Krinvoth Ruins, 10 Minutes Ago
“So, our destination is the Cathedral of Aegian, Captain Betaro?” The red skinned, horned woman asked, clutching the strap of the leather bag firmly to stop it from jostling around as much as possible.
“Oh, that’s right. You’ve never been here before, have you Elise?” The tallest of the group, Gryn, asked curiously, getting a small shake of her head.
“Not surprised. Some of us haven’t been apart of this team for eons like you and the Captain.” The rebel of the group, Shun, snorted; rolling his eyes when he got multiple narrow-eyed glares and raising his hands in mock surrender.
“As a reminder, some of us that have been here for ‘eons’ are more than equipped enough to ship you right back to the village.” The strict looking woman, with her hair done up in a tight braid that rested over the front of her shoulder and short –5 centimetres–, curved back horns, warned.
And Shun was more than aware that the woman, named Viole, would be willing to do so if he pushed any buttons too far. Apart from Captain Betaro, it was undeniable that she held the most sway out of the team of eight, being its Vice-Captain and all. However, knowing that she was willing to do so and accepting that she would do so are two entirely different things.
“Oh yeah, like anyone else is going to fill in for my position. We’re swimming in new recruits that are able to leave the village.” Shun scoffed, yelping as a hand grabbed one of his horns and shook his head violently for a moment.
“Thank you, Elise.”
“You’re welcome, Captain.” She nodded dutifully, letting go of Shun’s horn and sticking her tongue out at him when both Betaro and Viole looked away.
“Wha- You cheeky little-“
“Silence.” The curt, snapped, order from their Captain ground the other seven of them to a halt, mana running to their ears and eyes as Betaro began to look left and right slowly.
Something had him cautious, and Elise truly had no wish to see what it was going to be. Especially in an area swarming with natives that absolutely wouldn’t take kindly to them being here.
“Trained.” The cloaked male, Beez, murmured; their eyes locked on the distance, in a thin gap between two crumbled buildings.
“And closing in fast. We can’t outrun that.” Viole spoke, her eyes narrowing in the same direction that Beez was looking.
“Then we won’t. Elise, take Shun, Beatrice, and Gryn and continue heading to the Cathedral. We’ll deal with this and take an alternate method to meet up with you further down.”
“Wha- Are you certain Captain?” Elise’s face twisted in worry as she took a step forward, only to turn to stone as Betaro held a hand up toward her quickly, pausing her in her tracks.
“Okie dokie!” Beatrice saluted animatedly, the short, exuberant girl bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet.
“I gave you an order. Now, go.”
“Yes sir.” She gave a resolute nod before turning to her impromptu teammates and running off down a side-street, their steps following after hers as the remaining four members stood in their places silently.
“We should continue moving, Captain. It will no doubt alert whoever is approaching if we continue staying still.” Viole suggested, only to raise an eyebrow curiously when Betaro just sighed quietly in disappointment.
“I admire your dedication, Viole. But I told you all before, so long as our Lord is freed from his shackles then it does not matter if we reveal ourselves. Besides…”
The ground beneath their feet began to rumble and the mana in the air began to jitter and jolt in excitement. The wind stirring ever so minutely in response to something that none of the four could yet see but could more than sense was approaching.
“..Looks like they were on high alert regardless. How careless of me.” Viole sighed, taking two steps back as the final member of their team, the stocky male known as Vethin, stepped in front of the other three firmly.
“Incoming.” Beez spoke, his singular word, all the party of four needed to kick themselves into high gear.
In a blur of speed, showered in dust and pieces of flying rubble as they burst through the wall of a building nearby, an armoured figure appeared. A large, thick bastard sword held over their shoulder with magic flaring over its form as their feet meet the ground, sparks flying into the air alongside dust and shards of stone.
“Whoever you are, leave this place at once!” A tower shield of thick, silvery-blue metal appeared in Vethin’s hands, his body bulging slightly as his mana surged inside him.
The heavy bastard sword and the thick tower shield met in an explosion of mana and a shockwave. The ground beneath their feet carved away into the dust that streamed outwards from the two of them.
“You’re strong!” Vethin’s feet sunk half a centimetre into the rock beneath them as his armoured opponent began to actively push against him now that his inertia had been depleted.
“You will not get a second warning.”
An echoed clap was the only warning the other three red-skinned fighters got, another building exploding into a shotgun blast of rubble that bounced off the strengthened bodies of Betaro and Beez and stopped telekinetically in front of Viole.
‘That’s all? I expected more from such a prime opportun-‘
“VIOLE!” The rough, callous hand of her Captain wrenching her to the floor by her shoulder was the only thing that registered in her mind for a moment.
It had been so quick, so unexpected amidst all the other sensory jumble around them that it had taken even her mind a moment to catch up to the reality of the present.
The drops of blood, flung over Betaro’s shoulder by the very blade that cut a thin line through his pectorals, that landed on her face were the first things to finally register in her mind. His thick, black, blood trailing slowly down her face as she pushed herself to her feet. A magic circle forming in front of her outstretched hand just a moment after the third member of the attacking party leapt back.
“Captain. Are you alright?”
“I will be…” Betaro huffed, the tips of his fingers ghosting over the skin around his wound.
“Bleeding.”
The word that he spoke was simple, done quickly and in a matter-of-fact tone. Yet the power behind it was undeniable, his words seeming to warp reality itself at his very whim.
Yet despite their confusion and hesitancy, the result of that power became apparent to the three adventurers the moment he moved his hand away from his injury, the thin but mildly deep cut sitting there, devoid of any blood.
“Neat power you got there.” The rocks and rubble that surrounded the three red-skinned fighters began to rattle and float.
An annoyed click of her tongue left Viole’s mouth as the magic circle over her hand shattered and rebuilt itself in an entirely new formation.
“Mind telling me how it works before you’re arrested?” The speaker was a young man, looking to be somewhere in his early twenties, with straight black hair cut fairly short and a rather simple mages staff held in one of his hands.
“Beez, handle the stealth operative. Viole, with me.”
“Mmm.”
“Understood.”
“Oh well. Red Panther, preferable capture.”
‘It’s four on three but we’re still the ones left at a disadvantage. We’ll hold them off for a few moments or until one of us is severely injured before making our retreat. That should give Elise and the others more than enough time to reach the cathedral and continue lower into the ruins.’
Rubble clashed against rubble and metal crashed against metal as the unseen, unheard signal went off between the seven combatants. Their mana surged through their bodies and the air around them. Yet, while Red Panther saw this as merely an adventurer’s duty, Betaro and his team knew what it truly was.
A side-story, a preamble to the real show that was to happen regardless of if they escaped this fight alive or not. Their true objective had already been accomplished, everything after that was just silver linings. Elise had gotten away with The Key, they had nothing else to worry about.
XXXxxxXXX
“Well….This is unfortunate.”
“…Who are you?” Peter’s grip on his blade tightened, his expression sharpening as the most likely scenario slowly made its way to the forefront of his mind.
“Woah, woah. Calm down. I’m just an adventurer, like you.” Elise quickly said, hopping forward into the cathedral and raising her hands to be beside her head in a half-hearted surrender.
Shun, Gryn and Beatrice were quick to follow after her, their hands also in an identical form of surrender, though Shun’s expression told them all they needed to know on what his thoughts were about that.
“Adventurer’s like us? Really?” Angelica couldn’t help but scoff a little.
As long as she could remember she had been surrounded by people of other races, to the point that she was fairly certain she could name somebody by name that she knew from almost every single race that existed in the Twin-Continents. Yet, in all her seventeen years of life, she had never –in stories or in reality– seen nor heard of a race with red skin and horns.
Who, or what, ever these four were, they weren’t meant to be here. Angelica wasn’t quite sure how she knew that, or where the confidence in that knowledge came from, but from the depths of her soul to the tips of her toes she knew that to be true.
“We are, I swear it.” Elise replied simply, looking for all the world to be telling the truth as she took a few steps forward.
“Want to try again?” Angelica warned, getting a curious but understanding look from Peter.
As much as he wanted to believe them too, even he had not escaped the unnaturally disconcerting feeling the four red-skinned figures in front of him did not belong. Almost like a compulsion from something he couldn’t see, nor understand, that forced him to keep his guard up around them.
At her side, Shun pressed his lips together thinly and frowned at the tone of Angelica’s warning and the cautious poses the four adventurers had taken. As far as he could see, the four of them had no reason to be this hostile towards them, so the fact they were was annoying to say the least.
Stolen novel; please report.
Here they are, on a fool’s errand to uphold a thousand-year tradition that was apparently so important that they couldn’t allow even the slightest imperfection for a single generation and already they were hitting roadblocks. It felt like the Gods were trying to prove that Shun was right for doubting the ‘holiness’ of the tradition and how vital it actually was, and yet it seemed like he was the only one that saw the signs.
“Whatever do you mean?” Elise blinked owlishly and tilted her head to the side, trying to ignore the beating of her heart in her ears and the cold sweat that was forming over her hands and armpits.
The amount of pushback from the adventurers truly wasn’t much of a surprise to her, they looked incredibly different from any native race and hadn’t been in the adventurer’s camp they had set up outside the mine the day before. But the fact that this was likely to turn physical, and fast it seemed, was the furthest thing from what she wanted that was possible.
The Key was a special item that had taken a long time for their village to procure and properly create, it wasn’t exactly fragile enough for her to worry about its integrity. What she was worried about, though, was the potential for these adventurers to find out about its existence, which would pose more than one problem for the party of four.
“UUuuggghh! Enough of this!” Beatrice groaned loudly, dragging everyone’s attention to her.
The smaller girl took two strong steps forward, massively accelerating with each one, before she launched herself high into the air. Curling her legs to increase the speed of her forward flip, space warped and shattered into the form of a large metallic hammer held in her right hand, joined soon by her left a little further down the shaft.
“Woah!” Peter tackled his sister out of the way as both Felicia and Haley threw up shields of magic to defend themselves.
Barely half a second after Peter made contact with his sister, and both of the mage’s shields began to flicker to life, the large, flat surface of the red-skinned girl’s hammer struck the cracked floor of the cathedral.
The ground beneath their feet cracked and burst into thousands of shards of stone and moss. The cracks racing across the floor in the time it took the magnitude of the strike to register in their minds; curving up at the vertical incline of the walls and supporting pillars and winding their way up only to stop just short of the ceiling itself. The entire building groaning and shifting ominously as the swirling wind from the strike itself finally died down inside. Beatrice using the momentum of her strike to leverage her hammer further into the disintegrated stone beneath her and flip herself up and forward, landing just behind the two mages with a devilish grin and a gleam in her bright yellow eyes.
“WHEW! What a strike that was, huh ladies?” She grinned, stepping forward and spinning at the same time, bringing her hammer up and around from its brief resting point on the ground.
Haley quickly spun around while launching herself away from Beatrice and back towards Peter and Angelica as best she could, used to having to manoeuvre away from enemies –usually Beasts– to put the martial fighters between her and them.
Felicia, meanwhile, leapt high into the air with a pulse of eye-wateringly bright mana in an instinctual attempt to keep away from the clearly melee-focused girl.
The heavy metal hammer swung clean through where both girls had been standing without hitting hide nor hair of either of them. Though instead of the disappointment or annoyance that Haley had been expecting, she only got another devilish grin instead.
A few metres above her, Felicia clapped her hands together to prepare a spell. Dimly the edges of her irises lit up like the moon during a solar eclipse, her mana swelled inside her as she kneaded it into the complex shapes and figures required for her spell.
“Dammit Beatrice.” Felicia’s entire posture broke as she flinched instinctually at the voice that came from the air behind her, her concentration breaking a moment later as the bite of a small, sharp, blade surged through her back.
“Awww come on Shun! They were totally gonna attack first!”
“Shit! Felicia!” Peter crouched low and launched himself up to his friend and the newly revealed Shun.
Flames roared to life around his blade as he swung out at the red-skinned male. His strike fast and his aim true, at least before the chain that wrapped around his blade and tightened, clotheslining the teen thanks to the fact that he refused to let go of his blade.
“Yeah! Hold him still, Gryn!” Beatrice cackled, sprinting forward three steps before slamming her hammer into the ground.
Unlike the debilitating strike that had nearly brought the entire cathedral down on their heads from earlier, however, this time the ground seemed to almost bounce when she struck it. The sound of rubber stretching before snapping back into place filling the chaos-filled cathedral as the small girl rose to take the place of Shun and Felicia as they fell to the ground.
‘Snowflakes?’
A fractal magic circle, unlike anything Blessed Catalyst had ever seen in their lives, hung in the air before Haley. Its ice-blue form, sustained by the outstretched palm the reporter kept on it and frigid, moisture condensing fog spewed out the other side.
Its effects seemed harmless at first, merely cooling the moisture in the air and creating small beads of ice in the form of snowflakes that lazily floated through the air. The real danger, however, became blatantly apparent from the exact moment that the frigid air hit the magically constructed chain wrapped around Peter’s blade and the small hammer-wielding girl in the air alongside him.
“Agh!” Both Peter and Beatrice hit the ground with heavy thuds and loud cracks of ice.
Peter landed on his feet, his flaming blade now free of the constricting chains as the metal links that had been touched by the frozen air shattered into hundreds of pieces upon hitting the ground. Beatrice, however, hit the ground with the entire right half of her body frozen in place. The damage negligible but the debilitating effect of Haley’s spell on full display for everyone to see.
“Great job, Haley!” Angelica praised her, a vortex of cutting winds surging through the cathedral and forcing both parties away from each other.
“Three spellcasters and a single martial? Bit lopsided don’t you think?” Shun grinned as he stood up from his crouch, wiping some dust off his cheek.
“Like you’re one to talk! You have three mart- h-huh?” Peter blinked a couple times before swivelling his head this way and that.
There had been a fourth member with them, the woman that had first entered the cathedral through the window. Where was she? Was she also a cloak and dagger type like the ‘Shun’ that stood beside the hammer-wielding girl?
If so, he couldn’t sense her; which was worrying for more reason than one. Wait- no. There she was, heading towards…the broken platform at the back?
‘Come on Elise. Just enter the tunnel quickly and keep going! Leave us behind!’ Gryn thought anxiously, using a spell to quickly reconstitute the lengths of chain Haley had broken and attaching the ends of them to two short swords that warped into his hands.
“THE OTHER GIRL IS TRYING TO ESCAPE!” Peter’s cry seemed to echo through the entire cathedral hundreds of times over, freezing all seven other occupants in their tracks.
The fastest to act was Peter, being the one to have noticed the disappearance of Elise in the first place. The red-haired teen launching himself in her direction.
The next fastest were Elise and Shun in tandem, Elise making a break for the tunnel that Blessed Catalyst still had yet to discover and Shun flinging himself in the direction of Peter to block his charge off.
Following this, Angelica, Haley, Gryn and Beatrice were all the next to act. Shards of ice exploding into snow and sparkling fragments as Gryn’s blades tore through the ensuing barrage and the energetic horned girl bouncing around the cathedral to avoid the barrage of fireballs fired at her from the Kroll sister.
And as this happened, Felicia frowned darkly as she tried to heal the slashes on her back, clenching her teeth together as a broken chain fragment bounced off her back a little bit too close to the exposed wounds. She knew that experienced clerics, mages and saints could heal themselves and still keep fighting as they did so, but she found herself utterly unable to do so. The pain from the injury stopped her from focusing on anything except making it stop.
Further back in the cathedral, Elise clutched the strap of her bag and bit her lip. Her footsteps light yet hurried and her knuckles white from the force she held the strap with as she ran. She should stay back and help her allies; she knew that leaving them at a numbers disadvantage wasn’t safe. Yet at the same time she knew that this would be the perfect time to escape and reach their Lord while none of the four could catch up to her.
Completing the mission was one thing, but abandoning her entire team to do so left a sour taste in her mouth. However, that sour taste would have to stay. She couldn’t let this fail after her teammates had given her this opportunity, she just had to have faith that they would win and/or escape. Her form disappearing behind the empty platform with a hurried dive as Shun ground himself to a halt in front of Peter, a small trail of dust left behind him from his sudden stop.
“What is she trying to do?”
“Beats me! Can’t let you get close though!”
A longsword crashed against both of Shun’s daggers and a few bricks beneath the horned teen’s feet cracked as the force went all the way through him and into the floor.
“You’re invading these ruins!”
“UUuugghh. Could you be anymore textbook?”
Sparks flew in the air as Shun threw both of his arms to the side, Peter’s longsword scrapping along their edges before digging into the bricks with a flare of its orange flames.
‘He’ll be expecting me to try and stab him. So with this timing he’ll never expect-‘ Shun threw one of his daggers at the other teen’s face; Peter jerking his head back in response to narrowly dodge the blade, only receiving a light scratch along his cheek in return.
But that had not been the goal of Shun’s attack. No, the horned teen had expected Peter to somehow dodge or block that surprise attack. The palm of his hand impacted solidly with Peter’s core, though not as hard as the red-haired teen had expected from a proper strike.
“Hold a blade.”
A jolt of pure molten metal surged through Peter’s body, his teeth clenched, and his eyes bugged out. His blade clattered to the ground with a ring of metal and a surprised sound from the teen, even as he instinctively –yet sloppily– leapt back to avoid the follow-up stab from the second of Shun’s blades.
“You’re shitting me, you could even dodge a stab after that?” The teen griped as he scratched his head, looking between the extinguished blade on the ground and the wide-eyed, panting form of Peter who was clenching and unclenching his now empty fist in confusion.
‘What’s happening? Whenever I try to think about picking my blade back up nothing reacts and all the strength leaves my hands but the moment I stop it all comes right back.’
“HAHA! A martial fighter without a weapon! Not much use are youuuu?” Beatrice giggled, hitting the ground beside him with a small bounce to bleed off the rest of her momentum and swinging her hammer as she twirled.
“Wha- What did that guy do!?” Peter hopped into the air to avoid the first swing of the girls hammer and buckled his legs to duck down and reverse roll away from her second –higher– swing and her final third follow-up.
“Dunno. Wanna try again?” Shun appeared at Peter’s side, his dagger hitting a wall of light and bouncing off with a low ‘pong’ sound.
“Felicia!” Peter turned back to look at his friend in relief for her help in defending him, only to see both his sister and Felicia charging spells as Haley continued her assault with the chain-user.
“DODGE YOU IDIOT!”
His sister’s scream was followed, within a single second of each other, by the sound of glass smashing from behind him and the impact of Beatrice’s hammer directly into his back.
The world turned to a blurred kaleidoscope of colours, jumbled sounds, and body-wide pins and needles as Peter ragdolled across the length of the cathedral and slammed into the already damaged wall. His body cratered in its form as blood seeped from a few shallow cuts gained from the impact and his eyes went in and out of focus at complete random.
Blessed Catalyst, for all their talent and instincts, were still inexperienced in the grand scheme of the world, especially when it came to combat with sapient, intelligent enemies. Felicia’s decision to jump in the air with no way to move around proved her inexperience, Peter’s decision to look away from his enemies in his relief at his friend’s recovery proved his inexperience, and Angelica’s lack of focus in the wake of her brother’s impact proved her inexperience.
The sound of stretched rubber snapping back into place seemed to reverberate in Angelica’s head as Beatrice appeared at her side with a devious grin. Her hammer, for once, not mid-swing toward her but rather held behind her in one hand as her other hand reached for the red-haired [High-Sorceress].
“BEATRICE DON’T!”
The short girl jolted at the sound of Elise’s voice, her eyes widened only fractionally in surprise and worry.
‘What is she doing back here? She should have just kept going, we would have caught up. Buuuuut, I suppose it’s not the end of the world. After all, we win.’
Her hand touched Angelica’s stomach much like Shun’s had with her brother a few moments earlier, the girls pink eyes widening in surprise and horror as Beatrice tilted her head up just a few degrees to look her in the eyes. The corners of her lips upturned into an expression that looked, genuinely, demonic.
“Use mana.”
Blessed Catalyst were inexperienced in terms of the wider world, but they were not the only ones. Gryn and Vethin weren’t quite as experienced as Betaro, Viole and Beez but they still had year’s worth of experience to fall back on. Beatrice, Shun and Elise had none of this experience, however, being the three newest members of the team.
Beatrice’s inexperience became apparent in the exact moment that she spoke those words, a lightning-fast lance of pain surging through Angelica before it disappeared as if she had been dumped in a bucket of ice water.
“W-wha…?” The girl’s pink eyes slowly slid back down to the horned girl in front of her as the mental fog from the pain faded and she realised that her hand was still pressed against her stomach.
The arm pressed against her stomach swung limply to the ground as all the strength in her shoulder seemed to drain out of her, her left leg buckling and sending her toppling to the ground as well. Drool slowly seeped from the corner of her lips to the ground as her eyes stared, unfocused, on the far wall opposite to the direction that she had sent Peter flying.
“Fhat de wuck…?”
“BEATRICE!”