by Simon Archer
Then, because these were humans we were talking about, the greetings turned to raised voices as the cultures that were a bit more classically at odds came in contact, and the heated arguments quickly started a fire of chaos again. A disappointing yet expected mob of angry people whipped up yet again, all of them frustratingly at each other’s throats. In a few moments, their increasing passion was about to make that literal.
“Please, there is no need for bickering!” Torlith, showing his kindhearted diplomacy, tried to settle the situation more amicably and peacefully than I had done. “we have enough for each one of you! But we do not have the time to stand on old grudges while Grune is searching--”
“There you all are.”
Right at that moment, an unending blackness washed over the whiteness of the void and left no trace of the previous pale space. All the humans, myself, and the paladin elf demigod were still visible as if we were standing in an excellently lit room, and the furious yelling had stopped again, replaced by panicked screams as the high tensions came back with a vengeance. This wasn’t exactly the direction I wanted to go from the angry shouting.
The worry on Torlith’s face as he looked at the newly blackened void told me that the impossibly problematic crowd had just become a basement-floor level priority.
5
“Are these your attempts at ‘subverting my machinations,’ as your bird-brained boss put it?” The newest in scary ghost voices was far less aggressive than the other one, with an air of sophistication and class to its calm tone, but somehow all the more terrifying for it.
“When I learned that you all were having guests over to our world and didn’t consult me about it, I thought it more than warranted that I state my opinion in a firm and clear manner, as the new master and ruler over everything in Neo Ceissein, pending a few latent disputes. Then you did a surprisingly excellent job of avoiding my arcane spies, and I was starting to get excited that this might actually be a fun challenge for once. To only find you, Torlith, is a tad insulting, frankly, both for me and for these foreign creatures. Shouldn’t a host be present when the guests arrive? Could old Aurum not make it?”
A clear snort filled the air. “Pity. You know, I honestly expected more from the Order that had spent so much time frustrating me at every turn only to fail so fantastically at the finish line. And yet again, you’ve still continued your dull pattern of failing to subvert anything. Or was it only my expectations of the Aurum Phoenix’s competence that were being subverted this entire time? If so, well done! I applaud your brilliant plans! You have succeeded once again in a most spectacular fashion in finding new ways to make fools of yourselves. It’s a hidden genius, I must say.”
This guy was a douche. I no longer cared who was on who’s side anymore. Just by the sound of his voice and his chalkboard-nails attitude, I wanted to be on the side that got to smack this fucker around like a cat toy.
As Torlith picked up his shield, golden lights surrounded his head and flowed in his hand. A shaft of light formed that the paladin curled his massive mitt of a gauntlet around, the end of which manifested into a wide block I could have used as a carrying case for a motorbike. The lights swirled and thickened as they weaved their shapes, eventually growing defined and rigid. Finally, they exploded into motes of light, and a helmet and massive warhammer, more like a two-handed maul in size, were left in their place.
“You’re too late, Grune!” The paladin shouted to the sky, striking the pommel of his magically summoned warhammer against the ground as a circle of golden light circled the crowd of earthlings. The circle flooded inward with lines and arcane symbols and shapes, with the same bird insignia on Torlith’s shield showing up in the middle of it. Once it finished shaping up, it flashed even brighter than before, and a transparent yellow bubble formed over my fellow foreigners. “You can’t harm them so long as I remain!”
“That is easily changed,” the voice of Grune, the Sorcerer God-King, stated as if the paladin’s death in the next few moments was a given fact, “I did it once already, did I not?”
Oh, so that was what happened with Torlith’s ascension. Now I felt like an ass for thinking I’d have to kill Torlith someday but was more than glad to switch that distrust over to Grune.
“Have you forgotten your own blunder so soon, Grune?” Torlith smacked the head of his massive hammer against the face of his shield three times, the shield ringing like a gong each time he did so. At the third gong, the shield swelled to a bright white, and lines of light crawled around the knight’s armor, forming a secondary, even larger suit of armor around him made of transparent rays of holy energy. “In all of your new strength, you’re now trapped in impotency without a powerful enough mortal worshipper to channel your power through!”
“Do not lecture me on matters that are beyond your understanding, you sparkling oaf,” Grune reprimanded the elf champion of the Golden Feather, “I’ve already come up with a solution that I believe you’ll find quite sufficient. Zuak, you have the paladin’s attempted interference handled, correct?”
With a horrifying shriek, the presence of Grune’s fighter was announced as the creature was summoned from darkness into being, though calling it one may have been a bit generous in terms of glossing over its true nature. The thing, who I was assuming was the same Zuak that Grune was speaking to, was a mass of tentacles and throbbing veins big enough to cover the whole dome over the other earthlings, like a starfish straight from Space Hell. On each of its tentacle arms were smaller tendrils branching off them like fleshy vines off a tree, wriggling and squirming with unnatural life. Along with the tentacles and tendrils, there were growths of black spheres, glistening wet and clumped in the tiniest clusters like a coating of giant blackberries.
If that wasn’t brown-pantsing enough, here was what its display showed up as once it had fully come into this place from the abyssal nether:
Z?X?K, X?X?X?LX?VX?X
HX?eX?Xl?cX?MXg?aX?X
AX?mX?rX?AXg?eXs?X?X
AX?Xl?tXb?Xi?Xs?X?X
Yep, that wasn’t good. Not good at all. Hopefully, that fixed itself as I leveled up and not, you know, with a hard reboot to the universe.
“The paladin is a nuisance and nothing more, my lord,” the Lovecraftian sunstar bubbled out in its gurgling voice of throat sounds, “I know this magic well. A protective ward such as this, no matter how powerful, drastically weakens with the caster’s distance from it.”
With that, it pointed one of its giant tentacles, twisting several of the tendrils around it, as a black pearl of energy grew into existence just above the tip, nearly impossible to see against the black of the void’s new surroundings. The pearl swelled with energy as a few rays of dark energy poked out from it. Then, in a sudden blast, it shot out a cone of black fire from it, coating part of the dome and all of Torlith in the shadowed flames. My heart dropped into my stomach.
As the fire cleared, my heart returned to my chest in the greatest jolt of pure dopamine I’d ever felt in my life. That demigod bastard stuck his ground, his big shield raised between himself and the blast of black fire to stand his ground like nothing had even happened. He wasn’t even phased. Take that, Zuak, you revolting shower loofah.
“May I ask you what you think ‘sufficient’ means, Grune?” Torlith taunted the dark god, “Your example seems to show the exact opposite of the definition I’ve come to know the word to represent.”
He took the heat, and he dished back. Classic. Kick his ass, you beautiful blonde battlemage.
“There’s more than one way to pluck a griffin,” Grune commented, “Zuak, I gave you a severe size advantage for a reason. Use it.”
At the voice’s command, the same tentacle that sprayed out the black fire reeled back and swept down and across, taking the paladin and knocking him several dozen feet away in one swing. He flew like a shot in the Olympics from a gold medalist, landing about as far away as I’d have never dreamt after I learned about the inverse relationship of the dome’s integrit
y and Torlith’s distance from it.
With Torlith so far away, Zuak’s comment came true as the dome, once close to opaque and reassuringly thick, was now nearly invisible and distressingly thin. The people inside panicked as they looked at Zuak, the tentacle horror of inconceivable nightmares, was right on top of them.
Thankfully for them, Zuak slapped its tentacles towards where it just sent its victim of flight, seeking to continue preventing Torlith from staying near the dome. It wasn’t great since that meant the dome was going to stay weak and fragile, but it meant they weren’t in immediate danger.
Until they were.
“Much better,” the Sorcerer God-King smirked quietly, “Now then, how should I deal with you little cretins? There are so many ways available to me now. Oh, I know!”
From some nothing in the sky, an agitated clump of purple mites, like angry sand constantly shifting, touched down onto the dome’s vaguely visible surface, crawling over it and giving it definition again as it appeared to float. It had come to collect over the top of the dome, then suddenly stopped, reversing its spread outward. Before I could properly question why, a drip of the angry mites stretched downward into the space above the other Earthling heroes.
Grune’s inky, dripping laugh resounded through the void he’d reshaped in his image.
The people panicked.
I panicked.
“Fuck!” I found myself saying without my own volition, “fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! What the fuck! What the fucking fuck! What the fuck did that fucking fuck… fucking…! It fucking just fucked our only fucking… fuck! Fuck!”
What were we supposed to do against that?! What was I supposed to do against that?! I was the only one left standing! I couldn’t withstand black magic fire like it was nothing! I couldn’t dispel whatever curse of murderous maroon dust was trying to kill all of these people. I didn’t get my mage school seedling yet!
Oh. Well, if I was going to have any chance of surviving this encounter with an evil god and his pet Cthulhu monster, I needed to get one of those. Get busy planting strange, magical baubles or get busy dying by tentacle demons and magic devils, I always said. Or, rather, I’d have started to say after this moment. Anyway…
Running away from the certain death of the magic purple rage sand and towards the near-certain death of the horrific starfish abomination, I pushed my legs as fast as they possibly could, resisting every fearful urge to check if the purple sand was stretching out behind me or not. I couldn’t afford to slow down a single half-step’s distance, or the slim chance I had of outrunning it disappeared. Even if it was chasing me, it was going to catch me anyway, so I had to give it my all anyway and not think about what might have been happening to the others. To Tobias, Serena, or Ashura.
Was this what having friends was like? I’d forgotten after so long with just the work 'acquaintances’ to go by. I hated it. But I hated Zuak and Grune one hundred times more and greater.
I’d gotten closer to my destination, not dying yet, and still able to witness the battle between Torlith and Zuak rage. Torlith, his only goal being protecting the Earthlings and not distracting himself with this monster, was playing with hit-and-run tactics, filling the hammerhead of his mighty weapon with golden light before smashing it down on one of Zuak’s tentacles, then taking steps towards the dome. The hammer flashed with all manner of different energies, with holy white light, red flickers of flame, pale coats of ice, blue jolts of flame, all in various strikes against Zuak’s tentacles. He must have been looking for a weakness that’d give him the edge to break free of the giant monstrosity.
Zuak, on the other hand, had more tentacles than it had identifiable other parts and didn’t much notice a difference between Torlith’s weapon strikes as it continued to slap them around the huge knight to pull him back just as far as he had progressed before, if not a bit further away. As monstrous as Zuak was, it wasn’t a mindless creature in the slightest. Any time that Torlith had anything but complete focus on the fight for even a second was an opportunity for the tentacles to drag Torlith back even further. The guy was a goddamned demigod, but he was being outnumbered, plain as that.
Hopefully, not for long.
Still pumping my office-atrophied legs with every last calorie in me, I had somewhat gotten close to the battle, well into the riskier range that could have gotten me caught up in the battle and crushed in a chance fling of a paladin’s body, a stray tentacle’s sweep, or a misfired spell. I had to get the big guy over towards me without letting Zuak find an opening again.
“What?” Zuak shouted, vaguely pausing its onslaught for a moment. “How did one of the monkey creatures get ou--?”
This time, Torlith took the opportunity the monster provided by noticing me with its lack of eyes to charge up a stronger swing, giving the fat squid a taste of its own medicine as it flew far away from us. It screamed with its blood-curdling screech in its painful soaring trip far away from us.
Wasting no time to celebrate, the big guy ran over to where I was, planting his feet down as he thrust the bottom point of his shield into the unseeable ground, and a massive sphere of energy encircled the two of us. With a slam of his hammer’s pommel, he let go of it, letting the magic weapon float around by itself. As it sifted through the bubble with no regard to it, it shined a blinding white, then exploded into a ring of seven identical warhammers that encircled the bubble we were in. Though shape and size were copy-perfect between them, each had metal of a different color like a rainbow palette and had a unique elemental flair to the energies surrounding the hammerhead.
As he crouched down beside it more at my level, he pulled his arm out of the straps of the shield, clasping his gargantuan hands together tightly. A flash of dark pink light cracked out from the cracks between his fingers and hands, and he opened them up again. Floating in the space between his hands were dozens of dozens of the magic seedlings, each no bigger than the upper part of my thumb. Like they were suspended on strings or in water, they simply glided around each other softly and gently.
“Are you giving me one now?” I said, scanning through the cloud of potential magic, “I’ll just have to take a random one, and you can give the rest to the others when we get to them. I can help distract the tentacle creep while you give out the rest to the others, then we can help you fight back.”
“I admire your courage, young man.” He tensed his thick fingers, and the cloud of little magic seeds swirled around violently. “And your wit in escaping my shield that Grune turned into his personal bottle trap is inspiring. I can’t imagine how you could have done that, and that’s why you give me hope. You alone are the only hope we have left.”
6
“What?” I didn’t understand. Or, maybe I didn’t want to admit that I did. “We can still go back for the other people from Earth. There’s gotta be some of them we can save. I’m not greedy. It only has to be three of them. I’ve already got them picked out, so c’mon, big guy. And then we’ll save whoever else is left, I guess.”
“You are tenacious and stubborn.” He looked at me while the seeds blurred together into a light show of pink and green. “You refuse to give up on a fight or on people in need, even if you think you must hate them for their faults. That is promising to see. It does my heart good, knowing that it’s someone like you who lived. But we cannot dwell on the dead. We must do what we can for the living. When I release the energy within these seedlings, it will create an explosion that will most likely kill me and distract Grune and Zuak long enough for you to escape to the mortal world with the last surviving one.”
“That’s quitter talk, Goldmane!” I shouted at him, “There’s always a solution! Does this force field roll around? We can start running along the edge of it like a hamster ball, and if those hammers follow us, they can keep that squid thing Zuak off of us--”
Just as I said that, the bubble was surrounded by shifting darkness before the shroud disappeared a moment later. As the lingering flames of darkness clung to par
ts of the outside of the bubble, I both heard and saw the shrieking creature as he had returned. Each of the hammers, in slow succession, spun through the air and collided with the mass of fleshy madness. On contact, each hammer exploded in a flurry of elemental energy, disappearing into nothingness. One by one, like kamikaze bombs, they created flashes of dazzling effects, an explosion of fire that clung to the masses of black spheres, a huge chunk of ice that caught some of the tentacles up inside of it, a quick storm of lightning that caused the creature to convulse madly. Though the hammers were doing great at throwing the creature back every time, there were only seven of them, and they were quickly running out.
“Shit in a biscuit,” I cursed, “What do we have? There’s gotta be something we can do. Something one of us can do. Something you can do! You’ve got holy magic! You’re ascended, for Christ's sake! What’s the point of dying for that shiny pigeon you worship if he didn’t give you something better than this to work with?”
“How do you know about that?” Torlith’s helmeted head cocked to the side just a bit, the energy in his hands slowing down as he did so, “I never mentioned that to your group. I’ve yet to even be commemorated in the mortal realm for my sacrifice. Fewer still know that I’ve passed on in the first place. You are from another world. Supposedly.”
“That’s complicated.” I scratched the back of my neck. “Short answer is that I see little boxes with text on them that tell me different things about people. I don’t know where I got it, but it had your name and your ‘ascended’ status on it.”