Over the course of the next few minutes, my world narrowed to one thing only: the void tree.
The chances were good that it had picked up on my farspeaker communications, but I doubted it knew what to make of them—other than that we had a plan—and I wasn’t worried about how it would react.
The void tree also had to know the harbingers were on their way. Hells, it was likely the one to have summoned them. And that meant the stygian Power was probably keen to keep me preoccupied until its reinforcements arrived.
An urge I was more than happy to indulge.
Dance left, strike with my right paw, then with my left—that’s how I restarted my skirmish with the stygian Power. I mixed it up, of course, often using shadow jump and windborne to relocate. I didn’t want to fall victim to another black thorn shower. And if I became too predictable, I surely would.
A minute ticked by.
By the end of it, I had been barely hit. The same could not be said for the tree.
A level 340 young void tree is 100% shadow afflicted and its health is at 70%.
After what was now almost six whole minutes of continuous and heavy fighting, the void tree could no longer claim to be untouched. I’d stripped it of nearly a third of its health.
And it showed.
Fully a quarter of the stygian Power’s branches were devoid of black thorns. Most of the missing thorns lay buried at the bottom of the lake, having sunk there after failing in their attempt to find me.
Another quarter of the tree’s limbs were broken or had been gnawed off. To my surprise, I’d discovered that my ponderous steps could be an effective tool even when it was not on the ground that I trod. When I was buffed with heavy none but the stoutest of the Power’s branches could sustain my weight, a fact which I had exploited by darting from branch to branch, shattering them in the process.
The tree did its best to shield itself, even going as far as to whip its limbs back and forth to keep me away. And the stygian thorns were always an effective deterrent.
Still, my tactics forced my foe to focus as much on its own defenses as it did on trying to kill me, which only served to spur on my own attacks.
Another minute passed.
A young void tree is 100% shadow afflicted and its health is at 64%.
While it pleased me to see how quickly I was whittling down the tree’s health, I didn’t let myself get too excited. I’d learned from the experience with the nether sacrifice spell.
And now, I more than half-expected the tree to restore itself when its health dropped too low. When and how it would go about healing itself I didn’t know. Worst yet, I had no idea how to stop it from doing so.
Minute three came and went.
A young void tree is 100% shadow afflicted and its health is at 62%.
I finally slowed the tempo of my attacks. The complexion of the battle would be changing soon, and I had to be ready. Drawing on my energy reserves between attacks, I renewed my buffs.
You have cast engine of war, wind daemon, ponderous step, and trigger-cast quick mend.
Four minutes.
A young void tree is 100% shadow afflicted and its health is at 57%.
I backed away from the tree. It was nearly time. Any second now, an alert from—
An Aether Cloaking Device is no longer in place around this sector. Portals may now be opened at any location and the region’s coordinates are no longer masked.
My heart dropped, and for a split second I felt fear strike. Then reason reasserted itself. This is plan C, I reminded myself. This is what you asked Safyre to do.
And the shield generator hadn’t been destroyed, it had only been dropped—deliberately. While that introduced all sorts of risks in of it itself, doing so had been necessary.
Another trio of Game messages flashed for attention.
I didn’t need them, though.
The new shapes bracketing me on three sides spoke for themselves. The harbingers had arrived. And they had come hunting me.
✵ ✵ ✵
A level 301 stygian harbinger has entered the sector.
A level 303 stygian harbinger has entered the sector.
A level 341 stygian harbinger has entered the sector.
3 hostile entities have failed to pierce your disguise.
I didn’t stick around.
Swiveling around, I darted quicksilver fast between the harbinger to my rear and the one on the left. They both snapped at me.
You have evaded 2 hostile attacks.
The two behemoths might be tier seven creatures, but they couldn’t match me for raw speed, not buffed as I was, and I slipped easily beneath their searching jaws.
“Fleshling!” one roared.
“Deceiver!” the second cried.
“Face us coward!” the third yelled.
I paid them no heed, of course. My clawed feet sending water fountaining with every step, I fled as fast as I was able.
3 of 4 hostiles have passed a physical resistance check.
You have failed to stagger or knockdown 3 harbingers.
Sadly, the harbingers resisted my ponderous steps. That was of no immediate concern, though. I simply needed to get away. For now, my only task was escaping the lake.
Well, that and drawing out the three harbingers from beneath the tree’s protective aura.
Let’s hope they follow, I thought as I splashed deeper into the water. I didn’t intend on swimming, though. Releasing the psi, I held ready, I set down a windslide.
You have cast windborne.
Borne up by the ramp of air, I shot out of the lake to skim over its surface. Only then, did I risk a backward glance.
The harbingers were hard on my heels. But unlike the one I’d faced in Draven’s Reach, the trio were not winged specimens, and much to their disgust, were forced to wade through the lake.
“I’ll rend you from limb to limb for this,” the largest shrieked.
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Ignoring it, I turned my attention to the void tree. It had already fired off two volleys of black thorns, but as a result of the windslide, the Power had misjudged my speed and trajectory, making the twin barrages no threat.
My gaze drifted back to the harbingers.
The three were nearly identical to each other. Ordinarily, I would have thought nothing of the fact, but harbingers were chimeras and by nature, unique.
That must mean these three are… siblings? creche-mates?
Whatever the correct term, it likely meant the trio were used to working together. I grimaced. As if we needed things to get any harder. Setting aside my unhappiness, I studied the newcomers more closely.
Each had the torso of a lion, a manned, fanged, and horned face that was otherwise human looking, and the tail of a scorpion. Hmm... It was almost as if the void had been trying to fashion them into manticores but had somehow forgotten the wings.
Not that I was complaining.
Wingless foes were much easier to face.
All three harbingers were uniformly colored from the tip of their squashed noses to the business ends of their tails, and from the jagged points of their twin horns to their clawed paws.
The two smaller ones were males—going by their facial features, anyhow—and were gray and black respectively. The largest one—a female that narrowly outstripped even the tree in raw power—was a striking cerulean blue.
Gray, Black, and Blue, I dubbed the three.
With their necks stretched and their chins raised, the trio were doing their damnedest to stop the water from soaking their faces—a futile task—even as their powerful limbs ploughed through the water. But the harbingers were not just doing that. Through the scruffy growth covering all three’s faces, I spied their lips moving, almost imperceptibly so.
The harbingers were casting.
And they didn’t want me to notice.
I didn’t have much time, I feared. Swinging my head forward again, I scanned the horizon. The shoreline was still more than half a mile away.
I was fleeing eastwards, of course—towards the foothills. It was the only shoreline of the new-formed lake we had left unguarded.
And that wasn’t by chance either.
On first glance, the crest of the foothills appeared empty. But I knew that was not likely to be the case. My sharp eyes roamed over the ridgeline, searching for a particularly distinctive rock formation.
There it is. Found it.
My gaze dropped minutely to the dark shadow at the base of the formation that was nearly indistinguishable from the rock it was pretending to be.
Ghost.
She was waiting for me. As planned. Crouching back on my haunches, I leaped.
I arced through the air while weaving psi. The spell took form quickly and was ready just as I reached the pinnacle of my leap. Without hesitation, I released it and—
You have cast shadow jump.
—came down, not in water, but on solid ground atop the ridgeline, next to my patiently waiting familiar.
“Welcome back, Prime,” she whispered, not moving an inch.
“Thank you, Ghost,” I murmured as I spun around to face the onrushing harbingers. They had not broken off their pursuit yet, but they still had a long distance to cover, over half a mile in fact. Excellent.
The trio could not fail to see me either. Silhouetted against the ridgeline, I was unmissable. But just in case…
Drawing in a deep breath, I raised my head and howled, one long, undulating cry that threatened never to let up.
AhhhooOOOOOoowhoooo… AhhhooOOOOOoowhoooo...
The sound went on and on, echoing across the lake and the hills. Gray, Black, and Blue did not fail to hear, and I sensed their thrashing through the water gain new impetus. No doubt the trio believed I was mocking them—and I was—or that I was celebrating my escape from their clutches—which I was not.
What the void tree made of my howl, I could not tell. Ever since the start of our fight, its ominous regard had not shifted once from me. Even now I felt its gaze. But it cast no spell, launched no attack.
Perhaps it realized such was futile, or perhaps it was content to let its hounds run me down. Whatever the case, killing the void tree would have to wait until after the harbingers were dealt with—assuming, we could in fact do that.
“What was that?” Safyre asked softly.
“A challenge,” I replied just as quietly. “A taunt.” I bared my canines. “Or maybe just a little encouragement to make sure our quarry does not get distracted.”
She laughed.
“Don’t get cocky,” Ceruvax warned. “This is no easy prey we hunt.”
“Never fear, old wolf, I will take no unnecessary risks,” I replied easily. Staying where I was, I surveyed the battlefield. This was my first real opportunity to see what the others had wrought in my absence.
In the center of the lake sat the two overlords, still and unmoving. Dead, just like Safyre had reported. And already it seemed like the nether plumes around them were weakening.
Along the western, eastern, and northern shorelines the battle was still raging. I spotted Nyra to the south, surrounded by a pack of wolves, Shadetooth and Stormdark amongst them. Her arrows a blur, she was shooting down stygian after stygian from the sky.
A little further along was Anriq. The werewolf was fighting alongside a squad of wolfmen as they tackled a pack of hydras that had made it ashore.
Terence fought on the western flank. Dressed in Malikor’s bright red legendary armor, he stood out like a sore thumb attracting stygians from far and wide. But he had Megtir’s heavy dwarven fighters to protect him and looked in no danger of falling.
Shael was to the west too. With his head bent, his flute on his lips, and his fingers dancing along the instrument’s length, the bard was lost in the music he was creating, the notes of which traveled far and wide across the battlefield, uplifting the company.
Teresa was standing tall in the lapping waters of the lake’s northern shore, a giant spider—Lucius transformed—by her side. Her sword rising and falling, the blade priestess was butchering the stygians and doing her damnedest to tear them apart before they could drag themselves free of the water’s clutches.
I turned my attention to the stygians next.
There were a lot of them in evidence—especially of the flying variety. Everywhere I looked I spotted serpents swooping down on the company.
But they didn’t find my people unprepared.
The diving snakes were met by teeth, claws, arrows, and spells aplenty, and nowhere I looked did the line of defending forerunners appear ragged. And while I would not go so far as to say the skies were ours, the flying serpents’ domain over them was being hotly contested.
The picture on the landbound front was entirely different.
There were lesser stygians aplenty in the lake, but the water had definitely stifled their mobility. And instead of the nagas and snakes descending on my people in an unstoppable wave, the lesser stygians only escaped the water’s depths in small, isolated, ragged groups that were quickly put to the sword.
Despite this, none of the lesser stygians attempted to flee. We had deliberately left them a way out. The eastern foothills were free of threat. But none of the creatures fled this way. Instead, they threw themselves at my people on the southern, western, and northern flanks—futilely so.
Unless something changed drastically, the fate of the lesser stygians was sealed, and it was only a matter of time before the last of them perished. My gaze found the void tree again. But it didn’t seem likely that anything would change. The stygian Power hardly seemed to care about the creatures. It was not even attempting to support its minions by spraying our forces with its stygian thorns.
Was that because it didn’t care about the threat the company represented? Or because it was waiting for them to draw closer?
Which they would not.
Finding a way to assault the nest while not letting our people fall under the void tree’s sway had been one of our biggest challenges during the battle planning.
In the end, we’d concluded there was simply no way to protect the three thousand odd forerunners from the void tree’s beguiling influence. That had left only one option—keeping everyone outside of its mental reach.
Or rather everyone except me and the overlord strike teams.
The teams had been buffed with every type of psi protection we could think of. Unnecessarily, it turned out in the end. The void tree had paid them no heed.
And when it came to the void tree’s mental reach, my own scouting had borne out repeatedly what that was: by and large, the range limit of the void tree’s spells coincided with the nest’s boundaries. Some of the Power’s direct-damage spells—like stygian thorns and etheric lash—could be thrown farther, but we’d come up with more than a few contingencies to offset the expected damage.
What we’d not been able to compensate for was our forces becoming charmed or beguiled, and so we’d simply resolved to keep them out of the tree’s reach.
Of course, such a strategy would not work when it came to the harbingers.
The harbingers were highly mobile themselves and of similar threat level as the void tree. And as consummate death magic users, they would be able to obliterate half or more of our entire force in one fell swoop—if they so wished, or if we afforded them the opportunity to do so.
A single oblivion spell was all it would take.
That was why Ghost and I were standing alone on the crest of the eastern foothills. And that was why only a small force was assembled behind us, each of whom was already buffed by Farren and Adriel to withstand the harbingers’ death magic.
I was luring Gray, Black, and Blue into a trap.
But it was a trap in which only the forerunners’ most elite combatants would participate.
And shortly—very shortly—I would find out if my small team was up to the task of taking down the three stygian Powers.