Chapter 10
Suicide Mission
~<(0)>~
Lyrei awoke in the shattered remains of a house, head pounding as she tried to take inventory of everything. She quickly came to an answer: Everything Hurt. She tried to move and found herself impaled on a jagged spike of splintered wood, something she had broken when she entered the room. She pulled herself off of the broken beam, readying her magic for healing spells, though as she watched in amazement, the wound began to heal before her eyes, a strange rainbow shimmer as it flowed back into place. She dropped the spells, apparently unneeded at the moment. This wasn’t normal, but nothing was normal. Lyrei Araphine didn’t simply wake up impaled on architecture. This was simply unheard of.
Her gaze drifted up, looking around the room, and she looked towards the hole she had apparently entered the room from. “(Or)” she corrected that thought “(What I was blown through)” she shifted unsteadily over to the hole and looked down what appeared to be a tunnel of structures that she had added extra ventilation to before this final house had stopped her practically non-ballistic flight. There was something moving at the far end, but she couldn’t get a good look at it. She split her mind and… felt nothing as for the first time she could remember, she was unable to fragment her mind as she had become so used to doing.
Even stranger, she couldn’t seem to remember where she was or why she was there. She tried to remember what she could before she had woken up, but only felt an aching void. Her head throbbed, but she couldn’t discern anything beyond that. Wait, if she thought further back, she could remember things like the Saturation Project, and her research, and… an expedition. And a slime. She couldn’t remember anything beyond that fight, if it could be called such.
It was no matter, she could cast magic with one mind, it would just require planning to compensate for her inability to think four ways at once. She effortlessly cast her thought acceleration spell and pushed energy into a spell to help her clear these buildings and get to the town wall. Lyrei leapt up and into the air, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, until one final bound took her to a mostly untouched section of wall, save for where she had been thrown through it. Now, what in the world could actually throw her through walls like she was a ragdoll? As she crested the wall, she fumbled her landing from sheer shock. No, that… couldn’t be possible. It looked different to every other one she had faced in the past, but it was clear it had a different elemental core. There was no doubt in her mind, however, this had to be a Chimeric Abomination. She… she had to get out of here. She turned to throw herself off of the wall before it noticed her, to ready teleport coordinates. She’d go to the Elven Capitol and get the help of the best mages the Empire had.
Her eyes fell on the town below. Aside from the destruction she had caused by being bodily hurled through a dozen houses and a solid stone wall, the rooftops were smouldering if not outright burning in many places, and a section of the wall further down from her looked like it had suffered an extremely localized earthquake. But more importantly, she saw the people. Frightened men, women, and children, rushing through the streets seemingly trying to evacuate. There were figures in armour trying to direct the people, but even so she could see it was a slow process. They were human, she realized belatedly. She should leave them. Villages had always died in the past, simply a low priority when taking into account the destruction of something that threatened the world as a whole. However, something stopped her from simply leaving. She didn’t know why, but she felt some strange obligation to help them, to save them from the Abomination. Not just as a service to the world, her duty as the strongest mage in the world, but a service to them specifically.
But she couldn’t hope to fight that thing alone. It had always taken dozens upon dozens of the best mages in the world weeks to be able to fight an Abomination. There was a reason it was considered an Omega Class threat. And yet, she realized as she turned back to look at it, someone had been fighting it. She could see the remains of one of its limbs, as well as damaged artifacts and crystals all along the side of its body. Had she done that? Lyrei tugged at her magic, reaching a metaphorical hand into that flow and feeling the current. She expected a swiftly flowing river, the magic she had been used to for a millennium; She found a torrential flood, the feeling of an ocean being forced through a tiny pipe, and her eyes widened. Maybe… just maybe she could fight this thing. There were several things that didn’t make any sense, but she could figure those out later.
“No More.”
She, Lyrei Araphine, the most powerful sorceress in the world, waved her hand and dozens of spell circles flared to life, constructing a magical shield behind her that expanded rapidly to cover the entire width of the town and half again beyond. A simple tweak to the runes allowed those humans on this side of the barrier to pass through without issue, it was to protect them after all.
Chimeric Abominations were generally attracted to thaumic energy sources, so she needed to make herself the perfect target. She let the power flow through her. The feeling was exhilarating, it was as though a great river ran through her, so much, and she felt like she could do so much more if she tried. Wrong as this body seemed, it was no longer a limiting factor in her abilities. The surging energy emanated from her, energizing the surrounding rubble, causing it to lift into the air as she walked forward, little arcs of energy zapping between pieces. Lyrei hardly noticed, lost as she was in the feeling of power and focused on the enemy before her.
It was obviously fire related, the way blue flames crawled over every surface of it. It was likely a deep fire elemental of some kind as the intelligence driving this monster. With as rare as they were, she hadn’t had any kind of experience with a flame elemental Chimeric Abomination. The heat radiating from it, even at this distance, was causing organic materials to char and catch fire within seconds, though seemingly leaving inorganic materials unharmed. With a few moments of concentration, she layered her defensive ward across her body again, feeling the cooling relief the spells brought.
As she tuned her body to the flow of magic, she could feel two loci relatively nearby, one on the wall near where it had been obliterated, and something up in the sky. She ran along the wall towards the first locus, feeling a wave of heat as a spell detonated behind her. Movement was key, it seemed. She didn’t want to think about what might have happened if that had hit her. She couldn’t afford to be careless, or she would die. She found what she was looking for shortly before the missing section of wall. It seemed to be several things made out of slime, which she would have immediately dismissed, but she felt traces of her magic within them. She examined them more closely and discovered they each contained thaumic constructs. None of them possessed any form of even rudimentary intelligence, like naturally occurring slimes had, but what they did have was structure. She traced along the matrix in one, realizing it was set to feed a ritual spell. She compared it to all the others, realizing they were all dummy ritual members. She had used simple thaumic constructs like these before, millennia ago, before she had simply been able to think multiple ways at once. With the sheer amount of power she seemed to possess now, and her apparent lack of auxiliary minds, it made a terrifying amount of sense. She could easily power a ritual by herself, she just needed ritual node stand-ins… and these were perfect.
She felt the links to the spell high above, the other locus she had felt, and inspected the decaying runic circle written in the clouds above. She started feeding excess power into the ritual dummies, which at her power level was most of her power. Though she did have to moderate her output so she didn’t overload the matrices. The her that had been fighting this thing shortly before she lost consciousness had been preparing a massive ritual spell to drop the temperature of a frankly staggering amount of space to something approaching absolute zero. It made sense. If you were fighting fire, fight it with whatever fire was weak to. She didn’t know if it would work or not, but it was likely the best chance she had. The time the ritual dummies had been left untended meant the ritual had decayed to about a quarter charge, though it was difficult to tell the level it had been before her spontaneous nap.
All of this had been thought and done in a few fractions of a second, but even that was too long for comfort. She snatched up the ritual dummies and moulded the slime so that each formed rings around her body so she could keep them with her, and then slammed herself with a wave of telekinetic force, just in time to dodge another overpowered slung spell. Where it hit a house exploded into flames and splinters of wood and plaster, and she winced. She couldn’t do anything about the collateral damage, the best she could hope for was to save as many townspeople as possible. What she needed to do was stall until the ritual was ready, and then she could charge up something far more devastating to take the Abomination out once and for all.
The fact that each of these spells was impacting with such power was worrying. All it would take was one good hit, or even a near miss, and she figured that she’d be out of action at best, and a carbon image on the ground at worst. She leapt again, dodging a spell before it even came near her to get out of range of the blast. As she flew through the air, she planned. She couldn’t split her mind, and definitely not for lack of trying. That was one of the things that had seemed so wrong since she had woken up. For Millennia, she had been able to at least split her mind into two, and completely lacking this ability meant she was severely handicapped. Artificially created thaumic constructs, such as the rings of slime surrounding her, were what most other mages did, and what she had done before she had discovered the ability to fragment her mind. While she could boast a great many things, her will was only so strong, and the current constructs, the ritual dummies, were all she could reasonably handle without severely impacting her focus. It was, of course, completely possible to cast spells unaided, though most mages at least had some sort of spell focus. She nearly facepalmed as she realized and reached her magical senses out to detect her staff, which she had personally enchanted with hundreds of charms and had dozens of common spell matrices engraved inside the crystal at the top. She felt nothing. She blinked and focused again, pushing more power into the spell, tapping a fraction of her absurd power, enough to be able to track the staff planetwide. Nothing.
She forcibly filed the confusion about that fact away, as it wasn’t helping now, and therefore required no further thought until she had dealt with the Abomination. Unfortunately, this really did leave her with a single option: casting the spells with a single mind, and completely unaided. If she couldn’t feel that torrent of energy raging just below the surface, waiting for her to call upon it, she might have despaired and teleported out.
Spell options: Ice spells would be ideal, though greater forms of these spells would be needed due to the severe temperature. Spatial spells would likely be quite effective, however without other minds to handle the computation required, none of these were really viable, especially when mobility was taken into account. Sheer kinetic energy would likely have some sort of effect. She tilted her head and looked around, taking in the fragmented stones, the ruined houses, and the wall-side armaments. The ballistae were useless, but the cannons had promise. She threw herself over to one of the cannons with a burst of force, dodging the wash of another spell and getting her to her target.
It was an iron banded cannon, with cannonballs scattered around. Perfect for fending off wild animals and bandits alike, though utterly useless against the Abomination, at least in its current form. She lifted the cannon with telekinesis and started to carve runes into it, circles and patterns all along the surface. At the same time, she moulded the shape, the cannon glowing red hot as she stretched it out far longer than it ever would have needed before.
In her mind’s eye she saw the research of some far younger elven academy students a few hundred years ago. She hadn’t gone to their showing in person, she never did, but the test had apparently far exceeded everyone’s expectations, sending a ferrous slug far past the speed of sound, as well as the safety wards they had set up for the showing. The Elven Military had looked into the prototype but deigned it too different from the elven style of weaponry to consider it further. It was the hubbub that Lyrei heard that piqued her interest into their research material. Electrically powered magnetic coils pulsing in sequence to throw a projectile entirely without explicit need for magic or powder. The idea had seemed rather crude to her at the time, but now it might just prove to be her salvation.
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The cannon was complete. Double the length, with a spiralling pattern of runework coating the entire surface that detailed the system by which it accelerated the slug. She dodged another spell, throwing herself further down the wall, landing bodily near another cannon emplacement, complete with more cannonballs. She picked one up with her telekinesis and moulded it too, lengthening it into a pointed needle of a slug which she slotted into the bore of the cannon, letting it fall to the base of the barrel.
Lyrei dodged another spell, this time landing on her feet, with her experimental weapon at her side, and took aim. She fed a portion of the torrential magic into the input nodes on the cannon, and felt the whole thing crackle with energy, glowing a pale blue all over. Then a small push and CRACK! The sound was deafening, and the elf staggered back as the gun leapt in her telekinesis. She looked up at the Abomination, realizing she had missed seeing the shot hit. But she immediately realized she didn’t need to have seen it, as the behemoth was staggering backwards from her shot, a whole section of what made up its leg darkened, only a portion of the magical glow returning.
There was no time to celebrate her success, however, as the Abomination let out a horrible sound, something that shattered Lyrei’s eardrums and nearly threw her off the wall. Still reeling from loss of balance, she fell to her knees on the floor before, to her surprise, her ears seemed to regenerate themselves entirely without her magical assistance, harkening back to when her mortal wound in her chest had reformed itself with that strange rainbow shimmer. She looked up, still a little dizzy, and had to shield her eyes as the fire crawling all over the Abomination grew to a staggering intensity. Instinct took over and she scrambled to the inner edge of the wall, throwing herself to the ground. Pain flared through her body as she hit, but that was nothing compared to what happened above the wall.
A wall of flame passed above the wall, radiating heat even down at ground level. As it washed over the rooves of taller structures, they just… completely immolated, turning to little more than charcoal which immediately caught the rest of the structure in a roaring fire that started slowly burning downwards. Then it impacted her shield, and her vision blurred as the spell overloaded and pulled on her focus to stabilize. She gasped and retched on the ground, nothing coming up even if she wished for something to expel. The shield threatened to shatter, but she couldn’t just let it do so, not after she saw what the wave of flame had done, and she pumped more energy into it despite how it made her head feel. It was obvious that whatever rudimentary intelligence existed inside the Abomination felt threatened and was using its more devastating abilities in reaction.
Climbing to her feet, Lyrei stumbled over to her modified cannon which had landed nearby, and after taking a few breaths to clear her mind as best she could, she pushed magic into a leap up to the wall. What she saw simply horrified her. Half the wall had simply sloughed away as molten rock that flowed down to the ground. It hadn’t even started cooling. The ground itself was a molten glassy surface for kilometers, everywhere the wave of fire had hit. No plant life remained whatsoever, the only indication this had been a forest the blackened matchstick looking forms of the charcoalized trees that were raging with flames.
To say this was not good was an understatement. This was sheer catastrophe. Unless the fires were extinguished, the entire forest would burn, maybe even more depending on the various country responses. She tapped the connection to the ritual dummies, and found the ritual was 2/3 charged. Not enough, not nearly fast enough. She had to do something else to stall this damned monstrosity before it set the continent aflame.
Flight was a notoriously difficult skill to learn, let alone master, with dozens of different ways you could go about the problem, each with their own pros and cons. Holding oneself aloft with Telekinesis required proper anchors and a way to lift yourself relative to the ground. Spatial manipulation could be used to pull oneself up via warped gravity, though this required a considerable amount of focus, and if done wrong would likely end up with your body spaghettified by a short-lived singularity. Artificial wings of varying forms, both magical and mechanical could work, though she had neither the materials nor the desire to waste time trying to put something together, even if it were simply a magical construct.
Instead, Lyrei simply hurled herself into the air with wind, caring little about grace or control, and more about speed. The ground sped away below her, and she shot into the cloud layer as water vapor slapped against her body. Light blossomed around her as she shot above the cloud layer, seeing the intensely glowing circle array that was the ritual. As much as she wished she could simply flood it with power directly, she didn’t have the time to reconfigure the entire circle to single point input. It didn’t matter though, ultimately she just needed to buy time, and the spell would work as it was.
She let the magic flow from her into the cloud layer, spreading over kilometers of cloud cover, and then switched from the inelegant wind spell to a telekinesis spell anchored to the entire cloud bank. The next step required more subtle alterations. Weather was a finicky thing, based on temperature, pressure zones, and moisture content in the air. It had never been her specialty, but she had studied a great many things over her thousands of years of life, and she knew enough to make these clouds rain out over the forest fire below. It was achingly slow, and Lyrei hoped she wasn’t simply wasting valuable time preparing a storm to let loose like this.
A rumbling sound emanated from down below, and she let go of the spell anchoring her in place, dropping down into the clouds, fearing the worst. She slipped into the oven-like temperatures below the clouds and looked frantically for the Abomination. Her fears, however, were unfounded it seemed, as though it had moved, the Abomination hadn’t let loose any further devastating attacks. However, the rumbling came again, this time accompanied by flashes of lightning arcing across the darkened sky. She alighted on the half melted Fairpost wall and realized she could start to hear the pitter patter and hissing of raindrops hitting the molten landscape below. She tapped her link to the ritual, ¾ done, and realized she needed to keep stalling. She retrieved her cannon once more, and looked around for the cannonballs, though it seemed they had been hit by the fire wave and were now part of the slowly cooling pool of molten material on the ground. She heard the approaching roar of a roiling fire spell and threw herself off the wall and into the town again, this time landing far better than she had the first time. Several meters above, the fire spell flew off, ultimately impacting her shield as it was the only thing left standing above the height of the wall.
Lyrei needed iron. This town had to have a blacksmith, right? She looked down one of the town streets, trying to find something she could identify as a smith of some sort, and got a sudden splitting headache as memories spilled into her mind. She had memories of the blacksmith’s shop now, as though she had watched herself go there to buy tools of all things, which didn’t make any sense whatsoever. The memories felt like hers, yet foreign all the same. Lyrei massaged her temples as she tried to clear this sudden migraine and decided to file this conflicting information into the back of her mind, for later, as it wasn’t going to help her defeat the Abomination.
She ran through the town, finding the smith’s shop right where her memories told her it would be, in front of her shield, but nowhere near as damaged by the embers landing on its roof, due to it being fire resistant simply by being a smithy. She hoped the blacksmith wouldn’t mind if she took several of his works without paying, a thought that nearly made her laugh from the sheer absurdity of it. She felt a little bad about ruining the smith’s pieces like this, something that surprised her; They were quality work, but all she really needed was the iron they were composed of.
With her collection of weapons in tow, floating behind her, she started to mould them into elongated needle shaped slugs, like her original projectile. She slipped a projectile into the cannon’s bore as she ran back towards the wall, leaping onto it when she was close enough. The cannon thrummed with energy as she poured her magic into it, this time putting up a personal shield simply to protect herself from the sound of the shot breaking the sound barrier and also taking a more stable footing on the wall. The rain was really coming down now and was thankfully having an effect on the ruined and scorched landscape, cooling down the molten surface to rock and glass. With a CRACK dampened somewhat by her personal shield, the needle of iron flew through the air, visibly blowing the water away as it passed, until it slammed into the Abomination, causing it to stagger and darkening another patch of glowing thaumic crystals on its body, much of which didn’t return to glowing.
Lyrei was already loading another slug into the cannon, keeping a close eye on the behemoth in case it let loose a wave of searing flame like before. Thus, she was ready as it started to charge up its flame wave again, jumping off of the ruined wall and landing gracefully on the ground. The wave of fire once again passed over her head to impact on the shield, and she grit her teeth as the world spun. The hissing became louder and she turned back towards the wall, taking a few steps back as the stones, glowing an incandescent white, before succumbing to the heat and completely melting into lava that collapsed under its own weight.
As the remains of the wall flowed down, she readied her weapon and aimed, shooting another needle that punched a wagon wheel sized hole in the cascading lava as it flew off to hit the Abomination. She didn’t wait, she couldn’t afford to wait, and readied another round in her cannon. CRACK! Another hit that caused further damage to the monster, patches flickering and going dark. It roared again, and she threw up a shield to block the sheer wave of sound that buffeted against her.
The world began to grow brighter as what might as well have been a second sun grew around the Chimeric Abomination. Somehow, this seemed even worse than the other two times. She didn’t even have a wall to hide behind anymore, this was cataclysmically bad. Then her ritual dummies signalled completion and collapsed inward, sinking into her body, and she frantically triggered the ritual high above.
At first, nothing seemed to happen, and then in a portion that must have been underneath the spell circle in the clouds, the rain froze in midair. Then the ground solidified, taking on a glassy sheen which was quickly clouded by rime as frost and ice started forming and spreading outward. The air became unnaturally clear, free of any form of precipitation whatsoever, and she saw the Abomination beyond this effect ready to release its flame wave, and Lyrei held her breath. The wave pulsed from the monster, spreading outward, turning the ground to molten slag once more, but when it hit the supercooled zone it simply… stopped. The wall of searing white flames, blocked partially by the spell’s effects, missed the entirety of the town.
Lyrei came to her senses within moments, gathering up her projectiles and cannon, and preparing a wind spell once more to throw her up and over the slowly cooling molten rock wall. As she flew she readied more thaumic constructs, loading them with spells to protect her from the absurd cold, as she didn’t relish the idea of turning into an ice statue the instant she entered the current radius of the spell. She landed where the ground was turning to rock and glass, and immediately felt the change. Even with her temperature spells, she felt frigid, and the air felt difficult to breathe. It dawned on her that nearer to the center of the spell the snow on the ground was likely made up of the gasses in the air more than simply water, and she added an atmospheric spell to her orbiting constructs.
The spell had begun to reach the Abomination now, and it recoiled from it. Lyrei idly wondered what it was feeling as it tried to escape the spell. Was it fear? Rudimentary pain? Did it even understand what was happening to it? She readied her cannon, inside the bubble of air and relative warmth she had created around her, and fired, knocking the Abomination off balance and causing one of its limbs to be caught in the expanding field and frozen, the supercooled air extinguishing the flames where it passed. She fired again, another section going dark. Again. More damage. Again and again and again, until she ran out of ammunition for the weapon. She tossed it aside, deciding it had served its purpose, and kept walking forward.
There was an explosion of magical energies as the thaumic power cores in the large boiler assembly were destroyed by the frigid air and encroaching ice. Lyrei had reached the Abomination now, stepping onto the rock and crystal debris that made up the majority of its body. No heat seared her body now, nor did flames lick at her feet, attempting to turn her to charcoal. There was one final Catalyst that hadn’t been destroyed yet: A large mining machine, appearing dwarven in make. She made a grim realization that whatever dwarves had made this mining machine had dug too deep, and whatever primal natural thaumic construct of flame and lava had existed down there had possessed their mining machine. She wondered how many had died to it. She wasn’t going to let it gain any more victims.
The miner was obviously more protected from temperature than the rest of the Abomination was, it made sense really. It thrashed around, trying to free itself from the rest of what had been its body, even as ice threatened to lock it solid from the outside. She stepped onto the final living (if it could be called that) portion of the Abomination and looked down at it in disgust. She gathered her power in her hands, readying a spatial shearing spell, something to tear this monstrosity apart once and for all. It stopped moving under her, having been frozen solid, and her spell slowly worked towards completion. Mobility was no longer an issue, and though it took a while to prepare this spell, she didn’t care. After a subjective eternity, she lowered the finished spell to the control cab of the Miner and let loose. Reality flickered and sheared, inky black spiderwebs crawling outwards below her feet. She felt an explosion beneath her and felt the entity’s presence disappear from the world.
With a thought, Lyrei cancelled the ritual spell and turned, ready to walk back to the town through a frozen, scorched, and ruined wasteland. She felt empty.