AN:// Last Words will be dropping after this today, still working on the chapter.
As soon as the first person got eaten (started getting eaten? I wasn’t sure if they were going to be ok, but Ascendants were tough), I immediately took off at top speed. Previously, ‘top speed’ for me might have been flying or a combination of my wings and Mephisto’s Waltz. Now though, things were different. Top speed for me now was my newest form. Cosmic Waltz.
Tapping into my newest demon was an interesting experience. I hadn’t had a chance to test it yet, but once I triggered the incarnation, I felt everything around me shift subtly. Things slowed down, though not by much, and not in a way that felt like it had anything to do with time. Rather, the space around me had been altered. Now it felt like it was heaving and thicker, like I was underwater.
I would have thought the sensation would have made me slower, but rather than weigh me down, the heaviness seemed to provide purchase for me to kind of…swim through space. All around me, I could see strange flows and currents I couldn’t see before, albeit very faint ones, and I could see places where they crossed and overlapped, changing directions or speed as they passed.
My eyes scanned the currents, looking for any spot near one of my people, and I found one. Stepping into the current in the heavy space, I felt myself whisked away into a torrent of spatial energy, torn through the distance between myself and my friends.
I recognized the effect, because I had experienced it before. This was spatial lubrication. Rather than actually condensing the distance, this was an overlaying pathway of turbulent space that acted kind of like a spatial waterslide. I stepped in at one spot, then appeared again at another, pulled through the spatial riptide by my new power.
Cosmic Waltz was a REAL spatial traversal power. Mephisto’s Waltz had been more like short range fudging of the space. It was slightly more streamlined because I didn’t have to worry about how it worked, but in terms of distance or accessibility it couldn’t compare.
I emerged from the stream of space already spinning my staff, calling out for the explosive power of Mephistopheles as I smashed down on the monster’s head as it struck down at my best friend. “Get LOST!” I snapped as the creature shot backwards with a scream as the ruin infused flame ate into its skin.
Landing gracefully, I flicked my staff stylishly to clear off the burned skin and chambered it behind my back. Benny just rolled his eyes. “Most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said dryly.
“You’re welcome, dick,” I snorted. “See if I don’t just let you get eaten next time. Come on,” I grabbed his shoulder and yanked, sending him flying off his feet as I tossed him into my Domain. Without waiting, I took off back into the currents, emerging behind Jessie, then Abel, then Bethy. I didn’t grab Bethy’s siblings, because I didn’t trust them in my Domain, but they seemed to have retreated pretty fast anyway.
I arrived next to Callie after a few jumps, and I was relieved to see that my wife was fine. Her blades were out, and she’d taken one of the monsters apart into pieces, even through a rank difference. I couldn’t help but beam at how strong she was. She whirled on me as I landed, and I held up my staff to block, just in case. Luckily she noticed it was me and stopped her swing. “You’re ok,” she said in relief. “Where are the others?”
“Domain,” I said shortly. “Where the hell did these things come from? How did they sneak up on us like that? Lights or not, someone should have seen them coming.”
She snarled wordlessly, pointing at the mist. “Through THAT. It’s not a creep mist, it’s fucking Void miasma. That despair mist from the shoals? Same stuff, just much weaker. They used it to prime the space for an assault. The spatial nature of this building means they were able to corrupt it into a partial shallowing. The tower isn’t connected to the Void, but there are still realspace adjacent positions here. Especially in weak spots like the ones formed by work like this. They piggy backed on the spatial distortions behind the building to slip through.”
“Wait, what?” I snapped as my staff lashed out and caved in the skull of a nearby monster. “These are Void spawn? How the hell are these HERE. You just said we’re not connected…to the Void.”
She saw it click as the thought settled in my head. “Shit,” I said darkly. “Harper let someone into that godsdamned chamber and they got infected with Void corruption.”
“Probably more likely they volunteered to be a vessel,” she said in a tired voice.
“How the hell have they not been CAUGHT yet?” I demanded as I glared around for any clues. “I know the Void is slippery, but there are Overgods here.”
Callie grit her teeth. “There’s more than just the Deans though,” she hissed. “That Void Overgod isn’t as harmless and tame as Harper thinks. It’s protecting them. We have to…I don’t know, tell someone.”
“We have to get out first,” I said grimly. “And more importantly, we need to figure out what this was about. Ian was telling me about Clarissa and these people going missing, and assuming that’s a coincidence would be insane. Which means she’s probably a vessel herself, and if so, why the hell did she invite us here?”
I wasn’t seeing a point to this whole thing. I mean, even if I assumed that the monsters had been their whole plan, what was the point? Why would they come here just to-
There was a shift in the air, not spatial, or temporal, but…fate. Something changed in the destiny of the world. I felt terror flood my body, something so deep and primal I couldn’t even process it for a moment as it slammed into my lizard brain and sent me panic spiraling into what I could only describe as a stun lock.
Luckily, I wasn’t alone. Cosmic Waltz, Azazel, my demons were still with me, and they pushed me to react to the source of the fear. I stepped into a spatial current, pulling Mornax around me like a cloak as I pushed him up to A-rank and appeared behind my wife, staff raised in front of me to protect her.
The unnatural scream that preceded the explosion of chest pain was so loud it hit me like a physical blow. Which did nothing to prepare me for the ACTUAL physical blow that followed the huge, serrated antler that punched through my chest and out my back.
I gaped, staring down at the injury in disbelief. Mornax. My armor. The staff had barely managed to halt the attack as it caught on the tines of the antlers, but it was too little, too late.
“SHANE!” I heard Callie’s scream of rage as my knees went out from under me. My vision was going blurry, but not so blurry I couldn’t think. I jerked back off the antlers, kicking the monster away, and I reached for my Domain, pulling out all of my tier eight demons. As I did, I pulled on my staff. Upgrade. Upgrade. Upgrade. I got through three of them before my brain filled with pain and noise and I had to stop.
Azazel, Dom, and Sam hit the horned monstrosity head on, while Life Nova dropped to his knees beside me and started flooding me with power. I groaned as my bloodline ignited, feeding a bonfire into my chest as it knitted me back together. “Shane!” Callie said, kneeling next to me frantically as she started pulling out inverted objects with healing properties. “Stay with me baby, it’s gonna be ok.”
I coughed roughly, hacking up a piece of what I was pretty sure was spine. “I’m fine,” I rasped. “I’m healing, but you need to get in the Domain. They’re here for the lantern shield. I figured it out right before that thing attacked.”
She cursed. “The resentment,” her eyes narrowed. “Harper played us.”
“I don’t think so,” I shook my head. “There would have been no point doing it that way. We know why they’re here at least. Now the problem is what the hell we’re going to do about it?”
Because I was in bad shape. My armor would recover, it was designed to do that, and my wounds were already healing. But the thing had punched through me like wet tissue paper. It was A-rank, I was sure of that, but it was strong for A-rank. I could hear my demons ganging up on it, and the numbers were enough for now, but it wouldn’t last.
I was about to try to stand up when I felt another shift in the air. A long, world wear sigh echoed through the graveyard. “Enough,” said a lazy, familiar voice.
Then everything just stopped. Literally. I heard the sound of clocks ticking, the echoing click slowing until it finally stopped. I sat up, groaning, to find Professor Hawkins standing in front of…an abomination.
Standing fifteen feet tall, crouched on overly long spindly legs so tall the knees stuck up past its shoulders, the monster was terrifying. I could see my blood glittering on its horn as it loomed over the frozen demons below it. Which was less than expected. Several of them had been crushed, apparently. I winced at that.
Professor Hawkins was holding a stop watch, looking down at the face with a frown. He glanced up at the monster coldly. “Do you know how far you’ve set my work back?” he said levelly. “My rendering tools are still connected to the timepiece that idiot is using right now. I’m gathering realtime feedback. Feedback he wasn’t SUPPOSED to be aware of so I could get untainted data. And now you went and tried to infect it with your Void nonsense.”
The monster glared down at him, blue flame eyes I associated with the Void set in a shiny onyx skull that sat over its face, braced by its horns. He raised an eyebrow, and the thing let out an inhuman scream that started in its chest and burst free of its oversized fanged maw as it lunger at the professor.
It turned to ash on the wind before it reached him, dissolving under the wasting of centuries or millennia as it was destroyed in an instant. I gaped as time resumed across the graveyard, blinking in shock as I realized my pain was gone, and that my armor was now completely repaired. It had a self repair function, but not at that speed. He’d somehow managed to completely revert the damage to my body without even seeming to notice me.
Grimacing, he turned to frown down at me as I climbed to my feet. “Do you HAVE to make a mess every time you do anything, or is it just personal preference?”
Coughing lightly, I climbed to my feet, marveling at the feeling of not having an antler through my lung and spine. “This one wasn’t my fault. “We have to talk. Immediately. We learned some things about Dean Harper that might be relevant to the academy. Can we talk somewhere private?”
Rolling his eyes, he raised a hand and clicked his fingers, and suddenly we were standing in his living room. Not just Callie and I either. Will and Tamsin, Bethy’s siblings, were here with us, looking confused and kind of irritated (Will was missing an arm and a portion of his torso from the flesh flower monsters). “Now,” the professor said as he flopped down on the couch. “Tell me everything you know about Dean Harper.” Judging by the glint in his eye when he said that, I had a feeling we were going to be here a while. Lovely.