Book 5: Chapter 20 — Thornback (3) |
Noah was torn between relief and horror. Still, his heart leaped in eagerness to see what Aurelia could do now.
“I see we have company,” Korgan exclaimed, turning to face the newcomer. “Good. I was getting bored. Maybe you can… help make him talk.”
Aurelia only smiled, the flames burning around her growing more intense by the moment. “Or maybe I can make you shut up.”
Korgan’s mantis surged forward as the man’s arms transformed into their attack form, prolonged and bladed. “I’d like to see you try.”
Aurelia responded with eyes glowing with flame and a brand that seared itself into the mantis’s chest.
Korgan and his mount didn’t slow, closing in on her in a split second.
Aurelia disappeared and reappeared on their other side, leaving a line of flames in her wake directly in the mantis’s path.
Korgan cursed as the flame leaped up in his face before he had time to avoid it. Still, it didn’t seem to slow him down. He spun to face Aurelia’s new location immediately.
Must have a sensory power of some sort, Noah speculated.
The chain blades came out a moment later, slashing ineffectually at Korgan’s face in the brief moment before she had to flamestep again to avoid being sliced in half.
While half Noah’s attention was on Aurelia’s fight, the other half was on straining his resistances to the max as he tried to brute force his way out free of the stack of disabling effects the Phasecoil Venom had inflicted.
In a way, it felt nostalgic. The A-Rank power was similar enough to Zax’s strength level that he could almost convince himself they were back in training. Except for the part where Aurelia was fighting for her life moments after having finally ranked up. That was more than a little distracting. Though it also made him want to escape more than ever, so maybe it was a good thing too.
The snake hissed something to Vera, nodding its head toward Aurelia. Vera turned to look, assessing.
The Sunlight Warrior zipped back and forth across the battlefield, leaving walls of flame in her wake. The tether between her and the mantis never lost its connection.
Somehow Aurelia managed to never be where Korgan or his mount struck, leaving behind only a glowing golden dome that exploded on contact. The glowing mark on the mantis’s chest only seared itself in deeper and deeper with every failed attack.
Vera shook her head, motioning the snake to continue holding Noah with another hiss of command. She clearly assumed that one pair was enough to deal with any B-Ranker they met. Which was hard to deny given the circumstances.
Aurelia’s mana was draining fast and she had yet to do any meaningful damage. It made Noah’s heart ache, watching her move faster and burn brighter than ever before, but all of it nowhere close to enough.
If Noah would like Tony to do something, his symbiote said with a strained tone to his mental voice, we should do it now.
Health: 72%, cannot increase further.
Mana: 7%
Metamorphosis time remaining: 10 seconds.
There were plenty of options he had at his disposal, but with the disruption effects preventing half his abilities from activating, they were severely limited.He’d already been straining against the Phasecoil Venom with everything his astral-draconic bloodline could offer, to no effect. The disparity between B-Rank and A-Rank was too great to overcome with simple willpower, however bolstered. He really should have spent more time training resistances, but between practicing all his other abilities and fighting for his life, it was hard to think of when he could reasonably have done so.
I’d like to try something different, Noah answered Tony mentally.
Tony will do anything Noah requires!
Noah explained his plan in a brief burst of mental communication, spending an entire precious second on conveying all the details.
Are you sure? Tony asked, but they both knew he was. Even as he asked, Tony had already started to coalesce into his little eye-bat form, withdrawing his enhancements from Noah’s body and channelling Metamorphosis into a different kind of fusion instead. Noah’s race evolution had echoed to Tony as well. The symbiote’s wings were almost two inches larger now, and bore more of a resemblance to Noah’s dragon wings than before.
Tony is ready!
Noah pushed almost all the rest of his mana into the abilities.
Abyssal Symbiote has activated Arcane Spectre.
Tony burst into a flock of tiny bats, each a ghostly copy of himself with their single void-deep eye and purple-veined blue wings. Each fully equipped with Noah’s power suite.
Abyssal Symbiote has activated Arcane Step.
The swarm blinked from a single clump to a hundred different points around the serpent.
Abyssal Symbiote has activated Void Annihilation.
Before the snake could react to this unexpected swarm, each Tony copy glowed with abyssal light. They slashed their little claws down at the massive snake in unison.
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Where any one of them would be almost irrelevant, there were two factors that made this significantly more of a problem for their enemy. Void Annihilation tore through reality itself, rather than making any mark on the physical scales of their target, and there were a lot of Tonys.
The snake tried to use its phasing ability to slip away, but it had nowhere to slip away to. Tony’s tiny slashes into reality around the entirety of the viper’s body locked it in place. It couldn’t so much as shift its position without running into them.
Infuriated, the snake reared up to bite at the real Tony, ignoring the countless slashes across its body, confident in its scales to protect it from the tiny attacks with their ineffectual sparks.
But while Tony’s efforts couldn’t get enough strength or momentum behind them to pierce the snake’s physical protection, the static tears in reality he left behind were inflexible to an absolute.
The snake’s own movement was its downfall, slicing a dozen deep furrows down the back of its neck in its defiance of the sudden astral minefield that reached through both its accessible realities. The unexpected pain made it twist toward the offending attacker, only gouging more of its body on the unmoving void slashes.
“Stop!” Vera shouted, running toward them as concern for her bound familiar filled her eyes. She cast an astral nullification spell that slowly dissolved the slashes left behind by Void Annihilation, but it was too slow to change the outcome.
The snake stopped its movement and waited, but that only embedded the rifts into its body for long enough that their secondary nature took effect.
Void lightning crackled through the Phasecoil Viper from the inside, ten, thirty, fifty times. Its involuntary twitching only tore it apart faster, allowing more and more of the void lightning to build up and join with the rest.
Noah mentally braced himself for the shock when the lighting started chaining, but it never did. The snake was strong enough to absorb all of it, and kept phasing in and out of reality to diffuse the lightning safely away from its owner and allies.
Aurelia’s campaign against Korgan’s mantis seemed to be doing just as well. The oversized beast was staggering and flailing at nothing, the flaming brand in its chest visibly sunken in by inches.
At some point in the past few seconds, the Thornback’s leader had jumped off his mount to pursue alone. He now had ten spectral copies of his mantis arms and his own set of insect wings as he zipped after Aurelia, but so far she was still staying out of reach. All he caught were explosions and the trail of flame Aurelia’s rapid movement ability left behind.
Metamorphosis has ended.
Insufficient mana to sustain Arcane Spectre.
Tony landed on a high ledge as the last few of his copies flickered out. His wings drooped in exhaustion. Noah’s mana was bottomed out completely, the combination attacks enough to drain him fully.
Aurelia, though, was still going strong. She blazed across the battlefield in a whirlwind of blazing embers, her own personal volcanic hurricane whirling around her faster and faster as she ran.
The mantis finally stumbled and fell to the ground. The flaming tether between it and Aurelia snapped and the fiery brand dulled.
Then, before they could claim the experience for the kill, Korgan landed atop the mantis’s body. A brief pulse of green light later, and his mount’s body crumbled and fell away, revealing an entirely uninjured version underneath. This version was a little smaller, but not by enough to be notable.
“Get her,” the Mantis Lord commanded, and his resuscitated mount surged forward. Its claw snapped down at Aurelia, then when she evaded with her flamestep ability, its other claw was already waiting for her.
She had no time to react. One moment she was free-flowing across the battlefield, untouchable flame huntress, the next she was running straight into the grip of the monster she’d just killed once already.
A-Rank power is so unfair, Noah grumbled in his head. Then again, he had a resurrection ability of his own, more or less. Who was he to complain?
Aurelia exploded in a surge of golden light that nova’d out from her. It cut into the mantis and Korgan both, leaving shallow cuts and deeper burns. It wasn’t enough to free her.
She activated another ability, the one that doubled all her stats. She fired a beam of light at the duo, light so bright Noah could barely look at it. She slashed with her chain-blades in a flurry of mastery.
It was deadly and glorious. And all of it wasn’t enough. Despite taking a half dozen point blank attacks to its face and chest, the mantis retained its grip on Aurelia and crunched down.
Vera’s removal of Tony’s Void Annihilation slashes allowed her snake to resume its crusade. The Phasecoil Viper was slightly bloodied and scorched but barely even slowed down as it resumed the job of crushing Noah into a gooey paste.
If not for his pain tolerance skill, Noah doubted he’d still be coherent. As it was, without Tony’s constitution form boosting his sturdiness, he could hear his bones creaking under the pressure.
“Now, then.” Korgan’s extra limbs folded back in and disappeared. He straightened and brushed himself off. “I believe you were going to tell me where you’ve hidden the Menagerie’s treasures?”
Aurelia glanced sideways at Noah, the briefest glance, then went back to struggling against the giant mantis claw crushing her midsection. The blade of its leg was serrated, ready to slice her in half if its master so commanded.
“Not going to say anything? I didn’t want to have to do anything drastic, but if you won’t give it over willingly, well, not everyone survives this place as it is.”
Noah wanted to argue, protest that he’d given them everything he had. Or to jump at them, force them to leave at spearpoint. He hated the idea of leaving them any reason to hurt Aurelia, even if only an imagined resistance.
He couldn’t speak, though, any more than he could charge at them with an army of spectres at his back.
“Playing the silent type, eh fire girlie?” Vera taunted. “Don’t worry. If you’re not interested in talking, we can think of plenty of other ways to make this pay off for us.”
Noah strained against the paralysis holding him locked helplessly. He kept hoping for a quick upgrade to General Infliction Resistance that would let him break free, but he’d never leveled it that high. Even a couple more levels here wasn’t going to push him past the threshold.
Korgan nodded to Vera, then gestured with one arm toward the still-struggling Aurelia in his mount’s claws. “Lock her down. We’ll take them back to base. There’s no need to rush things.”
“With pleasure.” Vera snapped her fingers and hissed a command. Her snake uncoiled lazily from Noah, then lunged for Aurelia.
Before it reached her, everyone froze as a wave of fear a hundred times more potent than Noah’s rolled over them all.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” Zax’s voice was low and dangerous as he stepped forward from the shadows around the entrance. He wore his human form, but none of them for an instant mistook him for a mere human.
No one answered. Korgan, Vera, the other two, their bound creatures, all could only stare in stricken panic.
The pressure around Noah released all at once. The viper groveled on the ground, its every instinct demanding it submit to the superior Wyrm. Zax’s slitted eyes fixed on the mantis, and it dropped Aurelia and put its claws behind its back like an ashamed child.
“I thought so.” Zax strode across to where Noah had fallen, picked him up over his shoulder, gestured for Aurelia to follow, and stalked away without another word.
No one tried to follow them.
Once they were outside the Champion’s Gate, Zax transformed into his dragon form, shifted Noah to one claw, and took off with Aurelia on his back. They flew up and out of the arena, and deeper in toward the dark rend on the horizon that was Death Valley.
“What’s wrong with him?” Aurelia asked with concern as Noah continued to hang stiffly in Zax’s grip.
“Afflictions.”
“Can’t you do anything for him?”
Zax chuckled. “Of course I can. But why would I do that when we’ve been provided such a perfect opportunity to continue training?”