76 – Betrayal

Melina grunted a very contrite yes, and she and Lisette swiftly disappeared, dashing back into the gas and fluid filled room that separated them from their mechanical pursuer. They hid in the corners, using the intermittent lights and shadows to their advantage, since it seemed that the automaton was using visible light to track them. Had it been using magic, they would have shone like beacons to his sight, but it lost track of them whenever they hid in a gas cloud of behind corners, instead choosing to smash entire sections of the underground complex in its chase, revealing the hollow spaces beyond the walls that they had all believed made of solid stone until a few minutes ago.

Their task was simple in theory, harder to put into practice. They needed to keep the monstrous being of steam and metal occupied for long enough to allow Ishrin to perform whatever ritual he had in mind, which could turn the tides of the battle. None of the two questioned whether the ritual could indeed change the outcome of their predicament, trusting Ishrin and his seemingly endless supply of strange things and situationally relevant rituals he could pull out of his hat at a moment’s notice. He had confessed to them, back towards the earlier days of their acquaintance, that he knew more rituals and spells than he could remember at any given time, even with a cultivator’s mind. They just… came to him, that’s what he said, when he needed them most. Back then it had been hard for them to picture what he really meant by that, and they did not know him well enough to really understand the scope of his powers. They mostly thought—or at least she did—that he was simply boasting.

Now she knew he was not. And she also knew another thing: when he had mentioned that his cultivator’s mind could not keep in memory everything he knew about magic, he had not meant his current mind. No, he was talking about a Tier 15 mind. She wondered just how the knowledge had managed to survive his Tier loss back to Tier 0, and whether he had lost some of it and simply didn’t know it yet. It mattered little, since she suspected that even if only a minuscule part of his knowledge had survived, it would still put all of her and Lisette’s knowledge combined to shame. She wondered, as she ran through the corridors, if all higher tiered cultivators were that monstrous, or if he was the exception. Her mind struggled to wrap itself around the kinds of power required to reach those tiers, and what it took to reach those heights. Just what kind of power would someone amass in the time it took to ascend to those far reaches of cultivation?

Then the battle was on, and her thoughts refocused on what she needed to do in the present. The next time the automaton tried to grab them, they climbed on the arm and up. The machine tried to shake them off, ripping the whole ceiling of the room out in the process, and Melina felt her grip weaken. She knew that Lisette was not faring much better, judging by the strain clearly visible on her face.

Indeed, Lisette suddenly looked down only to find out that she was several dozen meters up in the air, pulled up by the jerking motion of the automaton, and all around her were rusty support beams covered in grease and gas condensations, with countless appendages coming from the automaton like snakes that were converging on her to catch her fall and kill her. She tried to hold on, but her hand was slipping on the smooth metal. She didn’t want to let go of her blades but if she had to, then she would gladly sacrifice them to it, even though it would mean that the whole trip to the ruins was in vain. For a moment, right when it looked like there was no other option, she felt sad for being the reason they were in this strange predicament in the first place.

Suddenly a hand, strong and safe wrapped itself tightly around hers. It was Melina’s, she realized with relief, and she was pulled up to relative safety to a better foothold, then saw that Melina nodded at her with a smile and dashed away again. Lisette did the same, avoiding the tendrils converging on her that only managed to hit the automaton itself, and she kept climbing up the body of the machine like a little ant causing all sorts of trouble along the way. Every time she saw something she could cut she did, plunging her blades that shone with a red aura of blood, and battle, and then she was out and away before the machine could react. Its body was too big for it to move fast enough, after all.

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It was a losing battle, however. The damage they managed to inflict was negligible, and the automaton was more annoyed at the fact that it couldn’t seem to touch the two girls than anything else. If an automaton could even show annoyance, that is, but it felt like its strikes were getting wilder and more dangerous, as if anger was fueling them. As for the girls, all it would take for them to be taken out of the fight possibly permanently was one hit with those crystal tipped harpoons the automaton had for appendages, and the machine seemed to be adapting its strategy too, multiplying its tentacles and its harpoons, sending out flurries of attacks that were becoming harder and harder to dodge.

But it didn’t matter. They would only have to keep dodging for another few seconds. Their role here was to distract their enemy, and they were being very effective at that. The machine seemed to have completely forgotten about Ishrin casting his ritual from a hidden corner of the far room, and it only realized its mistake when it was too late.

The girls jumped off, gliding and sliding on the beams. The ritual reached completion, coming to life as a series of concentric circles around Ishrin that wound themselves tighter and tighter, until eventually he clasped his hands together and pointed at the automaton. It was hidden by what was left of the roof, but it wasn’t a problem.

The circles exploded out in a cloud of energy, and from where he was pointing a ray of cold energy, so cold that the whole room was instantly frozen over and the very air became still, erupted out. It pierced the thick metal ceiling of the room like it was tinfoil and continued towards the automaton. Wherever they ray touched, everything froze. At first it was the metal plates, losing their wetness to gain a sheen luster of frost, but then it spread to the joints, to the arms, and the movements of the automaton started to grow slow and clunky in a matter of instants, and the cold spread more and more, penetrating inside, robbing the machine of the heat that kept it alive, stilling the moving parts, condensing the steam into water, into ice that grew in volume and exploded its conduits.

The frost didn’t stop. The metal plates began to crack and crumble, their temperature going from red-hot to being too cold to resist the physical force of the ray and the weight of the metal they were supposed to support, and the giant hulking machine first collapsed to a side then, as it fell, it snapped in half.

A yell. No, a scream. It was not the yell of victory the girls were expecting, but it was a scream of pain followed by a string of curses. The voice was that of Ishrin, but as more and more curses came out of his mouth, his pained voice seemed to shift and twist grotesquely, becoming slimy and sadistic.

Melina and Lisette turned around immediately.

The blinding light of the ritual dimmed.

The outer circles crumbled.

Energies run amok, scattering through the room. They hit everything, forming icicles on the walls, freezing the gooey fluid that had flooded the room. Melina made a shield of wind to divert them, and protected Lisette with it too, but they couldn’t see what was happening.

“What the fuck are you doing?” They heard Ishrin scream, maddened, enraged, in pain. “I’m going to kill you, you asshole.”

They tried to move against the pressure of the icy wind.

Ishrin was targeting something else now that the automaton was gone, but they couldn’t see exactly what, save that they were being caught in the crossfire. It wasn’t like Ishrin not to be mindful of his companions, but with how angry and mad his voice sounded, they didn’t think he was lucid enough to care.

Slowly the ritual seemed to run out of energy, the frost turning to hail, then to snow, then to rain.

They could see him now, standing crooked and curved, around him the statues of four people encased in ice. One of them was closest to him, and it was holding a knife tipped with crystal. On its surface a thick coating of now frozen blood was visible, Ishrin’s blood, still dripping down at the moment when the ray of energy had hit and completely arrested its motion, freezing the offending weapon in space and time.