Chapter 46: Might Want to Step Back |
Fire and force consumed Seena’s side of the arena, flames leaping fifty feet or more in the air as bodies – and pieces of them – flew in every direction. From the Ashes spread like wildfire through the tightly packed monsters, often killing a dozen or more with each new explosion. And, from that, at least one new pet would rise to continue to carnage. On its own, now that it’d gotten started, the repeating cycle of explosions, pets, and explosions would probably be enough to decimate the horde over ten minutes.
Except, more and more continued to flood endlessly out of the arena gates. The wingless lizards that looked so much like The Fourth Crusade still only numbered at five, but everything else emerged to replenish their lost numbers. That left Seena with an infinite number of targets, even as her flames scythed through them.
What could she do about this? More fire seemed to be her answer.
Blighted fireballs lobbed into the masses anywhere she spotted a gathering of creatures – or one of the larger beasts. She hadn’t been able to take down one of the lizards yet, and the bears took several direct hits – or more than a dozen point-blank petsplosions – to bring down. The others, though? They fell like wheat before her. Her totems continued to mow down the smaller wolves, which just gave her more ammunition to take down the larger threats like the monkeys and humanoids. Anything less than a bear hit by one of her fireballs was just dead, and when one of the humanoids or bears rose under her command, the subsequent petsplosion rocked the arena.
With Seena’s side seemingly under control – if she could manage her solar energy consumption for the next nine minutes – Hiral finally turned his attention to the other side of the arena. There was no way the Infested could be keeping up with her output, but Hiral was still curious what it was up to.
His eyes widened as he looked at the sea of frozen monsters. Like hundreds of ice sculptures stretched across the arena floor, nothing had gotten within a quarter of a mile of the Infested on his tower. All over, the air sparkled like miniscule flecks of ice hung in it, and it would’ve almost been peaceful if not from the chaos at the back.
Emerging from the arena gates, fresh monsters crashed over and through their frozen compatriots, chunks of the monsters littering the floor where others had previously stampeded past. Even as they crushed those who had come before, these beasts – no matter their size or strength – began to slow. Frost crept up their arms and legs, then dug deeper into them. Realization of their fates seemed to replace the blinding rage as their bodies slowed, then finally stopped.
The wolves and monkeys barely made it a dozen steps before they were frozen solid. The humanoids got to a maximum of fifty feet, while the bears made it a hundred. The wingless lizards? The pair on the Infested’s side of the arena stood looming at the front of their horde like perfect, frozen statues.
On and on, the process repeated, with new monsters charging out, crushing those that had come before, until they themselves froze and were trampled from behind. And, judging by the solar energy – or lack thereof – residing within the frozen monsters closeted to the Infested, it didn’t take trampling to kill them. Everything frozen was already dead.
“The hell?” Gran asked. “Is he cheating more than the girlie is?”
“He’s more perfectly suited for this than even she is,” Romin said. “Look how far the big lizards made it. They got the closest to the Infested before they froze. Like Seena, his ability – whatever it is – works best on weaker monsters. If there had been anything a tier stronger, he’d be in trouble.”
“A tier stronger,” Yanily said. “Like us. The ability will be dangerous, but I bet we can kill him before it kills us.”
“We don’t just have to worry about it killing us,” Seeyela said. “It’ll also slow us down. That’s not even considering what other tricks he has.”
“Oh, I know,” Yanily said. “I’m not taking him lightly. But, I am thinking we can take him.”
“One thing at a time,” Hiral said, looking to the party leader. Seena had seemed to catch on to the lead the Infested was getting, with her attention split between her side and the other. Her fireballs – still charged with Li’l Ur’s power – came almost half-hearted, like she wasn’t sure if she should continue.
Was she giving up?
No. No way she’d just give up. She was weighing her options. Go harder – and show some of her hidden abilities – to win the trial, or let the other side have this one. Her party had won four of the five previous rounds, which was a solid lead, but they didn’t really know if the mentioned reward was for each floor individually, or a tally of the total results. Either way, losing the floor would give the Infested an advantage they didn’t need.
Despite what Yanily had said, these six under Vorinal’s command were dangerous. As far as Hiral was concerned, none of them had taken this seriously. Not really.
Seena apparently came to a similar conclusion, the latest volleys of fireballs floating above her hands compressing and extending into flaming spears. From experience, these didn’t have the same explosive radius, but what they did have was significantly increased, focused damage. Enough to threaten the two lizards on her side, as well as the fifth hanging out near the middle of the boundaries.
That final beast looked like it couldn’t decide which side it wanted to attack least, leaving it shuffling like it had to pee as it turned back and forth. Interestingly, the Infested’s field of cold seemed to primarily stretch in front of it, toward the walls and gate, instead of in Seena’s direction.
A weakness to the ability?
Hiral filed the information away for later – mainly for when they arrived on floor twelve – and watched as the spears beside Seena spread from vertically to horizontally beside her. The salvo just hanging there, the party leader did something Hiral did not expect – she didn’t throw them. Instead, she brought her hands in front of herself again and began to summon more fireballs.
She can do that?!
Within a few seconds, seven more flaming spears hovered on either side of her. And she wasn’t done there. While her pets spawned by From the Ashes continued to decimate the horde and keep them from getting anywhere near her, Seena formed a third set of flaming spears.
Now, with over forty of them hanging in the air around her, she seemed to be reaching her limit. Concentration etched her and Li’l Ur’s faces, while the heat and light radiated outward. Her eyes turned toward the Infested – Is she going to take this a step further? Try to condense them all down to plasma? – and lingered. One second. Two. She considered her choices. A small shake of her head – she wouldn’t show more than this – and she gave her full attention back to the horde.
Almost like they all felt her look in their direction, the charging horde paused for the first time. The hooting and roaring silenced. Monsters in the back stopped trying to shove past anything moving slower, and instead seemed to shrink in on themselves. Trying to put another body – or twenty – between themselves and Seena on her raised platform.
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On Seena’s shoulder, the crown floating above Li’l Ur’s head flared with power as his chanting reached a new, fevered pitch. The solar energy around the pair rippled, and Hiral’s jaw practically dropped as he began to sense what was going on.
Even with the visual display of Seena’s spears, that hadn’t been the end of it. Li’l Ur had somehow been hiding the rampant – and frankly terrifying – build up of solar energy around Seena. She wasn’t using most of her abilities – not even her Aspect, which would drastically increase the power of the coming attack – and was instead plain-old brute forcing it. Even the Party Interface had been obscured, but he’d felt it for a split second.
The absurd forty-two spears weren’t her limit. That was just where she’d stopped so she could pump each of them so full of fiery energy, they were each almost as powerful as the sun she’d thrown at Banst.
“We… might want to step back,” Hiral said to the others.
“You… yeah. Yeah, I think we should,” Seeyela said.
There were no careful, measured steps at that point. No, the group – as one – practically dashed to the far side of the spectators’ booth. Even that didn’t feel nearly far enough, so Hiral erected a barrier of Rejection, reinforced with Increase and Dreaming, then laced it with another variation of Dreaming and Decrease, while visualizing fire. The air in front of them shimmered orange, and Seena’s head turned a fraction in their direction, nodding like she’d been waiting for just that to happen.
Snuff, and Wallop put himself between the barrier and the rest of the party, his body growing to its full size.
“You better be right your armor is strong enough,” Romin said, and solar energy pulsed off him to reinforce his companion.
That was the last chance the party had to act, Li’l Ur’s obfuscation of Seena’s power shattering with a sound like broken glass throughout the arena. Waves of heat spilled out, spiking the temperature across the entire arena so suddenly, the Infested’s head snapped in her direction as the edge of its frosty field melted. Water appeared on the nearest icy sculptures in the next second, those at the edge between the two unmarked territories sloughing like melting candles.
Not one to be outdone so easily, the Infested himself pulsed with power, pushing solar energy out to reinforce his field. As a being with unlimited solar energy, a shoving match like this wasn’t something he would – or could – lose.
Except, he’d misunderstood things.
Seena wasn’t flooding the area with solar energy. There wasn’t even any of it leaking out from where Li’l Ur had been hiding what she was doing. No, the only thing that had escaped was raw heat. All of her solar energy was bundled up tightly within the forty-two spears floating at her sides. All the Infested was doing was throwing more solar energy into the void. Sure, it would help grow his frost field… which turned out to melt just as quickly.
The corner of the woman’s mouth rose in a small smirk.
“Brace,” Hiral told the others. “It’s…”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence before Seena thrust her arms forward, the spears beginning to launch ahead from the outside, in. Shockwaves trailed each shot, BOOMsechoing across the arena as the air condensed, turned to water, then immediately evaporated to leave trails of fog criss-crossing the space in front of the party leader.
Then a new series of BOOMs sounded as the spears hit.
Hiral couldn’t describe what happened after that, because the sheer shockwave of flame and force hit the shield in front of him with such ferocity, everything turned sun-red. His feet left the ground – or maybe the ground left his feet – as the whole world became a cacophony of light and roaring flames. Even gravity seemed to be temporarily burned away, as Hiral felt his body floating free of all constraints, while shouts of surprise – and a woot of fun from Yanily – escaped the others’ throats.
More shockwaves, like a staccato drum line, washed against the barrier of Rejection, the almost transparent wall cracking even though Seena’s abilities normally wouldn’t hurt her party members. Another titanic BOOM, larger than all the others, and a bloom of white light grew within the orange and red.
“Wallop!” Romin said, his voice somehow piercing the tumultuous volume of chaos.
Another wall of energy formed at the Runeocerous’s shoulders, just in time, as the blast wave struck. Whatever threshold of power Tomorrow had expected – and set up defenses to counter – wasn’t anywhere near enough. The wall of the seating evaporated – which was pretty impressive, considering it was stone – and Hiral’s barrier of Rejection was next. It held for a whole second, weakened by everything that came before, before it turned to shimmering dust.
SNUFF, and Wallop braced, his big shoulders leaning forward into the oncoming wave. The energy of the shield at his shoulders flashed, while his heavy feet began to skid across the floor as he got pushed back. Shoulders and hands met his backside, the party moving to brace him physically – or get squished between him in the wall – and their solar energy joined the fallout as they activated their own buffs and abilities.
Just as Hiral wondered if they would need to get serious about surviving this, the blast wave finally exhausted itself. The whole group double-stepped forward, off balance, as they were suddenly pushing against nothing.
A snuff and a stomp brought them to a halt, steam wafting off the large Rune-o that’d stopped their forward momentum.
“Look at you, big guy,” Gran said. “You didn’t even take damage from all that. When did you get so tough?”
A distinctly proudsnuff, as well as Wallop cocking his head to the side in a pose gave everybody their answer. A-Rank had been good to him too.
“Thanks for the save there,” Hiral said, patting Wallop on the flank as he walked past him to take a look at the devastation Seena had wrought. Actually, devastation was a bit of an understatement.
The arena walls – where they still even stood – on her territory were either melted, leaning, broken, or some combination of the above. The spectator seating where the party had been no longer had a balcony to lean on. Or seats to sit on. Or… even really a floor to stand on. Everything in front of Wallop was a slagged ramp down to the arena floor. A wall forged of energy flickered off and on. Off and on. On… then off again. Oh, on. And, this time it seemed to stay on, though Hiral could feel how ragged it was.
More than anything, it seemed like an illusory wall to keep the horde focused on Seena or the Infested.
The horde that had been annihilated by Seena’s flex. Forty-two craters scarred her territory, blackened scorch marks marking the spaces in between. Whether those marks were a result of the flames – or all that was left of the creatures that’d been caught in them – was anybody’s guess. Even outside her territory, many of the previously frozen creatures had refrozen, though only after first melting and getting blasted sideways.
Now, where previously perfect ice sculptures had stood, horrific figures spread across the arena floor. Poses like the things had tried to crawl away from some terrible blast, and had been caught to find their flesh and bones running like wax littered the field. Between them, horribly misshapen and barely recognizable shapes stood distended. Humanoid bodies stretched and hung in grotesque poses. Wolf bodies had been thrown together and merged like nightmare chimeras – even uglier than the ones Hiral and the group had fought back on the savanna – while the monkeys looked to have limbs coming out of places limbs should never come out of. The bears looked like small mountains with the occasional recognizable feature, and one of the lizards appeared to be a stubby, softened snake before freezing again.
It’s actually good they were dead before Seena’s blast reached them.
Despite all that, the Infested’s frost field had taken hold again – which was why the affected ice statues had refrozen – and continued to reap the lives of anything coming out of the gates on its side. Which… was more than could be said for Seena’s side.
With the arena walls – and the gates themselves – blasted into ruins, nothing else was emerging. She’d either obliterated everything – even those waiting to come out – or she’d destroyed whatever spatial shenanigans Tomorrow had installed in the tower. Considering the still-endless series of monsters coming out on the Infested’s side, it was probably, unfortunately, the latter.
“Did she… break the trial?” Romin asked. “Why aren’t there any more monsters coming out?”
“She totally broke the trial,” Yanily said with a laugh.
“Which means she’s going to lose,” Seeyela said. “Though, I can’t even be mad at her after that.”
“I don’t think she agrees with you,” Hiral said, eyes on the party leader.
“Oh, she might be mad at herself,” Seeyela said. “I just won’t be.”
“Not that part,” Hiral said. “She’s not planning on losing.”
“How’s she going to…?” Seeyela started to ask as Hiral pointed at Seena.
At the lines of new spears on either side of her. Just seven on each side this time, with none of Li’l Ur’s chanting, but they weren’t aimed anywhere close to the wreckage that was her side of the trial. No, they were pointed toward the Infested’s side.
The trial had said attacks against the other faction would be prevented, but the heat crossing over had suggested the sides weren’t entirely separate. And, as Seena’s spears arced through the air to crash into the lines of monsters coming out of the gates on the other side of the arena, she confirmed the point.
She also proved – at the same time – that fiery spears were much faster killers than a creeping frost.