Chapter Fourteen: Strength and Speed

Tom was a whirlwind.

Never before had he felt so shockingly quick. He skidded, positioning, trying to process the information from his senses, from Sesame, from his birds. The perception buffs from Sweet Suffering helped somewhat, but his speed was exceeding how fast he could handle the information. The world moved as if submerged in molasses.

His bonds with his familiars were pinging with panic. Through them, he watched as the orc pack closed in on the frontline -on Sesame, Markus, Coro, and Kari. His perception jarred.

It was all wrong. Their frontline appeared to be moving in slow motion. The orcs, who had only a moment ago seemed hulking, lumbering giants, now appeared faster by comparison.

Tom flicked his attention to Rosa. Her and the rest of the backline seemed unaffected. Put together, with his own increasing speed, he realised what was going on.

The orcs had some kind of aura. It was debuffing them with some kind of slow effect, much like Tom’s own aura.

Individually, the effect was slight, but as the orcs had begun to push forward, and more of their auras overlapped, the frontline had been snared as neatly as a hare in a trap.

Once the rearmost orcs moved up, Markus and the familiars would barely be able to move. Tom was the only one unaffected. Or, rather, he was gaining substantial buffs, instead. He had to do something.

“They’ve got a slow aura! Don’t get close!” he yelled. He could see the backline had already realised something was wrong, though perhaps not what exactly.

Immediately, they began to move back, trying to put more distance between themselves and the strange new orcs.

Tanya fired off another bolt. The rod hissed, and the barrel of it went white-hot. A cracking sound issued from it a moment later, and Tanya discarded it as she retreated in favour of a bow pulled from a spatial storage.

Her shot had gone clean through the sternum of an orc menacing Markus. It collapsed with a groan, smoking from Rosa’s burn damage, but another stepped into its place. It swung a mighty blow. Tom could see the panic in Markus’ eyes. There was no way he could avoid it, trapped as he was in their auras.

The huge thigh bone connected with him crossways. With an explosive expulsion of air, he was lifted and thrown through the air. He tumbled across the hard packed soil of the trade road, rolling bonelessly through the dust before fetching to stop near Eli.

Tom grimaced. With only him and the familiars on the frontline, and only him unaffected by the orcs’ auras, they would be overwhelmed in short order.

But only if he did nothing. One Idealist could always be enough to make a difference.

Tom sent a frantic order to Sesame, then ducked under a blow from a bone club, and lashed out with the butt of his spear. It impacted the groin of the huge male charging him with a sickening thud.

He turned, twirling, his spear drawing a deep, diagonal line of blood across another’s torso. Wet pink-and-blue things began to slither out as he moved on.

He had been rightmost in their line, and moved forward from it. Now, some two thirds of the orc line had stepped past him to threaten the familiars. Sesame was growling, trying to have their lion and wolf retreat with him. They were managing it, but the orcs simply kept on.

The familiars could not escape the binding auras. Tom needed to move across the pack, into the middle, and try and hold up enough of them that they could unsnare themselves.

A lithe female smashed a length of bone into Sesame’s shoulder. Tom had seen him shake off worse blows with no concern, but the strength of these orcs was tremendous. Even through the enchanted plate he was wearing, the blow had still damaged him greatly.

Sesame dipped his head, accepting another blow on his back, then reared, roaring as he went. Shards of obsidian blasted the orc, tearing it ragged. With a herculean effort, the bear surged into the falling corpse, tossing it back into the orc line.

The next orc dropped his shoulder as the corpse smashed into it. It slowed it down, but did no damage. The orcs advanced.

I’m coming, buddy, Tom sent him, and suited his actions to his words.

The sight of Sesame in danger triggered something primal in him. A spark caught, and a flame burned. He fed it, and it became an inferno.

He stabbed out, taking an orc in the back of its thigh. He whipped the length of enchanted steel around, pivoting, slamming it with all his force into an orc’s lower ribs. He stepped and slid. He was amongst them.

The quarters were too close for the spear, so he stowed it. The familiar weight of his axe settled in his hand a heartbeat later.

Orcs, gigantic, crowded him on all sides. They towered above him.

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But where they were large, Tom was fast. He was more than fast. He was sure he must be within every orc’s aura now, and the overlapping buffs from Sweet Suffering had made him liquid. He was the wind.

Within seconds, he had dismembered several limbs, opened more stomachs, left rents in red skin lying open to the sky. He split a skull. He severed a spine. His only regret was that his cooldowns were not coming fast enough to keep up with his physical damage output.

Then he felt a surge of mana. As it rose, he pinpointed it, coming from the largest orc, directly in the centre of the pack. He slid to the side, graceful as a dancer, and felt the rush of a skill pass him. He immediately targeted the orc and Hushed it.

It was too late. The skill that had missed him had done its work. He watched through his birds as the three familiars’ retreat was halted and they were dragged forwards, into the orc warband.

Sesame, being easily the largest and heaviest of the three, was dragged the shortest distance. Even so, he ended up directly in front of another orc.

The other two familiars were not so lucky. Drawn right into the full power of the auras, they were helpless. Markus’ lion was stabbed in the shoulder with a crude bone spear and clubbed in the side. One of the orcs grabbed it by its mane and wrenched it bodily off the ground, turned, and hurled it towards where Rosa, Meri and Tanya, were harassing them at range.

Rosa disappeared in a puff of smoke, reappearing a few feet away, just out of range of the lion-turned-missile. Tanya threw herself to the ground.

Meri stood still. An orc had clubbed her greatwolf over the head. Another followed suit. And another. Dealing with the pain of her familiar being beaten to death in front of her, she didn’t react in time. Markus’ lion collected her, and together, they went flying backwards in a tangled mess of limbs, skidding and bouncing across the road.

Tom was shocked. The strength in the display was outrageous. Suddenly, his deadly dance in the middle of them took on a more frantic pitch. He could not let himself be grappled. He could not let Sesame be killed.

He fought frantically to clear orcs, to kill them, to save his friends, but he was too slow. As many as they had killed, there were still too many remaining. The orcs, finished with Meri’s wolf, crowded Sesame. His world narrowed to a single objective: slaughter.

“Tom! Mosaic! Get back!” Rosa screeched. The desperation in her tone got through to him. He threw himself backwards into a roll, relying on Sere’s view of the battlefield to direct himself.

As he did, he cast Wild Boar Strike. The orcs in front of him were pushed towards Sesame, bumping and crushing into their fellows ahead of them. But Tom had been fighting with Rosa for long enough now that he knew exactly what she was planning. He just hoped it didn’t injure Sesame too badly.

With his increased speed and perception, Tom noticed incandescent lines tracing themselves on the ground between feet, forming an intricate, circular pattern. Then they flared, igniting.

In the last instant, a blue shield sprung into life, sheltering Sesame. Rosa’s Immolation Mosaic ignited, and a furious column of fire obliterated the orcs. White healing sprang from the back of the shield, washing over the bear. A moment later, Granny manipulated the earth to pull Sesame back a ways.

It was a flawless manoeuvre. Tom flashed a grin at Rosa, sent encouragement to Sesame through the bond, and then threw himself at the remaining orcs.

With so many of the orcs dead, the buffs had started to drop away. With grim satisfaction, he noted that he was still faster than them. The lumbering orcs were even slower now. His own aura had been subjecting them to similar slowing debuffs over the course of the fight: now he was seeing it bear fruit.

Tom danced between the orcs, hacking at legs, at arms, at necks. He slaughtered the larger one, the one that had used the pulling skill, first. Then he moved to reap the others.

Always, he was careful to never let them touch him, cognizant of their prodigious strength. The group would be hanging from a thread after this. Tom taking an injury would push them over the edge.

Once Tom had killed a handful more orcs, Rosa began laying into them again with her skills. She must have drunk a mana potion. Lances of fire seared through the air, burning them. Arrows flitted and found targets unerring. Sus and Sol began to dive, cloaked in Silence mana to protect themselves from the auras, and raked open throats with their talons.

In short order, the last orc fell. Tom slowed, the last of the buffs slipping off him. Every muscle in him screamed at him for action. His brain was still going a million miles an hour. His body seemed to not quite believe it was over. He cast around, looking for more threats. Eventually, he started to rise out of the deep battle trance he had fallen into.

Rosa and Tanya looked exhausted. Sesame was in pain, but not in any danger of death. He had taken some massive hits while trying to retreat from the orc’s insidious auras, and Tom could feel each bruise through the bond. But he was alive.

Tom wasn’t sure if the same was true for all of them. Darius was crouched over Markus with a look of intense concentration on his face. Pure white light limned his hands, spilling from them, pooling softly over Markus’ chest. It was a skill Tom hadn’t seen from him before. He must have manifested it during the fight. Tom couldn’t see whether it was having much effect.

Meri was in a bad state too. Tanya was bent over her, hands pressed to her head. The shifty scout was babbling incoherently, calling out for Kari. The greatwolf familiar had died, dispersing into motes of soft brown light. The damage it had taken had been too much. Lut, her moth, flapped softly on her boot. Her hawk, circling above, released a heart-rending cry.

Tom made for Rosa, picking his way around the corpses of the giant orcs. They smouldered and sizzled and popped as he stepped around their prone forms. The rank smell of cooked flesh hung heavy in the air.

She met him halfway. They clasped each other close, taking a brief moment for comfort. Sesame ambled up, snuffling at them. Eventually, they released each other with matching sighs of relief.

“Right, you could probably use a nap, I’d say, huh big fellow?” Tom asked Sesame. The bear sent him an exhausted agreement.

“I should see if Tanya needs help,” Rosa said. “We will need to be going as soon as we can, I think.”

“I should say so,” Tom agreed. Rosa wandered off to the others. Tom scratched Sesame all around the strapping on his headplates, preparing to put him to sleep with Hush. As it happened, using it on a familiar was close enough to using it on himself that the sleep effect triggered.

He crouched in front of Sesame. The bear sat down and took a deep breath through his nose. Alarm flared through the bond.

Tom whipped around. Sesame had caught this scent before.

In the Deep. After they had met Darius. When an orc with a shadow Ideal had tried to assassinate them after a fight.

Shadowy tendrils coiled through the air. Rosa, completely unawares, strolled tiredly towards Tanya and Meri.

Tom desperately screamed her name.