I headed back towards Clause because Anna’s idiot older brother getting killed would hurt her, and despite thinking he was an idiot, I couldn’t fault him for wanting to act. The guards were cut from her service by the expedient act of not being able to follow her. Cut loose and left to drift, the old man whose name I didn’t know quickly got them moving off to help somewhere else.
I had no authority over them, and no matter how much I wanted to bring them with me, there were things far more important than following me around. He knew what he was doing; I was sure of that; he was too old not to know.
And it was old, not old. Age had nothing to do with it.
If I were being honest, after the last fight, the escort had become a little superfluous. It was good while we needed it; we would have probably lost Straus’s checkpoint if we didn’t have it, but all they did after was carry the wounded.
Best they leave, there were other people to save, other intersections to hold, they weren’t beholden to help Clause if he wanted to valorously charge a monster with his men.
I was, however, exposed as if I were running away from a [Longbowmen] on flat land. I knew what I was going into, or if I didn’t, I knew better than most people, regardless of whether it was the monster I knew or not.
If it were, though, if my guess was correct, what would I do? I didn’t know how to kill something like me; it was probably some flavour of immortal. Sure, I could try to send it on its merry way to hell, but I had no clue if that would work or if I could get the soul out of that magic leash that had returned it to its body.
That was serious soul magic, the gods knew I hadn’t the fucking faintest idea how it worked, and despite my hotline to them, I doubted I could just call them up to ask.
And that was if I could kill it. I was stronger now, and I had skills that could help me kill it, but unless I could somehow destroy its body through its regeneration, I was shit out of luck.
What I could try and do was pin it down until reinforcements arrived.
Assuming He needed help.
…
Oh, who am I kidding? He’ll need it eventually. It can cast magic and shatter stone with its bare hands, he stands no chance.
What to do? What do I know worked? It was defensive about its mistress, and it hated me for one thing. If I needed to help Clause, I could taunt it some more and watch as it came for me.
I also know some of its capabilities, and I know it’s definitely still stronger than me by far.
Though…
It also doesn’t know much about me. I killed it, but it was more of a reckless suicide charge with my holding my ground and letting it impale itself. It let me focus on other things to trick me.
It could sense me, though, so it would know I’m coming…
I hmmed aloud, thinking to myself as a kind of vague plan came to mind. It was less concrete than a blurry child’s shadow puppet but it was plan shaped.
I would run up, make sure Clause wasn’t going to get whacked, and keep my distance and get the monster to split its focus between the guard and me. Me and I could pound away at one another as much as we wanted; I could stop it from easily casting and keep the number of casualties down. If it came to it, we could pin it down until it begged for death, we destroyed its body beyond salvation, or I caught his soul and managed to whisk it away.
It was a very ‘hit it till it dies' plan, but I was just that kind of gal, no matter how smart Anna said I was.
What could I do to make that a little better?
Death magic, perhaps? I had a reservoir I could tap into; even if I had little proper reserve mana, I could maybe use it offensively. Perhaps I could enhance my skills. I imbued them with mana to enhance them; I should be able to do it with death mana. If I pushed it into one of my shovel skills, I might be able to lace the shovel with death magic, giving me a kind of discount death magic shovel.
Doing it was relatively safe and low cost compared to casting a spell outright and would have the effect of laying a smackdown on the target of my bane skill.
I started feeling it out as I made my way down the street to the guard we left behind, who were dutifully standing around, doing their best to stand around and look everywhere at once while also ready to fight.
If it was as simple as pushing it into the shovel, it would be easier, perhaps, but it resisted the death mana. It had its own structure, and while my skills moved mana into it, it was… separated, like the vascular tissue of a plant, separated from the pith by thin, omnipresent pipes. Pushing death mana into the shovel would change the shovel like I had created grave magic by pushing death mana into a pot; it was less like the graceful weave of the skill and more like folding dye into glass or clay, a semi-permanent transformation.
So I tried infusing it into a skill. Sophy had told me a [Magus] cast spells inside of themselves, which was not what I had been taught, so far it was all outside of my body. All external spells, nothing internal. Anna’s drawings, way, way back. Before I could talk right, she had shown spells being cast from inside, or through a staff.
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I knew it could be done, so I should be able to kind of futz around with the mana inside of me, and if I could do that, it seemed reasonable that I could push the mana into the skill with a bit of effort.
The entire idea seemed odd to me, more like a skill anyway, though I was starting to lose track of where one started and the other began. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed dumb to distinguish between them.
Could the answer to the question of what a spell was that simple? A spell is a skill of a different nature. It seemed like a very poor answer, so I told Selly, “Selly, can you remind me to think over the difference between a spell and skill?” and got a mumbled agreement as she muttered about heat and how it sucked.
I tried it, tried to take the skills that gave me a better grip and feel for death mana and put them to work while I coasted over the paving stones on long legs, the feeling like pressing around in my mouth with my tongue, feeling at teeth.
The mana in my body responded, and I generated a flicker of death mana, stealing away some life and boosting my reserve by a smidge before trying to take it and pull it into my soul to use as mana.
My new skill, [Death Magi] informed me I was doing it wrong. Like holding a shovel wrong, my proficiency and affinity gave me the tactile feeling of it being the wrong way… Like I was trying to roll a joint out of place, extending an arm beyond its range of movement.
Which was a pain.
I tried to figure out how it was wrong, but I felt that the difference was simple. Before I had just pushed my mana into it, this was… More like pulling. I was moving it wrong.
“Well shoot,” I told myself in a sour pout.
“Swhats wrong?” Selly complained.
“I was trying to get mana into my skills like I did before, but using death magic, and it doesn’t work right… I’ll have to figure it out on my own somehow.”
“You could ask a friend?” She asked, confused, “Wherest tha… Where’s the [Druid]?”
“She’s casting her spell, we're going back to Clause to fight,” I told her slowly, worried for her.
“Mmmm… You brought me… Good,” she stated simply, like she was half asleep, and I had just told her I was about to make breakfast.
I probably shouldn’t, and not just because it could get her hurt. She was seriously out.
I kept trying to shunt the death mana into a skill, any skill, but it was more like I needed to cast a spell of a sort to get it to move right, feed it not just the death mana but my reserve as well. It wasn’t a spell, but I felt like it was close. I couldn’t get it in like I was doing now, but I could get past that by making a half-assed spell inside of myself.
I tried it, trying to push it in with my mana, cupping it to the tiny mote of death mana, and pressing it deep into myself.
It took focus, serious, stop moving and paying attention to my insides focus. I could tell it would work before I needed to stop, but I didn’t complete it, letting go of the hard to hold movement.
I would be vulnerable, but I could do it; I could press death mana into my shovel, or the skills that ran through my shovel; I just needed to work around it.
Taking a hot breath with a tang of smoke, I turned myself back to the task at hand. Getting to the monster. Reaching the checkpoint, I started paying attention to myself before I walked into a [Guard] like a total tool, in and out in a quick jog.
I let myself take in the sound, let myself be as present as I could be, taking in the world around me, and trying to guess my range from the fighting.
The [Guards] cast me a quick glance while I passed, but they didn’t ask where Anna or their buddies were. They made the guess, and stood out of my way, my lack of blood presumably tipping them off to a lack of fighting.
It was a terrible indicator, but it was an accurate one. I had a bad habit of getting coated in gore like I was a loadstone in a bin of iron dust.
Thinking about how I could get an extra edge done, I started rolling it into the plan, the great shadow puppet ploy… But there wasn’t one approach I could think of that was the right way to take the fight. I couldn’t tell how the fight was going; I could just tell there was a ring of metal up ahead, along Clause's path.
I sped up, pushing my long legs to eat up the curved road, hurling myself toward the sound of fighting, inching closer with every breath, every twinge of pain, every beat of my heart in my ear.
You better not be dead, Clause, or I’m going to be very cross with you. That’s bound to make Anna cry, and I will ring that out of you before you cross over.
As I neared, I spotted the signs of a fight. The broken body of what I assumed was a [Hunter], his body literally buried in the shattered road. It is soulless meat in the shape of what might have been a person, a t shape that stretched along the ovular imprint of destruction.
The soul was gone, likely taken, and so I moved on.
Up high, visible by the shifting shadows and trails of pich, was the form of a person up on a rooftop, holding a bow, panting. They had an empty quiver.
Several more sights like that paved the way toward the fighting. The [Hunters] who had fought here were mostly alive, but none seemed to be in good condition. Clause’s intervention either saved them or, soon enough, caught the creature before it could slink off into the night.
In one case, a hand cart was embedded halfway through a wall. Its bottom was carved out of a wheel shape in stone, and its top blasted a similar shape into the wood above the foot of the building. It just sat there, off the ground, except where it rested in the middle.
I deaminated a few damaged zombies and raised my guard, their bodies showing signs of bites, but once again, no souls.
A few [Hunters] shadowed me from the roofs, bringing with them an encompassing dread, though they luckily didn’t shoot me.
And then I came into sight of the fight, a cyclone of power slowly whipping into shape above the creature, a line of guards, Clause in the front, his glimmering armour showing himself. They pressed into an unseen enemy, no doubt undead.
It was the same one knew; its horrible, grotesque body towered over the people around him, the closest one in height. Clause was still visually dwarfed by the towering monster.
It was casting a spell, and I could feel it building. It had taken quite some time for it to cast before, and if it was anything like last time, it would be quite the lethal attack.
And they were clueless, the figure simply standing there, its method of casting obscured by the fight.
I pushed in, empowering my steps just slightly to close the gap, pushing into a full-tilt sprint, my feet clinging to the ground foot after foot as I leaned into the turn.
I came out close, going into a straight away, getting ready for the biggest show-off in my life.
“Selly. Hold on!” I shouted.
Closing in, I got close to the backs of the [Guards], a few of them, the ones in the back of the line, turning to check the noise, and I sprung.
I hurtled myself through the air, throwing as much power as I could into my legs, my shovel helping me to gain height as I burned my forward momentum.
I spring up, up, and over the line of guards, over Clause's head, over the line of ghastly undead, a few too big to be zombies, and into the line of sight of the monster.
“Sup, you ugly, unloved dog. Guess who’s back!”
Time for the trash talk to begin.