NOVEL NEXT (Vol 5) Chapter 19: Wheelhouse
Continuously moving, Sammy checked off one foe as helpless and largely defeated while turning her attention to the other specter still ‘lighting up’ Ozra. She did not have a good angle or distance to try eye shots, so she slung her last two stones into its torso to keep adding damage there. It had one arm flopping uselessly, so Sammy directed her attention to the other shoulder area, aiming to disable its other arm.
She cloaked her attacks in illusions to make it look like last-ditch Ozra attempts and not give away her position.
She narrowly missed the shoulder with the first strike, nonetheless taking it right in the center for more blown-apart tissue damage. Her second hit square where she wanted, blowing out chunks of shoulder flesh. With one hit, it wasn’t entirely disabled, but the arm was definitely not moving as well, swaying erratically when lifted.
Despite her precautions, the specter spun from the burning Ozra right in her direction. It screamed in outrage and charged…
Sammy started preparing for another spell, still backpedaling to create more distance… but then both of the specters had their fires and that light in their eyes begin to sputter.
They both slowed, swaying in weakness, and their auras flickered and reduced significantly. Finally, they just collapsed in heaps like a ragdoll. Or a pile of burning bones.
They could ignore their wounds only temporarily. The last-ditch frenzy is over.
Sammy breathed a sigh of relief — then coughed, because of all the acrid smoke.
Immediately ceasing the whole ‘breathing thing’ again, Sammy wasted no time taking advantage of her time gap instead of fucking around. She cast Armor of Light to refresh her wound negations, cast a Shield of Light spell to replace the loss of her magic shield, and then began using [Phantom Constructs] for more things to automate and program orders to, to be ready for any other flanking specters showing up.
Primarily, she created dozens of individual darts that could fire through her greater radius, then made a couple of golems and armed them with some of these, with the rest just floating around her. She also re-summoned Ozra who appeared with a sigh and a shrug. This time, she utilized twin flintlock-looking repeater handguns to load up.
Running low on actual mana, she nonetheless spent three castings of Hard Light Layer to give the two golems and Ozra some protection.
Finally, she remembered one buff layer she’d neglected before: the Twist Up the Sleeve spell. She did a 3-card draw and got no Major Arcana but did get 7 of Wands, which provided a simple, flat ‘+1 Effective Levels to any defense or resistance, as a (Tarot) modifier.’ She took it but didn’t unleash it immediately, as it had a duration of 5 seconds per caster level. At level 23 effectively, that was a good amount, but not before she was directly under threat.
Inevitably, the stragglers came around to flank from the forest… and these specters went down under a fusillade of darts, bullets, and Light AoEs blasting them. None got anywhere near them, and only a few were elite enough to survive the AoEs. Soon, there was nothing but the flaming auras sitting around.
Sammy walked a bit toward them and called upward, “Well? Now what, unnamed torturer? Your specters are all defeated. Let me guess… you have a dungeon for me, next.”
Mocking laughter answered her, unconcerned. “How can you defeat that which can never die, nor rest? Their suffering is eternal and it will be yours, too. They’ll never stop seeking you. Never! Suffer, demon bitch! Succumb inevitably, whether today or in a year, and know a tiny sliver of the fear you’ve inflicted! Then they will have meted out some appropriate revenge.
“Perhaps after you’ve felt the pain of a false death a few dozen times, we’ll move on to a dungeon! Maybe that is where your psyche will be flayed and exposed to finally rot away — if you’re lucky! Gyahaha!” Mad, cackling laughter ensued after this for a long spell, before gradually fading.
Sammy frowned and cast her gaze out toward the still-burning auras. Torture through repetition? It was a rather good choice for her, because she did not want to exist in some wasteland fighting flaming zombie-wraiths for days or weeks. Could not.
I need a fucking solution, then.
Ozra was rubbing her chin at the conundrum before them. “It doesn’t look like a spell so much as their inherent nature, so it is harder to analyze outright. A pity.”
Sammy walked up to the flame aura of the one that she had ruined the head of. It was basically just a burnt, decayed corpse being slowly consumed by a big ghostly flame around it. “Everything in a spirit realm is subject to spiritual analysis, though, and this is my wheelhouse.”
“Ah. The word of the day! I swear, it must be — It keeps going through your head. Give it a rest!”
“Shut up, Ozzy! Don’t be a Dart.” Crouching down directly in front of the aura, Sammy focused more with Spirit Sight. She closed her eyes, to blot out the natural interpretations that the eyes tended to produce, which often obfuscated deeper meanings.
Energy. All energy, as manifested animus. There was nothing truly physical there, not even the remains, which were coalesced concepts. Destroying the body essentially confused the conjured, manufactured spirit. A fractured psyche designed to be in agony.
It was tied to the realm and thus tied directly to the god. Hobgoblins made of pneuma, simple phantasms without souls, spawned from cruel intentions and memory.
“Pneuma, is it?” Sammy muttered to herself as she stood, opened her eyes, and stared at the aura. After a moment, she walked right into it.
“Er, what are you doing?” Ozra queried, concerned yet curious.
The fiery aura licked at her sheath like a constant attack, ghostly flames and heat reaching to burn the insides and failing. With the voluntary face-tanking, her resistance was penalized, enough that it was dealing Superficial Wounds like a mild sunburn. And she could feel the hypothetical absorption through [Be Converted], the Pneuma FE she’d get if it wasn’t from the same source over and over.
Absorption. Could I do it absolutely? [Pneumamancy] isn’t allowed willy-nilly here, but… I am the Goddess of Pneuma, not a mere practitioner. And this… this is what the title exists for.
Sammy invoked her identity as that goddess, invoked the domain directly as she had so often done with [Fate] as the more natural for her. She invoked [Pneuma] itself as she held her luminous hand out within the flames and attempted to absorb the energy aura around her with an effort of supreme will.
She felt that essential will of a deity within her grappling with the realm itself, as two contrary authorities were weighed by contest and pulled in two directions. It came down to the raw resistance of a mad, tiny reality but only one hallucination within, against a goddess with a huge assortment of circumstantial advantages — insistent disbelief, inspiration, deific indignance, the battle against it already won, the Sympathy of being within, and understanding through analysis.
The Goddess of Pneuma overwhelmed and overcame that resistance and change was enforced. She absorbed the energy of the fiery aura into herself as it reduced and reduced, flickering and fading as pneuma was removed. In the process, the tortured psyche within was unraveled and released, evaporating like smoke.
“The malignant bonds holding you are broken,” the Goddess of Pneuma declared with a voice that rang through every fiber of the realm. “Your contrived, abused existence as this abominable puppet need be no more. Begone.”
The last echoes of the tortured soul’s howling faded and died, and then there was nothing left but wisps of foggy, freed proto-substance akin to the energies of Limbo.
The realm and the god were eerily silent, apparently in shock and disbelief. She felt eyes on her, but that was all.
“Wow!” Ozra exclaimed. “That was damned gnarly of you.”
“I know, right?! Epic!” Sammy cleared her throat and waltzed over to the other elder, smoke and fog trailing behind her. She stepped into the flames, held out her hand, and repeated the whole ordeal, swallowing the energy into herself and consuming what was intended to be undying.
Once more, the Goddess rose up from within her to say, “I tolerate no suffering for children’s lessons, for petty vengeance and misguided notions of justice. Wrongness in my sphere shall be corrected! Transmuted to right!”
With this, the sky was made to scream and shake, and storm clouds brewed in the marred, already bruised and broken painting of reality. “No, no, no!” the god’s voice exploded from above, as loud and shrill as the highest notes of a singer into a mic. “This is not how it is to be! You will not deny them their revenge! You will not escape what you deserve for your crimes!”
Sammy deliberately marched on to the next fiery aura while flinging a finger up at the sky and snarling. She let the goddess within her flare up with answering offense. “If you hope to stop me, do it with your own mettle, you weak and pathetic wretch! Dispense with your toys and puppets fit for mewling babes! Take victory or defeat as a deity should — face-to-face!”
Damn, girl.
Part-way to the aura of the next downed specter, the ground suddenly cracked and black stone burst upward out of it.
Sammy dodged backward immediately, dropping into an all-out defense sort of stance, as the black stone became a monolith rocketing upward — a tower. A black cloud swirled and coalesced onto its top into a giant figure all in black-and-gray armor of sharp angles, with a helmet sporting two enormous horns flaring up from either side. The eyes from within the helmet glowed a baleful red.
In contrast to the dread armor, he held a glowing, golden longbow of great splendor.
Over the crenelations of the tower, the figure pointed down at Sammy. “If you are eager to die your first painful death by my hand, then so be it! I’ll strip your corpse of every recourse to defend! For your next punishment, I’ll toss you to them to be ripped apart limb from limb!”
“Whatever!” Sammy tried for a quick laser light blast to take advantage, but the god ducked behind the crenelations immediately and she missed.
Vaguely, she saw the bow flash, and an arrow streaked straight up into the sky. An instant later, the storm clouds blossomed a thousand points of light, and an almost literal rain of arrows came down, all of them glowing with an aura of fire.
There was no dodging the arrows, and running seemed likely to make it worse, so she planted and interposed her shield, ready to block and deflect any dropping down on her square. Meanwhile, Ozra had gone defensive instead of attacking leading up to the rain of arrows, and had totally protected herself under a tall pavilion-like structure of Hard Light.
Not a bad idea, really…
But she had no time to copy it. A cluster of arrows fell upon her, and she blocked the majority with her spell shield. One thudded and stuck into the surface, not penetrating.
My spell is actually stronger than my magic item, now, or these arrows aren’t so bad, after all.
The golems were peppered with arrows but held together with some damage thanks to their wound negation and ensuing sheer toughness.
Ozra’s Hard Light pavilion flashed out of existence after getting peppered with arrows, but it had done its job — Ozra was somewhat under threat from the irregular patterns dropping slightly off-timing, but being irregularly spaced, none happened to hit her.
But each still was glowing with fire, and all of them detonated mere moments after impact.