I wasn't sure if Sharon had known her timing would be impeccable, but she certainly acted like it. The group of satyr had been in the process of returning their bowls to the kitchen when I reentered the bar. To my surprise, Daniela was there. The brunette waved, but refocused quickly on whatever the bartender was telling her. Her expression was as serious as I ever saw it, so I opted to focus on my own pseudo-mentor instead of trading barbs.
"Where are we going now?" I asked, glancing in the direction of a fallen chair to see Blobby rolling in my direction. The slime seemed smaller, despite the half digested meal floating in its body and the presence of the saddle on its back.
"To the hospital," Sharon called back, stepping back outside without waiting for her escort. The satyrs looked flustered, but not as much as I expected. Probably because trying to keep up with Sharon is about as likely as catching wind. Though... perhaps I shouldn't make that comparison since that is exactly what she is hoping to teach me.
"Come on Blobby. You get to ride, but maybe not quite as fast; we need to keep pace with the old lady." The Blobite attached to my leg jumped to meld with its counterpart before wiggling with joy.
"Ha!" One of the satyr chuckled, before another whacked him on the back of the head. None of them provided an explanation for their reaction.
When we exited the Taste of Old Sharon was working some seriously complex spell chains. Oddly, the smooth connections that came from naturally developed magics almost seemed superimposed with the glyph patterns I was starting to recognize in Entity-granted Skills. Thanks to my experience with Amplitude Items, and the creation of my Amulet, I could tell it was two layers of Air mana and one Water mana spell chain mixed in. The density matched the same as I could produce, so she wasn't stepping up the magic twice, but the Shaman seemed to be working the layer that had taken me out of commission with the Stinger Staff with ease. I need to learn to do that.
"Uh, Sharon?"
"Are those lazy ankle biters done with their food? The ride is waiting!" The woman said, voice short but nowhere near as strained as she'd been when summoning her Totems.
Instead of answering, the satyrs got to work with a bit of magic of their own. Each of them let out a low toned hum. As soon as they were all in sync, spell chains sprung up overtop Sharon's. Before my eyes, tree bark manifested in a rough sheet. The tone of the satyr song changed, and the sheet grew sides and seats within seconds. Then they clambered aboard in a hurry, pulling the elderly Shaman after them with the help of one satyr shaping steps out of the bark material.
The moments that followed were very convoluted. Sharon's magic triggered, hoisting the bark raft in a fizzy bubble of water. At the back of the raft, winds were pulled in viciously not too dissimilar to
Like the world’s most scrapped, yet magical, airboat, the Nash shot down the emptied street south. Had Blobby not reacted with utter glee at the prospect of speed, it was entirely possible we would have been left behind. For what was the way-too-many-times time, I juggled myself in the slime saddle. My mount friend, using whatever senses it had, kept a bead on the raft as it sped down two sharp corners and onto a long curving road.
The few remaining carts and transports on the road seemed to know not to get in the way of the cackling old woman driving the magic airboat so we avoided any close brushes with others in Ocala. Despite the speed of our travel, I got to get a better look at the Nash portion of the city once we were south of FL-40 and a ways from MoneyMcMoney. The ranch homes with pens I'd spotted on the edge of their Faction's land were only the start as orchards and wide plains housed what had to be hundreds of cattle in what had once been residential land. Here and there the patched together apartment towers rose from some old commercial building.
The most notable thing about the structures was their lean towards natural materials when compared to the more mixed architecture of the Zebelos. It wasn't surprising, considering the specialized path the Nash had taken when compared to the Zebelos, but when you see half a building made up of mushroom growths that seemed to shrug off the growing storm with ease you really start to take notice.
Despite all the sights to see, one edifice stood out. The most surprising thing was that, thanks to my LPS map, I could see we weren't far from McMoney at all. It was a stone throw from where we'd seen our first Ocalan Crystal Ward, and its entrapped fragment of Hec. Some would have called it a humble hospital with a strange tower rising into the sky. Others who knew about storms would have called it an impossibly localized supercell. As for me and my newly christened mana sight... it was a terrifying collection of elementals.
While from afar it had been hard to identify the slowly swirling cloud as anything but various shades of grey threatening rain, the closer we got the more I could see the ephemeral come physical. Training lights flittered through the clouds, either forming the currents I could see or being carried as if they were no lighter than a feather. I wasn't sure how grey could look so bright, but I just knew each of those represented an elemental of some fashion. Of them, there were several dozen, which was mirrored by their other companions in the sky.
Beyond the Air Attuned elementals were a cyclical wave of Water Attuned elementals shifting from mist to rain and back again. When two of the grey lights collided, silent thunder flashed and forked between their closest fellows. The collisions between the water elementals seemed to turn the clouds around them dark enough to obscure the elementals. Amazingly, there wasn't a single collision between different elements, as if the collisions were anything but that and merely part of the mesmerizing lightshow taking place in the sky.
I pulled on Blobby's handlebars as hard as I could, leaning back with enough intent that the slime slowed its advance on the building and the stone block fence I'd nearly collided with due to my distraction. Sharon seemed to have been expecting my reaction since she had been slowing her spell down and pivoted in a smooth U-turn instead of continuing towards the opening in the fence. The airboat pulled onto the grass adjacent to the road before the bubble of water seeped into the ground and the bark turned into rich mulch right under the feet of the satyrs.
"Good! It seems our little heart-to-heart took. Welcome to the old HCA hospital. It's been through a number of remodels over the years, but we've found we like it a little modular-- especially when we need to tussle with the Anemoi and their sycophants," Sharon said. The clack of her staff drew me out of my surprise.
"You want me to fight that?" I asked, pointing blatantly at the storm overhead. The satyr shared looks, apparently not expecting me to put together the task so directly.
"In a way. At the heart of that tower is the child of one of my Totems," Sharon said simply. If the woman hadn't been desensitizing me to her manner of speaking, I was sure I would have called out some explicit selection of curses. Of course, if the Entities could fragment--purposely or not-- it stretched that so could Mana Shards. It was just astounding how many of them the Shaman had at her disposal.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
"Is that why the elementals are here?"
"Sharp," Sharon said flatly. "Yes, what better bait than the very thing that helped birth them. Most of them, anyhow. The skies aren't ours during hurricanes, so I would point that out to your two elven friends. One got the warning, but we wouldn't want your little squire to get got. Anyhow, they are very eager for a taste of power and enlightenment. Of course, I have no intentions of letting them get to the little chick."
"How does this make things better? I suppose it makes sense concentrating the elemental threat so you don't have to hunt them down through the city, but I can't picture fighting that," I said, once more pointing at the gathering of elementals as lightning rippled through the sky.
"Our efforts are more along the lines of... let's say forcing a draw," Sharon said, walking closer.
She shooed me off Blobby before taking a seat on my saddle. She pat the slime and it started to roll at the gentlest speed I'd seen it. At that point I'd just been in a constant state of flabbergasted, so I took the odd behavior in stride... by matching her mounted speed with my own longer legs. The satyr followed steadily behind. She thankfully continued her explanation without me needing to ask.
"It takes mana for the elementals to remain congruent. It also requires mana for them to advance through the thresholds, albeit at radically higher rates than for the Fallen. The longer they can hold on to that mana, the higher up the totem pole they'll be. Pun entirely meant, since control of a Shard is a shortcut to power."
"Wait, their mana is their health?" I asked, thinking back to Sargon in the Hog Parade.
"That's what I said, didn't I? Their mana is probably twice what even your brutish self has as a giant," Sharon commented off hand. There she goes again, revealing important information.
"Okay, I'm with you. So, we damage them enough to flee but keep them close so they don't recover somewhere else where they can cause trouble?"
"Bingo. For those without a handy dandy Totem it becomes a wrestling match of mana to defend against the manifestations while disrupting the elementals. Manifestations being the actual physical effects of their spells, by the way."
"I gathered," I said, not even bothering to be aggravated by the condescending tone. The old woman knew her stuff, and I was all for learning.
We approached the bottom floor of the hospital unopposed. That was likely due to the Shaman herself, but that didn't mean the location was unguarded. As a matter of fact, I felt pressured by more than a dozen Life effects courtesy of guards spread through the area. They weren't lasting effects, but it left me feeling like I was in the crosshairs of some beast ready to turn me into so much organic mush. I knew that I could combat the magical effects with Arcane Sink and with holding a spell chain active to Gift Wrestle control of my own body, but I didn't like the odds. Even if everyone I saw was Q4 and Q5, quantity was a quality of its own.
"Think you can take the stairs?" Sharon asked Blobby. The slime quivered, somehow making its way right for the unlabeled door my vibrosense told me led upwards. Marveling at the slime's strange senses and sapience, I watched as the escort of satyr bowed at the entrance to the hospital before scattering like the wind.
"No more baby sitters?"
"They insisted on taking part of their off shift from the beacon tower to walk me. Even if someone wanted to hurt me here, they would have a very bad time."
"I've noticed," I said, realizing once again how balance had been maintained for so long in Ocala. Mutually assured destruction was a phrase I felt should have been stamped at the very front of the city's entrances.
Sharon simply cackled, her voice echoing in the stuffy stairwell. We had to switch to another after getting to the top floor in order to reach the roof, but it wasn't long before we were at the foot of the tower. As someone that liked to build their own structures, I could certainly appreciate what the Nash had built. The four vertical pillars that made up the tower were pine trees grown right out of the roof. The roots extended over the entire roof, even reaching the edge and spilling over the side like some living waterfall of vegetation.
The trees didn't even look particularly modified, as natural branches spoked out from their trunks every so often. Where they were modified was in the cross-bracing of vines that stitched up the sides up to the crown of the pines. Every twenty feet or so the branches of the pines wove together unnaturally as if the four massive trees were holding hands. I wasn't sure why they gave me that impression, but when vibrosense failed to penetrate into the trunks of the trees I knew there was more to them than met the eye.
So, I squinted. With my Perception bent to the task, I separated out the obfuscating vines from the true tree and the information in question manifested before me. I couldn't help but let out a soft whistle, especially when I noticed the same from the others.
"You guys make living structures often?" I asked.
"When need calls for it," Sharon said simply, waving at a fae that had been hiding amidst the branches and I'd missed completely. That they had orange toned skin only shades off from the tree bark certainly worked in their favor. Another reason to dislike Life Attuned. Sneaky forest fiends.
The fae blew into a flute, a golden-green spell chain forming around her for only a moment. When nothing else happened, I was ready to ask Sharon what the deal was, but a boxy platform lowered itself from above at the speed of... well, a creeping vine. I thought I had the modern construction blended with magic thing locked down in the trademark department, but the Nash were trying to show me up. The biological birdcage elevator settled gently in the center of the tower.
The woman and Blobby didn't hesitate to get on the lift, but trepidation filled my stomach. It wasn't hard for me to identify where it was coming from; vibrosense had been more than a little muffled since arriving on the roof and once we left the ground my sixth sense would be drawing a blank. For all the hardship it had caused me in the beginning, I'd begun to rely on it even to the point of using it to gauge the power of those around me before the Implants.
A muddy mole ran its feelers along the back of my neck and I jumped in alarm, ready to brandish my axe hammer but finding it unwilling to be released from my back. I realized what had happened, and growled, "Fievil!"
"Ha! I miss the mischievous phase. Now they are so... responsible and bloodthirsty. Ugh, no fun," Sharon chuckled.
"Fine fine, you oversized rat!" I ground out, stepping onto the lift. Were it not for the extra weight from Ballast at my legs, the sudden jerking rise would have caused me to stumble. As it was, I just glared at the Shaman who I was sure had somehow been involved with the timing. It was better than focusing on how 'blind' I felt without Harmonic Sinew's feedback. Even with that, however, my mind went blank the moment the lift rose into the eye of the storm.
I'd thought I understood the scope of what Sharon was trying to do. I'd been wrong. Three groups of Life Attuned Fallen scurried at the top of the tower. A duo of elves and merwomen were working to keep the surface of the tower from growing too slick by turning slurry into water that fed the trees or into chunks of ice they discriminately launched back into the storm overhead. And when it came to the storm overhead... what I'd seen from the ground didn't do it justice. There were so many elementals that I had to purposefully push my Implant away from identifying them all. My new strange magical sight worked against me as the sky turned into a blurry blend of grey and blue interspersed by gold and green spell chains from the teams on the tower.
A gale of wind swept over the surface of the tower, tipping it sideways by several feet and dropping the bottom out of my stomach. Immediately, the Fallen reacted to the shift and spell chains doing their best imitations of buzz saws cut apart a swath of the sky to reveal the blue hiding above. Despite that monumental move of magic, it hadn't been enough to dissipate or dispatch all the elementals and a few headed right for us on the still settling lift.
"Welcome to the meteorological battlefield, boy," Sharon cackled, her Totems manifesting and immediately snapping bites out of a cheeky elemental that dove for the Shaman.