AN: Much thanks to my new Beta Readers; their help with proofreading and editing the chapters before release makes them much more readable and fluid.
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The party moved slowly and carefully, keeping their centers of gravity low. Trying not to slip on the slick limestone floor covered in uneven bumps and chaotic surfaces was a challenge all by itself, and the goblins up ahead weren’t happy to just let them approach unmolested either.
Mia ducked, her heart leaping into her throat as her left foot slipped a little before she managed to catch herself. Only then did she notice that Lina caught the arrow before it could have hit her with a thin wall of air, but what was done was done. Slowly, she forced her fingers to uncurl from where they had held Camie’s shirt in a white-knuckled grip.
Great, I would have dragged her down with me into the river. Great work, Mia. She shook off the silly thought; Camie would have dug her talons into the limestone before she could have been dragged along. It was fine. She was stressing over nothing. Focus.
The path was wider now than it was back where they landed, enough for four of them to walk abreast comfortably, though only three did to keep some space to dodge.
Advancing would have been an impossibility if the goblins were free to set up and just pepper them with arrows, and gather in force at the end of the ravine. Fortunately, only a handful of goblins were taking potshots at them. Mia would have had Sparkle handle them, but he needed his rest. Besides, they could handle it.
The problem was the group of robed figures, which Mia could only perceive, gathered in a wide circle in the middle of the grand chamber. She could feel the miasmic, broken mana roil and churn under their combined effort into something that made her stomach clench in halfway between instinctive disgust and horror. She would have loved to tell the army guys to give them some supersonic lead injection to take care of that problem, but they were surrounded by a veritable wall of flesh and muscle.
Orcs, ogres and goblins stood between the advancing delving party and the site of the nefarious ritual. It was only about twenty, maybe thirty greenskins put together, but they were backed up by the ones quite literally hiding in the walls.
As they finally stepped into the final chamber, Mia laid eyes upon the strange architecture of the place. She felt like she stood in the courtyard of a medieval castle, though it was … inverted. Instead of keeping an invading force out, it was meant to be a murder zone.
Was that the proper term? Or was it called a killing field? Kill zone? That last one was probably the one, not that the correct terminology mattered at the moment. The point was that seeing hundreds of narrow arrow slits dot the walls so densely that it would set off someone with trypophobia made her nervous. She could sense that most of those dark holes had no malicious little monsters hiding behind them, waiting to shoot her in the back the moment she had it turned to them, but that only helped a little.
There was no dramatic standoff, no speeches or even warcries. The primitive arrows and pebbles fired from slingshots began firing the very moment Brent’s foot touched the distinctly artificial-looking stone tiles of the final chamber.
At the same time, an arc of lightning thick as a wrist snapped out. It connected Helene’s outstretched hand with the largest ogre, and from there it split and chained across five more victims, two of them goblins that died on the spot while the orcs just barely survived. The primary target collapsed, its head a charred mess, but the secondary ones just twitched on the floor, smoking, or cradling limbs the lightning had ripped into.
Goblins wearing leather armour and brandishing rusted iron blades rushed forward from their post around the orcs, but before they could take more than a step, a trio of concussion grenades — as Mia had mentally dubbed the alchemical bombs that exploded with extreme concussive force — landed in their midst.
Those things were nasty, liquifying internal organs, bursting eardrums, eyeballs and largely bypassing most forms of physical defence organic beings had. They used arcane magic, moulded into a sudden explosion of kinetic force. Mia had considered trying to learn how to do that manually, but discarded the idea because it would only be effective until the Body stat got high enough. After all, the concussive force the bomb generated was entirely mundane, even if it was generated through magical means.
The goblins were blown back, their fragile bodies broken the moment the shockwave hit. Even the orcs stumbled, caught within the blast, and then five of them dropped unceremoniously, dead before they even hit the floor. A liquified brain and heart were apparently too much for their healing factor, but as shown by the other orcs caught only at the periphery of the explosion, internal bleeding and a massive concussion were not.
Still, they were enough to daze the monsters something fierce, which was enough as Mia’s party rushed forward to meet the disorganised force of greenskins in battle. The soldiers once more started firing their rifles, taking potshots at the goblin archers hiding in the walls. More often than not they hit only bare stone, but that still had the goblins ducking out of view and scuttling off, which was the primary purpose of their suppressive fire.
Brent led the charge, his armoured form almost blurring as Ki burned through his body. Each step he took seemed to carry him twice as far as it should have. When he finally reached the first orc, still dazed from getting caught by the fringes of that concussion grenade, his blade whistled through the air and tore straight through its thick neck. There was resistance there, but Brent's longsword refused to stop; it cut through thick leathery hide, corded muscles and a spine made of bones tougher than they had any right to be.
The orc dropped, head tumbling off its neck as blood poured forth like a fountain from the stump. Brent cut through two goblins and lobbed off another orc’s sword-hand before the first one’s corpse even stopped its postmortem spasming.
Camie could have reached them even faster, but she slowed her pace, intentionally keeping near the ‘squishies’. Not that it robbed her of the chance to fight, since after a moment the orcs from both sides roared and rushed at them, trying to flank them and crush their smaller party between their two groups.
Unfortunately for them, less than ten greenskins remained on either side, and Mia finally had the space to summon her two pseudo spirits, which neatly handled the right group. It had an ogre leading it, but it had been caught by the earlier concussive blast, and it could barely stand by this point, blood streaming down its face from both its mouth and nostrils. Whatever it was that kept it on its feet — probably a Trait of some sort, maybe something like a ‘last stand’ sort of thing? — it was faltering. The Black Knight rushed it, shouldering aside goblins and orcs to meet the dazed ogre in battle, which only lasted a few seconds before one of the Knight’s bastard swords was thrust up from below the monster's jaw and lodged in its brain.
Camie handled the other side, with some support from Lina and the soldiers to keep the greenskins from just mobbing her and burying her under a pile of bodies. A jab caved in a goblin’s skull, introducing its crooked nose to the inside of its skull; a leg sweep sent an orc falling on its ass, and a vicious roundhouse kick nearly took off the head of another, but failing that, it only tore off its jaw. The slight crimson sheen of translucent energy around her limbs was clearly working if she could do that to an orc.
A crackling bolt of arcane energy shot out of Mia’s wand, zipping through a small gap between the rapidly dimming number of green bodies and on course to blow one of the ritualists' heads off its shoulders. It wasn’t a perfect shot, but it would have hit, and that would have been enough, had an invisible dome not flickered into existence around the robed figures to intercept it.
The Arcane Blast struck the barrier and exploded with a thunderous crack, splattering across the now-visible dome. A hole the size of a beach ball was torn into the magical construct, but Mia hadn’t been prepared to send a follow-up attack and nor would she have been able to, as the small gap she’d shot her spell through collapsed. Mia was sure the spell hadn’t been there just a moment ago, so either it was some reactive enchantment … or someone had cast it. Someone, or something.
She didn’t have time to follow that line of thought as the remaining greenskins took her attempt to kill the robed ones rather badly, trying to rush at her even as it left them exposed to her party members.
The White Guardian charged back to her side, each of its heavy stomps echoing in the stone floor as it crashed into an orc shield-first. The Black Knight rushed back as well, focusing on the monsters closer to Mia instead of ranging out and hunting the monsters trying to flank the group. The soldiers took up the slack, laying down suppressive fire on the handful of monsters her two pseudo-spirits left behind.
The Wards on a few of them faltered and popped, but everyone remained standing and ready to fight as the number of foes shrank down to the single digits. Mia, finally, had enough breathing room to once more attempt to halt the ritual, preparing herself to cast a pair of Arcane Blasts in quick succession. One to blow a hole into the Aegis spell and another to fly through it and strike at the mages.
She almost stumbled when a new presence, more potent and foul than any she’d felt since escaping that Raid, entered the range of her Spirit Sense. Her eyes snapped up, focusing on the parapets of the fort sitting nestled against the far wall. There stood an ogre with two heads, hunched over a massive staff the size of a lamppost. One head sported two eyes that she could almost feel glaring in her direction, and the other just a single cyclopean eye that lit up with an inner glow.
Miasmic magic gathered and condensed in an instant in that eye, and Mia barely had a moment to react. She threw her hand up, and her pre-cast Arcane Shield snapped into existence right above it, just in time to meet a thin beam of vile green magic. The Shield popped after a second, and while it took the brunt of the attack, the beam still sent Mia flying as it slammed into her Mage Armour and tried to burrow through that as well. Before it could manage, the White Guardian interposed itself between its master and the revealed Ettin, taking on its eye-beam with its own shield.
Mia groaned, shaking her head a little as she waited just a moment for any possible pain to register. Sure enough, her skull felt like it wanted to split right open from those hastily dismissed Arcane Blasts and the broken Shield. Dismissing her developing migraine, she focused on her body, trying to feel out whether anything was broken. When no part of her body saw fit to assault her with waves of agony, she threw herself back onto her feet, stumbling a bit as a sudden bout of nausea assaulted her. Dark shadows crept in from the edges of her sight, and she was forced to keep still and take a handful of short, calming breaths until she no longer felt like she’d pass out if she moved too hastily.
Her hand was still holding her wand in a white-knuckled grip, something for which she felt inordinately proud of herself — even if the magical stick was doing its equivalent of pitiful whining after having taken the brunt of the magical backlash onto itself. All those times getting thrown around while sparring with Camie were showing their fruit. The Mage Armour was still intact as well, though down to half its ‘battery’. It was a worthy trade though, having protected her from that beam and the perils of the consequent high-speed tumble she took. Getting half the bones in her body broken would have been well within the cards without it.
“I’m fine!” Mia shouted, mostly for Camie’s benefit so the silly girl would keep focusing on her job instead of rushing over to check on Mia. Quickly gathering her wits, she sprinted back to her team as fast as she dared, trying not to trip over the dozens of smaller or larger corpses scattered over the floor, or slip on the pools of blood covering the tiles.
The last of the greenskins had fallen, but if anything, the party was even tenser than before and for a good reason. The Ettin had somehow crossed the distance between the fort and the ritual, coming to stand right in the middle of the softly chanting figures, its long ivory staff reaching into the churning globule of miasma hovering above them. In place of the dome-shaped barrier now stood something reminiscent of Mia’s Phalanx, a visible wall conjured from solid, if translucent magic. It stretched from wall to wall, cutting the entire chamber in half.
“Throw anything you have over this damned thing!” Brent shouted, and the demo-squad obeyed with haste, each member chucking a vial on a high arc.
Two didn’t make it high enough, striking the wall and exploding into intense, fiery spheres. Three crested over the top more than five meters high and plummeted towards the cultists.
The Ettin raised its two-eyed head while the cyclopean one kept glaring at them through the translucent wall. It raised its free hand, the four digits on it curling as if to grasp something invisible and then wrench it back. A portion of the translucent wall caved in, then a horizontal disc of solid miasma exploded from it to intercept the falling vials.
The first exploded with concussive force, its shockwave causing the other two to burst prematurely. One into a small storm that crackled impotently in mid-air, and the other into a massive ball of liquid fire that then fell on its original targets like burning rain. The disc was gone, shattered by the first two explosions, so there was nothing to save the monsters from the immolating shower.
The Ettin roared as half of the robed figures instantly went from low, soft chanting to agonised screaming. The towering monster grabbed its staff — which on second look seemed to be the entire trunk of one of those ivory trees from the surface — with both hands, uncaring of the few drops of burning magical napalm trying to melt the flesh from his bones. The staff rose, the upper third of it fully enveloped in the churning ball of miasma that was mere moments from slipping free of the ritual’s control, supposedly in an extremely explosive manner.
The Ettin’s eyes glowed in that same unnatural green, all three of them, and the miasma stilled, then rushed into the staff. The monster slammed it down, the bottom of its staff cracking the stone tiles and planting the pole into it. The broken mana surged into the Earth, not in the manner Mia associated with a miscast spell running amok, but with purpose. It sped off, racing to the very edges of Mia’s perception where it struck the fort and … flowed into the stone structure.
All of it happened in just a second, far too fast for Mia to do anything about it, even as she started beating herself up over not having Sparkle in position to throw an Arcane Blast at the ritual — hopefully disrupting it in mid-activation — but everything seemed much more obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
‘Sparkle, see if you can do something to disrupt that!’ Mia practically shouted in her mind, and the small sprite shot out of her Core, then raced over the ethereal wall and off towards the distant fort.
‘Oh,’ Sparkle said after reaching it, and Mia was already grimacing at the emotions contained in that simple sound. ‘Well that’s not good. It’s trying to summon and bind an Elemental Titan.’
‘And what the hell is that!?’ Mia asked, but it turned out to be rather superfluous as she sensed new magical presences pop into existence one after the other, sliding sideways into the world from the Spirit Realm. They were of the Earth, uncorrupted by the miasma, but that didn’t make it much better. Earth Elementals by their dozens, all somewhere along Rank 1, were coming to inhabit parts of the fort before their presences started … merging. Where one Elemental’s presence started, and another’s began, grew fuzzy and inconsequential as they became one cohesive amalgam. But there was something rotten there, a seed of dense miasma sitting at the heart of the creature. It was dormant for now. Waiting.
Then the fort shook, and then it moved. Walls shifted, condensing and warping as massive slabs of rock were reshaped by the new ‘Elemental Titan’ into a form it liked more. Two massive arms formed at its side, a triangular head atop the parapets and then legs. The fort began to stand, and then it did, a titan of earth and stone towering above everything around it, made of battlements and walls, and even a portcullis that ended up wrapped around its chest like some webbed armour.
‘That.’ Sparkle replied. ‘Sorry, but it was a bit too late to disrupt its formation … but what we still can prevent is its binding being completed. It’s unfinished, but the seed is already there, planted into the Titan, the summoner just needs to connect to it. That Ettin needs to die yesterday. Don’t let it work its magic.’
The monster in question was already jogging towards the lumbering giant, stomping off like a happy toddler seeing its newest toy. The wall behind it was forgotten, and Mia felt the magic in it lose cohesion and focus. It would fall by itself soon, but not soon enough. Mia quickly discarded the idea of blowing a hole through it; the Ettin would reach the Titan — which seemed happy enough to just stand still and loom over the battlefield, which it was exceedingly good at — long before she could blow a large enough hole that they could get through.
‘Okay Sparkle, aim at its legs, I’m sending through a Missile,’ Mia said, and swiftly focused. Arcane Missile was a cumbersome spell, on account of being her own custom-made patchwork monstrosity that was still due months of refinement to make it less of an absolute mana hog. It was also rather slow, both in its flight and casting, but those could be fixed as well, given enough time. Feeling the nonverbal acknowledgement resonate through her Bond, Mia gave her mind fully to the effort of casting the spell, checking over all the rune arrangements twice before grabbing hold of her mana. The more mana a spell took, the nastier the backlash if you messed it up, and so she couldn’t rush the casting of this spell too much even under the present circumstances. She wouldn’t be of much use to anyone if one of her arms — or her head — exploded.
With a mental flex of her will, the spell actualised, the spellcircle slamming into reality above her palm and visibly crackling before it collapsed inward and a thick globule of volatile arcane energy zipped across her Bond. Sparkle caught it on the other end and with a precision Mia doubted anyone other than a Spirit could pull off, sent it on its way. An instant later, the magical missile slammed into the ground right in front of the Ettin’s right leg and then exploded.
If the explosions her Arcane Blasts caused were on the level of fireworks, then the Missile was a fist-sized chunk of C4 going off. The arcane discharge detonated with a thunderous boom that reverberated across the chamber, and, riding along on the shockwaves, a crackling storm of arcane energy swiftly expanded to cover the entire form of the two-headed giant. Mia watched it all happen through Sparkle’s eyes like a hawk, suspicious beyond reason that the spellcasting monster that had conjured a magical wall spanning dozens of meters without much effort failed to even throw up a simple shielding spell to protect itself now.
The explosion lasted only a fraction of a second, and then it was gone, leaving the Ettin on its back and lying still for a brief moment where Mia dared to hope it was dead. Then realised how stupid that was and prepared a follow-up Arcane Blast to double-tap the downed creature, just to be sure. She had another four, maybe five of them in her before she had to drink her final mana potion of the day.
The Ettin growled, a deep sound rumbling forth from its massive chest as it shoved itself up into a seated position where its three eyes came to stare at what remained of its legs. One had the skin and flesh charred off of it up to the ankle, while the other was a gory mess from the hip down and ended at a bit below the knee in a mangled stump. Why it hadn’t cast a spell to defend itself, Mia hadn’t the faintest clue, but she wasn’t about to complain. Maybe it spent the last slivers of its magic to finish the ritual; maybe it was dumber than she thought and got cocky now that the ritual was finished. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It didn’t matter. You didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
‘That’ll probably slow it down, won’t it?’ Sparkle mused, sounding oddly gleeful about the objectively miserable state the monster found itself in. Not that Mia could talk when she felt nothing but a malicious sense of glee at the sight of the monster starting to crawl towards the distant form of the Earth Titan. ‘Good thing it was a caster and distracted. Stupid thing. Thought that silly wall was enough protection.’
“Alright,” Mia said aloud, her focus snapping back into her body. She blinked once, then twice more to fully center herself. Ignoring the looks she was getting, she clutched her wand and flicked it. The spellcircle for Arcane Blast snapped into being, then collapsed inward and zipped across her Bond, slamming into the back of the crawling Ettin’s head … one of them at least. Its forehead slammed against the floor, and the entire body fell flat on its stomach, arms slipping away as if suddenly unable to carry the weight of its torso. Once the explosion cleared, the two-eyed head was revealed in all its mangled glory, the back half of the head missing entirely and whatever had been contained within having been vaporised by the blast.
The head hung low, but the other, cyclopean one, rose again and let out a furious, mournful howl as the monster started crawling again.
One more. Mia thought, eyes narrowing as she flexed her will again, sending forth another Arcane Blast. Under Sparkle’s careful control, it found its mark and a moment later the familiar sensation of a monster’s miasmic presence bursting upon death reached Mia. She almost collapsed as a wave of relief hit her like a speeding truck, only stopped by an arm snaking around her waist and holding her up.
With a soft sigh, Mia let her head rest on Carmilla’s shoulder as she felt the adrenaline fade from her veins, leaving an annoying shaking in her hands and an even more annoying weakness in her legs.
Oh well, there were worse fates out there than to be the damsel in distress.