Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

As Adon drew closer to the wall where he had left his friends, he noticed that ants were everywhere on the walls of the level. They had abandoned their underground bases and tunnels completely, and they now swarmed across any solid surface.

A few dozen of them had concentrated themselves where his friends had been, and they formed a sort of dogpile on top of the space. Adon could tell that the spiders were still there and alive. Not only could he sense them with Telepathy, but he could also see the results of their continued struggle. Every ten seconds or so, an ant would fall away from somewhere beneath the top layer of the pile, dead. That still left the spiders buried under other ants, but at least they were holding their own.

Adon used a tiny boost from Transformation to streamline his body for the last key moments of his final movements toward the spiders, to fly slightly faster and cut through the air just a little more smoothly.

He moved almost within reach of his friends, and he activated Telekinesis. Then Adon's large invisible hands started plucking the ants off, two or three at a time, tossing them into the void below.

Unlike the spiders, he did not have to actually kill the creatures to remove them. They were fairly lightweight, and dropping them from a height had proven fatal before, so simply yanking them away from the wall was the obvious answer.

After a dozen of the ants had been hurled to their dooms, the collective seemed to develop some sort of understanding that there was danger in that space. They scattered and gave the unseen hands a wide berth, revealing the two spiders huddled together beneath.

Samson was mostly protected under Goldie's body, Adon observed.

Guys, are you all right? Adon sent.

I have had worse, Goldie replied immediately.

Mama protected me from most of it, Samson sent, but she was stung multiple times. I noticed her moves slowed down a lot in the last few minutes.

I will be fine, Goldie snapped back. I know my own body. I have taken plenty of ant stings in the past.

Not from giant ants, Adon thought but did not send.

Get on my back, he transmitted instead. You don't need to fight anymore anyway.

He quickly transformed his shape, enlarging his back and wings to take the same form he had employed the last time he carried the two spiders. Then he flapped over to them until he hovered just beneath their bodies. Finally, Goldie let go of the wall, and both spiders dropped onto Adon.

And Adon knew immediately what Samson had been talking about. Samson clung to Adon's back as normal, with perhaps a hint of stiffness on his lower right side. Goldie tried to use her legs for purchase on Adon's back, but she almost fell off immediately.

She's pretty close to paralyzed right now, Adon thought. I have to make sure to keep our distance from those ants.

He assumed that time alone would be enough to heal Goldie's wounds. Up close, Adon could see the perforations in her exoskeleton where she had been stung and injected with venom at least a half-dozen times. But Adon was fairly certain that in her garden life, Goldie had suffered stings from far more ants than that. She had survived then. She would survive now.

If she starts getting worse, I'll stop and heal her, he promised himself. For now, the most urgent thing was to get back to the group and join them in seeking refuge wherever they were going. All around, pieces of the floor's ceiling continued falling, and the floor collapsed unpredictably. Adon doubted that any level of reflexes would be enough to survive being on this level for much longer.

Hold on tight, he sent to both his passengers.

But Adon used Telekinesis to keep them in place as he flew at top speed back toward the group. In Goldie's present condition, he knew it would have been genuinely impossible for her to remain on his back.

In the distance, he could see the party as a whole was fighting their way through an army of ants that had surged up the side of the cliff.

He was gratified at least to note that the division between the Dessian and Claustrian factions that he seemed to have caused had at least temporarily disappeared. In this moment, there was only the surface dwellers versus the endless horde of golden flesh.

Adon would have been pleased with the situation, except that he could not help noticing that Rosslyn was at the back of the group, leading a rearguard action while the young lords cut the path forward. This would probably make Rosslyn the last to reach safety after the group managed to find a place to shelter, which was consistent with her character.

More worrisome was his other observation. Having seen her fight on multiple occasions, he was confident in what he noticed.

Rosslyn is a lot weaker than she was earlier.

—

The Princess drove a sword point through an ant skull, hurled the creature aside, then slashed another one in two, her movements rote and practiced.

This should have all been easy for Rosslyn, trained as she was from a young age for battle—and skilled as she was in dispatching enemies. She may not have been the strongest royal in Claustrian history, but she was probably one of the most careful and tactical fighters the Royal Family had ever produced.

Still, she was sweating as heavily as any of her knights who fought alongside her—increasingly further from her, as more and more ants swelled up from the holes in the ground all around them, driving individuals apart and breaking up any attempt at formations. She was probably panting harder than any other human out there.

I shouldn't have used that, she thought for probably the fourth or fifth time, referring to the light magic attack she had employed against the giant spider that she had dispatched earlier. There had seemed little choice at the time, but now it felt reckless. Now it took all the strength she had to just keep going, continue swinging her sword, put one foot in front of the other, and stand holding the line with her knights, protecting the retreat. Thank goodness these ants are so weak.

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She cleaved one in half lengthwise with a single swing of her weapon, hoping that the stench of death would scare off others from around her, but the prospect of death did not seem to dissuade them. Two more ants hurled themselves at her, and she was reduced to throwing elbows and knees to break their bodies apart and get them off of her, since it was hard to swing her sword at creatures that were already attaching themselves to her limbs.

As she broke the second ant thorax on her knee, she felt a stinger pierce her just behind the knee. Another one. This was the third time that had happened in just a few minutes. She wrinkled her nose, more annoyed than in pain, and she quickly stomped the ant that had gotten behind her, crushing it with one foot. This added that ant to the dozens slowly piling up around her.

And it felt like she had not even made a small dent in their numbers. The knights who fought for her were only growing further apart from each other and their leader as more and more of the gold-plated monsters emerged from the bowels of the underworld to contest every bit of ground the humans wished to cross or occupy.

The fact that there were so many of them, and that they would all spend their lives cheaply to accomplish what seemed to be the dungeon core's goal—slowing the party down long enough to catch them in the level's collapse—could become a serious problem.

She darted her head quickly from side to side, sword raised in front of her face in a defensive, ready stance, and she saw that there was space to retreat a bit further backward, a little closer to the cliff.

The cliff was the goal. William and Frederick were already beginning their descent, fighting their way down, and Rosslyn could see additional knights holding off ants as they slowly backed toward the cliff and attempted to join the young lords.

Rosslyn backed away a little further, took a little ground for herself, drew a bit closer to the cliff and to her other comrades. For a moment, she was unchallenged, and she sensed other knights who were fighting to protect the rear, like herself, likewise moving toward the cliffside.

They would reunite as a group. They could do this.

Rosslyn! Adon's voice rang through her mind

Adon, she thought. She could not keep a note of relief from her inner voice. She felt as if the situation was halfway salvaged now that he was back.

What's going on? he sent. How can I help?

Get your friends to the others first, Rosslyn replied. Take them to the front of the group, where they will be safe. William and Frederick understand what happened now. The illusion magic. Once it was broken, it was much easier to explain to them. Much more quietly, she added, That was your plan, right?

Adon did not answer her, though. Perhaps the last thought had been too quiet, or perhaps he just understood the situation's urgency too well, because he immediately flew over the cliff's edge and out of sight.

Rosslyn continued bulldozing her way through ants, slowly working her way toward the cliff while trying to keep the ants away from the area where everyone else was lowering themselves down the cliffside as best she could.

The struggle continued for several minutes, monotonous. She felt the effects of the constant fighting, the need to repeatedly evade falling rocks and sidestep randomly collapsing ground. Everything slowly ground her down.

By the time Rosslyn drew near the cliff's edge, she had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. She pushed it down and kept going. One knight climbed down the cliff in front of her. Then another. Finally, there were only two knights left beside her, the young Sir Humphrey and the old stalwart Sir Elton.

She waited for them to descend. Both met her eyes and then conspicuously looked away.

She ordered them to descend. They looked at the ground and rubbed their ears as if hard of hearing, while continuing to fight the ants that surrounded them on all sides but the cliff face now.

Rosslyn understood. The two men were going to hold the ants off so that she could descend, taking the extra risk upon themselves so that she could get away. She considered arguing. She was the strongest warrior left up on this cliff, of that she had no doubt.

But there was no time. Arguing would only have insulted them, anyway. The two men were simply performing their honorable duty as they saw it, risking their lives to protect their ruler.

Rosslyn simply nodded, accepting their possible sacrifice.

Thank you, she thought. She did not speak the words—did not wish to speak the potentiality of their deaths into reality, and did not want to distract them as they made mincemeat of the ants that tried to approach.

She instead turned and began descending the cliff face. There was no rope, no climbing apparatus of any kind hanging from the side of the cliff. There had been no time to set one up. The others who had come before her were simply ascending by pushing mana into their hands and gripping the wall with superhuman strength. Rosslyn did the same.

She was far behind most of the others, and there was no one within close range of her now besides the two men on the cliff face who were fighting to guard her retreat.

The cliffside was incredibly dangerous now, with no one to catch her if she fell. When she looked down, Rosslyn saw that the floor of the valley far beneath had completely fallen away. There were just chunks of cliff face and tunnels left. Below it all was only black void, boundless and empty. The same space she had sent that monstrous spider tumbling down into.

She suppressed a shudder.

Then Rosslyn focused what little power she had left into her hands, silently thanked the Goddess and the two brave knights who had made this opening for her, and tried to catch up.

She diligently climbed for the next couple of minutes and felt herself gaining on the others.

There was a hard, sharp pain in the back of her head. Rosslyn felt suddenly aware that she had failed to guard her blind spots. She was just so tired. She hardly had the strength for climbing.

With the blow to her head, she felt her vision grow dim, she observed the strength leave her arms, and she saw—almost as if she were outside her own body, watching this happening to someone else—herself tumbling backward.

Rosslyn spiraled downward, into the black emptiness of the seemingly bottomless pit below, her consciousness flickering as she fell.

—

Adon saw the heavy rock that struck the Princess in the back of the head.

He saw her hands release the wall, her feet bicycle kick as if struggling to find more secure purchase of their own by reflex, and then he saw her begin to fall. He saw the yawning abyss open beneath her, like a great throat ready to swallow her whole.

Adon saw that no one was positioned nearby to catch her. In everyone else's haste to retreat as the level collapsed, no one had remained near the Princess to protect her.

A wave of emotions rose within Adon, so powerful that they overwhelmed him. The whole mad cocktail of feeling that had been slowly developing within the butterfly since he met her.

Before he realized it, he was throwing himself after her, his body transforming.

Goldie and Samson were in good hands already, but in the moments when Adon began spiraling downward, he thought of only one person's well-being: Rosslyn's.

Rosslyn, he thought. Then: Rosslyn!

Then Adon hurtled downward into darkness.