As he downed the stamina potion, Kite missed the comfortable warmth of auntie Dove’s stamina restoring pills. Even though this was one of the more expensive potions with actual decent taste, it just wasn’t the same.
“Of all the times for homesickness to rear its head,” he inwardly mused before turning his attention back to what Ryker was saying.
After the flare was deployed by the mercenaries, Kite and Amica had withdrawn to the back of the adventurer ambush to try and find what little time they could to recover, because even with monsters creeping up into the city they were sure that there would be quite the response to their location being marked like that.
“-and us downing two of their silvers, even if they were core-users, is a step in the right direction. Expect things to get a lot more messy and spread out when their reinforcements start arriving,” Ryker said while keeping an eye on the other adventurers driving off an injured trio of silver-ranked mercenaries. Kite could see opportunistic attacks from their side hoping to catch one of the enemies off-guard, but had to give it to the mercs; they had pivoted into an ordered retreat quickly once the situation turned on them, using some of their more potent defenses to disengage.
“You know your roles and where to fall back and switch when needed?” Ryker asked the two, receiving nods in response. “Good. We-”
Ryker’s words were interrupted, however, as a pillar of flame descended from the sky. If it was an attack, it was either aimed badly or had different idea of proper targets, because it struck one of the houses just outside the side street where the adventurers had set up their ambush. Said house was immediately disintegrated into a cloud of ash as even the normal-ranked stone seemed to be consumed in the fires. Other sparks were seen in the roiling haze, illuminating the silhouettes of five people and a moment later, the direction of the ash cloud shifted as if the billowing detonation simply reversed.
The maelstrom of ash and cinder only lasted a few seconds, and when it vanished Kite could finally get a clear view of the new arrivals; five silver rankers, their auras not showing a trace of cores as their spirits expanded outward.
As the last of the ash was drawn into a dark sphere floating over the hand of the human man at the front of the group, he looked around at what embers remained inside the charred building, casting him and what Kite assumed to be his team in an ominous orange glow.
“Franz, you magnificent man! Full score for that one. What an entrance!”
Taking a step forward, the man smiled at the gathered adventurers visible in the side street as well as towards the other beleaguered mercenaries. It was a wide smile which seemed a bit out of place in the situation, but the handsome man radiated it with an unflinching confidence.
“I’ll have to give it to you all! You did well in hiding for more than a few minutes in a city such as this. It’s nice and all, but all of this ‘cramped island with limited space to run’ really cramps one’s style at times, no? Either way, I-”
His loud and rather flamboyant speech was interrupted as three twined-together tendrils of magically reinforced and sharpened cloth struck at the man, crossing the distance in an eyeblink. Kite recognized one of Ryker’s more versatile special attacks, which should normally be able to punch through even the gleaming metal armor that the smiling man was wearing. But the attack which Kite had witnessed impaling three silver-ranked monsters simultaneously instead met the dark orb in the man’s hand, disappearing into it as if through a hole before the cloth tendrils went taut.
“Rude!” the smiling man complained. “We’ll get to fighting. Can’t a guy just get to enjoy himself a little first?”
As he spoke, the orb in the man’s hand seemed to continue to pull at the cloth connecting it to Ryker, the team leader slowly being dragged closer and closer along the street even as he clearly tried to dig his heels in as well as other tendrils of cloth shooting out to anchor him in the nearby street and stone.
Realizing it was a lost cause, Ryker instead severed the cloth in short order before being dragged any closer, and the loose part was dragged in and devoured in a blink.
“I hate talkers,” was the only thing Ryker said in response, more enchanted cloth winding itself out and around his limbs as the runes were activated. Kite had always been fascinated with how his teacher used the enchanted fibers to empower himself, and from the mana he was channeling into the augments at the moment, it was clear that Ryker Lansar was preparing for things to get brutal. “Gauntlet, you know what to do.”
As he finished, Ryker gave a hand signal, and Kite could feel the ambient mana starting to churn as several summoning rituals were enacted in the houses and alleys around them. While Kite himself did not have any such powers, several others in the teams of the task group did. Summons were incredibly useful as long as one had the time to actually enact the rituals, and the teams had prepared the circles well ahead of time.
“Shame, since I really love talking!” the smiling man called back, his head cocking to the side as he too felt the rituals go off. “It’s good to just put some of what you want into words, you know? And a good way to get your people into position too,” he said, his smile widening. “It even seems like we had the same idea.”
Even before he finished, Kite could sense more rituals going off in the distance, as well as people starting to move in on the city block which the adventurers had prepared. Quite a lot of them, too.
“Ladies and gentlemen, time to earn that danger-pay!”
“Gauntlet, engage!”
As the two commands were spoken almost in unison, it seems like fate agreed that it was time to let the budding calamity spring to full bloom. Nearby buildings were shredded as the summons of both sides burst into action. Kite saw what looked like a living sandstorm burst through the walls of a house to clash with a walking iron maiden sporting a swarm of levitating spikes around it while small, crystal beetles scuttled beneath them to charge in among the opponents before exploding. Essence-users, adventurers and enemies both, rose into the skies from among the houses, and the air was quickly turning into a chaotic mess of spells and attacks.
With one enhanced sprint, Ryker dove straight for the smiling man, who could only be the leader of the mercenaries, while Emilio appeared and started harassing the rear of the team before them. Gray Sky, Sztyka and Amica all joined in, mana surging and powers unleashed. Kite wanted to join in as well, but had been assigned other priorities first; ones that he meant to fulfill to the best of his abilities. Mtanga and Christine were likewise otherwise occupied, and from the violence that was rapidly unfurling and spreading into adjacent parts of the city, what they were working on would soon be much needed.
As he moved, ducking beneath a stray spell and averting a pair of launched iron spikes with his barriers, Kite tried his best to get a count of the two sides.
Task Group Gauntlet should currently have sixteen silver-rankers on their side, all well trained and chosen. The summons were harder to count as Christine's crystal beetles came from a hive growing in a nearby cellar and continuously spawning new little drones, but Kite thought that there would be at least eight of them if the hive was what counted.
As to their enemies, Kite managed to note eighteen of the mercenaries with at least eight more core-users. Their summons were even harder to account for as they descended on the city block from all directions, so Kite just assumed that they were numerous. And as the teams from Gauntlet were already outnumbered, he hoped that the powers of his path would allow him to even the scores along with the defenses they had prepared.
Said defenses soon made themselves known as two of the core-users came charging as Kite when he was moving one street over, one brandishing a long estoc as he lunged towards Kite in an empowered leap, the point of the weapon shuddering with resonating force.
“Ward!”
The first barrier of Heaven-and-Void Warding cracked under the assault, but the second held, leading to the man smashing bodily into Kite’s barrier as the point slid off the magical disc all while being pelted with tiny projectiles, courtesy of Kite’s new shield.
Stepping up and into the air to avoid a shockwave of rippling earth spikes from the other, more cautious core-user, Kite used four of his arms to grapple the man and throw him towards the wall behind him while one remaining arm used the chitinous shield to intercept another projectile.
“Simplicity and directness,” Kite thought, trying to emulate what master Zarth-an had taught him as the leonid had lit the spark of inspiration when it came to his fighting style. As the man struck the wall behind, Kite swung his staff into the side of the man’s knee, where Void-Sunders-Firmament ripped part of it to shreds.
While Kite’s first instinct had to be to go for a flurry of mana-draining attacks, it wasn’t what he was here for at the moment. These two were only a distraction that he should leave behind, and the best way for that was to make sure that they couldn’t move. And stayed as long as possible with what came next.
“Aaaaa- I’ll get you- AAAAHH!” the man tried to shout, but was interrupted when the wall behind him lit up, revealing a magic circle which shot out tethers of lightning to ensnare the hobbled man.
The core-user tried to get away, but the tethers kept drawing him closer while his injured leg kept buckling beneath his attempts. With a flick of his wrist, Kite dispelled another projectile from the unrestrained foe before jumping at him with some of the stored power from Unyielding. The man’s inexperience of actually fighting someone of his rank showed as he flinched back from the flashing strikes from Matra’s descendants, even if said attacks were mere stinging feints.
“Cut the base, and the tree falls,” Kite thought as his true strike, another heavy blow of his combat staff, swept the man off his feet. Kite thought he could hear something crack inside the shinbone of the man as he stomped down on the leg even as the stun of twin Chakra Implosions from the feints stunned the man further.
“Glint, if you please?” he grunted as he bent down and heaved the other man towards the wall as well, where another lightning tether trap triggered. Neither of the pair of struggling men had the time to right themselves before globes of water enveloped them, the liquid joining into one single sphere which insides continuously flashed with sparks of lighting.
“Thanks, little beauty,” Kite sent through their bond as he once more started running towards a nearby intersection while leaving the two struggling core-users behind him. Kite knew that the lightning tethers weren’t enough to kill them, even restrained and temporarily crippled as they were, but hopefully it would keep them out of the fight for long enough.
Ahead of him, Kite saw a mass of summons, fleshy soldiers of muscle and sinew trying to take on a two-headed, dragon-like creature with fins instead of feet that swam through the air. The summons clashed around a single essence user from each side, and as more summons in the shape of a swarm of living, winged swords were gliding across the street to join the fray from the enemy side, Kite saw his opportunity.
“Fortune preserve me,” he prayed, activating the speed enchantment of his boots before making a leaping run straight into the fray. The flying swords arrived at the same time, and Kite spent a painful second surrounded by their sharp blades and wings before he had managed to get far enough in amongst the pack of summons.
“Dissolve the patterns of power!”
Ripple of Cancellation’s alternate form burst from Kite in a sphere, more mana leaving him as he excluded the adventurer from the task group and her scaled summon from the effects. But the other, hostile summons, all neatly clumped together in the melee at the intersection weren’t spared the same courtesy. It had been quite some time since Kite got to use Ripple of Cancellation on this many summons at once, probably as far back as iron rank and the summons of the fallen sect. And as most of the enemy summons were shattered and dissolved by the invisible ripple, Kite was reminded of the satisfaction of seeing such a wide-scale impact by one of his powers.
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“This must be what area-specialists feel all the time,” he mused as he swung his weapons toward the mercenary along with the other woman from Gauntlet and her two-headed friend. One of the fleshy soldiers and a scattered flock of the flying swords had escaped the effects, either by being just out of reach or lucky enough that the dispelling wave had been spent when reaching them and therefore failing to completely scatter their forms.
In a minute, he would set off again to do the same elsewhere if he was able. But meanwhile, there was a hostile silver-ranker present to deal with.
“And one should find one’s opportunities for tempering wherever they appear.”
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Ryker Lansar was all business. He liked being all business too. Direct, honest and professional. One shouldn’t speak if one didn’t have anything worthwhile to say, after all. But it would seem that Temperance had seen fit to test him that day, as the smiling man he was currently fighting just. Wouldn’t. Shut. Up.
“It’s rare that I get to eat such well-made and well-enchanted materials. My compliments to the crafter. Can you refer me to your tailor? Or is it you? Do you have a little knitting circle where you meet others of your ilk in between your oh-so-important contracts? Drinking tea, showing off some crochet and the latest in embroidery… No? No. I’ll take your silence as a no.”
If the world had been fair, the man would be so distracted by his own attempts at wits that the battle which Ryker and part of his team were embroiled in would have been a short affair. But Ryker definitely knew that the world wasn’t fair. At all. And so, the man was good. Worryingly so even as he fought with the dark sphere in his hand as his fulcrum. It weaved around him, struck with him and defended him, seemingly endless in its hunger.
Not that the man didn’t use other powers either, as Ryker noted plenty of empowering boons stacking up or different kinds of special attacks, mostly delivered through the orb in various ways. Fighting him just felt like taking on some ever-growing beast, and that everything Ryker or the others tried just fed it more.
“Hunger, Growth and… Void?” part of Ryker’s mind tried to calculate. The darkness of the orb did have some similarities to Kite’s special attack and his odd familiar, but you could never be sure. But trying to calculate could help you know what to expect next, even if most foes tried to keep details close to their heart, never-.
“Trying to figure out my essence? Why don’t you just ask? Come on, have some banter. Here, I’ll even give you some hints. Or rather, demonstrations,” the smiling man said, deftly catching three of Ryker’s cloth limbs in the swirl of the orb while using some defensive ability.
“Void was actually my first essence. Crazy, right? But my mother found it during her career and kindly donated it to her precious little Solomon for when he was all grown up.” As he spoke, the orb in his hands shuddered and spun around him in tight, rapid circles to counter Ryker’s attempt at a rapid flurry, sharpened cloth striking only nothingness.
He followed up with his dark sphere devouring the very ground as Ryker dodged an attempted blitz-attack, removing stone, wood and soil as if it had never existed. And even the failed attack seemed to help the man, adding just a bit more to his capabilities as he didn’t seem to stop improving. Or, unfortunately, talking. “And grow I did, so the growth essence fit me very well too. It's nice to go through life, taking a bite here and there and just becoming more from it. Very enjoyable. And speaking of taking a bite-”
At his words, the dark orb suddenly swelled outwards, and only Ryker’s quick thinking and additional limbs of cloth pulling him away kept his slightly overextended arm from coming into contact with the thing. “- I chose the hunger essence for myself. Earned every scrap to get it too. Mommy dearest was nice enough to leave me two before going off dying somewhere, but little Solomon grew up strong enough. And I have always been hungry for life and new things. So there you have it; my little power set presented nice and summarized. Oh wait, I forgot the confluence. Do you know what void, hunger and growth becomes?”
As a few of his cloth tendrils were snaking in towards the man’s feet seemingly unnoticed, Ryker prepared Hammer of the Weave to unleash if the trip succeeded. He-
“Doom.”
As if in a grim punctuation of the single word, the smiling man - Solomon, if his ramblings were to be believed - suddenly blitzed forward with unprecedented speed, as if all what had come before had just been a countdown to something growing to unstoppable power. Solomon’s form glowed and shuddered, but Ryker didn’t have the time to take in more details as the dark orb swallowed his whole field of view. Pain exploded through his body, but it was fortunately short-lived as he activated one of his own modes of transportation, melding into the cloth of his anchoring tendrils and moving several meters off in an instant.
As he reappeared, Ryker noted that he only had one eye left to assess the damage, with a fair bit of his left cheek and jaw gone as well. But he had been silver rank for long enough to shove the pain to the back of his mind, just another signal to note and act upon when he chose. And with one half of his face left, he wasn’t out of the fight yet.
Still, with how the others were faring, Ryker decided that they needed to start to bring their preparations into play if they were to even the odds against the experienced team before them. Battles between groups of silver-rankers were rarely a contained affair, and the chaos of their group’s conflict alone had demolished a lot of nearby buildings. Surging his aura in the agreed upon way, the rest of the team - many of them bruised, singed and battered - disengaged and joined Ryker as he started a fighting retreat back towards the block surrounding the old mill.
“Oh? Inviting us back home are you? Have something nice waiting for us, too? Fine, we’ll accept. But only because you’re asking so nicely,” Solomon Blaske called to them, before he charged at them once more, his wide smile unfaltering.
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Kite’s staff descended to crumple another part of the summon before him as what looked like some kind of divinely sent crustacean, it’s shell glowing a radiant pearlescent color, tried to use one of its massive claws to crush him, only to once more hit one of the walls of force Kite had set up to narrow the street he had been retreating down even further. The stalling tactic, restricting the lumbering creature’s movements during the steady retreat, had worked well so far, but the struck pane of force had already been quite battered. This meant that the impact of the heavy claw finally broke through, the barrier dispersing with a faint crackle and forcing Kite to shift his focus to intercept the incoming appendage with his staff instead.
Just as he did so, the crab’s summoner, one of the mercenaries wielding powers of light, probably with the avatar confluence in some way, dove in at Kite from the side through the opening in the barrier walls where Kite had previously been standing. The man descended in a streak of light and appeared mid-thrust with his heavy spear, but before his strike could impale Kite through the side as intended, his day turned a lot worse.
A perceptive observer might have found it odd that only the recently broken part of the force wall hadn’t been recovering at all between strikes like the rest. And someone who had seen Kite fight before might have questioned why he didn’t use his dispelling wave on this summon like others before it. And that was all revealed when the man wreathed in light stepped down next to Kite, just in the spot the younger man had hoped he would.
*snap*
The crisp sound of snapping fingers echoed along the street, the invisible rune trap beneath the mercenary detonating in an instant. Much of the man’s lower body was injured even through his conjured armor as he was sent flying, only for him to impact another concealed trap in the air above him; a hidden sigil which swiftly turned into an orb of green light which sent grasping, draining tendrils shooting into the mercenary. The sudden tether altered his trajectory, sending him swinging across the street in an arc only to crash into a nearby wall where another rune trap lit up. That process continued three more times, and Kite couldn’t help but be very impressed with the setup.
With all traps spent, Kite could finally get about what had been his original plan.
“Dissolve the patterns of power.”
The summon winked out along with the conjured armor of the mercenary, who was now laying on the street, stunned and half torn apart by the chain-detonation. More motes of ominous green light started appearing around the wounded man as a soft voice spoke, seemingly next to Kite even if there was no one there who he could detect.
“Thank you for the assistance, young man. That crab was most troublesome for my traps, and you actually managed to get the man where I asked you to. Well done. I can handle it from here, which should free me up to go renew some of my little gifts.”
“It was my pleasure, senior sister,” Kite began, and was about to say something more when he saw something in his expanded vision; a flaming projectile rising from off in the distance, reaching its apex before turning to crash towards the ground not too far away from where Kite was standing. Except that he soon noted that it wasn’t a projectile at all.
“Heavens!” Kite called, his conversation with the trap master forgotten. He sprang up in the air, barriers appearing like a heavenly stairway beneath his feet. Glint, feeling his intent through their bond, sprang from her bottle and grew to her enlarged form as she raced ahead of him. A globe of water appeared around the descending, burning object, and then another as its momentum carried it through the first ball of liquid. The water at least extinguished the flames, even though Kite suspected it would have been unable to had it not been conjured by a silver ranker, revealing the battered and burned form of Sztyka hanging listlessly in the globe.
It took a few more seconds for Kite to catch up as he was forced to slow down in order to deflect or ward off some stray attacks that were starting to be sent their way from below or the sides, their elevated position leading to them being another clearly visible target.
Glint carried the heavily injured but still living leonid downward to Kite, shifting her conjured water to instead keep her passenger floating atop a makeshift watery cushion instead. As he closed in, Kite reached out his aura to Sztyka’s to announce his presence as her eyes were missing, along with most of the fur on her face, torso and arms. From the look of it, intense flames were responsible for putting her in such a state.
“Kite,” she rasped in response, recognizing his presence. “And little Glint. I… seem to have failed Justice this time. Our foes were most potent.”
“Where are they?” Kite asked while leaping onto Glint’s back as they set off towards their prepared fall-back point with the injured leonid in tow. Even as he asked, he tried to quest outward with his spiritual senses, but the city blocks beneath him were a true mess of clashing auras and discharged powers threatening to overwhelm even his silver-ranked senses as he tried taking it all in. The air was ablaze with conflict and the houses trampled beneath the clashes of the mighty spread out below. Whoever won today, Warrior would be proud. To further complicate things, the unrestrained use of powers had caused the ground to collapse in more than one place, and from his vantage the occasional smaller groups of skittering monsters from the tunnels below
“I… Cannot… See. Search for the darkness. The hungry void-”
“Or Amica ripping up an entire house and throwing it at someone?” Kite interrupted, his eyes drawn into something in the distance.
“... That would also do.”
As they were making their way through the chaos, Kite on constant vigil, and it turned out that finding Amica Steiner on a battlefield wasn’t too hard. One building had indeed been ripped from the ground, compressed into a tightening ball of stone, planks and violence before descending somewhere below in a great swathe of destruction. It wasn’t too far off either, almost in the path of where they needed to go to reach the healer’s station back at the mill. Sztyka needed to get there as soon as possible if they were to have any chance of getting her back into the fight, but her being knocked out of the fight also meant that the team that remained might be fighting outnumbered at the moment.
Kite was torn, truly torn, weighing his options when Glint made it for him.
“Little beauty, are you sure?” he asked as he sensed her intent through their bond while also deflecting errant attacks with his barriers. Sensing only determination from the carp, Kite knew that he had to accept. He knew that Glint was silver rank now too. And he knew that he kept her out of fights way more than he should. It was just that he remembered the little fish in the stream back at iron rank. And her pain as she was badly injured when taking him the final stretch towards the Jade-Sky gate all those years ago. But looking at her now, she was more dragon than fish; a majestic serpent of glittering splendor. While she still lacked any potent offensive options, Kite knew her to be stubborn. And that he really shouldn’t keep her all bottled up any more.
“Thank you, Glint. And please, take care. Of both yourself and Sztyka. And please help gather up any more wounded you can find. You… are a big fishie now. In a good way!” he hurriedly added, sensing that he was treading dangerous waters with his words. As he slid off her back to stand in the air, idly shattering a pair of stray projectiles with the arms of his mantle, he sent her another set of emotions through their bond; care, love and another urging to be careful. In return he got a short burst of affection, followed by warm determination.
And then, Glint sped off like a glittering meteor, Sztyka in tow. Almost immediately she had to swerve around a clashing pair of flying adventurers, and was clipped in the side by a stray sword wave. Kite flinched and almost made to follow, but instead felt at the emotions of his bonded familiar; her determination burned still, the pain only minor for a being of her rank.
“Fortune keep you, little fishie,” he prayed silently as he instead started running among the chaos and madness that was the sky. A projected attack sent out gave a flying adventurer a moment of advantage. A conjured pair of barriers protected the flank of another from a teleporting sneak attack before the brief stun of chakra implosion hampered the same saw-wielding foe just enough for the adventurer to brain him with a glowing hammer.
For the few seconds that his running through the air took, Kite reached out to interfere in over a dozen clashes; dispelling equipment, nudging strikes or adding his hand to the metaphorical scales wherever he could while trying to go for the simplest and most direct action that could make the difference he felt was needed.
Then, he arrived above a particular fight in the wild clashing beneath him, accompanied by the irregular bursts of magical traps and the other prepared defenses of the adventurers.
“For so few people to wreak such havoc…” he thought idly, reading himself and waiting another three breaths for the right opportunity to appear, finding a strange tranquility as he centered himself amidst all that conflict. Then, seeing a dark sphere swell and surge with violent intent, Kite knew that the moment had arrived. So he let the discs of force beneath his feet vanish, and let himself fall.