NOVEL NEXT Book 3, Chapter 10 - Is that it?
My sword appeared from storage in my right hand, and my left pulled the dagger from my belt. I rushed forward, slicing at anything that got close or impeded my path. One more kill, and maybe we could have some peace for a while.
I threw down a Firewall, shaping the pattern to create a corridor between Amir and me, with offshoots spreading out to attack his Soulbound and divide them up. I just needed the kill, then I could escape and leave this lot to wither and die without their master.
Men screamed as the near-invisible flames reached their feet, causing them to stumble and jump away. At the far end of the burning tunnel, Amir turned and stared. His brocaded coat swung behind him as the updraft from the sudden heat carried his hat away into the sky. His grey hair and neatly trimmed beard swayed in the air as his eyes narrowed.
"You!" he hissed. He reached for a dagger with his left hand and spun, bringing his right hand forward.
"That's mine!" I growled as I barreled forward. In his hand hung the black orb of Death's Source. Something hit me, some wave of force that made me suddenly sluggish. My health began to tick down rapidly. God, I hated the Death affinity.
I cast Heal, Enhancement, and tapped my Haste Amulet for a speed boost. The few metres left between us blurred past, and I brought my sword from a low guard into a rising slash intended to bisect the man from crotch to crown.
The black orb slammed into place between the blade and his body, the force of the impact launching him backwards. As he rode the reaction to my attack, balancing carefully as he flew away, he called out in a voice that cut through the air.
"Defend me!"
It was English to my ears, but it came through with a discordance as dozens of other languages said the same thing all at once. The call carried out above the screams and yells of the mob that surrounded me, and a sudden silence fell.
They moved as one. The snake-things slithered into the flames, extinguishing them with the weight of their broiled corpses. Men leapt over biological barricades, and I was suddenly fighting for my life.
A spear skittered along my side, prompting me to spin and slash the shaft in half. The man stared at me blankly as he mechanically tried to impale me with the stub of his weapon. A slash from the dagger took his life, but a blow from behind knocked me off balance.
I became a whirlwind, spinning and dancing as I moved through the swarm of dead-eyed men and monsters. A blast of fire opened a space around me, but was answered with a barrage of spells that knocked me to my knees. Lines of blue-gold dripped where shallow gashes had appeared on my skin.
Even the civilians, unarmed as they were, rushed towards me. I searched frantically for Amir, but he was lost amid the crowd. I released my aura, spreading out a field of slicing force that tore at those who got within a few metres of me. It didn't stop them; it barely even slowed them.
This wasn't the compulsion any Shikrakyn had over their Soulbound, this was something else. A boon or a synthesised spell, something I hadn't seen before. None of the monsters had the tell-tale scarlet letters, and most of the humans didn't either.
I used Titanic Majesty, swelling to nearly eight metres tall and began kicking and stomping at the mob that now barely came up to my knees. There you are, you little shit, I thought, using Hunter's Gaze to locate the direction, and spotting Amir running into the town.
I moved after him, giant strides eating up the distance. The constant stings of minor injuries on my calves and ankles were lost in my determination to end the fight as soon as possible. I left the docks, tall wooden buildings on either side of me, before the spell faded and I returned to my normal size. Glancing back, I cast three Firewalls, throwing out fractal trails of incandescence that spread out into the crowd and finally managed to stall them for a moment.
The buildings on either side of me caught fire, and it spread rapidly up the walls, into the wooden shingles. I pulled my aura close again to hide myself in the smoke as I tore open a purple portal and stepped eleven metres away and up, landing on the sloping roof of a building.
I locked onto his presence and gave chase. Portals let me hop from one roof to the next, but the footing was unstable. If I pushed off too hard, the rooves would crack and break, throwing off my jumps. I leapt down to the ground once I was well clear of the shoreline and accelerated. One more man had to die, and then I could go back to Fay.
More screams erupted behind me, and I borrowed Glimpse's sense for a second. The bird was strafing the mob with fireballs. The compulsion of whatever power Amir had used having worn off, and the unity of the pirates and monsters had dissolved. They were killing each other as desperately as they tried to fend off the crow's fireballs. Off to one end of the beach, a mechanical bronze blur was cutting through my enemies.
Buildings were collapsing to the west, on the inland side of the town, but Amir wasn't there yet, so it must be Wilson having some fun. I checked and felt a sense of savage satisfaction flowing down our bond. I ordered him to circle out into the woods, receiving a whine of annoyance in reply. Amir was heading in his direction, so I reaffirmed the order, and the wolf reluctantly acknowledged it.
I stumbled briefly, running while using another being's senses wasn't easy, righted myself and sped on. Amir was heading for the hill. What he thought he'd achieve wasn't clear to me. Being slightly uphill wasn't going to offer him any advantages in a fight against me, and he'd already demonstrated what he thought of his odds in a straight-up fight by running like a coward.
I hurled myself through the air, covering the distance in leaps and bounds, but he managed to keep ahead of me, his legs a blur. He vanished up a trail in the woods as soon as he was clear of the houses, and after quickly checking Wilson was out of the way, I threw a series of Fireballs out that vapourised the trees and bushes.
A shield of Ice appeared behind him to tank the last one that had been intended to turn him to ash, and steam flashed out. I heard a howl and sensed Wilson charging closer. I flicked out a command to withdraw, but the wolf ignored me, fought against my control and kept barreling through the woods towards Amir.
As I burst through the steam, I saw the bronze blur of man's best friend slamming into the target, snatching an arm in his jaws and spinning around. As soon as his paws touched the ground again, he pulled hard and jerked his head from side to side, throwing Amir off balance.
Unfortunately, Wilson had targeted the wrong bloody arm. The black orb of Death swung round and slammed into Wilson's shoulder. Flesh and bone exploded, throwing the wolf back towards me. I skidded to a stop next to the wolf and quickly cast heal as Amir vanished into the trees.
The wolf was missing his left foreleg, and his shoulder was a ragged wound, blood spattering out.
"I told you to stay away," I snarled, earning a whimper from my friend. I pulled out some bandages and a Pure Health potion from a storage ring. I lifted his snout gently and poured some of the liquid into his mouth. His breath was ragged, and blood was frothing on his lips, but I stroked his throat until the liquid was gone, then poured in the rest.
Chifting his weight, I began to wind the bandages over the exposed muscles. They turned crimson as soon as they touched the wound. I cast healing again and again until the blood stopped.
I sat back, checking on Amir through Hunter's Gaze. The bastard had kept going in a beeline up the hill. I couldn't do anything else for Wilson; if he lived or died, he would be crippled now. I carried his body into the trees and threw some detritus over him to conceal his body as best I could.
I checked my status screen for a moment.
Normalis Humano (Soulbound Servant) slain x112
Two thousand, two hundred and forty Souls gathered.
Normalis Humano slain x164
One thousand, six hundred and forty Souls gathered.
Anag Slain x234
Three thousand, five hundred and ten Souls gathered.
"Don't die. That's an order." I said to the unconscious beast, before turning and tapping my haste amulet to speed after Amir. As I ran, I pulled my armour from storage, the black metal appearing in place as I sprinted through the trees. I felt more comfortable fighting without it, ever since my ascension to demi-godhood, but I knew that the Source of Death was capable of. Poseidon had stolen it from me when I drowned after the fight outside Urkash and gifted it to this bastard.
Amir had stopped. His presence in my mind was no longer retreating. He had found whatever he had run to. I approached more cautiously; the armour didn't weigh me down, but it made stealth more difficult, and he was waiting for me.
I reached the edge of the trees, a large, shadowy clearing spreading out around the widest tree trunk I had ever seen. The tree wasn't tall, but it was broad and had choked out all the other plants across a good hundred and fifty metres. I tracked my eyes down the branches and trunk to find Amir glancing at the woods around me, his right arm cradled across his chest.
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Behind him, the trunk was split, roots starting a metre or so above the earth to form a triangle of darkness.
"You're there, aren't you?" he called. "We don't have to do this! You don't have to be their slave! Fuck the gods! Together–"
"We could rule the world? Are you for real?" I interrupted, stepping out of the bushes and striding towards him.
"But we could! Immortal! Divine, with stolen power! She told me how to use this!" He waved the orb around. "You didn't understand it! Just used it as a club, for the love of everything that is holy! How have you gotten this far?" he hissed. I was halfway across the cleared land, halfway to one more murder.
"You're like Morty, aren't you? Lost in the power," I said sadly. A few more steps and I'd be close enough to end this.
"Come and take it if you can, killer!" He vanished backwards into the darkness beneath the tree. Well, shit. I ran forward and paused, stared into the gloom and sighed. Mortimer had hardly been easy, you ass.
I summoned a ball of fire and moved into the earth. The passage was tight and narrow, and the faint light of my fire showed gnarled roots lining the tunnel walls and ceiling. I was walking into the heart of the tree. The air was dank and ripe with both life and decay.
"You know what the secret is?" Amir's voice was muffled as he retreated deeper underground. There were no side tunnels, so I continued on after him. It occurred to me that this would be a great way to kill another Shikrakyn. Lure them underground, collapse the walls and ceilings. I took a swig of Mana potion. Shape Earth meant that it wasn't going to be an issue for me, but it might be a good way to finish the bastard off.
"One thing leads to another, it's a web! Like a brigade, the commanders need the grunts and every step in between!"
I pulled my aura close and moved as quietly as I could. The occasional root still crunched beneath my sabbatons, but his ramblings provided me plenty of noise for cover.
"You can't manage without scouts, or artillery, or commo. Everything is part of a whole. That's what you didn't understand, Raymond, what someone like you could never understand. You were always alone. You never belonged to anything."
Blue light, faint and shimmering, spilt around the next corner to illuminate the roots, and I quenched my fire. I blinked repeatedly, still subject to the foolish idea that it helps your eyes adjust to darkness, and crept forward.
The tunnel opened out into a vast cave. Blue crystals dangled above, studding the roof and walls. More of them sprouted up from the ground, some over seven feet tall, creating a crystalline maze. They were partially translucent and partially reflective. It depended on the angle from which you caught the light.
A dozen versions of my face looked back at me, or off to one side, and another dozen Amirs crept backwards, all holding a black orb in front of them. A cloud of darkness spread out from the orb, and the roots around me began to rot. The tunnel behind me sagged and collapsed as blue shards fell and shattered around me. I dodged a big crustal and took half a dozen smaller ones on my pauldrons and helm, the glass-like gems exploding into shards on impact. My aura contracted around me, ethereal blades deflecting most of the shrapnel before it could reach my armour.
"Is that it?" I growled. My sword swept out and slashed through the nearest shard, slicing cleanly through. I rushed forward, slashing left and right, taking out more and more of the gems, quickly reducing the number of reflections.
"It won't help," he replied. He'd stopped running and was circling around. Even with Hunter's Gaze, it was hard to make out exactly where he was. A heavy iron spear appeared in my hand, and I hurled it through half a dozen of the gems at where I felt he hid. The shaft of metal smashed the crystals apart as it flew and sank deep into the wall behind Amir.
He flinched and turned to hunch over something I couldn't see as the wall partially collapsed. I activated Earth Shaping and Shape Vegetation simultaneously. The roots boiled and twisted into spears that lunged for Amir as the crystals flowed out of my way. The first knot of roots plunged into his body just above his hip, and a spray of red flew out. The next bound his legs together and yanked him into the room as yet more stabbed and wormed under his skin.
His scream was high and loud, but it wasn't agony or fear I heard in his voice, but exaltation. I dragged him into the air with the roots and spun him to face me. He had been pin cushioned, and his face was pale, but he was smiling, a broad, happy expression painted across his face. He twitched as I wormed the roots deeper under his skin, looking for something vital to break, and he spat out a mouthful of blood.
"You cannot win, Raymond. I've done what I promised, and now others will fulfil their oaths!" He bellowed the last part, but it wasn't addressed to me. In his injured arm, he cradled a green orb. Some other Source had been waiting here for him.
He fought against the roots as my spell faded, and the ones binding his arms snapped as he slammed the black and green orbs together. A wave of power went out, throwing me backwards and snapping all the roots pinning him in place.
He was now hanging upside down with nothing to hold him up. The two loci of god-power sparked and flashed, but he slammed them together again. As he stretched out his arms for a third time, he looked like an inverted crucifix, then with a blur the orbs met again.
This time, there was no blastwave. The orbs cracked and melted together, forming a swirl of green and black. He brought them up to his stomach and pushed them into the largest of the wounds my root-spears had left his body, and the combined orb melted into him.
His eyes, normally so dark as to look like the pupil and iris were one, flashed with green light, and his wounds knitted together as he pivoted to float feet down. He drifted towards me, arms outstretched as though to give me a hug, and I charged.
Sword and dagger sliced and chopped, but the weapons passed through him, and any cuts healed instantly.
"Life and death combined, Raymond. It was the only way," Amir grunted. One arm flashed and hurled me backwards into the crystals that had survived my earlier efforts to redecorate. I passed through a dozen before my back slammed into the wall, and the now dead roots of the ancient tree above exploded into dust that choked the air.
I cast Shape Earth again a flowed forward on liquid dirt that reached up from below Amir and locked around his legs. Once again, my blades flashed. I had to find the weak spot. The abominations Mortimer had made had all had a shard of the orb of Death hidden somewhere inside. If I could find something similar in whatever the fuck Amir had turned himself into, I could kill him.
The silvery metal of my weapons danced and swirled, leaving tracks in his body that healed instantly while he swatted at my sword to deflect the blade with his bare hands. Was I right? Was there some weakness the larger blade might find if he wasn't careful?
I jumped back as he broke free of the stony fingers I'd called up from the ground. Before he could sweep towards me, I fired off a series of fireballs, carving a sphere around his body of vapourised dirt. He flinched and his flesh crinkled and burned, but wasn't turned to dust like most people would have been. The ceiling groaned, and tons of dirt began to fall, filling in the hole my spells had made and burying Amir.
I tapped into the power of my pauldron, feeling my health and mana tick up faster. Sweeping back the visor of my ornate helm, I tried to brush the dust from my eyes and nose, finding metal metal-clad fingers didn't really work for the task. I snorted and coughed, blinking fiercely.
Where Amir had been was a pile of dirt, shards of blue crystals and thick roots poking out of it in places. I staggered forward, being tossed around like a rag doll had left me bruised and aching. No notification meant no death meant no peace.
Shape Earth spread out around me, my senses expanding through the soil and detritus. I began packing and hardening the dirt, crushing down on the struggling shape buried a few metres into the mass. Normal humans burst like grapes with no effort at all. Amir fought back, the granite-like stone failing to break his body as I squeezed and crushed him with it.
A rumble rang out, and the dirt at the top began to tumble down the sides of what I hoped would be his grave, trickling in rivulets to pool at my feet. I cast Firewall, covering the mound in flames to bake the dirt together even as I worked to turn it into obsidian with Shape Earth. The air grew thick and heavy, the smoke making me step back.
A green shoot appeared halfway up the side of the stone, worming its way out, roots spreading through the rock below. As my spell ended, the sprout ignored the stone and fire, growing in seconds into some kind of oversized fruit that burst and deposited a now naked Amir on the floor in a puddle of clinging green syrup.
I brought the sword down through his back, just above his shoulder blades. The point pierced through, cutting into his stomach and the top of his left thigh before sliding into the hardened stone beneath him. A blast of force threw me back, and I lost the blade.
"That hurt," he said pleasantly. The sword rose out of his back and clattered to the ground. He got to his feet and stepped towards me, once more extending his arms as if to embrace me. I switched my dagger to my left hand and moved towards him. I lashed out with my aura, expanding it and pouring my desire into it. Cut this thing, make it bleed. Kill it.
"That won't help."
I unsummoned my armour. As he reached out, his fingers extended and distended, snaking out across the distance between us. He got his revenge. Instead of root-spears, his fingers stabbed into my flesh and burrowed under my skin. I could feel them branching out, forming rivers of alienness in my veins as I was pulled off the ground.
"It's not a nice feeling, is it?" Amir asked, cocking his head to one side as he held me aloft. My strength was leaving me; the once black and green finger-tendrils stabbing into my arms and legs were now flowing with blue and gold, moving from my body back towards the thing he had become.
An enemy within the walls. How the fuck could I deal with an attack from within my own body? I'd fought half a dozen of Mortimer's Amalgams from the inside, but that had been desperate, dangerous work. Whittling them down from afar with Burning Skies before sending in the golems to find the shard of death that animated them had been a much safer proposition.
That wasn't an option. The flames licking up from the goo at the newly reborn Amir's feet didn't faze him at all. His skin popped and fizzled as something, some kind of sap, bubbled and boiled away.
I used Wildfire, Combustion, and Major Shapehift at the same time. My flesh became mutable, flowing and twisting around the tracks of Amir's alien flesh at the same time as every cell in my being caught fire, and flames roared away from me. I crawled along the tendrils of his mutagenic flesh, shifting and tangling my own body in the process. It became a war on a cellular level.
He twisted and coiled as I did the same. My cells burned his away, but his regenerated almost as fast. I enfolded his startled face as my body flowed like a sheet over him. I had no eyes or ears; his expression was clear to me only because I could feel him blink in shock as he was engulfed.
I enshrouded him and contracted, burning and fighting with threads of muscle and flesh. I had become a tiny version of the gigantic abominations that had depopulated so much of the north.
He fought back. Life and death combining to feed each other, his vitality was off the charts; everything was healing at a rate even my divine ichor couldn't match. Mt flames consumed, but he healed.
I made my flesh more malleable, and he ballooned outward as the pressure dropped. I only had a few more seconds. As his body contracted, I cast Fireball inside the bubble I'd become. Over and over again. My flesh blossomed and tore, blue-gold sprays arcing out whenever the pressure overwhelmed my semi-divine body.
He shrank and contracted. He was dying faster than he could regenerate. Tendrils shot inwards as I pulled my tattered body back together and pressed in, sending sharpened tentacles into the goo Amir had been reduced to. One struck something and quickly engulfed it, yanking it away and swallowing it back into my chest as my normal body snapped back into being.
The fires sputtered out, and I coughed as I brought my hand up to my chest, feeling the orb nestled next to my heart for a moment. Glancing down, Amir was dissolving, his human form shifting and contracting as it became plants and animals which appeared and rotted and transformed into one another.