Somehow, in the midst of the chaos, Ensharia had found her back pressed against Fall’s. The two of them stood together and faced the rest of the room, one clutching her fist tight about a warmace, the other clutching it tight just for the sake of clutching it. Around them the magi had galvanised, and their power was thick enough that she could taste it.
They were like wolves circling a bear, able to guarantee victory with sheer numbers alone, but rightly cautious about the attempt. There was a power advantage not to their favour, and Fall had made it clear that those first few to attack would be risking their lives with his retaliation.
Even so, there was murder on the air, and men did not remain terrified forever. Ensharia’s Paladin training was enough for her to recognise the currents of magic shifting as their enemies readied an attack.
Then the window high above them exploded inwards, and whatever assault had been coming was interrupted as Silenos’ body dropped fifty feet down to land hard between her and the enemy.
Instantly, the entire room fell silent. A hundred stunned eyes gaped wide at the fallen caster, as he grunted and pushed himself to his feet. Silenos Shaiagrazni did not appear terribly injured, however he was clearly pained by one wound or another. Clothing ragged, body littered with minor cuts and bruises already etched across his bronze flesh.
A great pressure emanated from him that Ensharia recognised well, the pneumatic waste of his magic building to volcanic intensities and displacing the air around him. By the way they backed up and licked nervous lips, even as their elders got to their feet, the magi could sense it even more keenly. Here was a man who carried with him the killing might of an army, and Silenos looked in the mood to use it.
It was a testament to the pure terror at play that the newcomer managed to draw all eyes away from even that.
One far wall, just above the window Silenos had been thrown through, came apart into flying, arrow-fast debris, chunks of mortar and stone hitting the far wall hard enough that they might have killed any men caught between. Before the dust had even cleared, a new figure emerged at its midst.
A tall man, the magus Walriq was not. Ensharia recognised him nonetheless by the sheer force of magic surrounding him, wind currents whipping about so violently that the dust was dispelled from everywhere within a dozen feet of his body as if it were scared to go near him. The wind didn’t remain by his side for long, however, lunging down for Silenos in a funnel of power so sudden and jarring that it didn’t even give her chance to wonder how her Saviour was being attacked by a dead man.
Silenos met the blast with a wall, some strange construct that looked like yellow-tinted bone and flexed upon impact. The wind broke against it, deflecting in all directions and sending magi to crash against walls. The rest of them panicked instantly, and began fleeing from the hall.
Her own body was no heavier than theirs, but the magical vigour that allowed Ensharia to move with the strength of a creature many times her weight also left her anchored to any less force than would be needed to move such a beast. She felt herself driven back a few inches by the deflected fraction of magus Walriq’s attack that struck her, but a simple pressure at her heels let her hold herself still. The wind soon faded, and just as it did she saw the Saviour’s arms raise.
Fluid gathered before him, the inky substance that had melted through siege towers in one hand, a more translucent liquid in the other. Then the explosion rang out.
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Bombardier beetles had long since been an interest of Silenos, and he’d taken the time to study their curious biochemistry, discovered the particular chemical formula of the deadly compounds their bodies produced and mixed to bring the power of incineration and detonation into biological matter. Then improved it. His own blend was just a hair weaker than nitroglycerin in mass-specific explosive power, and notably denser. The armoured plate he built into the palm of his hand was strained in absorbing the concussion of its ignition, and the shockwave forced his arm back.
It forced the shadestuff back, too. And, having been placed between Silenos’ own body and the necromantic material, it forced it back into a spray of high-velocity death arcing right for the magus.
Walriq had come to, if not impress, then at the very least enforce a healthy degree of caution into Silenos, and so it was no surprise that he shielded himself. The shadestuff would have eaten through any physical barrier a creature of his strength might have conjured, but it was unable to fully permeate the wall of wind that halted it. Force was not a thing, it was a stimulus that acted on things, and in taking on mass and substance, shadestuff made itself vulnerable to such misdirections. Silenos was finding this opponent particularly suited to troubling him, and quickly dove from the path of his own redirected attack.
The Paladin, Ensharia, surprised Silenos by charging for the magus while he focused on defence. Her speed was considerable, determination moreso, and yet the woman’s strength had long since been evaluated, and he knew it fell far short of the sums needed to bring any measure of threat against something of their opponent’s calibre.
At best she would be a mere inconvenience, at worst she would die, and he had far too much use for her to allow that.
Rather than attempt to stop the blows that soon aimed themselves for Ensharia, Silenos simply turned his focus onto capitalising on whatever momentary distraction she caused. He shaped his arm, letting a long cavity form inside of it, then lining its interior with dense bodily minerals, prioritising mass and hardness over all other things. At last he formed complex glands at the back, primed and ready to excrete another round of his blasting chemicals, before forming a projectile of yet more ossiferous tissue. Finally, he released the explosives.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Ensharia had already been forced to dodge twice, then finally swept from her feet and high into the air by the time enough moments had passed for Silenos’ weapon to be fired. He saw, then, however, that he had chosen right.
There hadn’t been the time or available matter for a full-body combat form transformation, his makeshift cannon proved deadly enough regardless. The blasting chemicals reacted with sufficient force that, even surrounded by the most unyielding and durable tissue he knew of, Silenos felt lances of pain run out from the point of their detonation. The released energy was strangled and intensified by confinement in his tight barrel, forcing the generated overpressure into extremes only measurable in Gigapascals. Every ounce of this pressure found release only behind the bullet of bone placed between it and the exit far ahead, accelerating the projectile so rapidly that a sting soon alerted Silenos to his cannon being heated dangerously fast.
It all held, though. Despite his decades without combat, despite it being a design Silenos had coined mere moments before, despite the dozen ways he’d already identified it falling short of idealisation in, the makeshift, prototypic weapon held, and it spat death from its mouth with such intensity that the air flashed visibly bright and hot for a moment.
Silenos’ eyes and occipital neurons had been enhanced to the point of clearly perceiving the momentary spread of flame across black powder, and seeing even the blinking of an unenhanced eye as if it were a sluggish, lengthy thing. Even he barely caught the flight of his projectile in its path towards the enemy, however. Such was its speed. By the time he registered that it had left the barrel, it was almost upon the magus.
Air parted, then flesh and bone followed suit. The projectile punched clean through its target as if his body had been constructed of wet mud rather than solid matter. Blood fell in darkened, de-oxygenated hues to spatter the ground beneath Walriq, and the reanimate was sent spinning backwards. Silenos took the opportunity to alter his creation.
Fractionally thicker plating within the barrel, a membrane of frictionless lubricative mucus to avoid wear and tear, a tighter fit with the projectile so that he might make a more efficient gas seal. Despite it all, he was forced nonetheless to reduce the yield of his blasting fluids, but the next projectile was still supersonic. A fist-sized block of bone heavier than any equivalent volume of lead, smashing hard against the enemy shield once, twice.
By the third time, Walriq had moved to keep himself from being further assailed. Silenos was forced into another dodge, which only served to send him into the path of a second blast of wind, this one snatching his legs out from under him. He spun, hit the ground hard enough to shatter any bone not made with Shaiagrazni genius, and bounced a full metre back into the air before another jet came for him. He braced himself to be dashed against the far wall, then blinked as the air distorted in front of him, and the attack broke apart with nothing more than a few scrapes of pressure on his skin.
Silenos only needed to tighten his eyes for an instant to recognise that half the power before him was not the undead’s. Arion Fall’s magic was younger, less refined. All youth and passion and uncertain vigour, like a wildfire burning itself out. The innate power was something to be admired, however, and Silenos realised the boy wasn’t entirely far from being a match for his own talent.
But he hadn’t nearly his master’s experience, and it was clear how a contest between the two of them would end. Silenos was quick in interrupting it.
Silenos took his time producing a secondary cannon, letting this one emerge from his other shoulder, and while he did, Silenos grew further plating around his sides and torso, serving as vents for yet more blasting fluid. He was done within ten seconds, firing within one, and this time his aim was truer by far thanks to the new stabilising jets of pressure he could release from all directions to keep the momentum of his weaponry from spinning him like a leaf in the wind.
Walriq’s magic quickly turned onto primarily defence once the volley began, buckling and shivering as the impacts racked it, while Arion Fall’s own magic safeguarded Silenos from being attacked whilst he focused on breaking through. Finally Walriq’s defence failed, but it was not Silenos’ own attacks that struck at the weak point.
It was Ensharia.
Ancestors only knew when the Paladin had gotten it into her head that this was a fight she had any business partaking in, but her presence was actually of no small convenience. She struck, by instinct, fortune or cognition, at the precisely perfect moment to slip past the gap in their enemy’s defences, latching onto the magus was a grip strong enough to crush most men to death.
Silenos saw the energies of wind magic wrapping about him, resisting her compressive hold, and realised that Ensharia’s mace had been lost somewhere. Before he could even begin to doubt her odds however, a glow began to build around the woman.
What the girl did next was something Silenos recognised only from stories and legends.
Holy magic, miracles, True Faith, there were a thousand words for the curious phenomena of otherwise mundane individuals gaining the ability to enfeeble and destroy undead. Naturally, such magics had long since been removed from his own world, House Shaiagrazni had utilised ten generations of careful eugenics to ensure it ceased emerging among the general human populace, but he was not entirely surprised to find it here. Witnessing its effects first-hand was an indescribably fascinating experience.
As a rule magic was the act of changing the physical world through will, and rarely anything more. Hers could not have been more different.
Silenos, with his Entity-granted perception, was able to see clearly how it functioned. The way the arcane powers conjured at Ensharia’s will targeted not the physical world, but the undead’s own magic, eating swirling colours of magical light and rapidly deteriorating their effect. He watched as Walriq grew sluggish, his wind less potent, Ensharia’s iron grip closer to fully closing upon the reanimated corpse and crushing it to paste. Even still, it was a struggle for her to keep hold.
Walriq’s magic was weakened, which in turn weakened the potency of his winds, but they were still a cut above anything the Paladin was likely to muster in her lifetime. She had moments, at best, before being dislodged, and Silenos had seen enough to know all too well that she would not be allowed to even hit the ground before scything winds tore her apart.