Midmark Quest Given: [Summons]
More details provided after summons. Do you accept Summons?
Reward: C-rank
That notification made his stomach flip, but there was no time to process that new Quest; he could only focus on the three S-rankers before him.
“What have you done?” Tinker’s voice echoed through his mask, disbelieving, lost.
Sol turned away, facing the rising flames threatening them all. Over his shoulder, he answered the Artificer.
“Did you really think I’d abandon all these people?” His skin began to glow, the air seeming to warp around him. “Did you really think I’d give that much power to Dancer?”
The fire around Qui Shen began to spit, tendrils snapping out, reaching toward them, the nearby refugees—everyone. Sol lifted a hand, and the burning heat began to pull toward him instead.
“Tinker, protect the innocents as best you can.” Sol glanced back, his voice tight with concentration. “Or hop through that portal right now. The choice is yours.” And with that, he launched into the air, Qui Shen’s flames rising to meet him.
Terry studied the unreadable mask of Tinker’s power armor, wondering what the man would choose.
The two S-rankers clashed in the sky, light and fire ripping through the air, catching a group of people. Some went running or blocked the power with their own aura. Some were burned, but managed to escape, their screams echoing through the tunnel.
Some fell down, their skin sloughing off, and never moved again.
“Tinker!” Terry shouted. The man’s mask simply stared after Sol, watched the titantic fight begin to coalesce. He reached over, gripped Tinker’s steel arm, pulling the man from his daze. “Tinker! If you can shield the civilians, I might be able to hold open the portal! But I need your help keeping the fight away from them.”
“Don’t forget there’s a Hypnotist hiding somewhere,” Bloodhound added. “S-rank, judging from the aura.”
Tinker seemed to shake himself from his fugue, turning to face Terry.
“I can block most of the heat—if he doesn’t target me directly. But you know Dancer will just shut the portal the moment the first civilian pops through instead of us?”
Terry focused on the piece of aura he’d funneled into the still-open portal. Beyond, it felt like a wide open space. Hopefully large enough for nearly a thousand people.
“If I can’t force it open, I’ll make my own.”
Tinker seemed to study him for a moment behind his steel mask, then nodded. Without another word, thrusters activated on his armor, launching him over the bulk of the group. A ripple of energy whined in the air, and a moment later, a dome of blue power spread out from Tinker’s position.
A lick of Qui Shen’s flame danced along the blue dome, singing wherever it touched, but not breaking through.
Terry cupped hands over his mouth and shouted toward the nearest group.
“Get to the portal!”
It didn’t take more than a second for the crowd to recognize their only avenue of escape. They began to run toward Terry, Tania, and the portal. A few Duelists zipped past everyone, launching through at speed, but most were low to average ranking Awakened.
Tania started coordinating the fleeing group into a manageable file just as Terry felt the portal aura began to disintegrate, fraying at its edges.
He reached through space, feeling the opposing Traveler releasing his hold on the portal. With a flex of power, he reinforced the aura framework and the portal flashed back to full strength.
For a moment, as another dozen people rushed through to safety, he thought that might be the end of it—perhaps Dancer wasn’t the monster they all considered him to be.
That was when the Traveler flexed his aura over Terry’s hold.
He almost lost his grip on space in that first moment, a wave of power crashing into the portal’s structure in a destabilizing rush.
His own aura buttressed the tear in space, wedging it open. Another rush of energy ripped at his hold, threatening his grip with frightening strength.
All the while, people rushed through to the other side, though Tania had been able to force some semblance of order.
Sweat dripped down into his eyes—from the struggle with the opposing Traveler or Qui Shen’s heat, he couldn’t say. He blinked it away, his teeth clenched tight as Dancer’s Traveler fought to wrench the portal from his control.
A third wave of power gripped him, pushing and tugging back and forth like he was a chew toy in a Doberman’s mouth. His grip began to falter, the pain of his aura being ripped away felt like a lash across his back.
A hand gripped his shoulder and something—no, someone—joined the struggle. Rushing power coursed into his limbs, his aura, his mind, soothing the ache that was gripping his body.
He spared a glance to see Lady next to him, her eyes shut in concentration as she funneled raw power into his aura.
A wave of irrational humor washed over him; he’d dreamt of fighting side-by-side with Lady, once upon a time. In his youthful daydreams, they’d thwarted evil with casual ease, and she’d witnessed just how heroic and selfless he was. Her eyes had glistened when she looked toward him, her admiration and desire naked on her face.
The juxtaposition of that daydream beside the sweaty, terrifying, and most likely thankless reality nearly made him laugh. He stifled the manic sensation threatening to rise and turned his full attention back to the Traveler fighting to trap them all miles under the earth with a walking fire storm.
With Lady’s boost, the fight became more even—one of speed and skill rather than raw strength. He felt the Traveler’s aura smash against his in sub-space, trying to encompass him like a closed fist and snuff him out.
But the strength disparity wasn’t a yawning chasm anymore—he could hold out for a few minutes, at least.
Then, the Traveler’s power spiked, nearly doubling in the span of a blink. Before he could even register what was happening, the portal snapped shut with the finality of a guillotine’s blade.
The refugees who had been about to enter cried out in sudden panic. All along the line, screams and confusion rippled among the people.
Terry could only stare at the empty space where the portal had been. He’d been so confident, so sure he could hold it open.
“Someone Amplified him.”
He turned toward Lady, his eyes unfocused as he struggled to process the sudden change of events. It took him a moment to return to the present and he spotted the lost look in her face.
“We’re dead,” she whispered, her eyes tracking up toward Sol and Qui Shen.
He wanted to argue—she was the hero, not me!—but there was a sense of dread hanging in the air. Something indefinable, but laying heavy across them.
His eyes widened in realization.
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“The Hypnotist,” he muttered. “They’re attacking us even now, sapping our will to fight.” He turned toward Bloodhound who watched the fight between the S-rankers, his blades held uselessly in his hands. “You can find them, right?”
The man seemed to shake himself from a trance, his eyes ranging over Terry.
“Yes…” he replied hesitantly. “But even if I do, that’s an S-ranker.” He looked between Terry and Lady. “What can we do against that?”
Terry furled his nose. “Here are your options: lay down and die…or fight.” He looked toward Lady, then the soldiers behind her, Tania at his side, and finally, the nearby group of refugees who were in a halfway panic. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to give up just yet.”
Bloodhound and Lady exchanged a look, then Bloodhound shrugged.
“Alright, kid. I’ll see if I can home in—”
A ripple of power washed over them—not the group of refugees, but just them. Terry felt it slice through their group, more scalpel than the blunt instrument it had been before.
As he followed its direction with his senses, he realized its target too late.
Rupert’s eyes glassed for the briefest flash, then he moved.
Terry’s cry of warning died in his throat before it could even form. The blur that was Rupert practically teleported in front of Bloodhound, his hands dropping back to his side as if he had just finished swinging. Bloodhound’s eyes bulged in shock and that was when Terry noticed his throat.
It was caved in, a fist-sized divot where his Adam’s apple should have been.
He stirred his aura on instinct, activating his Master of Light Skill to blind the attacking Duelist. Bloodhound collapsed to the ground with a gurgle as Rupert began clawing at his eyes like a feral animal.
Lady screamed in horror as her gaze tracked toward Bloodhound’s spasming body, his legs kicking the stone futilely.
Rupert turned his blind eyes toward her screams, prepared to move with deadly intent.
Stone hands reached up and gripped his ankles. He growled in anger as he reached to pry himself free.
Terry followed the aura back to a thin man who had arrived with Tinker. His aura felt weak to Terry’s senses—a D-ranker if he had to guess.
Their Stone Elementalist, he realized.
A moment later, while he was still connecting the dots, a booming sound cut across the cacophony around them. Qui Shen and Sol’s fiery fight above, Lady’s screams, even the panicked shouts of nearly a thousand refugees, were overridden by that echoing boom.
Rupert went limp, his body drooping oddly, bent in half over where the stone still gripped his legs.
Terry spotted the blood seeping from a bullet hole in his forehead a moment later.
From where he lay prone on the ground—still clutching his throat with wild gasps—the pistol fell from Bloodhound’s hand.
“We can still save him,” Tania hissed at his side. She nodded toward the larger group where hundreds of Awakened stirred restlessly. “There’s gotta be a healer among them.”
Terry nodded. “Good point. You work on that. I need to try and punch through this fucker’s spatial lock—”
He cut off as he felt space begin to respond to someone’s pull. His breath caught as he considered if Dancer had decided to come aid them after all. Maybe the Council or Terry’s father had pushed the issue, forcing his hand.
Then, another thought hit him like a gut punch.
What if Dancer’s just coming to mop up the survivor of Sol and Qui Shen’s fight? What if he just wants the Singularity?
His thoughts were interrupted as a portal cut through space with a definitive finesse—parting it, rather than peeling it back.
A familiar finesse.
“What is it, Terry?” Tania asked at his side. She must have noticed his smile.
He merely watched the portal, not even extending his senses to get a feel for its framework. Tania opened her mouth to press the issue, when a figure stepped through, his silhouette backlit by the blue of the portal, obscuring his features.
He didn’t need to see the man’s glowing eyes or feel his imposing presence to recognize their newest arrival.
Terraform had joined the fight.
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Sol’s skin burned, his aura twisted. This wasn’t a fight he could win; never had been. He was out of his depth and he had known it the moment he’d chosen to defy Dancer and face Qui Shen head to head.
But the stark reality of the disparity in their power still managed to shock him to his core.
Their elements were similar in many ways. Light and Fire were siblings on the elemental spectrum and Sol wouldn’t say one was superior to the other in the general sense. Fire was more devastating, while Light possessed more utility.
Utility, though, could only carry him so far when faced against the raw destruction that was Qui Shen. Flames spewed toward him, as hot as the surface of the sun, burning with a power that should have sucked the air out of the cavern in an instant.
But the Elemental Singularity was Qui Shen’s trump card. With it, the impossible became possible. His fire burned hotter, his attacks came faster, his defensive shell became impenetrable.
Worse than that, Sol’s own element turned traitorous, flexing against him, bucking against his control with pulses of the Singularity in Qui Shen’s possession.
He fired a concentrated laser—hot enough to penetrate Qui Shen’s armor—only for it to diffract uselessly. He pulled on the infrared light generated by his flames, only for it to revolt under his grip and suffuse the cavern. He tried to fly in close to fight hand to hand, but his powers revolted, sending him careening into a wall.
There was nothing else he could try; he was losing this fight and handily. As he moved to clear some distance to reassess his options, a blast of pure fire hit him. He tried to absorb its heat, but he felt the Singularity pulse, robbing his aura of its intent.
Blistering flames struck him, scorching his flesh, melting a palm-sized hole in his chest down to the ribs. The pain blanked his mind and he realized distantly that he was crashing to the stone below.
There was no time to brace for impact. His mind was bathed in searing pain, too much for any human to bear.
But when he struck the stony floor, there was no bone-crunching collision, no crack of skull or slap of flesh. Instead, the stone seemed to embrace him, receive him like a catcher’s mitt.
There was no time to wonder about that peculiarity; Qui Shen was coming.
Get up, Sol! Get up! These people need you!
Boots stepped into view and he felt despair. It was too late, Qui Shen was on him.
Then, his mind righted itself and realization struck him: those boots weren’t wreathed in flame. Instead, there was a steadiness to the presence standing over him, an anchoring strength that resonated deep inside his aura.
He looked up, his eyes tracking up to meet Terraform’s piercing gaze.
“Get up, Sol. Job’s not done.”
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Lance Gunnar, also known as Silver, had his attention zeroed in on that damned Artifact restricting space.
He hated when Artifacts impeded his Travel. Though he had an affinity with the Physical Singularity and was able to utilize it to teleport, he had never had a fundamental grasp on manipulating space.
His methods tended closer to the brute force path and he acknowledged that about himself. Oftentimes, brute force was enough, anyway.
But this Artifact in particular was powerful—far more powerful than the one in Terrence’s palace back in Wichita. And the distance didn’t help.
After a few minutes, he growled in annoyance.
“It’s damned strong. Gotta be an S-rank Artifact—with a meaty power source, too.”
His daughter simply placed a hand on his shoulder, but he felt his irritation drain away like the plug had been yanked.
For a moment, he felt embarrassed—she had to modulate his mood more often than he liked. He wanted to blame it on the infection he’d been fighting from the Spectral Singularity back on the far side of the moon—that struggle had done a number on his psyche, he was realizing. But he also had to admit that he was still dealing with the trauma of four decades trapped on his Capstone Quest. Four decades living with the knowledge that he had failed his son, abandoned his daughter, and there had been nothing he could do about it.
But now…now he had a chance to make things right, at least with Penelope. He’d started that work with her son, mentoring Terry in what little ways he could. And her return had only fueled him with renewed purpose.
Finding an equal—no, he wasn’t her equal—had infused him with so much pride that he had fought down more than a few tears.
And that’s what ate at him now. She had developed into such a competent and powerful Awakened—all without his guiding presence. She hadn’t needed him and for some reason, that stung more than all the rest.
Perhaps that was why he felt so irrationally irritated now; he was good for at least one thing, and that was portaling them where they were needed.
If he couldn’t even do that…what good was he?
“Dad…” she whispered. “I can hear your thoughts.”
A flush of embarrassment passed over him.
“Well…it’s true,” he replied.
He knew they’d had this conversation a dozen times; knew it must be tedious for her to constantly reassure him. But he couldn’t seem to work past the self doubt and recrimination.
Her grip on his shoulder tightened and for once, he didn’t let her pull away his troubling thoughts.
“No, I…I need to feel this.”
She hesitated, her hand lingering for a moment before she pulled it back.
“Okay, Dad. But I’ve been processing, too.” He turned to look at her through the inky darkness. “And I’ve forgiven you.”
He opened his mouth to protest—I haven’t forgiven myself, he tried to say—but she cut him off.
“Let me finish.” He felt her turn away and pace through the small cave. “I resented you all of my life—you know that.”
He nodded, but couldn’t fit any words past his tight throat.
“But I did the exact same thing, Dad. Don’t you get it?” The air stirred as she whirled back toward him. “I abandoned Terry—left him alone to navigate his childhood, his Awakening, without me!”
They’d already had this conversation and he found himself confused.
“Pen…”
“Wait—” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “But you were there for him, don’t you see? He didn’t have me, but he had you!”
He scoffed lightly. “Not sure that’s the boon you think it is.”
She chuckled, stepping closer so that their auras touched.
“I-It means more to me than you could ever know.”
He reached out, his hands questing in the dark to embrace her, when he realized that something was different—not a sensation, per se, but more like the absence of one. Like the background static of a TV had suddenly turned off and he hadn’t noticed it right away.
With a burst of energy, he reached across space, trailing his senses over where the Artifact had been active just a minute ago.
“Pen! It’s down!”
She pulled away in obvious confusion.
“What?”
He didn’t bother explaining, instead reaching through space—no, smashing through it. It parted before his strength with a pained cry, yielding to his power with a whimper.
A portal cut across the dark cave, blinding blue light searing their eyes.
Penelope didn’t even wait for an explanation; she raced through the portal in a burst of speed.
And Silver was right behind her.