10.
Finding the Pillar wasn’t difficult. The difficulty was in everything else was also trying to find it. Mutated animals, monsters, and humans were all crawling out the woodwork and whatever hidey holes they had sequestered themselves in. Santi was forced to cast spells at a blistering pace.
Mutated birds were wrenched out of the air and cast to the ground, frail bones shattering. Something big, ugly, and with wings shrieked at them before wheeling away when it watched a flight of birds crash to the ground. The girls were stuck with the things that came bolting out of the countryside and over the interstate they traveled.
Peak Initiate level goblins, a lost primus, and some lizard monsters that scuttled about in bronze armor. Chloe met them head on without hesitation, her axe a black blur as bodies were dismantled around her. Hana danced in the backlines, disappearing and then reappearing to ram her knife into something’s vitals. She lacked the sheer brutality of Chloe or Santi’s overwhelming power, but she could kill with a practical ruthlessness that was hard to match.
“Santi! What the fuck are those?” Chloe screamed as something trundled out onto the interstate from an abandoned rest station. They were bears. Kinda. Big, hairy, sloped shoulders and triangular heads with beady black eyes. Yellow canines jutted from their jaws as they sniffed with inquisitive, wet, black noses. They rose to their hind legs, towering above all as they looked around with beady eyes.
It was just the pair were the size of a house.
Mutated Short-Faced Bear lvl. 52
Mutated Short-Faced Bear lvl. 54
“We fighting them?” Hana whispered, eyes wide as she took in the North American monstrosities.
“Fuck yeah.” Santi hit a sprint, morph spreading and turning into a long boar spear as he closed in on the two monsters. The lone primus strayed too close, beating its chest and the bear reached out with casual authority and swatted the primus’s head free of its shoulders.
His heart sang as the lower leveled one fell forward, landing with a crushing boom that shook the earth under Santi’s feet. The ground rippled forth in a wave and Santi leapt with grace, taking flight briefly as he rose up and over the quadruped, sun shining behind him as he began to fall.
The spear stretched out and the magical blade sheared flesh, fat, muscle and bone, reaching for vital organs as the bear roared in agony.
It shrugged its great shoulders and Santi was flung like he had been slapped out of the air. The space around the bear simply rejected his presence, slamming him away from the monster.
Santi spun in mid air, landing light and easy on his feet as he took in the monster and reevaluated it. Not an earth affinity monster then. Something closer to space or mass. Annoying.
“Careful, don’t get too close. It’s in complete control of its immediate surroundings,” Santi called out, warning the two women before they could get too close. The monster was a hard counter to Hana if it could sense her getting close.
The second monster continued to shuffle away, ignoring its partner as it moved across the interstate and disappeared into the rampant dried brush. Santi watched it carefully with one eye while his other was on the second mountain of fur and fang in front of him.
The wounded bear was snuffling and licking at its wound, wine red blood staining its pale gray coat. The tongue was dark and purple and much too long.Santi cast [Crosscurrent-Orb] at the beast’s face. The gale force winds ripped at its flesh, flattening its fur and caused its jowls to ripple. It ducked its head and sneezed violently, but otherwise seemed not bothered at all by his most violent attack.
“Really need a new spell form,” Santi murmured as he closed the distance carefully. He prodded at the bear with his morph stretched out to its current fullest extent. The wounds were middling, more irritant than deadly to the bear as it shuffled forward toward him, slowly gathering speed.
Space shrank as with each slow, lumbering step the bear traveled further than it should.
“NOW!” Santi yelled, hoping that while it controlled space to chase him, it couldn’t stop either of the girls. He jumped at the bear, a manic smile unnoticed on his face, the long spear transforming into a cruel axe as he swiped down to split flesh from bone.
The bear’s mighty paw rose and glinting black claws hit the axe and the axe blade slid off, redirected in an instant. Santi split the interstate in twain, the axe head burying itself deep as the bear smiled at him from only feet away. A bolt of fear rattled him, shaking the surging adrenaline and desire for bloodshed.
Santi cast three [Air Shield]s in a row and watched as all three were destroyed with a contemptuous swipe of a paw. It had bought him a moment and that’s all he needed to jerk back and create a bit of space. The bear took a single step and crossed the distance, but spun and growled as Chloe slammed into it, her axe slicing its flank.
Hana appeared, spells falling away as she rammed home a long dagger into its turned neck, ripping and tearing as she ran away. [Air Shield] slowed the bear’s sudden head turn from killing Hana as she darted away.
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As it turned back and forth to confront the three of them, Santi began to whittle it away. His more rational mind taking control of his bloodlust as they worked with mechanical precision. They had trained for something like this, for hunting more powerful monsters. Without Cameron and his shielding abilities it was up to Santi to play the role of frontliner while Chloe moved to damage while Hana looked for a weakness.
It wasn’t pretty. A half hundred wounds turned the bear into a tapestry of red, its howls and roars ignored as its more powerful brethren never returned. Santi was panting, gasping and clutching at his willpower as the heady copper scent of blood filled the air. Santi feinted, stabbing at an eye and the bear raised its head, jaw snapping at the spear point. Hana darted in, sliding under and slashing again at where she had already cut it.
A geyser of red jetted out, blood staining the ground and Hana as she failed to get out of the way fast enough. Santi was forced to cast again to prevent a stomping foot while Chloe hit the beast with a shoulder charge before it could chase Hana. It staggered about, eyes glazed over in fury and blood loss as it failed to make a decision. The decision was taken from it as its tree trunk thick legs buckled and it collapsed to the ground.
The kill notification was appreciated but Santi was already urging them forward. He left the bear to molder, the weight of a thousands of pounds of meat sitting to rot in the hot sun. If he had a crew with him the harvest would have been plentiful, but he had to keep moving. The closest pillar was going to be a hotbed of activity and he was determined to see it belong to him.
Neither of the girls said anything to him even if they were coated head to toe in tacky blood. Santi recognized his own state as being slightly cleaner, his weapon allowing him the distance needed to avoid the sprays of blood. Part of him wished he was coated though. That the blood of his defeated floes dripped off of him, a testament to his skills and power.
“Hana, get up and ahead of us. The Pillar should be close by, it looks like it landed in the middle of that town up ahead,” Santi said, nodding at a sun faded green population sign. The smoke of the arrival of the pillar was rising high as a beacon, alerting all to what was coming.
Hana nodded, face tight with a mix of anger and displeasure, but she did as she was ordered. Her light bending wrapped her up and made her disappear and a moment later Santi felt her leave his sphere of omniscience.
“I don’t think you have that curse under control like you were telling us,” Chloe said as they slowed down from their blistering pace into a steadier march. An overpass was coming up which would allow them a decent view of the small town and the two of them walked as they started up it.
“It’s a bit more insidious than I thought it was. It got me there for a minute, but I got it back under control,” Santi said as they got to the top of the overpass and looked down. It was another one of the small towns that dotted the Sacramento valley, formerly a farming town that had slowly withered as the locals were bought out and driven off.
A fifty foot tall sliver of silver rose like a pin from the ground, dwarfing everything in height. It was buried through the heart of a brick store and steam and smoke wafted off of it. All around it battles raged. Humans were the dominant group, in ragged clothes and fighting with a mix of weapons, they killed and died in small clusters. Santi watched as one group turned and fought another, two men dying under a woman’s blister red, skill wreathed fists.
“ Something funky is going on down there. They’re not unified, maybe competing factions?” Chloe hypothesized as she watched, slinging her axe over her shoulder. Santi nodded his agreement while he waited for Hana to get back.
“What’s the plan chief? We go in there, crack some skulls, kill some monsters, and you take the Pillar?”
“That could be what we do. Need to see what Hana has to say. I don’t think cutting a bloody swathe through that melee would be the best for me right now.”
“Oh, you think?” Chloe smiled as she needled him. She didn’t flinch from the bloodshed, from the hard realities. There was a true core of steel in her that would carry her far if she could stay alive. If Santi didn’t drag her down with his personal dilemmas.
“I was thinking about first date ideas.” Santi raised an eyebrow and turned to her.
“I think we should go on a picnic,” Chloe suggested eagerly.
“I think you’re just trying to get me to cook for you again,” Santi smiled at her as he discerned her intentions.
“Ughhh, can you blame me? Been eating those nutrition sticks for weeks and finally get one real meal and now we have to go back to the sticks.”
“Better than being hungry.”
“Just because it could be worse, doesn’t mean it’s not bad.”
“True that. But, yes, I accept your proposal of a picnic.”
“Excellent!” Chloe beamed at him with a wide smile and Santi felt himself responding back.
“You two done?” Hana asked as she stood right outside of his sphere.
“Now you know how all of us feel when you and Daniel do couple stuff in front of us,” Santi retorted. Chloe just shrugged, not caring at all.
“What’s it looking like down there, besides the scrum.”
“Three factions of humans. They each have a small camp off to the side and are busy fighting each other. Playing keep away with your pillar. I don’t know if any of them really want it, none are being aggressive about putting their reserves forward to claim it. Maybe sixty of them all together with another twenty or so in the actual fight. Monsters aren’t organized at all aside from those lizards in armor. Just a few Acolyte monsters, all of them weak.”
“So far.”
“So far,” Hana agreed as she sipped on some water.
“March down there, crack skulls, kill monsters, and take what you want?” Chloe asked again.
“Let’s see if we can avoid cracking skulls. Hana in your quick in and out, did you see any of them that looked like they’d be willing to talk or at least not try to kill us immediately?”
“One of the groups has skulls, human mind you, hanging from chains. All men, no children with them, no women, no younger men either. Second group is a mix of middle aged people and they’re the ones who are playing it the most defensively. They’re also the smallest, but that woman down there with the red fists is with them. The last group is like us, younger and more flexible. They’re mixing it up without a care in the world, but they’re also killing the others whenever someone steps in front of them.”
“A group of killer assholes, careful middle aged fighters with a heavy weight, or a bunch of younger hot heads. Those are my options?”
“Yeah.”
“Chloe, I think we’re going to get to crack some skulls.”