Staccato flashes of light were accompanied by bursts of force that the team could feel reverberate in their chests. The magical force of the blast’s percussion could be felt on their auras. The constructions on either side of the corridor took it in turns, the one on the right firing a split second after the left, creating an arc of inescapable fire. As soon as it fired the front rotated, aligning the next blast like a rotary cannon. The rock elemental caught in the crossfire was pummelled to pieces in short order and the constructions disappeared into their slots in the floor.
“Sweet mother of god.” James muttered under his breath.
“The mother of which god?” Auster asked. But no one answered.
They had gone deep into the city, into the chasm at the bottom of the canyon, down so deep that no sunlight would ever reach. The Mitchells were finding it uncomfortable, they had an extremely tight leash on their auras except Kyra who was doing her best to shield everyone, especially Ragnar who’s aura control wasn’t as tidy having not come through the annex program and as a human the array was affecting him a lot more than the outworlder bodies of the Mitchells, he was sweating profusely and starting to shake.
“Guys excuse us, I’m going to take Ragnar up top.” Kyra said, pulling on his arm.
She moved her aura away from the others and they swayed taking up the strain. Kyra and Ragnar sprinted away, getting him away from the deleterious effects.
“So you get lots of elementals come through here?” Teddy asked just as a bunch of three came around the corner and the construct ‘guns’ popped back up and laid into them. Two rock and one magma elementals. They were blasted to pieces in short order.
“Almost continually.” Orcnig rumbled. “An effect of the array we found when we tried to expand deeper. We turn off the constructs when we have a youth who needs to learn a lesson in discipline and duty.”
“Wait wait wait, hold up.” James said excitedly. He furrowed his brows and used a narrators voice. “Delved too greedily and too deep, we know what they awoke in the darkness of the array, shadow and flame.”
Teddy rolled his eyes at James. Orcnig looked confused and was about to say something when Lucy buried her head in her hand.
Just then another scraping sound came from the other end of the tunnel, this time four elementals were there, a rock, a magma, a smoke and an iron.
“May I?” James asked excitedly. Orcnig shrugged and nodded yes. “Teddy can I borrow a sword?” Teddy struggled against the array’s effect but conjured a sword from his storage and James strode forward towards the slow elementals.
Teddy whispered to Orcnig while James moved forward. “How many do you normally get?”
“Ones and twos, having more of us down here calls them quicker.”
James was now standing in the middle of the corridor. With a huge surge of effort he managed to conjure is Staff of the Everglades although the effort made him weary.
“You cannot pass!” He shouted at the elementals.
“Oh jeez…” Lucy said to the others.
“I am the servant of the… Adventure Society, wielding of the Staff of the Everglades! The dark fire will not avail you, elementals of the array!”
At that moment the magma elemental shot a glob of lava at him and he batted it away with the staff.
“Go back to the shadows!” He shouted theatrically.
Lucy turned to see how Teddy was taking the performance and saw that he had got out a heavily specialised rugged recording crystal and was grinning.
James was really winding up the performance now, looking wild eyed at the monsters.
“YOU! SHALL NOT! PASS!” He said as he thumped his staff into the ground.
The team and the two Stonewallers suddenly saw blossoming roots around them, the stones of the glade were darker than normal but it still looked like a bright glade all around them.
“Err James, didn’t you need that staff to fight the monsters?”
“Oh, yeh.”
“And you just brought us all in here.”
“Yeh.”
“And the monsters are out there.”
“Yeh.”
“With the magic Gatling guns turned off?”
“Oh bugger!” James closed out the glade, it didn’t mean it had disappeared, more that he had booted everyone out.
The elementals had got slightly closer and so James was right on top of them. He punched the smoke monster in the face with his right fist and it zoomed backwards, looking like it was bleeding smoke as parts dripped off like gore.
“That must be the improvement to his bear claw engraving, it seems to be able to effect non-corporeal enemies.” Lucy noted.
He picked up the iron elemental and used it as a club to smash the magma, lava splattering off and hitting the walls like blood. What followed was entertaining to watch, the big man ‘manually’ took apart the four elementals by punching them to pieces.
He walked back to the others when he had the notification they were all defeated. As he crossed the threshold of the guns they popped back up and started firing at an earth elemental that rounded the corner.
“Impressive!” Orcnig rumbled. “But I thought that essence users had more powers than what you showed.”
“We do, It’s a bit of a struggle to use them down here though.” Lucy admitted.
“What was that power with the roots? That was maybe the single most painful thing I have encountered in my life.” Auster nodded along its Orcnig’s words, she looked a little shaken at the experience and watching James take apart the elementals.
“It’s a special power I have, a racial gift, its a redoubt we can retreat to if it all gets too much. Come to think of it, it did help me feel better while I was in there…”
“Me too.” Answered both the others.
“Orcnig, if you will allow, I would like to stay down here and train a while. Can we control the constructs?”
“I can have someone come down and construct a mechanism you can affect.”
“And you’re sure you don’t mind me down here alone? I don’t want to fall and then allow elementals into the city to kill your people.”
Orcnig shrugged casually. “There are four more sets of weapons between here and the city, this set has not failed in the decades since we installed them.”
The team gave each other a look, they had unknowingly walked past four sets of weapons that ripped the monsters apart in seconds, four sets of weapons that were between them and the sunlight when they had only limited access to their powers. It was a good job the Stonewallers had been on the level all this time.
“Are you going to be all right down here on your own?” Lucy asked.
“Yeh I should be fine, I have the glade to retreat to and to rest, if I can turn the guns back on then I can do this indefinitely. It’ll be really good training, get me used to my new armour.”
“Ok, well Teddy is going back with Orcnig and I wanted to see what the forges looked like so I’ll check back on you later?”
He smiled and gave her a hug then sat on the floor, facing the monsters getting taken apart by the guns to meditate until someone came and showed him how to turn them off himself. The others left him there, flashes of light from the guns silhouetting the big man, his new armour with the upper arm and shoulder flange standing out.
They made their way up the levels, not too many as the forges were deep within the effect of the array. Lucy plagued Orcnig with questions. She managed to find out more about the Stonewallers, they had been magically affected over the generations into what they now were. They could no longer take essences, around the age of maturity that, at the same time around the planet others could take essence abilities, the Stonewallers found themselves developing powers. They were fire, earth and forge powers. They had enough powers to defend themselves from the natural monsters that they saw which were almost exclusively the elementals the Mitchells had seen at the bottom most levels and where James was now.
They had made it back to the forges and once she had been shown around by Orcnig Teddy pulled Lucy by the arm to adopt a squat by the door.
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“Why are we sitting here like this?” She whispered so low only his enhanced hearing would pick it up. “And congrats by the way, you never had this much mobility before essences.”
They were both in a deep squat, something neither of them had been able to do since the flexibility of youth, some cultures on earth had adults that regularly relaxed in such a squatting position but they definitely had not been one of them.
“Now we sit and watch Orcnig work. So far only I have been asked up to get up to work the forge on the vambrace.”
“Oh, how long are we going to be here for?” She continued whispering, concerned she was going to be stuck here for some time.
“I don’t know, shh, he’s starting.”
Orcnig walked towards the group of students. In his hands he held two lumps of ore. The one in his left held veins of silver while the one in his right held veins of red that seemed to be flowing.
“Today I am going to impart the knowledge of imbuing offensive and defensive magic into materials best suited to them.” He rumbled in his slow metronome of a voice.
What followed was an extensive lecture on the fundamentals of magical preparation of materials. Lucy found she was far from bored and listened intently, the lesson gave insight into why some of hers and Teddy’s experiments had not gone well. The difference of using materials that naturally held magic as a reservoir, held magic in a defensive way or offensively were subtly different. In the example of the Deathstick she had covered the lack of using the correct materials with her essence abilities, and, ‘brute force and ignorance’ to force it to work.
After a long time, they couldn’t be sure how long as the interface was intermittent down here and they were deep underground Orcnig stopped. The students started speaking to each other cutting out Teddy and Lucy. Orcnig came over to them.
“I hope the subject matter was interesting to you. Now we are moving onto the making of things. I have agreed to teach this one but I will not teach more.” He said, holding his hand out with the bulbous ends of his fingers pointing at Teddy.
Lucy nodded to the others and made her way out, she was content to not have a guide as she wanted to take her time and explore some more than she had been ale to when shepherded with a guide each time.
She took a stick of chalk from a pocket on her belt. She stopped at a quiet corner, there wasn’t much traffic from Stonewallers as they were all busy in the multiple forges along the corridors. She drew out a very basic magic diagram on the wall with the chalk, it left the thin dusty lines that could be easily be wiped away after she was done. What she was drawing was a simple ritual to measure the ambient magic, she frowned as she drew, pausing. There was something wrong with the diagram, one that she had drawn countless times and through her essence abilities had perfect recall of. Her essence ability Magical Master meant that she could sense if a ritual was going to be successful without having to test it. She tapped the chalk on her chin while she thought then adapted the diagram. This time she felt the rightness of it and shortly after she had the result she wanted. The natural array effect on the ambient magic meant that she had to adapt the drawing. She made a note in one of her many notebooks and moved on, wiping away the chalk.
Sometime later she was only slowly making her way up the floors, face, forearms and knees covered in chalk from where she had been drawing on the walls and floors and one case the ceiling. Her hair was messed up from her fervent scrambling to get results. The Stonewallers at large had no idea the outworlders were staying with them and gave her a wide berth as they shielded their children from the crazy lady stuck in her research.
………
“FOR HEROOOO!” Ragnar screamed as he swung his double headed axe sideways two handed into the frog-like creature that was pouncing at Kyra.
They had found the pack of bronze rank monsters not far from the array, they had tracked the footprints through the ground and were surprised for a few reasons. The first was the tracks were in a perfect arc, they seemed to be tracing the outside of the array. The second was the amount of monsters. Kyra had been hesitant to engage until Ragnar had told her it would be fine, he had dealt with the monsters before.
When they caught up and watched from a high rock the pair observed the slow awkward gait of the monsters. They were frog-like but had long reptilian tails, their teeth were wild and large and didn’t fit in their mouths. The long legs with the high knee joints made for awkward walking meaning they were dragging their lower halves and tail on the floor. The fact that the trail was so messy and they were all almost single file along the invisible edge of the array meant they had been surprised by the numbers.
Kyra had done a fine job of splitting up the battlefield, using her walls, terraforming and golem to good effect to split up the numbers and make them more manageable. She had been taken unawares halfway through the fight by one of the monsters leaping at her back from on top of her golem that had been overwhelmed as it pummelled the monsters in front of it. Ragnar had her back though, using a leaping power he smashed through the monster cleaving it in half. Kyra turned to see the golem was completely covered and being bourne to the floor under the weight even with all its prodigious strength. She snapped her fingers and it exploded, bits of diamond and monster flesh going everywhere, she managed to get a wall up in time for her and Ragnar to be protected from the gore before it got to them.
They had started with around fifty monsters in front of them. Each of the adventurers had taken out half a dozen each and the golem had killed at least a dozen between beating them and exploding. They were roughly halfway through the horde but that wasn’t a problem. They were warming up.
Ragnar’s essences were Might, Earth, Forge and the Titan confluence. He took the role of a frontline attacker. He shared some powers in common with Kyra with the boulder throw and earth spikes. His earth essence also gave him a land-mine type power that he could place under the feet of the enemy and the ground beneath them would explode. His most simple powers however were the synergism of Might and Titan. He had the common powers of Unstoppable Force, Mighty Strike and some power that added explosive damage to every hit. But the combat style he used meant that he made small early sacrifices to gain power. He allowed himself to take damage early and his limbs where they had been attacked started taking a metal sheen, transparent at first then becoming more and more solid until he seemed to grow metal armour. This came from an essence power he used as a mainstay of enduring fights.
Ability: [Titans Redoubt] (Titan)
Special ability (conjuration, holy)
Cost: High mana.
Cool-down: None
Current rank: Bronze 8 (80%)
Effect (iron): When the user has received enough damage the limb will become encased in summoned Titan armour. The armour will last until the user has meditated to consolidate the effect into themselves.
Effect (bronze): Summoned armour now causes trace transcendent damage when under attack. The limbs encased in Titan armour will be imbued with some strength of the Titan.
Although the power had a high mana cost he spent the mana freely, the return being worth the cost. By tactically taking damage he became stronger and tougher. After the fight he then meditated and not only saw the traditional benefits of essence power advancement but he became tougher over time, keeping some of the benefits long term.
Kyra had the presence of mind during her own fight to check out his essence powers on the interface now that they were outside the arrays influence and they had full access again with Ragnar as a guest. She realised that she had got very lucky with their fight in Baboa’s travelling castle and if the fight had gone on for too long she would have really struggled to overcome his power-ups.
They fought together, using each others strengths to their advantage, now there were less monsters on the field Kyra deployed Lucky to help the three smaller diamond golems that had erupted from the first. They managed to sweep and clear the rest of the monsters until they were surrounded by dismembered corpses.
Ragnar rested the hilt of his huge axe on the floor and draped his forearms on the top, looking over their work. His arms, legs and a section of his back were covered in the oddly shimmering metal as he stood in the bright sunlight.
“A fine offering of combat I say.”
“It is good to let loose I guess. We’ll have to let the others know that there are such big packs out here though.”
“The pack was not enough against such warriors though! Hail, we could take more than what the foe could offer.”
Kyra smiled at Ragnar’s enthusiasm.
“Indeed, shall we move away a bit and see what they have offered us in their death?”
They started hiking away, out of range of the rainbow cloud, then looted the monsters. They got a stash of bronze rank coins and some uninteresting loot. As he was in the party Ragnar got his fair share, Kyra’s went straight into her storage space but Ragnar had left his dimensional sack that he carried over one shoulder on the Serenity buggy when they had started tracking the monsters, a shower of bronze rank coins and a pair of gloves bounced off his head.
“Forsooth! The gods rain pleasures upon me for my bravery and I should not complain but that was rather unexpected.”
Kyra laughed as he stared around him not knowing where to start picking it all up and she pulled a mirror and absorbed it all before leading him back to the buggy.
They spent the rest of the day driving around the local area trying to find more monsters, there were a few more fights, Ragnar was completely encased in armour by the end of the day and they found a good tactical rhythm to their fights, when he fought solo he had to compromise health and mana for Titan armour, fighting with a healer on the other hand meant that he could rapidly and recklessly throw himself into combat with no thought to taking the kind of hits required to gain his armour. His further limitation was mana, but once he had the armour of the Titan it came with enhanced strength, as did his earth essence, as did his might essence. All together he was an absolute powerhouse against the much larger than normal groups of monsters even without the mana for special attacks.
That night they formed an extremely comfortable cave in a large rock formation, with two bedrooms and a living room, two earth essence users made it little to no trouble.
“We had a good day Ragnar, you’re a lot of fun to be around.” Kyra said as they shared dinner.
Ragnar had meditated after they set up their hovel for the night and the metal armour was gone, he had changed into what looked like a smoking jacket and quilted trousers that looked very comfy.
“A fine day of adventure, as it is meant to be!”
They stayed up and chatted. Kyra learnt about Ragnar’s home town and how they all had to go and find adventure, with almost every child raised worshipping Hero or an adjacent god and leaving home to find glory before returning. She found she really enjoyed his company and even though she missed her family she was happy to be with the giant man for a day or two.
Ragnar seemed to be a caricature when he was in battle but the friendly intimacy of the two of them in the cave living room made Kyra open up. She told him about the pirate on the boat and contrary to what she might have thought he was pensive and thoughtful rather than launching into congratulations of victory.
“There is a misconception. That many who follow hero fall into. And I was one of them, the virtue of a hero is not in killing. Is not the father who carries his sick son a day and a night to find a healer a hero? The mother who works two jobs to raise her family after her husband died in a monster attack? If you have managed to stop this man from his nefarious deed without bloodshed then you would have undoubtably been a hero. If you had gone in the room and ended his life without remorse that would not have made you a hero, your actions, attempted and actual, your remorse and contrition even though you were justified show the hallmarks of a hero.”
Kyra looked at the big man who was absentmindedly checking the grip on his axe. He was showing a depth of character she had not expected. The followers of hero seemed to be a reckless, enthusiastic bunch of warriors who lived for battle. She hadn’t guessed there would be a deeper philosophy about what makes a hero behind it all.