falsehoods,” insisted Torch, lunging forward and swinging for Mark’s head.
Mark ducked underneath the blow, lifted his legs off the basket, and kicked Torch in the gut with both legs at once. “I dunno, buddy, I know what I saw. Sounds like you’ve got some unaccounted-for variables.”
“Shut it!” Torch pushed away by Mark’s kick, swung around one of the Voidfish 1½’s ropes and redirected their momentum back towards the human. It had begun.
-
Waia grappled at the sword dragging her down towards the ground, hundreds of feet below the Voidfish 1½. The all-too familiar blade twisted around of its own accord as it hurtled towards the snow-covered earth, stopping Waia from getting any kind of grip on it.
Waia growled at the sword as she swiped at her back like a grizzly bear. “Stop moving, you lit–”
She and the sword slammed into the ground. The foot-deep snow cushioned her fall to an extent, but Waia still bounced twice before coming to a stop. The sword disentangled itself from the thoroughly-ripped clothes on Waia’s upper back and flew back up to the green pinprick in the sky.
Lying flat on her back, Waia stared straight up in bewilderment as the air slowly returned to her lungs. She looked up as a small, dark blue light disengaged from the Voidfish 1½ and flew towards the ground, only for Torch’s sword to soar past it. After a moment of floating motionlessly in the air, the light returned to the Voidfish 1½.
Waia pulled herself out of the snow, shifting into her true form for nobody to see. She spotted another green light flash into existence, this one at ground level. Further along the small road that Waia’s impact had revealed, Quet stopped herself from hitting the snow-covered pavement face-first by holding her arms out. A wall of glyphs appeared beneath her, and as she passed through them, her descent slowed to a near-stop and she landed safely on the ground. The glyphs above her shuddered with absorbed momentum and vanished.
Waia walked through the snow towards Quet, melting a circle of clear space around her as she walked unobstructed. She noticed an abandoned gas station on the side of the road as she approached Quet, and the wheels in her head began to turn.
Quet was already shivering by the time Waia melted the snow around her and helped her to her feet. “So, uh… they work fast, huh?”
“Mmm.” Waia looked up at the Voidfish 1½. “Horan and probably Mark are still up there. I gotta get back up.”
Quet folded her arms and silently regretted not finding more weather-appropriate clothes even as a contingency. At least Waia was acting like a space heater on her behalf. “Okay, how? I can’t sustain any effects like flight for more than a few seconds with these gloves. Ugh, they knew we’d be the only ones who can’t get back up! The guys are gonna get slaughtered, and we’re gonna die alone out here!”
Waia turned and started walking towards the gas station a hundred feet away. “I have an idea, actually. Don’t follow me.”
“What…?” Quet’s eyes went wide as she realized what Waia was heading for. “You can’t be serious!”
“Oh, I’m dead serious. We’ll pick you up once I’m done with them. They think they can just come back like…”
Quet stared in dismay as Waia kept on going towards the gas station. At least the now-stationary Voidfish 1½ would make for an easy target. Huffing in frustration and resignation, Quet sat down in the patch of wet pavement that Waia had revealed and soaked in the bitter cold that now invaded her newly mortal body.
She pulled her legs close to her chest and drummed her fingers against the tops of her knees. At least turning mortal hadn’t changed her material situation all that much. Full-fledged Primus or no, she’d still be sitting here, alone and ineffectual. The only real difference was that now she had to fully feel the nature of what and where she’d been saddled with. She sat silently and grimaced as she waited for the fireworks to start ahead of her.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
-
Torch swept Mark’s legs out from under him with a single fluid kick, then shoved the weightless human straight up into the air. The only thing that stopped Mark from flying straight out of the aura of zero-gravity was the limply-floating sail that caught him and slowed his climb.
Torch reached back and caught their sword right when it flew into their hand, then wheeled around just in time to see Horan fly back up to the Voidfish 1½’s level, a new freshly-summoned sword in his hand. “A failure on all fronts,” they said. “To be expected.”
Mark refused to let Horan’s lack of results on either Quet or Waia distract him. Instead, he grabbed one of the ropes connected to the sail and used it to haul himself forward, knife raised in preparation for another futile strike against Torch.
Torch easily blinked out of the way of Mark’s swing, reappearing a few feet off to the side as the human collided with Horan, sending both of them sprawling backwards. The only thing that stopped both of them over the edge of the basket was Mark grabbing one of the ropes again as he flew past, yanking Horan back from the edge of the anti-gravity bubble by the sleeve of his jacket.
Mark sluggishly pulled himself and Horan back to safety, just in time for Torch to slice the rope he was holding onto in two. Immediately, the entire basket listed to the side as Torch kicked off of the corner no longer connected to the sail.
The change of the basket’s angle made the visibly-glowing anti-gravity plate begin to drift away from the center of the Voidfish 1½ and into open air. Horan instinctively flew forward and hooked the plate with the curve of the sword, pulling it back towards the rest of the craft.
Torch slammed a foot into Horan’s back, pressing him into the surface of the basket, which was already almost perpendicular to the ground as the entire Voidfish 1½ slowly spun around in the air. Torch grabbed Horan’s sword-wielding hand and prepared to snap it when a flash of light on the ground, thousands of feet below, distracted them.
“Impressive,” mumbled Torch.
Mark could make an educated guess as to what that explosion heralded. Without a second to lose, he kicked Torch in the back, pushing them off the basket and into open air, neatly bracketed by the basket and sail of the Voidfish 1½. An easy target.
Torch spun around in the open air to face Mark. “You would–?”
“Yee-HAW!”
A blur rocketed through the Voidfish 1½, snatching Torch out of sight almost too fast for the eye to see. It was certainly loud enough to hear, though.
Mark grinned. “Attagirl.”
Waia soared through the air with one hand wrapped around Torch’s windpipe, visibly smoking from being caught at the epicenter of a gas station-sized explosion. Grinning ear to ear, she flicked Torch’s cracked mask off of their face with her thumb with the ease of someone opening a beer bottle. “Aloha!”
With her free hand, Waia hefted a stout canister of propane, gripped by the handle. Torch’s icy blue eyes went from the mask tumbling out of sight to the basketball-sized canister, and their face flipped from indignation to confusion.
Waia swung the canister like a tennis racket directly into Torch’s face, letting go the instant before impact so that they were sent flying down towards the ground. A thin trail of blood streamed through the air in Torch’s wake. Quickly, Waia spun in the air so that her back faced Torch, held the propane canister close to her chest, gripped it with both hands, and began heating the metal. Her fight with the Chosen had taught her a thing or two about managing her own momentum.
Torch grabbed their sword and let it pull them out of the way a split-second before a second explosion somewhere above them sent Waia bouncing down on a collision course for where they had been. Torch swung themself up so that their feet were planted on their sword’s blade, wiped away the blood spilling out of their broken nose, and began scanning the white expanse of Mount St. Helens’ side for their white mask. Already, they had to hold back a snarl as the bones of their face popped back into place of their own accord. This could make for a problem.
Waia landed back in the snow and was on her feet in less than a second. At least the problem hadn’t been her that time. She looked up and easily spotted a trail of ethereal blue light that skimmed the side of the mountain a couple hundred feet ahead. Wow, that explosion had taken her all the way to Mount St. Helens? Gas stations were no joke.
Waia sprinted along the side of the mountain, melting the snow ahead of her to make a clear path. “Hey!” she called out. “You gonna keep trying to ignore me, or are you gonna make this best of three for real?!”
Torch gritted their teeth and kept looking for their mask. They only had one more in reserve back in Portland after the Hawaiian and her hangers-on had burned through their stockpile as if it was nothing, and they could not afford to enter the final phase without that protection. They chided themself for losing their gloves to that Aztec nobody.
“I’m talking to you!” shouted Waia. “You’re not backing out of this now!”
Torch silently retracted their earlier statement of being impressed with the Hawaiian’s creativity. She remained an idiot.
They pulled away from the mountainside right before Waia leapt up at them. Had they disengaged half a second later, she would have pulled them to the ground like an alligator dragging a gazelle into a river. They would have to come back for the mask later, once the Hawaiian wasn’t guarding its hiding place and they could start implementing what little magic they could manage without those gloves.
-
Tears stung as they froze against Quet’s cheeks. Crying was stupid right now, but it wasn’t exactly something she could turn off at will. She knelt in the partially-melted snow, just close enough to the flaming wreckage of the gas station to not get heatstroke or whatever. Because that was something to deal with now.
Quet wiped away whatever was leaking out of her nose, then grimaced at the sensation and flicked it away. She stared at her hand as it passed in front of her face, then turned it around and examined the glove.
These gloves were the only thing she had gotten out of what was easily in the top 10 worst days of her life. It felt like some cruel joke: Losing everything but her magical knowledge, then receiving a mystical artifact that made it clear after all this time that that magic meant nothing. A consolation prize for the one Primus out of thousands to need it as a crutch.
She looked up at the dark grey silhouette of Mount St. Helens. A speck of orange light swiped at a smaller mote of blue light, which pulled away from the mountain and headed up towards a slightly larger speck of green. Nothing but specks. It wasn’t like she was doing much better.
Back down to the gloves. Maybe Torch had made it easy for her to steal them on purpose, as some kind of cruel joke. They were almost in the uncanny valley of her magical experience – the practicality of its Mapuche foundations handicapped by the short-lived flashiness of its Assyrian imitation. Almost saying to her face how she wasn’t worthy of using them.
And what could Torch have ever gotten out of them? The gloves couldn’t make anything; they were no help for anyone who wasn’t already a magical savant. They just projected blueprints out of their users’ head. Unless one could near-preternaturally recall complex matrices, all they did was simplify Assyrian into…
…Thing was, Quet had a lot of experience with blueprints.
She looked back up at the rising blue speck. Some short-lived flashiness could be just the thing.
-
Torch winced in pain as they felt new teeth regrow to take the place of the ones that Waia had knocked out of their skull. Each new calcified layer destabilized them more and more, and they could feel their body struggling to hold itself together without that mask.
They looked back up and set their jaw as they approached the Voidfish 1½ aboard their blade. Things weren’t going perfect right now, but they had already dispatched one of the unwanted factors, and the remaining one had minimal protection. That, at least, would simplify the mess that this had become.
The Voidfish 1½ had slowly resumed movement. In a last-ditch escape attempt, the Egyptian was evidently attempting to resume the craft’s original course. Foolhardy. There was no escape for him.
The Egyptian stood in the center of the Voidfish 1½, one arm outstretched towards the sail while the other desperately blasted the red-hot anti-gravity plate with frigid air. Between him and them, the human glared at Torch as they raced towards the lopsided craft, silhouetted by the red glow of the metal plate behind him. With deliberate care, he drew his gun, shaped it into a modest pistol, and aimed it at Torch.
Before either side could engage the standoff properly, Torch’s sword slowed to a halt in the air.
Mark lowered his gun in confusion, then looked past Torch and stared in shock.
A vast tract of snow on the ground, multiple square miles at least, lit up in a bright green haze, illuminating Torch and the Voidfish 1½ brighter than any mere daylight could ever do. The remaining momentum that kept Torch’s sword aloft ran out, and both they and their blade hurtled back down towards the side of Mount St. Helens with meteroric speed. Gravity had been increased tenfold.
The glyphs along the blade of Torch’s sword strained and flickered as it fought against the massive increase in weight of both itself and its passenger. All it could do, however, was slightly slow down its descent. Torch scrambled to hold onto the crossguard as their own weight worked to rip them from the sword. They gritted their teeth and hissed, feeling their bones struggle against the force holding their body together. “…Azte–!”
A wave of snow was thrown up as Torch slammed into the ground, creating a large crater around them. The snow on the edge of the crater piled into the new depression, desperate for any way to get lower. Torch thrashed and snarled as the snow piled up on top of them and threatened to bury them, but the more they struggled, the more loose snow surged onto them.
The sound of loose boulders and snowdrifts being ripped from their resting places to be sent rolling down the mountainside echoed all around Torch as they fought against their icy restraints. Through the sea of noise and green light, Quet calmly hovered a foot above the top layer of snow, a circle of clear, glyph-free space following her. She drifted through the air towards the thrashing pile of snow restraining Torch, her cardigan billowing around her torso from the lack of gravity around her.
Quet examined Torch’s makeshift prison. “You know, I was always wondering in the back of my head why you only brought these things out now. I mean, it’s so far looked like you’ve just been using them for training wheels, rather than anything else. But I realized something just now: No maximum effective range other than the distance you can accurately visualize their presence in, plus the fact that they don’t need to bring matrices in one glyph at a time or anything, makes for…” She gestured around her at the ocean of green covering the side of the mountain. “No wonder you were saving these for the last minute! These things make all the practical limitations of magic vanish! It’s been a house of cards this whole time!”
The glyphs maintaining the increased-gravity effect sputtered and died, having run their limited course. Torch instantly surged out from underneath the snow, but before they could reach Quet, she lifted an arm and another square patch of identical glyphs appeared three feet above Torch’s head, immediately pinning them back down in the snow.
“And I–I don’t even think you realized that!” exclaimed Quet. “If you properly understood what these things could do in the right hands, you would’ve… I dunno, covered the entire building Horan and I were hiding in in fire glyphs and left. You could’ve gotten rid of us in seconds, but you didn’t even realize what you’d made!”
She smirked. “Or, of course, maybe you just aren’t good enough with magic to produce matrices on such a reflexive level. It’s a real shame for you, then, that these gloves ended up in the hands of someone who’s spent the past five hundred years taking an interest in magic to a degree that I have been informed by outside observers is not normal.”
A sinewy, impossibly long arm emerged from the snow, swiping blindly at the space near Quet with yellowed, serrated talons. Quet made sure to pull herself out of Torch’s reach and apply a fresh patch of gravity glyphs. “…Weirdo.”
Waia trudged forward to take Quet’s side, staring at the roiling mass barely contained by the snow. “…Man, that’s really all it took? Some heavy snow?”
Quet shrugged and looked down at the Hawaiian, kicking her legs idly in the air. “I take what I can get. Sorry if I caught you in that first part, by the way. I wasn’t sure where exactly in the air Torch was relative to me, so I had to cast a wide net.”
“Nah, I was fine. I weigh a hundred and sixty pounds. I might’ve noticed if I switched to my seven-foot-tall gold-blood body, but I could also probably bench-press a yacht without Amping, so whatever.” Waia rolled her shoulders. “So now what? Wanna make a ledge for me to elbow drop ‘em from?”
“Actually, the anti-gravity plate keeping Mark and Horan afloat is probably gonna melt into uselessness in, like, ten seconds, so I say we deal with that and move on.”
Waia looked up at Quet in confusion. “I–? Torch is right the–”
“Folding space!” Quet waved a hand and the space containing Waia shrank into nothing. The Aztec chuckled and looked down at Torch. “Magic rules. Anyway, I’m gonna push you underground now. Have fun getting suffocated, idiot.”
She waved her hand again, the snow around Torch lit up once more, they were abruptly sucked downward, and the snow grew still. With that, Quet vanished in turn. That itself might have been a bit much, the increased weight from Waia had a chance of burning out the anti-gravity plate early. But hey, it had been plenty of time for Quet to get a lot of stuff out of her system. That by itself was worth it.