Teyva bolted for the ring of stones around the boss chamber, vaulting over the rubble left behind by the terrible things’ attempt to crush her. She’d been way too cocky with that, in retrospect, but she didn’t have enough ranged attacks to bring the thing down from above so she had to count on the fact that it would have to engage in melee combat somehow. Sure, Azrael had several ranged attacks as well as the knife but if the Bound One even looked at her funny there would be nothing left.
She slid to a stop, her shoulder hitting stone, and rolled-forward until her back was to the largest formation she could find. She looked around, not immediately spotting her allies. She called out to Nephral again and saw a pair of white wings rise behind a formation a dozen yards away. She looked over her shoulder towards the dome of rock and dirt in time to hear a terrible bang echo from inside. She didn’t wait to see how long it would take the freaky-looking thing to bust out. Instead, she charged towards the formation where Nephral was hiding.
“Mother! Hurry!” Nephral called, waving her close. She slid to a stop behind the formation to find Azrael pressed against the stone with her weapon at the ready. She glanced over at Teyva and nodded while Nephral rushed to his mother’s shoulders and wrapped himself around her. Teyva let out a sigh of relief as her MP quickly began to rise even as the bangs of the Bound One’s attacks on the walls echoed around them.
“I’m not good at this kind of fighting, I’d rather be out there.”
“If you get hit by that light, it’s over Az,” Teyva said, flexing her mechanical arm. Frost formed and vanished on the fingertips and knuckles while she experimented.
Azrael scoffed; “Then I will not let it touch me,” She said twirling the black blade between her fingers.
“I’m serious Az,” Teyva warned.
“And I’m serious too, I will not let you fight on your own. You need to recover with Nephral so I will buy you time. More importantly,” She smiled wickedly; “We finally have a wide-open place to fight in.”
“Your point?”
Azrael grinned down at her friend, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she worked herself up. Her eyes flashed with eager energy while her fingers tensed and relaxed. Then she began to work her magic; “A falsehood, a whisper, a doe to be chased, dart away wind and sound,” She intoned and the wind picked up. Stones and rocks of various sizes and shapes gathered together with clumps of dirt and clay. Before long a vague shape reminiscent of a person was standing there, held together by the wind. Without waiting for orders it darted off in one direction.
Teyva opened her mouth to speak but Azrael held up a hand; “Trust me,” She said and then looked up; “Like the wind, swift-footed,” She said and as an Olympic gymnast she leaped and spun through the air before landing atop the rock they were hiding behind. She darted in the opposite direction of her decoy, keeping up her speed as she moved around the outer rim of the space. Staying close behind the rock formations Azrael began her hunt. Meanwhile, Teyva leaned against the rocks and caught her breath, concentrating on coming up with the next stage of her plan. They needed a strategy to reduce contact with the Bound One and confuse it. The thing seemed to operate on a very simplistic mindset which meant it should be easy enough to deceive.
“Mother, are you okay? You have been… erratic,” Nephral said, looking over at Teyva warily.
Teyva winced, pulling her knees up to her chest; “It just hit me that someone’s been playing mind games with me, I’m angry, Nephral. Very angry.”
“Do you believe it was Queen Rani?” He asked.
“She’s got something to do with it, I don’t doubt it,” Teyva said, rolling her jaw and clenching her fists. Something very fishy was going on inside her head and she couldn’t help but feel like the moment she figured it all out she was going to be even more pissed. Someone, somehow, had set her up and they had used the tutorial to play games with her brain. She should have been mentally ripped to shreds by the trauma of fighting the Tomb Guardian, yet here she was. She’d been enduring mood swings and bursts of almost manic energy. Her heart rate had been rising and falling. Not to mention the rushing thoughts.
She’d tried to get herself killed back there.
The crash of stone shook her out of her thoughts and she returned to the task at hand; “I’ll be okay Nephral, I’ve just got a lot to work through, Let’s focus on getting out of here alive, yeah?”
The feline eyed her and then nodded, spreading its wings proudly; “I shall not fail you mother. Your light shall spread across Orum and all shall know your name!”
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Teyva laughed and looked away, “My name, huh?” She muttered. A name that she’d been compelled to choose by some force, whether it was the ghost of the queen or the mural itself. She wasn’t sure. Yet now she was cognizant enough of it to make a conscious decision. Did she keep the name? Did she make it her own? She wasn’t Ianna Kovac anymore. She was pretty sure most of Ianna was stripped away by her repeated deaths. All that was left was this new person, lost in the maze of a new life. Her lip twisted at the labyrinth joke and she glanced up at the ceiling.
“Teyva Akura, Mother of Monsters,” She said, “Labyrinthian only as a technicality. I reject that heritage.”
“A fitting title, Mother, and strong words.” Nephral crooned, stretching his arms and extending his paws. “Has your mana recovered?”
She glanced over at her stats. Her MP was high enough to start putting some ideas into action. The first thing was first; she needed answers. She pulled up the combat log, looking for the moment when she had been in melee range and the Bound One had been suffering from [Chilling Weakness]. She rolled her eyes, she had known it was a possibility but it still sucked to see it in plain writing.
[The Bound One]
That narrowed her options a little, she wasn’t going to waste her energy trying to trigger [Withering Halo] then. Instead, she looked for a nearby rock that they weren’t using as cover and glanced around the side of the rock, looking for Azrael and the Bound One. She rolled her jaw, watching the fight from afar, and looked up. She opened her journal and quickly checked her theory. A wicked smile stretched across her face.
“Nef, sweetie, we have work to do.”
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Acceleration. Azrael had always relied on speed since she was a little girl. She had relied on it when she ran away from the slavers in Akar. She relied on it when she stole food at the Skysong Bazaar. She relied on it when the guards of the local warlord had pursued her. That had been the first time they had failed her, but now she wondered if the wind had instead guided her in the direction she needed to go. That warlord had become King, he had raised her and loved her as his child. He had been her world.
Now, she wasn’t so sure. There was someone else in her life she felt that she owed loyalty. Perhaps not the same kind of loyalty as King Thrake. But Teyva had become like a sister to her. She refused to let her down just as she refused to die in a depressing place like this. At least in Azrael’s mind, it all boiled down to speed. No matter how supposedly powerful this thing was, no matter how terrifying its abilities were, no matter if it wielded death magic, as long as she was faster she would survive.
No question was faster between the two of them as she counted the seconds in her head until the spell of speed would end. Three seconds left, she’d dragged it out as long as she could. Her feet had touched the ground thirty times in the ten seconds. She aimed and threw her weapon, breathing the incantation again and feeling the wind pick her up as her speed increased by another stage. Ten seconds. One, the blade hit. Two, the creature reacted. Three, the blade returned. Four, Threw the blade again. Five, the blade hit. Six, the monster turned again. Seven, the blade returned. Eight, Threw the blade again and began another round of the incantation.
Her feet had touched the ground fifteen times. Each step carried her longer than the last. Each movement was more difficult to control. More skill. More focus. She continued to run, darting in a perfect circle around the cleared central part of the room. The weapon returned to her hand and she continued throwing again and again and again. The blade struck over and over as she continued to accelerate. She wondered if she would hit her limit again. She could see the red line in her mind’s eye, the end of the current acceleration cycle. She’d accelerated five times. Could she go a sixth? Would she survive slowing down?
The Bound One turned, its eyes beginning to glow. It had lost patience with the barrage of attacks. Azrael gritted her teeth, looked forward, and tried not to imagine what had happened last time she’d said the spell a sixth time. The fear in her father’s eyes. The frustration on her teacher’s face. The worry of the nurses. The pain. The sight of her bones. In the instant between the last incantation and the next, she closed her eyes and centered herself. She had to do this and Teyva had better deliver on whatever hair-brained plan she had come up with.
She bore her pointed teeth, sweat glistening on her olive-gray skin. Her off-white hair had formed a perfect stream behind her. The blade reappeared in her hand and she took a breath; “Like the wind, swift-footed!”
Azrael felt a flare of cold behind her. A column of pure white light had erupted from the face of the machine and was sweeping across the field behind her. She counted the seconds, hurling her weapon and catching it as it returned. She felt the strain on her muscles, the disorientation, the confusion. It was hard to tell where she was as she ran, putting everything into one last dash before she let go of the acceleration. She couldn’t risk going faster. She glanced back over her shoulder at the column of white light, it was starting to flicker out. Even so, she wasn’t sure it would end before she slowed down.
In the end, fear crippled her. Azrael felt herself begin to slow just as she was starting to say the incantation again. The cold started to catch up and she dropped to the ground in hopes of dodging it. What should have been a drop to a prone position became a tumbling roll. She felt something cold wash across her leg as she slammed into a rock, striking her head and feeling the room spin around her as all the pain in the world concentrated down from her calf to the tip of her toes.
She gripped her leg, blackened and withered by the frigid death magic, and looked up at the killing machine that had finally pegged her with its gaze.
“Hey, Azrael!” A voice called from above.
Azrael looked up to see Teyva hanging from the side of the Bound One’s root, “You ever think about running track?”