Aidan slowly rose to his knees from where he had fallen, the maddened grin still covering his face as his eyes adjusted.
The spell itself had been an experiment and a costly one at that. The staff that he had carried with him at the end of Sojourn was sacrificed. It had even had growth bestowed by Vienne on it, which pained Aidan a little. It made sense that the cost was so significant. You had to level a weapon up and then part with it for only a moment's glory. In fact, he had considered just dueling with Lady Unfair, but a quick look around had told Aidan the truth. They needed something big to even the field a bit.
Even without the named visage, the standard everyday variety was starting to slip passed the valiant defenders in the courtyard. That they were in the courtyard in such number at all meant that there was a great deal getting through the encirclement. There had been only a fraction of a moment where he hesitated to gamble. He had looked over briefly while he was talking to Hunter and his eyes had caught Forsythe facing off against Grimgrieve. His friend had such solemnity, had looked so noble, that for a moment Aidan had been blind to the hopelessness of the situation. It was easy to tell that he and Forsythe both knew that the visage he was fighting was just toying with him. It had been then that he had decided that it was better to go all out from the beginning than to go down slow. Toward that end, it was time to see if his choice had resulted in him being dealt weal or woe.
Aidan started to reach out to put his staff down so he could rise from his knees when he fell into the snow, his hand waving through empty space. He was still incredibly disoriented from having all the audio go nuts and his vision turn white. In addition to that, while there had not been any sort of pain from the meteor dropping, he still felt himself being juggled through the air as an onslaught of forces had presented themselves on his person. He had felt weightless as he had flown up, both deaf and blind. He had felt heavy as he fell down and landed in the snow.
Snow?
Aidan reached out, already forgetting that moment before when he'd tried to leverage himself with a staff that no longer existed, and picked up a handful of snow. It was pretty incredible to him in a lot of ways. That he was this disoriented, that his staff was gone, and that after all that there was still snow on the ground. He put his hands under him and started to push himself up, his brain apparently finally ready to start working at a normal pace again. Time had not been slowed down, of course, just him.
What had been a scene of chaos and death moments before was now practically silent as the snow fell on the people who remained in the plaza. Many were as dazed as he was, or even more so in some cases. Forsythe was already on his feet and was stumbling over to Hunter in what almost looked like comical slow motion. He was always quick.
"Well, that's a hell of a thing." Aidan finally made sense of the quiet around him. Every trace of the visage had vanished from the plaza. Where once there had been streaks of visage blood and bodies on the ground, the snow was now wiped clean as if they had never been. The skeletons of the buildings and the rooftops that consisted of the perimeter of the courtyard remained. Remained, even though Aidan distinctly remembered them disintegrating with everything else in the terrain only moments before.
"Those freaking gods just made everything the way it was? You know, some of us pray to you, if you are that powerful you could do a little more." Despite his casual contempt directed toward the sky, Aidan didn't actually care that they had erased the full extent and proof of his spell. The important thing was it had wiped the visage off the map. Besides, if any half-baked mage came and tried to do what Aidan did there would be no end to the number of crater lakes and devastated cities because of spellcasters that had just done it for the lulz.
Aidan began walking toward where he remembered Amelia being before the meteor hit. It took him a few moments to find her because she had obviously been tossed around the same as him and, unlike most people in the plaza, she hadn't bothered to get up yet. She was lying on her back scribbling in her book, her hood cushioning her head and keeping her hair separated from the ground.
As he got closer he felt his body warming up in anticipation. He would say something non-committal first, he decided, and then try to think of a modest way to get her to praise him. Aidan expected a good bit of praise for this. If he was lucky, he pondered, he might even get her to smile for him. Then he'd kiss her on the live stream. That would probably really piss her off, and her red-face was the best.
All this was going through his mind when a sound from his left alerted him to the fact that something was stirring from within one of the shells of the buildings. Aidan had just turned in time to see Lady Unfair stumbling out of the broken building, surprisingly still alive. She stumbled and used her staff for leverage as she slowly staggered out of the wreckage that had surrounded her post-meteor resting place. Discomfiture must have been something that extended to visage named as well. They were practically humanoid, Aidan decided, so it made sense that when they were at low health they would suffer movement penalties the same way players did.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Aidan was so fascinated that he didn't respond right away as she staggered indirectly toward him. From this close, he could see the bewilderment in her eyes as she looked around and obviously tried to make sense of the situation, much as he had. Her stats must have been amazingly high because she was already starting to eyeball the surrounding players and the wheels were obviously turning about the lack of visage ground troops.
Lady Unfair seemed to notice his presence for the first time. A tired sort of grunt sprang from her lips and she slowly raised her staff. Aidan straightened and stared back at her, legitimately curious about what her plan was. He raised his own hands, looking up quickly to see what spells were available without a staff. Much to his surprise, there were a great number of spells that were off-limits. Anything that required striking an opponent seemed to be greyed out.
"You should know when you are beaten." A rough voice, brittle with hatred, rasped out at him, once again causing Aidan to stare in astonishment. "It seems that we will have to teach a lesson."
Lady Unfair pointed her staff at him and ran toward him with the pointed end as if it were a spear. Maybe she had determined that the only way to be sure about killing him was to use her superior stats, maybe she had used all of her mana on some sort of spell to protect herself, maybe because she was at such a low health, 9%, the game had determined she wasn't thinking clearly. Either way, it was no idle threat. He had already seen first hand the power that she was casually capable of producing and he had no intention of trying to experience it with his character body.
A dozen ideas flashed through his head as she approached. To the world, he appeared frozen, both his hands pointed palm out toward her as if he himself wasn't sure he would be casting spells or wrestling with her.
Amelia looked up just in time to see the strange sight of a robed woman visage charging toward an unarmed Aidan. She had started to sit up, wondering if she should do something when she stopped herself. She stopped because Aidan had tilted his head slightly and was looking out toward nothing as if listening. Only a fraction of a moment passed before a really evil smile started to form on his face.
He spread his arms out behind him and cast, "[Mass Manipulation - Ice Floor]."
"Hey!" Amelia started to shout. He didn't look like he was defending himself at all. It was happening too fast though, and before she could have a thought on what to do to help him he had reached forward to make a risky grab at the staff that was racing toward him.
Lady Unfair made no move to change her plan and thrust forward, stabbing into both of Aidan's hands and toward where his heart would be. Instead of being impaled through the chest, however, the force of the thrust pushed Aidan backward. Though blood didn't gush out spectacularly from Aidans hands, his health bar did start to move down from the upper 90 percent it was in toward about 75.
Additionally, there was another strange happening. The strength behind the thrust of the staff would normally have been enough to go through both his hands and his chest. Instead, Aidan began sliding backward as the sharp end of the staff hit his hands, and Lady Unfair, who was still holding the staff he was stuck to was dragged forward by him. They both slid with comical slowness as each tried to remain on their feet in this new slippery condition, like two newly initiated toddlers who were wearing ice skates for the first time. Aidan was slipping back and forth and Lady Unfair wasn't much better.
They, at last, came to a tentative stop and Aidan just laughed as he spun her around on the ice once more. It was probably his last move because she was pinning his hands and would absolutely dominate him physically.
"I enjoyed the lesson." Aidan laughed again and his gaze sharpened somewhat, making a knowing nod over her shoulder.
Forsythe stabbed through her back, angling upward so he avoided Aidan. Fours stared incredulously over the shoulder of the visage he'd just stabbed. She had died on her feet pretty much immediately. He was currently holding her up by the saber in his hand, the staff still held in a death grip in hers jerked a bit as he moved to support the weight a bit more comfortably. "This was your plan? This was the best you could come up with?"
Aidan extricated himself from the staff and frowned down at his hands. "This was always the plan. I knew how this was going to end from the beginning," he confidently declared. "Ah, crap, they don't look bad but they're disabled. I'll need to see Elisha probably."
"Always the plan?" Forsythe rolled his eyes.
"Yes. I knew you would be there, in that spot, at this moment, from way back then." Aidan tried to point at where Forsythe was standing but his hands really were disabled and all he managed to do was flop his right hand limply up and down in front of him.
Amelia sighed at this point. This was getting too emotional for her heart to take. With the ups and downs and the back and forth rollercoaster of sequences. She got up and walked over to Aidan even while he was still gesticulating at Forsythe. He was using his dead hands in a comedic fashion to try and scold his friend. She wrapped her arms around him from behind and laid her head on his back, feeling him still in response.
"It was just a little something I had been working on," Aidan said quietly without turning around.
"I enjoyed it," Amelia whispered softly into his back.
Hunter and Forsythe were already moving off toward the edge of the courtyard. There was more visage to kill, despite however many hundreds or thousands had been slain by the meteor drop. In the distance, they heard a low thundering and rumbling sound, as if the dead visage they had taken had been a footnote on the actual number available.
For a few minutes at least, a man in white and a woman in blue embraced each other in quiet companionship while the snow fell.
At least until someone over their party channel intruded.
"Amelia, how did you tame Aidan?" Forsythe asked, sounding genuinely curious.
"You feed him attention when he wants it, but set boundaries or he'll just walk all over you," Amelia said after a moment.
"Are you kidding me?" Aidan's indignant voice rang out.
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[Cinderswitch Staff] Acquired.