The sky was black, the midday sun hidden behind cloud cover so thick it made everything as dark as night. Howling winds raged against the surrounding hills, slowly but steadily growing towards a proper hurricane and throwing around both raindrops and small debris hard enough to hurt. Lightning flashed overhead in greater and greater frequency, thunder shook the sparse trees for miles around and bolts of energy that most definitely weren't natural left craters at hilltops and lowlands both.
Anyone sane had evacuated the village of Keswick, as well as the rest of Lake District National Park in North West England, hours before. The dozen or so figures pressing to reach the top of the nearby prominent hill were not sane, as was evident by their willingness to charge a throng of enemies a hundred times their number as well as their casual disregard for the laws of reality. Fireballs, lightning, beams of light and pink bolts that looked like molten bubblegum launched by the few attackers clashed against clouds of shadow, swarms of insects, and flashes of sickly, ominous green radiance from the hundreds of defenders ringing the hilltop.
Another crackle of alien energy flashed overhead, illuminating the battlefield in eerily strobing radiance and revealing the stark differences between the two battling sides. Seven out of the small attacking group were flying low, some of them on brooms, others with wings of energy growing from their back. All seven of them were female, the youngest a slip of a girl that could only barely be called a teenager, the oldest a burly, thirty-something woman that hurled energy bolts at anything nearby by violently punching the air. The other five attackers were on the ground, keeping pace with the fliers through bounding leaps enabled by the obviously superpowered armor they were wearing. Their gender was a bit more ambiguous under said armor than their aerial comrades', but as all of them either had needlessly feminine shape to their armor or said armor was flexible and form-fitting enough to show off their curves, it wasn't much of a difference. These ladies, too, blasted at the ring of opponents blocking access to the hilltop, not with magical-seeming blasts but with technological weapons built into their suits. Lasers, glowing projectiles, shining swords, torrents of fire, all were thrown or swung around with abandon. The fire was pink, and both popped and smelled like bubblegum.
The force defending the hilltop were monsters. Misshapen lumps of flesh in vaguely humanoid, child-sized packages made up the front lines, shark-like fangs oversized for even their bloated heads, clawed limbs that not once matched in size or shape and often numbered three or more per body, eyes that glowed in the dark with malice... and those were the least of the young women's foes. In the air, dozens of winged, gargoyle-like figures attacked their vastly outnumbered human opponents with various forms of foul-smelling sorcery, from the black smoke with the consistency of boiling tar, to the angrily buzzing insect swarms, to green flame that stuck like napalm. Larger, even more monstrous figures stood in the back, some of them rotten and skeletal, others demonic and inhuman, wingless gargoyles writ large. The worst were the thousands of shambling or crawling figures outnumbering all the rest combined. They might have been taken for human at a distance thanks to both wearing clothes and lacking monstrous features or magic, but up close their slack, pale features, still gaping but no longer bleeding wounds and obviously dead state revealed their nature of walking corpses. While not particularly dangerous individually, the zombies did not feel fear or fatigue, did not care about random body parts being blasted off, and even when decapitated or hacked apart their pieces still tried to attack.
The flying women had tried to break through the ring of monsters several times already, using their superior mobility. This time they closed ranks, bulled their way through a swarm of gargoyles, dodged around the more powerful enemy spells with superior coordination and teamwork, then launched themselves at the hilltop when no further obstacles seemed to bar their passage. This turned out to be a mistake, because all seven of them slammed into an invisible wall and bounced. The youngest almost toppled from her broom, coming a hair away from falling to the rocky hillside beneath before one of the other girls caught her and helped stabilize her flight. A couple of the others seemed a bit dazed from the impact but there were no serious injuries, so the girls immediately started work on breaching the barrier.
Three of them concentrated their firepower at a single point while the other four turned around and stood guard over them. The more mobile monsters - the gargoyles first among them - were quick to turn around and batter their position with sorcerous attacks. Instead of dodging, the four guards raised small barriers of their own. Bolts of shadow, clouds of foul smoke and sickly green flames splashed against that defense and were held back, though with intense effort from the young women. Return fire blasted gargoyles out of the sky by the dozen but there always seemed to be more of them and the less mobile monsters were now joining the fray. Hulking forms threw boulders, fiendish entities blasted with fireballs much larger than the gargoyles could make, swarms of thrown darts or even arrows pelted the general area.
The worst came when the skeletal-looking monsters came together and combined their foul powers like the apparent witches were doing. Instead of foul darkness or thundering death, their group-cast spell summoned a large cloud of furiously buzzing, strangely glowing wasps. The ominous mass spread and blotted out all light even more than the supernatural hurricane had done, then crawled over the barrier maintained by the defending women. They could not pass through it, but the barrier was not complete either; where an attack formed a crack or lapsing concentration weakened it, a few glowing insects at a time went through. Once inside, they immediately swarmed the girls, both the defenders and those trying to get through to the hilltop. Layers of secondary defenses activated, spreading anything from glowing auras to skintight force-fields over the young women, but those were far weaker than their combined defenses, especially with their attention split, and the insects were not mundane. With powers of their own, they stung and bit at the inner layers of protection and began to leech energy from them.
At the same time the battle near the top of the hill was raging, the countless zombies and almost as numerous child-sized monsters swarmed the five ground-bound and now unsupported women in power armor. The intensity of the fight rose and rose as the heavy combatant's weapons spat death and destruction as only automatic weapons firing on ranks of massed infantry could but try as they might the five of them were just not enough to break through. Crawling corpses half-torn to bits and sneaky, multi-armed, gremlin-like foes managed to engage them in melee and started crawling up their armor. Said armor was tough enough and powerful enough to mostly ignore attacks from such weak beings, but being grappled en masse stopped the knights' progress entirely and forced them to switch to melee weapons that would make blasting their way through the throng even slower... and time was not on their side.
"It is done, wizard," a monstrously bloated figure stretching its black robe almost to bursting growled at its much smaller compatriot at the top of a hill. Its voice was the grinding of stone of stone, the tearing of flesh under claw, the weak wailing of dying men as they were ground to meal. "Your enemies will never reach this place in time to stop the ritual, so I want my reward." It pointed with a wasted, oozing, clawed arm towards a circle of standing stones. "A few of your spares will do."
"We'll see," the far more normal-looking man despite his archaic cloak and fully concealing hood said. "The agreement was that payment would be rendered after completion of the task."
"Bah, you new worlders are so skittish," the larger figure spat. "Why, if we were back in Maveth..."
"But we are not," the robed man said in annoyance. "Now summon a few more lesser fiends. I want those meddling witches that dare call themselves Valkyries beaten and in chains in time for the next phase of the ritual. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the gain."
Behind them, on the very top of the hill a circle of standing stones a hundred feet wide loomed. Before thirty-six out of forty stones stood a robed figure holding a dagger of bone and at the feet of each lay six smaller figures, bound and gagged. All of them were girls or young women, shaking from both the icy rain and obvious terror. Just that continuous trickle of terror and suffering had already been enough of a sacrifice to get the services of the bloated otherworldly figure and its small army of summoned monsters.
The wizard and his acolytes were eager to see what new powers six times six times six human sacrifices in a properly dedicated and ancient site of power would bring.
xxxx
A thousand miles above the Earth, a mass of metal lay in orbit. It was the size of a large cargo ship and matte black and even from up close it was a lot harder to see than it should have been. Here and there turrets jutted out of the main hull haphazardly, more like the branches of a tree or something else organically grown than anything that came out of a construction yard. In other places it looked not so much unfinished as just as haphazardly expanded after the initial construction had been complete, with the bulk of new chambers, turrets and several dozen feet of length added to the hull itself with little rhyme or reason, let alone a plan. It was as if whatever the metal construction was, it was undergoing repeated overhauls.
Within that enormous for any artificial satellite hull, lay rooms of all kinds. Rooms for habitation, rooms for training, rooms that doubled as labs so any occupants would not have to leave their experiments behind to eat or sleep, storage rooms, even rooms of alien geometries that had windows overlooking forests or active volcanoes or the bottom of the Laurentian Abyss. Most of the rooms were empty but not abandoned, signs of both frequent and lasting habitation in several of them indicating a small group of people making use of the facilities for weeks at minimum. Strangely enough, despite no evidence of a reentry vehicle or other method of resupply, the kitchen held fresh produce, several boxes of New York pizza only hours old, and a chicken. The chicken had feathers of purple and gold and glow-in-the-dark eyes. It was also annoyed at how its habitual feeding had been delayed for several hours and pecking at the emergency pizza cupboard. Its beak was leaving deep dents in the hardened steel all the furniture on the space station appeared to be made of.
Far from the kitchen and the angry, hungry chicken, in the chamber everyone in the group of the station's inhabitants agreed was the bridge but who could never agree where on the ship's structure it should be located, was a control station with twice as many buttons, levers screens and warning lights as a 747's cockpit and half again as many on Tuesdays, and on that control station sat a young man. Tall, broad shouldered but only lightly muscled, with unkempt brown hair that fell halfway to his shoulders and eyes that shifted colors when he used his powers - that was, all the time - the maybe twenty-year old looked at the screen and did not like what he saw. He pressed a series of seemingly random buttons, pulled a lever down twice without pulling it up in between, then turned a button widdershins thrice. The button did not appear capable of turning at all yet it did, and one of the screens showing some disaster movie with a lot of fire and explosions in rural France blinked a signal about "establishing a direct uplink".
"Amanda, we have a serious problem," the young man spoke into this 'uplink' without preamble. "How soon can you disengage?"
"Disengage?" a woman's voice sounded clear as crystal and more musical than an opera recording, cutting through the sound of more explosions coming from the screen. "Jerry, this stupid gathering of wannabe warlocks we've been tracking managed to find some actual, working Mavethan spells on the Darknet, summoned a humongous bunch of minor monsters and are now trying to use the Carnac stones as their site of power with their monsters raiding the surrounding area for sacrifices."
"Mandy..." the young man tried to cut her off but she talked over him.
"...then I got those idiots from the local commune protesting about national heritage and protected sovereignty and a bunch of other irrelevant bollocks when they have bloody monsters raiding their houses and abducting children."
"Mandy!" Jerry shouted more insistently, but whoever the woman was on the other side of the connection, she was on a roll.
"Bunch of buggering wankers. Don't they realize that I can't properly blow up the monsters and save the hostages if I have to worry about stupid six-thousand-year-old rocks?! They're not even magical. The bloody planet didn't have any magic a year ago, let alone in the Pleistocene!"
"The girls are in danger!" Jerry shouted, trying to talk over a voice that was louder than the tiny megaphone should have allowed for and barely managing it.
"I'm listening," the woman said in a suddenly very dangerous tone. The background explosions on the screen stopped, showing many scattering wolf-like beasts in a field of hundreds of menhirs. The disaster movie had not been a movie at all.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
"Our sensors picked up The Wizard twenty minutes ago in Cumbria, Britain. Three minutes later there was the flare of a proper summoning, followed by dozens of smaller ones. Considering how the guy operates, that meant sacrifices..."
"Jerry you didn't!" the woman demanded and despite a distance of over five thousand miles the whole station was filled by the ominous pressure of her ire.
"Jace demanded they go, said the whole reason they were training was so no more girls would suffer as they did." The young man sighed. "When they learned the Pachyderm wouldn't get in position for another forty-nine minutes, there was no way I could convince any of them to stay."
"Only you would name a spaceship like that," the woman said with fond exasperation before her tone sharpened once more. "And what do you mean, 'convince' them? Are you a technopath or not? They were in a hundred kiloton steel mass every last inch of which is infused with your powers, a thousand miles from breathable air. If you wanted to you could have canned them like sardines and there'd have been nothing they could have done!"
"Can we do this later? The girls are still in danger." Jerry looked at another screen with line after line of rapidly shifting code and his face paled. "Their stamina and magic are rapidly tanking for all of them! How quickly can you go?"
"Hold that thought," the woman said and the screen showing the fleeing monsters suddenly blanked out from a blinding actinic flare. When the flare subsided seconds later, only the shadows of monsters remained against smoking rocks and cooked, partially glassed ground.
An incredibly good-looking woman with long, wavy hair of gleaming crimson so intense it couldn't have been natural glared through the screen with almond-shaped, bloody-hued eyes. Perfectly symmetrical, ruby-red lips were pursed into a displeased frown and the force of her presence somehow reached through the screen to press Jerry back against his seat.
"This is the last time I'm leaving you in charge," she vowed threateningly. "Don't think you're off the hook either. We'll talk more after I've retrieved those idiots." Then there was another actinic flare and she vanished from the screen.
Jerry sighed in relief that the girls would not get more than a very extensive scolding and the hope that by the time she was done with them Amanda's anger would have cooled down before the two of them met face to face. And with that forlorn hope, he got off the Captain's Chair and went to feed the chicken.
xxxx
Neck-deep in monsters, using her light magic to its fullest to protect her friends while they desperately tried to breach the Wizard's ward and get to the vile man before he could murder more innocent girls to feed his vile hunger for power, Isa was only certain about one thing. If they survived this, she was going to kick Jace's ass six ways from Sunday and never listen to anything she said. Older and wiser her ass; that meathead had probably gotten them killed.
Back when they'd first started their lessons, both Lady Crimson and the Engineer had warned them that if they wanted to be proper frontline combatants they should never shape their magic to have an expendable resource. Yes, they'd lose out on peak output and absolute magnitude of single workings, but the ability to keep casting combat workings again and again for more than a minute or two would be invaluable. Seeing as that form of magic was what the most powerful sorceress around used as well, she had readily agreed.
Not all of her fellow rescuees did. Some preferred the Engineer's style of building up both artifacts and magitech during their downtime so they could face any battle with stockpiled firepower as well as full reserves to throw into a few really big spells. In almost every normal fight, against a reasonable number of opponents, that would have worked too. They'd outnumbered The Wizard twelve to one and forced him into retreat before so they thought it would be fine this time too. They never expected him to have recruited no less than forty acolytes as well as summoned something big and nasty from the Abyss the sacrificial sorcery of the Mavethans gave him access to.
Aisha had been the first to fall. The mage-knight had been the last of them to join their little band and only six weeks of build-up had left her enchanted armor dangerously fragile, comparatively. Then Hasna, a middle-eastern girl they'd saved from a cult that had wanted to infiltrate and mind-control the Indian government, had been downed by a powerful curse that slipped through their outer shield during the enemy's last attempt to storm their position. That had left only two girls working to breach The Wizard's magic, which all of them knew would not be enough. With the defenders already pressed hard and the four remaining knights unable to reach and join them, it would only be a matter of time.
Isa strained in her casting, demanding more of her light magic than ever before. More damn spell-bugs pressed against her inner barrier, their dispelling claws clacking against it and sending dangerous destabilizing vibrations through her magic. One tiny dispelling was insignificant, but five hundred? She had already made the mistake of ignoring it, leading to a tiny crack and just one of those bugs getting through. Now its sting was buried in her left armpit, not only stinging like a bitch but also being a minor but noticeable drain on her magic. The worst thing was that if she tried to remove it she'd have to lower the only defense keeping the other four hundred and ninety-nine bugs back.
There was no way she'd do that during the fight. She diverted more of her magic to her defense for good measure, because she'd seen what happened when Mumbi dared try the opposite to help clear the monsters faster. The older African girl was shaking like a leaf under the assault of several spell-bugs, barely any of her magic left for more than holding her shield.
But that left Isa with not enough of her light to matter. She might splatter goblin things with the one beam she could throw at a time or burn zombies all day long, but one kill at a time was not enough to matter. She gritted her teeth when another knight fell barely a hundred feet away, leaving only three of them standing. The fight was so chaotic she couldn't even tell who the fallen girl was.
Her beam speared three goblins in a line then blasted a zombie's head completely off. Unlike with her friends' attacks, the headless corpse did not stumble on to attack them until it had to be incinerated or hacked apart; Isa's beams burned out the animating dark sorcery in its entirety and shone a bit brighter for the accomplishment. Just a little, a practically minuscule increase. Now if she could do that another few hundred times in a row...
Mumbi fell to her hands and feet next to Isa, barely contributing to the outer barrier any more and Isa struggled to take up the slack. The big ugly things on the back line decided that was the best time to throw rocks at the trapped girls, trying to batter their defenses. Or rather, the malicious intelligence behind them did. Isa was certain that vile mind was guiding all the monsters somehow, even the bugs. They were too coordinated for anything else. As rivulets of sweat ran down her face and her body protested as she forced it to fuel the barrier magic, she cursed the nameless fiend, she cursed The Wizard, but above all else she cursed herself and her friends for their stupidity. They could have waited a few minutes, couldn't they have? Now they were lost and The Wizard would either kill or sacrifice them to his big, stupid ritual just to get more power. She could already feel it, the sacrificial magic pulsing under the earth.
Then she got an almost certainly stupid idea, but since they were going to die anyway... closing her eyes, she stopped attacking at all and reached for that beating pulse of black magic. Being trained as a Valkyrie, helping hunt down evil wizards that played with alien magic downloaded from the Internet with zero idea of what they were doing, Isa had been trained to recognize just that type of magic. You couldn't face the enemy without knowing the enemy, Lady Crimson always said. She realized that she remembered the words of several rituals and given what The Wizard was trying to do, possibly the actual spell that bastard was using. Like, she was sixty percent sure.
Her previously racing heartbeat had slowed, matching the pulse of the ancient sorcery. That alien world the invaders had come from had had magic for thousands of years, according to her teachers, with powers that made even nuclear weapons seem like firecrackers in comparison, if allowed to work out to the end. That was how they'd first spread powers to Earth; by starting a huge, open-ended sacrificial ritual and feeding every single death they could cause to it to build magic that would be native to the planet that could then be used for further rituals, or be indirectly tapped by non-mages.
Isa didn't care much about the theory; she only cared that what she was trying to do was technically possible and that with her back literally against a magic wall she saw no other way out. So still with her eyes closed, she carefully formed a bolt half out of her light magic, half out of the ritual's energy and offered its kill to the ritual. The spell was primed with a tangible malevolence that slid like an oil spill over her soul, an endless hunger that whispered promises of power if only she would feed it life.
She opened her eyes to find a five-armed goblin thing leering at her from only three feet away. Next to her, Mumbi was shaking in agony, swarmed by bugs and unable to even think of casting any more. There was nothing Isa could do about the black girl so she cleaved the goblin's head from its shoulders. Power. Sweet, restoring, energizing magic flowed through Isa as her target was consumed utterly. Half of it boosted her own strength, the other half was absorbed by the ritual. Even with getting only half, her net gain was easily ten, twenty times what she got from using her powers to purge necromancy.
She hastily made another bolt, aimed carefully, and cored two monsters that had climbed on one of the still standing knights and were banging on her helmet. More power flowed through her, not just exercising her abilities, not just sticking to a theme her teachers had told her would fit best with her talents or killing monsters to push her growth a little faster, but unmaking the little shits in their entirety and feeding on the results. He body was already halfway through purging her previous fatigue and the nasty little bug at her armpit didn't seem like such a point of agony any more. She threw another blast and another, then two at once. She thought about feeding some of the extra magic to the defense, but if the bad guys stopped her before she could kill and devour them it would all be over.
Already more attacks were pounding at her defenses and the ritual just behind her back progressed faster; she was running out of time. if she wanted to save her friends, she could not afford to play it safe. So she tapped deeper into her newly growing strength and tried something she'd been practicing in her free time, something she'd seen in a movie once and wanted to replicate with her light but never managed before. Except this time she did, and it was glorious.
A blast of searing light came out, thicker than her wrist and brighter than a thunderbolt, more powerful than anything she'd ever attempted. It also wasn't white but a deep crimson, same as a red-hot bar of iron straight from the forge. It didn't go out in a straight line either; that would have been a waste. No, it angled in its path, a jagged judgement chaining between targets it immediately obliterated and reduced to ashes. A dozen, two dozen, three; a massive torrent of stolen power went through Isa and she laughed out loud. She could save herself and more! She could protect her friends, smash The Wizard's barrier and save all his victims.
So she repeated the chaining beam attacks again and again, crushing the monsters with her power, cackling without a care in the world. Then finally, just as the closest monsters were starting to flee, she felt a weak, forgotten spell cracking... and spell-bugs poured through her breached inner defense. Hastily, she poured power into it to force the breach closed, but her magic was far more volatile now and hard to control. There was more to control of it, too, a raging river where before it had been an easily guided stream. When she finally closed the breach, far too many spell-bugs had gone through. Immediately, she wove more barriers to seal parts of her body they hadn't reached, but the damage was done.
Painful, draining stings bit into her sides and armpits, feeling like hot needles driven into them. More bit around her navel, each bite like a punch to the gut. Her body had felt powerful only moments before, invincible; now she couldn't even lift her arms and she was swaying on her feet. Most of her new power was drained away by magical parasites, what was left barely enough to hold her own defenses. Without her contribution the outer barrier collapsed and monsters poured onto them. A whole group of both zombies and misshapen goblins pounded on her failing inner barrier while the parasites left her powerless to strike back. She was going to die...
Then a blast of fire an order of magnitude brighter than the jagged beams she'd been so proud of before flashed waist-high, incinerating everyone and everything above that. With all of the girls hurled to the ground by monsters it safely rolled over them; the monsters could not say the same. Then a wave of draining magic, similar to that of the parasites but different, invisibly lashed out to the smaller monsters and those with the reflexes to have ducked the first attack. For a moment it didn't look like as if anything had been accomplished... then every single remaining monster shattered to pieces, every bit of their internal heat violently sucked away.
A towering pillar of fire came down from the sky and took the shape of a woman. It was so blindingly bright Isa's eyes hurt just looking at it but she couldn't help herself; the Crimson Lady had come and they were saved! Just her presence alone was like a gravity well and heat so intense it made stones crack hit them all... but left them unhurt. The parasitic bugs on the other hand instantly perished, like so many leaves in a forge-fire.
An immensely strong magic ripped the dark ritual apart, the backlash bringing half of the forty dark acolytes to their knees and incinerating the weaker ones were they kneeled. Isa screamed; she felt like being bathed in molten iron, thrown into the heart of a star. Her stolen power raged within her soul, struggling against annihilation. For the first time Isa noticed how dark and sinister it had become, fed on the souls of hundreds of sacrificed enemies. In a river of darkness only a few patches of her original light remained. But she had no time to lament her own foolishness; it was work with the black magic, use it to save herself, or be annihilated.
A battle raged fifty feet from Isa's back, The Wizard and his remaining apprentices forced into retreat or slain outright, but she had no attention to spare. She put every last iota of effort, every bit of her soul, her natural light and the stolen darkness into fighting off a fraction of the backlash caused by her own teacher. By the time she won she was utterly spent and could do nothing but pass out. And in her torpor, Isa the former Valkyrie began to change...