Elise cursed as she ran forward, one hand holding the leather bag at her side as steady as she could as she made a mad dash for her teammate and friend.
She had had a bad feeling about leaving the three of them behind, an itch at the base of her horns only corroborating her worries. An ill omen amongst her people, supposedly a gift from their God to warn them of overuse of their inherent ability.
Elise had never put very much stock into those beliefs, even if that itch in her horns had kept her from danger more than once in her training. But now, as she slid to a stop beside the body of Beatrice and launched herself high into the air to avoid a small ball of fire, she began to understand where they had originated from.
“W-What just happened?” Angelica muttered, patting her hands all over her body as Felicia clicked her tongue and fell into a kneeling position by Peter’s side to begin healing him.
The burning, agonizing, feeling that had shot through her spine when the small girl –Beatrice, apparently– had spoken those words had been more intense than anything she had ever felt in her entire life. She understood now why that dagger-wielding man was so surprised by her brother being able to dodge his attack, the sheer level of pain had left her completely unable to respond to the new girl's rescue of her comrade. Her thoughts static and her senses naught but pins and needles.
Yet now, nothing about her felt different, except the lingering echoes of the pain that she had been put through.
Experimentally she called forth her mana, only to hum as it pooled lazily in her hand like she had expected it to. No difficulties, no anomalies, just regular mana control.
Ahead of her, hitting the ground rather roughly with a small hiss, Elise placed Beatrice on the ground and scrunched her eyebrows together in worry at the state that the young woman was in.
“She overdid it. That red haired girl there, clearly using mana is too hardwired into her existence.” Gryn muttered quietly, so that none of the adventurers across from them could hear.
“What’s happening to her though?” Shun asked as quietly as he could, standing beside Gryn as the ‘guards’ of the party as Elise looked her over.
“A…stroke, I think.” Elise muttered weakly, her hands shaking just a little as she went to place them down on Beatrice’s shoulder.
“Elise, no. You can only hold one at a time and the moment you grab the Key it’s going to end it. Let me do it. The moment she’s up, though, we’ll go.” Gryn whispered sternly, managing to just barely suppress his flinch as Shun sliced through and deflected a small barrage of icicles.
‘They’re up to something, whatever they’re trying to do I can’t allow that. But I also can’t go on a full offensive since Peter and Felicia are tied up right now and if push comes to shove it looks like they have three combat-ready fighters…’ Haley grit her teeth, a small amount of mist rolling off her ankles as her mana flared ever so minutely around her.
“Haemorrhagic Stroke.”
Both Haley and Angelica tensed up in preparation for the attack that they knew was going to come, their arms brought up in instinctual defense and their mana flowing through their body at full blast to prepare for any kind of spell that they would need to cast.
Currently both their melee frontliner and their support healer were unable to take part in the combat, so no matter what happened, they couldn’t afford to go on the defensive and leave them unprotected. An uncomfortable situation for both women but one that they both knew was a necessity.
“Woah!” The short girl jolted from flat on her back to her feet in a second, the slight wobble of the ground beneath her, much like that of slime, the only indication of how she had managed such a feat with such seeming ease.
“What happened to me? Why’s the fight stopp- AH!“
It was quick, the actions of the other three red-skinned fighters, almost quicker than Angelica and Haley could react to. The moment that the short girl had sprung up to her feet, the other three had taken off running, the chain-user having whipped her off her feet and carrying her over his shoulder as they sprinted for wherever the fourth one had gone before.
“Oh no you don’t!” A magic circle spun to life in front of Angelica as she pulled an arm back, the wind around them swirling in preparation for her spell before Haley’s arm whipped out and slapped across her chest.
“Angelica, no.” The wind around them swirled faster for only a single moment before dying down as the magic circle faded into small motes of light that quickly broke down to nothingness.
“Haley, why-“ Angelica tried to question, only for the reporter to turn on the heel of her foot as the three fighters, and their struggling companion, disappeared behind the platform.
Rather obviously, Haley’s eyes went down to the form of Peter, who was currently holding his head and wincing a little as a very nasty looking bruise incrementally shrank in size at the hands of Felicia and her magic.
It didn’t take a genius to understand what she was trying to get at, and Angelica was far beyond that point. A sad expression crossed her face before she crossed her arms and clicked her tongue.
“You’re right, starting a fight while that idiot is still in this condition isn’t smart. But letting them get away isn’t a smart decision either, they clearly have some kind of agenda here in these ruins.”
“Of course we aren’t just going to let them get away, but we need to wait for Peter to recover first and then we’ll go after them.” Haley tried to placate Angelica, biting lightly on the nail of her thumb as she tried to think the situation through.
At the absolute forefront of her thoughts were only two questions.
What was that strange ability that they had, and what was their purpose in these ruins?
XXXxxxXXX
“Dammit Gryn put me down!” Beatrice finally snapped, whacking his shoulder and wrenching herself out of his grip, continuing to run alongside the other three as they made their way out of the tunnel that they had gone down.
“You’re being awfully rude to the person stopping your brain from starving itself of air.” He grunted, charging clean through a dilapidated wall as the rest of the team slowed down only a few steps to avoid slamming into it before he had broken it down.
“Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that.” The short woman mumbled beneath her breath, her eyebrows pinched together, and her cheeks puffed out ever so slightly.
“Speaking of, I’ve hit the limit of mine. My negation has worn off.” Shun relayed to the team as they ran, clicking his tongue in annoyance.
“Ohhhh? So, a hundred meters is your limit, huh?” Beatrice teased, looking over her shoulder to grin mockingly at him.
“It’s 173 you brat!” The teen snapped, gnashing his teeth together as the girl just stuck her tongue out at him and waved her hands mockingly beside her head.
“That reminds me, you have 149 meters around me to play with, Beatrice. Any further and I can’t keep it going.”
“Got it! But could you really not get it to 150? Make it nice and –y’know– even?”
The tall man just decided not to retaliate in response to the girls mocking, merely looking ahead of them as he continued to run.
He was aware that those four adventurers were going to continue chasing after them, he had seen the way that the white-haired girl amongst them was healing their frontline combatant. It was only a matter of time before they actually managed to catch up and the more distance that they could put between them and the adventurers the better.
In an idyllic world, they would be able to meet up with Captain Betaro and the other, stronger and more experienced, members of their squad, but Gryn wasn’t putting much stock in that future. Too many things had already gone wrong and who knows if someone has managed to kick up some kind of alarm already. Expecting a bail-out and not getting one was far more dangerous at this stage than just moving forward while expecting no assistance.
“Shun, where are we going?” Elise suddenly asked, turning towards the dagger-wielding teen at her side and getting an annoyed click of his tongue as he vaulted a half-rotten and disintegrated cart.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“Because you’re the best out of the four of us with directions!” The girl snapped, clutching the bag at her side tighter as a jostle on her end caused the entire thing to light up in bright runes.
‘I’ve been agitating it too much with all this running around, the preventative measures are going to shatter soon at this rate.’
“Why the hell do you have to be such a know-it-all?” Shun grumbled, taking a quick moment to look around and go into autopilot for a moment while trying to figure out their location.
Honestly it was a skill that Elise was jealous of, the ability to just zone out the world to focus on something more important. She had tried to do it multiple times and just found herself utterly unable to, the young woman far too sensitive to the world and everything around her to ever zone it out or ignore it consciously.
“!” The girl’s eyes widened as she felt a spike of mana, her own mana swirling to life inside her as she kicked off the ground hard enough to crack the stone beneath her and flung herself into the air and to the side.
The other three were quick to do the same, not because they’d sensed the same thing that she had, but because she had reacted in such a way. A chain of Gryn’s wrapping around her outstretched arm, alongside those of her allies, and pulling her in towards him as a familiar cloaked figure burst through the side of a building.
Based on the height and rotation of his body, he had clearly bounced off something at least once before slamming through the building, but the speed and elegance that he curled his body and twirled to land back onto his feet with was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The next moment Viole appeared at his side, soaring through the air while avoiding a barrage of something that moved too fast for the team of four to see on her way to land behind their cloaked comrade.
In quick succession the rest of their team and three unfamiliar adventurers descended on the street intersection after Beez and Viole. The building beside them cracking and crumbling under the force of a blow and forcing the four of them back down to street level to avoid being crushed under the building that they had been standing on.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Elise!?” Betaro’s eyes widened in shock and mild horror as he caught sight of the four of them, only for them to crinkle up in pain as the razor-sharp edge of a blade bit through his chest once more, black blood flying high into the air.
The wound was shallow, despite the blood that it drew, luckily enough for the horned man, but it was enough to slow his reactions just enough to let the lightly armoured woman skip back unharmed. The short blade in her grasp glinting in the light of a nearby, faintly glowing, crystal as she cartwheeled backwards just far enough for her feet to land solidly on the wall of what looked to be an old store.
In the time it took Elise to blink, the woman had cleared the distance between them, their faces only about fifty centimeters apart by the time that the young woman even realized what was happening. A choked gasp left her lips as she tried to stumble back, bumping into Gryn’s chest clumsily as Betaro crashed into the woman’s side, his blade and hers grinding against each other as her feet met the ground and slowed them both to a halt.
“Get out of here!” A vein in Betaro’s arm bulged and throbbed as he tried to push the woman back, a vein in her own forehead beginning to stick out as she pushed back.
“Ohhh?” The four youngest of the red-skinned fighters froze on instinct as the eyes of the black-haired mage locked onto them, a sharp grin on his face. “Are you four important by chance?”
Whatever he tried to do next, as a magic circle spawned to life facing the four of them, they never got to know. A thick wooden beam from one of the crumbled buildings nearby crashing into him and exploding into a thousand wooden shards and a thick smog of sawdust.
“You four. Leave. Now!” Viole snapped, flinching on reflex as three sharpened stones crashed into a previously invisible barrier set up around her.
“Where the hell are we meant to go!? We can’t exactly just run down the street!” Beatrice griped, yelping and diving into a roll as Vethin and the heavily armoured figure crashed through where the four of them had just been standing.
“Shun!?”
“I’m thinking!” The teen snapped using the tips of his daggers to try and plan a route out of there internally.
His daggers waved up and jabbed in the air as he tried to find the best, safest, way out of here for the four of them. His body being tugged and thrown around as the four of them ran, dived and otherwise flung themselves around the battlefield to try and avoid the ongoing fights.
The teen bounced off the ground, sprung into the air thanks to the spell of Beatrice, and flipped lazily as stone spikes stabbed through where he had just been. His hair flapping and whipping over his eyes as he approached the ground headfirst, only to be caught by Gryn and tucked protectively to his chest as the older man rolled with his momentum, the wall to their side crumbling from the force of a nearby strike.
A stray piece of rubble from the wall exploded out of the structure and dinked ineffectually against one of his horns. The sound reverberating through his mind as his eyes widened in realization and he rolled out of Gryn’s arms and to his feet, looking directly at Beatrice.
“I’ve got it!”
A spike of mana from their side, where they had come out of the tunnel from, stopped him in his tracks as he turned to look towards it, his daggers raised in preparation for a surprise strike.
The air grew warmer and the moisture in the surrounding area seemed to diminish greatly as he stared in surprise, annoyance and horror at the attack closing in on their battleground down the street that they themselves had run down.
Almost as tall as the buildings that surrounded it, and about half as thick as the street itself, a burning arc of flames roared down the street, setting millennium old cloth alight and instantly charring the wooden beams that made up a lot of the building's supports.
“Woah!”
“Incoming!”
“Group up!”
“To Elise!”
Multiple shouts overlapped each other, just barely heard over the roar of flames as the two groups separated in bursts of motion. Bodies sliding to a stop as the flames tore through the ruined intersection that they had just been fighting through; both of Shun’s hands around Beatrice’s ear as he said something to her.
“YOU AREN’T GETTING AWAY!” Peter’s shout seemed to echo through the empty city as his flames died away, the teen’s form high above the intersection as flames licked off the edges of his blade and his hair waved in the updraft created from his own attack.
“More adventurers?” The leader of Red Panther questioned, seeing the figures of Angelica, Felicia and Haley sprinting down the street after their own leader. “Perfect. You four focus on capturing anyone you can! We’ll back you up!”
“Yes sir!” Angelica saluted sloppily as she slid to a stop, her staff out and pointed towards the invaders.
“More of them? What kind of luck is this?” Betaro growled, holding a hand over his bleeding chest wound.
“NOW BEATRICE!”
“Huh?” Betaro and Viole both turned towards their subordinates in shock as they felt the sudden influx of mana aimed towards the girl as she leapt in a low, fast arc towards the center of the intersection with her hammer held all the way behind her.
‘This feeling- It’s different!’ Angelica tried to backpedal as she saw the muscles in the smaller girl’s arms tense.
Only to jolt sideways as the head of the girls' oversized hammer slammed into the ground and shattered the entire intersection beneath them. The swing motion completed before the red-haired girl had even been able to see it move.
Her opening strike in the cathedral had been powerful, nearly bringing the building down on their head just from the singular strike alone. This strike, a Power Stance of some kind, was that attack cranked straight to twelve. The entire intersection caved in on itself like a pane of glass, all fifteen combatants falling into the hole that formed beneath them before they’d even realized that a hole had opened. Dirt, stone, wood, crystals and oh so much more rained around and past them as they tumbled and fell, bouncing, rolling and jumping from debris to debris as best as they all could.
“SHUN!”
“GOOOOOOOING DOWN!~ AAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
XXXxxxXXX
“Hm?” A single, slender eyebrow raised as Tristana’s eyes slowly rolled from the analyst babbling beside her to the ceiling of the cavern they were in, about 70 meters ahead of her, past the Super Asuran and in the opposite direction to the hole that she had leapt down to get here.
That was…fifteen mana signatures she could sense. A surprising amount considering the orders that had been spread amongst the [Tungsten-rank] adventurers, though when the cavern that they were in began to rumble and crack ominously, the reason for that became apparent.
“W-What the hell is happening?” A nearby Shadow Mook cried out, leaping away from a small setup table when a stalactite crumbled from the ceiling and crushed it beneath it.
“Promethea!” Keev cried, shieling his head with a clipboard and looking up at her with wide, confused eyes. “What’s going on!?”
“Visitors, Keev. We’ve got some visitors on their way down in 3…2 ... .1…”
The ceiling of the cavern opposite to where they stood exploded in catastrophic crashes of stone and crystal, a wave of dust tearing through the room so fast that stalagmites, pillars and buildings wore down subtly just from the sheer force of the rushing dust. Keev standing behind Tristana as she just stood firm, weathering the dust sandblasting without a word nor a flinch of any kind.
To their side, the middle of a pillar cracked and crumbled under its own weight as the edges wore away, crashing to the ground and only creating more chaos and confusion amongst the analysts and Shadow Mooks behind her.
“Augh!” The woman’s eyes went to her left where a group of four teenagers, though the brunette looked a little older than the rest, rolled out of the thicker dust directly surrounding the crash-zone itself.
Dust, sweat, bruises and trace amounts of blood covered their forms as they came to a stop, two girls curled protectively in the arms of the lone male of the group and the brunette trying to free herself from an ice-based cocoon of some kind.
“Hey, are you brats alright?”
“Bra- T-Tristana Promethea!” The spiky red-head of the group awed, unwrapping his arms from both of the young woman in his grasp and trying to get up at the same time as them.
“Yeah that’s me, so?”
“I’m fine! Well, nothing serious, you know?” He said quickly, grinning excitedly at her.
“Yeah, I get that.” She chuckled, looking over the other three with an experienced analytical eye.
The brunette with them was a Guild Reporter, which meant that these three were meant to be here, so that was good.
Well, ‘here’ as in the ruins, not quite their current location. Though based on the overlapping coughs and shouts she could hear from the dust cloud, she didn’t exactly imagine that they had planned to make their way all the way down here.
“ELISE NOW!”
The shout was from a male, the gruffness and depth of its pitch was a dead giveaway, but who burst out of the dust was decidedly not the person that had shouted. A young red skinned girl with the mangled scraps of a leather bag hung around her should-
Tristana’s green eyes widened in alarm and horror as she disappeared from her spot faster than any of the occupants of the cavern could ever hope to follow. Her kick-off creating a shockwave the flattened all the dust against the buildings and walls of the cavern while sending Keev and the four teens back on their asses once more.
The blade that she tried to summon to her hand shattered into motes of nothingness as her perception of the world ground to a halt, all the mana in her body going flat and limp no matter how hard she tried to coax it out. Her arm stretched out as best as she could to block what she knew was about to happen.
The collapse of the cavern ceiling had brought with it an influx of mana-sensitive crystals and unsettled those that existed within the cavern, filling her senses with too much jumble for her to properly notice before she had seen it. But the pitch black, void-like sphere in the young woman’s grasp was impossible to ignore or mistake once she had seen it.
Zynthan, a metal blacker than night and heavier than steel, a metal outlawed across the entirety of the Twin-Continents for one reason and one reason only-
Tristana flipped and twirled chaotically through the air, her mana surging through her body the moment that she left the twenty-meter radius around the sphere and speeding her senses back up as she spread her legs and arms to re-orient herself and land in a crouch with a singular hand on the ground.
-That one reason was because it, alone, was a metal that despised mana to the point of outright negating it, no matter what form it came in.
A throbbing pain shot up her arm from where her hand had clipped the sphere on her flight past it as the sound of chains bending and snapping filled the cavern. A huff of annoyance leaving the hulking figure as they snapped a broken manacle off their wrist and took a singular, solid step forward. Their large, muscled mass bending forward to pick up the Zynthan sphere in one hand.
“So…this is how my freedom was attained? How fascinating.” Their voice was deep and gravelly, their arm moved lackadaisically to the side before snapping forward, hurling the sphere into the chest of one of the armoured adventurers now in front of her.
There was a crack of metal as the sphere, turned cannonball, slammed into his chestplate; the defensive enchantments inlaid in the gear shut down in a singular instant and leaving it nothing but refined metal against the speed and power of the flying Zynthan sphere. A pained groan leaving the adventurers mouth as he hit the ground like a sack of bricks, clutching at the sphere buried in his chestplate with twitching, shivering fingers.
“Huh. I thought that would be the end of him. It looks like smithing techniques have gotten better since I was sealed. No matter.”
The air around the ‘Super Asuran’ began to swirl as his mana started to flare out of him. A thick, deep crimson colour reminiscent of blood surging out of him as stones and rubble began to rattle and float throughout the cavern.
One by one, everyone in the cavern fell to their hands and knees, forced there by the sheer, overwhelming presence of his power as a deep, sadistic laugh bubbled forth from his lips.
“Ha…Haha….HahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! They tried so hard and yet this is all that came of it! I, Lord Trexin of the Asuran people, have escaped my shackles once more! I’m FREE!”
Screams and shouts of alarm filled the air as the mana flaring around Trexin doubled in size and tripled in intensity; lightning arcing through the cavern and melting the stone it touched to slag in an instant. Those closest to him, being the Asuran girl that had thrown the sphere and the red-haired teenager from before, slid back along the ground a few meters from the sheer, buffeting strength of the wind that he kicked up.
Yet, throughout it all, Tristana stayed crouched in the exact same location she had landed in earlier, her blade slowly forming in her grip as she watched the form of ‘Trexin’.
‘Ah, that’s right. That thing I’ve been forgetting about this whole situation. It’s-‘