Clearly, chasing decoys one by one was a losing proposition. Cole needed a play that hit the mimic as a whole, not the individual constructs it was throwing at him.
Fortunately, the repeated exposure had given him a structural observation to work with. Every single copy and every single tendril shared the same gelatinous substrate underneath the cosmetic skin – apparent in the way they dissolved and extruded both.
That discovery opened the door to a fairly straightforward solution that Cole was a little embarrassed not to have arrived at sooner. Anybody who’d ever stuck a bowl of Jell-O in the freezer as a kid was already in possession of the key insight: namely that gelatinous matter loses cohesion and becomes brittle once its temperature drops past a certain threshold. In other words, cold was the bane of Clayface and pretty much every other shapeshifter out there.
With that in mind, Cole pulled his wand, planted his feet, and dropped the ambient temperature in a tight ring around his position. Of course, he also made sure to calibrate the spell carefully enough to mess with the gel’s biology without giving himself frostbite in the process.
Rather than dump the siphoned thermal energy into the void, he funneled it into a small barrier at his off hand. Conservation of energy being what it was, parking the heat for later beat venting it outright – especially with another spell almost certainly on the docket.
The effect manifested within a second. The moisture around him condensed and crystallized in the same instant, materializing a cloud of vapor dotted with glittering ice. The fog sank as quickly as it had appeared, pouring down in a slow-motion waterfall reminiscent of liquid nitrogen.
The mimic, naturally, wasn’t going to extend him the courtesy of waiting its turn like some anime villain. A tendril whipped through the vapor before the chill had even had a chance to propagate, forcing Cole to catch it across his blade in a heavy parry. And yeah, ‘heavy’ wasn’t usually in the lexicon for parrying, but with how long the fight had gone on, the fatigue was unavoidable.
And it wasn’t just the body, either. The headache that had crept in earlier throbbed in earnest now, a low pressure behind the eyes that sharpened the longer he held the cast. Having to sustain this level of physical and magical exertion was just straight-up fucking brutal.
Mercifully, the spell finished before the strain got any worse. The next copy to come at him – a Graves this time – slowed as it crossed the field, moving like it was underwater. Frost spread across the surface, the gel beneath turning cloudy, almost opaque. The three tendrils that lashed in to support it suffered the same fate, all of the mimic’s constructs stiffening by the second.
To its credit, the demon caught on quickly. It yanked the affected limbs back in the same way anyone would jerk a finger off a hot stove. The frozen sections, stripped of their flexibility, fractured at the boundaries and snapped clean off. The remains crashed to the floor like a bag of ice cubes dumped onto pavement.
Cole stomped on the nearest chunk at once, shattering it into fragments hopefully too small and ruined to reabsorb. Two more he crushed the same way, grinding them under his heel with the same petty satisfaction as smushing an annoying-ass bug.
Unfortunately, the aches had started to catch up now, his periphery blurring as tunnel vision set in. Despite that, he still had a bit more kick in him, mostly because he didn’t have to shit out a new spell from scratch.
He drew on the cached heat from earlier and assembled the rocket fireball he’d tried to throw earlier – the one the mimic had so rudely interrupted. With the spell actually completed this time, if a bit underpowered due to mana exhaustion, he shot it downrange.
The demon, presently occupied with amputating its own frozen limbs, barely got a defense up. It threw a wall of its own substrate into the fireball’s path, which was actually pretty damn interesting – because it hadn’t bothered to defend against the rifle rounds earlier.
The spell slammed into the wall, its surface erupting into steam and foam on contact. Meanwhile, the jet itself drove straight through, lancing like a shaped charge punching through armor. The thrust eventually vented out the back, launching boiling spall in a violent, narrow cone. The backspray perforated the demon’s torso along the exit axis, though not so dramatically as a real HEAT round liquefying a vehicle crew.
Cole turned to the others, ready to call out the play, but apparently he didn’t need to. Every one of them had already worked it out, each shrouded in the same miniature cloud he’d just conjured for himself.
So he pivoted back to the mimic, preparing to dump his mana into one more attack before falling back to replenish his reserves. But before he could even start the cast, it let out a screech that just about split his ears. The closest thing he could compare it to was a fork scraping against a plate, but cranked up about a hundredfold – and even that probably didn’t cut it.
The demon’s shield wall then bubbled and churned across its surface before blowing apart in a sudden release, loosing a volley of blackened needles like a hwacha unloading its full rack.
The windup gave Cole just enough warning to get a barrier up as he broke for the nearest pillar. The projectiles flew across the entire passageway, perforating every unprotected surface like this was some gang shootout. Against his barrier, the needles shattered on impact.
The demon kept the pressure on after that, churning out a steady stream of shards like some fucked-up machine gun emplacement.
The barrier miraculously still held, but given Cole’s present mana reserves, it was only a matter of time before it faltered.
He strained as much magic as he could into both his legs and the barrier – as much as the pounding headache would permit. Hell, just a few more strides and he’d be safe. Alas, proximity to cover couldn’t just conjure mana out of thin air; the barrier failed just a few fucking meters short, leaving him wide open.
Most of the shards pelted him across the back. Each impact stung, but it was hard to tell whether they’d actually penetrated through the armor. Turns out they likely hadn’t, because the moment a cluster bit into his right arm, he learned real quick what penetration actually felt like. And damn, did it sting on a different level.
He barely had time to register that before even more shards caught him in the back of the leg. They must’ve hit the hamstring this time, given the way the limb involuntarily folded out from under him.
He scrambled the last stretch into cover, dragging himself around the pillar just before a line of shards impaled the floor beside him. Only once he’d gotten past the pillar’s edge did he roll onto his left side.
It stung like a bitch in all the places he got hit, enticing him to just yank the needles out. But he knew better than that; removing embedded shit was an invitation to turn a plugged hole into a bleeder, not to mention being unable to actually inspect the injuries. Hell, even the slightest attempt to twist around hurt too damn much to push through.
He sucked air through his teeth. “Agh, fuck.”
He needed somebody else’s hands on this. A scan of the room gave him his options: Ethan and Miles tucked behind a wall to his left, lit up about as bad as he was, with Mack already crouched over them and working. Elina had ridden out the volley behind Graves and Vale, the two Celdornians having caught the shards on a shared barrier of their own.
“Elina,” he gritted out, forcing her name past the pain.
She didn’t waste time asking what for. She threw up a barrier and broke from cover, sprinting the distance to him with the shield angled toward the threat. Having read the move, Vale and Graves opened up on the mimic with a relentless volley of ice and flame. It didn’t bother targeting her – or more like couldn’t, not with the punishment the two of them were dishing out.
Cole put the window to use. Working his good arm free, he fished a mana potion off his belt, thumbed the cork loose one-handed, and drank it down in one go. It’d take a few minutes to fully digest, but even the early trickle was enough to take the worst edge off the headache and push back the gray creeping in at the margins.
Elina reached him a second later. She dropped into a slide and came to rest behind the pillar on her knees, already on the wound before she’d fully settled.
“Leg first,” Cole said. He shifted to give her room at the wound, bracing through the spike of pain.
Elina got to work, easing the first needle out slow enough to keep from tearing anything loose, healing magic threading in behind to seal the wounds.
Cole held his position and let her, fishing a second mana potion off his belt with his good arm and knocking it back.
Behind them, the others kept the Alpha Mimic occupied. Cole couldn’t see it from where he sat, but he could definitely hear the battle rage on – shit blowing up over and over, the demon screeching somewhere under all of it. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel at least a bit useless right now. But somehow, sitting out of the fight bothered him a hell of a lot less than he’d have guessed.
A few needles in, Elina’s hands slowed at the back of his thigh, then stopped altogether. “The barb has set against a great vessel. Were it drawn out now, the blood would not be stayed.”
“Then don’t – don’t pull it.” The words came out faster than the thought behind them, a hundred hours of Mack’s lectures doing the talking. “If it’s pressed up on the vessel, it might be the only thing holding it shut. You pull it, it opens, and back there I can’t – there’s nothing to clamp it against, you get me? Brace the vessel first. Throw a barrier on the wall, something to hold it closed, then ease the barb out once that’s set. Not before.”
“Hold still, then,” she said, already adjusting her grip to do exactly that.
He did as she asked. This one took the longest by a mile, her getting the barrier set into the vessel wall and holding before she’d even dare touch the barb. When it finally came out, it lit the whole leg up, hot and wrong in a way that had him bracing for the floor to go red underneath him.
“Be still,” she said with a soft, gentle smile. “You’ll not bleed out, brave as you are. The wound is well in hand.”
He took her word for it over his leg’s, and sure enough, no flood ever came. The pain dropped off to a dull ache soon after. The rest were nowhere near as bad, thank Christ – just splinters, nothing he couldn’t have dug out himself given the angle and a free hand.
A couple minutes later, she sealed the last of it and sat back.
Cole stood and twisted the leg around to test it. The initial bite of the healing magic aside, Elina’s work had left no residual pain. The leg now basically good as new, Cole peeked around the pillar.
The battle had progressed in their favor since he’d gotten lit up, with the Alpha Mimic down to about half its original mass and on the back foot. Graves and Vale had pushed it back toward the security kiosk, keeping it contained on the sides. Mack finished up his own treatments right about then and rejoined the fight with a slew of fireballs, spamming them like there was no tomorrow.
Cole would’ve called it a done deal, if not for a fresh racket emerging from the concourse they’d come from. All that shouting and stomping had to be the cultists, no doubt having narrowed down the team’s position from the last few minutes of chaotic fighting.
“Elina, with me.” He moved off toward another pillar as he said it, putting a few obstacles between his back and the Alpha Mimic on the way.
Once he’d settled into cover, he pre-aimed the corner and waited. The first orc to round it caught a round before it had finished the turn.
The sight of it dropping in the chokepoint split the ones behind it down the middle, half recoiling back behind the corner while the other half, already too committed to stop, spilled forward into the open. That half-second of disorder was all Elina needed to drop another runner before the enemy started firing back in earnest. Revolver rounds cracked off their pillar, with a scatter of shoddy firebolts chasing behind – terribly inaccurate, but thick enough to keep the two of them pinned in cover.
“Mack, stay on the mimic with Graves and Vale,” Cole called over the noise. “Everyone else on the cultists!”