Time slowed to a crawl.
Tahir could only rush toward the roots, his body moving faster than his mind. He tried to think of something, anything he could do to cut all of the roots at once. Theo couldn’t move, and her aura raged out of control, so her aura shield wouldn’t be stable either. Just one of those massive roots would prove fatal. His first thought was a wide blade of air, but he only had about half of his mana left, not enough to make such a powerful blade, nor enough to teleport directly to Theo with the magic he learned from the Traveler. The Winged Serpent didn’t have enough energy to stop all of them, and was too far away to even try to reinforce Theo’s divine shield. At that moment, as his aura and the wind spirit’s speed carried him as fast as they could, he only had one thing he could try.
He held his blade in both hands, focusing his aura, feeling it wind around his blade, holding it out for a swing as all of the roots began an upward curve and poised to spear Theo all at once. “Please!-” He poured everything he had, all of his remaining aura, mana, his soul flame, and even divine energy from the shield. He felt them mixing together in the turbulent storm of aura he wound around his sword, felt the sword shaking in his hands from all the power going to one place, but paid them no mind. He put all of his attention to his impending swing, Murabi’s teachings, and Theo’s dire peril. With murderous intent, all of the roots began their descent.
“Reach!”
With a single horizontal swing, he released everything he had. The tumultuous force flew from his blade in a wave of shimmering gold, crossing the distance in less than a second and cutting through all of the roots at once, halting their momentum and causing them to fall toward Theo rather than stab down to impale her. Before they could even reach, Theo’s incredible flames erupted up around her, incinerating the remains of the roots immediately. Tahir thought that, despite everything, she might have lost herself in the fire, but she stood with balled fists, and the flame seemed to swirl and pulse around her in time to her breathing: she had regained control.
To say Tahir put his entire body into that swing would put it lightly. Tahir hit the ground and rolled, the sudden drain of all of his energies taking a toll on his body and stunning him temporarily. He winced at the feeling of the hard ground, a feeling that he couldn’t block with his aura shield since he put all of it into that single swing. He landed face up, thankfully, enough for him to watch the rest of the fight unfold around him.
With control over her elemental energy regained, Theo conjured up the largest fireball yet. She shouted for Meti and Hasio to clear the area, and once they did she didn’t hesitate to throw it. The maligno saw it coming, and conjured more roots to block it, but they stood no chance against Theo’s fire. It released in a deluge of fiery motes that all converged on one location. In the resulting explosion, its shriek rang out, subsequently withered, and died in the blast. Once the fire faded, all that remained was a charred husk of what used to be the maligno. The fire had burned through the shield and roasted its body all at the same time.
While Hasio moved to check the status of the maligno and confirm its death, Meti moved over to Tahir. In the seconds that passed after the explosion, he’d regained the ability to move, but he could barely stand, and used the sword to keep himself upright until Meti grabbed him. Bereft of aura, mana, or divine energy, Tahir felt about as drained as when Zorhe tried to steal his soul, but didn’t have the impending feeling of being about to pass out.
Theo approached, but before she got too close, she took another vial of her medicine, calming down her flames and bringing her back to normal. “Tahir, that was amazing!”
“Compared to you? Slinging advanced spells around like they were nothing? I don’t think it was that amazing.” He said, glancing back behind her. “Especially compared to that.”
His words brought everyone’s attention back to Murabi, who still fought with the cairn lord at the opposite end of the room. At the appearance of the Maligno, he’d abandoned any pretense of conserving his aura and fought with everything he had. His aura manifested in a pink glow around him that flashed whenever a sharp root or an attack from cairn lord bounced off, and every swing scattered pink flower petals that Tahir could only guess was another manifestation of his aura.
He had the cairn lord on the back foot, and it could never truly escape his reach. As Murabi followed after it, he’d swing, and waves of aura followed to cut into the cairn lord, scattering pieces of the shield of stones it created for itself. Any time roots came to impede him, Murabi would swing and cut through them without a thought. Soon after the group’s fight ended, Murabi rushed it with a truly inspiring combination of slashes, which culminated in the cairn lord being cut in half, and several carved lines in dirt that depicted part of a massive flower in an array of curves and lines.
Silence fell over the room. The fight had been so intense on Murabi’s end that no one else really had a chance to join without disrupting it. Once he took a moment to catch his breath, Murabi looked at the group and exclaimed, loud and clear “I knew it!” He ran over with far too much energy for a man who’d just fought with something he himself considered a ‘psuedo-archfey’, coming to a stop in front of the group. He didn’t come out of it unscathed, either, his clothes were covered in scratches and scrapes. Places where the roots and the claws of the cairn lord itself cut him during the fight. Theo began reaching in her pack for a potion, but he waved her off.
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“Nothing that won’t heal now that we’re not actively fighting. Anyway, Tahir, I saw that last swing. Barely felt your aura fluctuating over Theo’s, but I nearly missed it.” He said. “I only taught you about manipulating your aura yesterday, but it confirms a theory I’ve had for a while about how they do things in Shinevi. For a short version, they have everyone there training for years before they can get to anything close to what you just did. You don’t even have a year of experience manipulating aura from what you told me, but you’ve been fighting with it basically since you gained access to it, am I right.”
Tahir gave a nod, following his train of thought. “So are you saying that combat experience makes for a better teacher.”
“Absolutely. At least, more so than all the philosophical crap they’d try to drill into you over the course of years. Decades if you’re unlucky.” Murabi gave a satisfied grin, and then let out a sigh. “Sorry, I’m getting overly excited here. It’s just a part of the reason I left Shinevi to begin with, so it’s nice to finally get some validation in that regard.”
“All well and good, I suppose.” Meti said. “But Tahir, by the looks of it, you used more than aura in that strike.”
“Right, I used just about everything. Didn’t really think about it at the time, I was just so focused on saving Theo, but it even took the divine shield with it.” At that, the Winged Serpent came down to settle around his shoulders. Tahir glanced over to Murabi as he asked. “Have you ever seen anything like that, it definitely wasn’t something I was consciously trying to do.”
“Not really.” Murabi said with a shrug. “One of the elves in the city might know, but we can talk about that later. Are you all alright?”
The group described their fight with it, and how Theo put in the most work toward killing it by far. Tahir went on to describe that swing of his in more detail. He wanted to attempt it again, but he felt beyond drained. He’d take a while to be able to do anything close even if he only used his aura. While these explanations went on, they gathered up the bodies of the cairn lord and Maligno, and Meti took a kind of ‘core’ from both of them. A physical black and red knot of wood vaguely shaped like a heart from the maligno, and a thin sliver of wood, about a foot long, from the cairn lord.
“Will those really help you with anything?” Tahir asked, as Meti went to store the materials.
“Judging by the danger we faced when we fought them, I wager the materials from these things wouldn’t be inferior to the seeds you and Hasio received from the unicorn.”
That got an appreciative whistle from Hasio. “Good find then. What are you gonna make with ‘em?” He asked.
Meti glanced toward Tahir. “Depends. I’ve made it a bit of a personal goal to make a weapon that can withstand Tahir’s antics, so I’ll see if I can put at least one of these toward that.”
At that, Tahir glanced down at his sword. The blade itself had dulled considerably. It looked as if it’d been used for years without ever being sharpened, and was one good swing away from falling apart.
Before he could ask if he’d somehow overdone it with that swing, they all whipped toward the teleportation circle at the feeling of its magic activating. A couple of seconds later, Talibah, Larissa, and Naevys appeared on the circle. “You guys alive down here?” Talibah asked with a grin as her eyes scanned the room.
“You came to check on us?” Murabi asked. “Everything alright upstairs?”
“Oh it’s great up there. ‘Specially since everything in the massive woodland army something brought to the barrier just suddenly went limp.” She shrugged. “We figured it might have been from something you folks did down here. So we came down here to check.”
Murabi gave a nod in response, and gestured to the charred corpse of the maligno. “I believe that’s your leader. It snuck in here in the body of one of the weaker wood guys. As for what happened down here, well, let’s get everybody together. I don’t want to have to tell the same story twice.”
The group left the ruin, and had about an hour to rest before everyone planned to gather up in the same meeting room where they had originally received the plan for delving. On the way from the ruin to the embassy, Tahir spotted the remains of the small army. Crowding around the barrier, more wooden figures and plantlike creatures. Most of them burned, or damaged in some way, but others perfectly fine but inert. A relatively small amount of them in comparison were practically in pieces within the barrier, somewhat close to the ruin. He imagined the maligno must have teleported them, including the one it hid inside, past the barrier somehow.
Thankfully, Tahir felt much better after some time to rest and partially recover his energies. He and Meti spent less time worrying about him and more time making sure Theo felt alright, which she had to assure them multiple times that she felt fine after her ordeal. For all the incredible power her primordial soul granted her, she still hadn’t assumed complete control over it. Tahir supposed she wouldn’t grasp it from a few weeks of aura control training, given that this was an issue she’d dealt with for her entire life. It had undeniably helped her, though, and she herself seemed keen to continue.
Once everyone had time to rest and get cleaned up, they met back in the meeting room, joined by Fenian, with the same captain of the guard lightly pacing back and forth. He started by thanking everyone for their work for the city, and then asked for a recount of what happened while they went through, floor by floor. Despite some minor protest that what was important to what had just happened at the barrier was only on the final floor, he asked all the same that they describe their experiences on each floor. And so they did. Tsekani, Raline, Kazadi, Hasio, and Theo giving their account of the second through fourth floors, Talibah, Larissa, Naevys, Tahir, and Meti talking about their experiences on the fifth, sixth, and seventh, and then Murabi, Tahir, Theo, Meti, and Hasio talking about their most recent fight on the eight, ninth, and tenth. All with the captain of the guard listening, asking questions, and having a scribe record the details.