Gods of Myth and Midnight: A LitRPG Novel (Seeds of Chaos Book 3)

by Azalea Ellis

  Birch opened his jaw and spilled out Chaos, which rode the wind to Pestilence and turned into small fireballs like we’d practiced.

  Adam channeled a slow and steady stream of electricity out of the two large energy cartridges strapped to his back. It wasn’t as dramatic as a lightning strike, but the damage was continuous, bugs frying into little crisps when they managed to form past the rest of our attacks.

  “Die,” I whispered, Voice carrying my words on the air and pushing against Pestilence as he tried to reform. Even more bugs fell to the ground, perfectly fine except for the fact they were now dead.

  Sam kept the void of his black eyes trained on the place where Pestilence’s head would be, if he managed to remake it past our other attacks.

  The blue glow of Torliam’s mist crushed any bugs that tried to crawl in from farther away.

  Kris kept her marionettes in reserve, since they would be damaged by our attacks if they tried to get close to Pestilence, but she glared at him with a hatred that was backed by terror, her tiny hands clenching atop the grip of her four-legged, metal mount. She tried to kill the bugs by ripping out their spirits, but they didn’t have any.

  Jacky kept back as well, except for throwing pieces of rubble at the spot where he would have been, the spot where the air looked wrong, and hurt if you stared for too long.

  Pestilence responded to our barrage by rebuilding himself even faster, too fast for us to stop, too fast for us to see. He reappeared five meters away, snarling. There were obvious cracks in the facade of Chanelle’s face. He held up a finger, as if he’d had a realization. “Actually, I don’t need to wait for someone else to find this place. I only need to wait for you to die.” He shot forward, moving so fast he lost pieces of himself from the force of the air pressure against his body. The bugs left behind immediately succumbed to the cold and died.

  I tried to jump back, which helped lessen the effect of his cracking blow to my jaw. Still, my head snapped back and I flew a few meters before Torliam’s power wrapped around me and gentled my fall to the asphalt. I counterattacked with Chaos even as I rolled to my feet, a spear of darkness that exploded into black flames as soon as it entered Pestilence’s chest, engulfing him from the inside.

  I poured on the power as I bought the single second the others needed to join their attacks to my own. We had planned for this. Trained for this.

  Our barrage broke even faster, this time.

  —It’s time.—

  -Eve-

  I lashed out with the branching cords of Chaos, cut his body in two, and then set the entire street on fire with the force of an explosion.

  We ran away, scattering into the nearby buildings.

  I could feel the attention of the Other Place as it turned its hunger on the fire, but it kept to our bargain and didn’t draw at it any more than normal.

  Pestilence made it out of the mixed black-and-orange flames, more cracks in his facade showing themselves. His head swung back and forth as he looked for us.

  I watched with Wraith from inside a nearby building, keeping the others updated through a shared Window. It seemed likely that he’d have some way to sense targets for his power, living things that could be corrupted, so we implemented the plan immediately. We were on a time limit in any case.

  While the rest of us stayed as still and silent as physically possible after running away from an intense fight, Gregor rustled a bit within his building. The tip of his staff peeked out above the edge of a windowsill.

  Pestilence’s head swung toward him, and he shot off, jagged grin stretching his mouth wide.

  Gregor entered his Shadow state, even as Pestilence crashed through that same window onto the boy.

  Pestilence swiped for him, but his hand went straight through Gregor’s dark form.

  I breathed the tiniest sigh of relief, and remained hidden.

  Gregor raced away, even as Pestilence easily kept pace with him, attacking again and again despite the outward lack of effect.

  I bit my lip. I knew Gregor’s Shadow form could only take so much disruption before it started to seep through to his physical body, and then caused the Skill to give out completely.

  The boy led him into the depths of the building while Adam crept through from the other side, on a course to meet them.

  Pestilence stopped and simply pointed to Gregor.

  I squeezed my eyes shut instantly, fighting back against his will as he tried to kill the boy the only other way he could.

  Gregor jerked and almost fell, but I poured my power into negating Pestilence, sweat beading on my brow and freezing before it could fall, and Gregor regained his composure and kept running.

  Pestilence seemed to give up and returned to attacking physically with a scream of rage. As Pestilence’s blows grew more rapid, Gregor stumbled, then turned, swiping out toward him with his staff, its tip extending as it swung.

  Pestilence jumped backward to avoid a blow that never actually turned corporeal, and that gave Gregor the tiny opening he needed. The boy brought his foot down, excluding his shoe from his Shadow state, and letting it drop onto the concealed pressure trigger at that spot in the floor. He turned, and raced away, for all appearances looking as if he’d gotten scared and swung, failed to do any damage with his weapon, and instead lost his shoe before realizing his failure and running off again. That is, if you weren’t familiar with Gregor, and you hadn’t been one of the people painstakingly rigging the building a week before. We hadn’t needed to even come into the Other Place to do it, because once something was stationary for long enough, the Other Place replicated it. We’d had the military rig the trap up and disguise it, and then we’d kept anything that could possibly disturb the building far away.

  Gregor wasn’t more than two meters away before the spark hit, and the napalm in the floor burst into flames. He made it to the door before Pestilence, and dropped the lever on the other side, releasing the steel blast doors that had been suspended over both openings to this inner, reinforced room.

  Pestilence realized his mistake, then, but Adam had reached them. He slapped a multi-layered, complexly-woven ink shield mixed with blood and diamond dust over the doorway.

  The blast door on the other side of the room fell, as Pestilence pounded futilely against Adam’s shield, and within slightly over a second, he was trapped within, with thousands of gallons of napalm and the oxygen tanks in the corner.

  Within, Pestilence screamed again, and then his voice was swallowed by the flames.

  The walls of that inner room were heavily reinforced, and, as Pestilence’s body was being continuously destroyed by something else, we had time to regroup outside the building.

  I extended a hand for Gregor to high-five, and he grinned up at me proudly.

  “Is this gonna be enough to kill him?” Jacky said, frowning as she slapped her fist into her palm over and over.

  “If it is, that’ll be a waste of all our other plans,” I said.

  Zed shook his head. “The Remnant scientists said I would probably be able to see the weakening of his connection, once he ran out of enough power. Judging by the tiny amount of damage we did to him back there, I don’t think this is going to be enough, either.”

  Jacky grinned. “I guess that means I still might get to punch him, no?”

  Despite our preparation, Pestilence wasn’t trapped inside as long as we had hoped. The high heat of the napalm fire, combined with the pressure of the exploding oxygen tanks, weakened the metal reinforcements of the walls. He burst out a few minutes later, still on fire, spots all over his body now dark and wriggling with the insects that formed him, rather than showing the fake skin veneer. As he moved, bugs sloughed off, and the napalm with them. He stopped when he reached the outside of the building, a few dozen meters from where we were. He stared at us for a moment, and then, instead of attacking, darted off into the cover of another building.

  I shared a look with the others. “He’s not stupid. He knows our plan is to wear him do
wn.”

  Sam stared at the spot where he’d disappeared, then moved to follow. “Does he also know he has no chance to escape? The Other Place only extends so far until you reach that edge of hungry darkness, and we have two Skills among us that can keep track of him wherever he goes.”

  Kris stared intently at the mini-map of his location I was sharing with them. She twitched her fingers, and one of the marionettes she’d stationed around the Shortcut anchor cut Pestilence off.

  Literally. It cut his head off his body, then his torso off his legs. Then it stomped around within the mass of bugs.

  Pestilence reformed and destroyed it like it was a toy, but every little bit counted.

  Adam’s fingers twitched restlessly. “How much time do we have left?”

  My jaw tightened. “Not a lot. We’ll have to start paying up directly, soon. If this becomes a drawn-out battle of attrition, we don’t have the advantage. The only way he loses is if we kill him. We can just freeze to death, once the crystals are out. My bargain of a day of fire won’t make enough difference to matter, beyond that.”

  A building a couple blocks away shuddered as Pestilence set off some of the landmines we’d planted.

  We ran after him, darting through the swirling pseudo-ash of the Other Place.

  Pestilence was fast, but he didn’t know this section of the city like we did, and he wasn’t able to sense us from ten blocks away and adjust his course correspondingly.

  When we got close enough, Adam Animated a flock of lightning birds, born from greater control of his Skills, which allowed him to combine Electric Sovereign and Animus when using blood as the medium. Electricity arced between them as they flew together, chittering like the sound of a hundred android songbirds, but way more disturbing.

  They caught up to Pestilence and flew around and through him, small branches of lightning arcing between them with that high-pitched sound as swaths of smoking bug carcasses exploded or fell to the floor half-cooked.

  Another of Kris’ marionettes came after him once the birds were snatched out of the air and crushed to death.

  Zed sniped at him with a small rocket launcher, complaining that the Other Place didn’t allow him to use guided missiles.

  At that point, Pestilence dropped all semblance of being human. He darted toward the Shortcut anchor, just a dark, humanoid mass of bugs moving faster than should be possible, shedding pieces of itself under the friction of the frigid, ash-filled air.

  We ran to meet him, hurrying even faster when we realized he was attacking the crystals scattered at the foot of the anchor, crushing them under stomping feet so large they looked cartoonishly comical. He looked up as we arrived, a dark scar in his face widening in what might have been a smile. “I figured out what you did, how you’re still functioning,” he explained in a conversational tone, his voice made of the drone of bugs chirping and rubbing their legs and wings together at just the right frequencies.

  A shudder rolled through me just at the sound of it, something in my hindbrain telling me it meant danger and a painful, slow death.

  The broken crystals flared with light and Wraith watched as the energy escaped them. He wasn’t destroying the energy, but I watched as it was sucked out of the air greedily. He was simply spending it faster, so that we would lose its protective buffer.

  We lashed out at him, and he dodged, zig-zagging to make it more difficult to catch him with an attack strong enough to stop him. It meant we couldn’t easily trap him with another constant onslaught of damage.

  “I know what this place is, Eve. When you’re dead, the others will be without your protection. I know exactly what you are, what you’ve done to safeguard their puny little lives. You can’t last against me. When I’m finished, your brother will open the Veil for me.”

  Marionettes rushed in from all around, throwing themselves sacrificially at Pestilence for the chance to arrest his movement.

  Kris caught him, just long enough for one of Zed’s anti-physics bullets to rip him apart and Torliam to trap him within a shield.

  Sam caught Pestilence’s eyes, or the dark spot of wriggling bugs that would have been eyeballs on a human, but the creature laughed, completely disregarding the flare of cold power. Sam shook his head. “Black Sun won’t work.” He rushed in as Torliam crushed Pestilence like a bug inside a fist.

  Jacky followed Sam, whooping with excitement and growing even larger.

  As Pestilence reformed, Sam swept his hands through the bugs a single time and ran away.

  None of the bugs were even dead. The ones he’d batted aside rejoined the whole again. Two seconds later, the spot where Sam had touched started to crumble, the bugs losing their grip and spilling out from the body like water. The effect spread, and, with a curse and swipe of his hand, Pestilence destroyed his own body, letting the whole mass of bugs fall away and starting anew, free of whatever spreading agent Sam had introduced.

  Jacky stepped in where Sam had been, braced herself, and kicked right up between Pestilence’s legs.

  The boys winced.

  Birch caught Pestilence’s disrupted, half-floating form in a gust of wind and slammed him away from the crystals.

  Pestilence landed at the edge of the rubble we’d created by crashing a gigantic island into the Other Place.

  Jacky followed, raining blows on him with her huge limbs, moving faster than anything that size had a right to, fast enough to make the air whistle and her attacks blur. She kept growing, and started screaming as she continued, pounding a crater into the ground around the two of them as the earth gave way under the force her rage.

  Adam released a couple tentacled ink constructs, these ones also releasing electricity, but, instead of a more damaging attack, the suckers on the underside of their tentacles basically acted as a taser.

  When there was a break between Jacky’s attacks, they intervened to keep Pestilence trapped, along with a responsive blue barrier from Torliam.

  Meanwhile, the rest of us watched, unable to intervene without fear of getting in her way or hurting her with overflow from an attack.

  Struggle eventually gave out, and, as Jacky shrunk, Torliam swept in and snatched her away, and the rest of us stepped back in to take her place.

  After a couple more minutes, the crater she’d pounded had only grown. We attacked without pause, not trying to match each others’ pace, simply destroying Pestilence as quickly and as completely as we could.

  I panted as I lashed out with more lightning-quick branches of Chaos, tightening around the tiny ball of bugs that was all Pestilence had managed to rebuild, and then exploding into a ball of black flames. I squinted through the blizzard-like storm of grey sediment swirling through the air, that ashy fuzz heavier than it had ever been before. It still disintegrated immediately upon contact with a solid, but it was impairing our visibility.

  I spared a moment of concentration for a glance at the dimming crystals behind me. “How much longer?” I yelled to Zed, my voice hoarse with the cold. This wasn’t the most I’d ever used Chaos before, but it was a lot, and I’d spent a huge amount of energy directly negating Pestilence’s will when he tried to infect Zed and Gregor. I was growing tired, and the crystals were running dry.

  Zed shook his head grimly, the lack of answer enough to sink my hopes.

  Pestilence grew desperate soon after, the spot where he began to reform, the central locus of his body, jerking around spastically.

  The rhythm of our attacks faltered, a beat just a little too long opening up between Torliam’s crushing barrier and Birch’s exploding Chaos-fireball.

  Pestilence darted out of the crater, straight toward me, too fast to dodge. His hand smashed into my neck and clotheslined me. He bore down till my head cracked into the ground, pushing his will against mine. “I made a mistake, the last time,” he said.

  For half a second, I felt dizzy, as his power flowed into me and tried to subsume my body and my will, but then it was gone again as Pestilence avoided an attack and was
forced to release me.

  I rejected his influence, negating my bleeding gums and the skin at the base of my jaw that had started to literally rot off the bone.

  Pestilence turned his head toward me as he dodged my teammates. “I should have turned you, and set you to attacking the world you loved. It’s not enough for you to die. The mortals need to see their heroes fall.” He cracked a hand ineffectually through the space where Gregor’s jaw would have been, if he were corporeal, and received a knife through the back of the knee as the boy retaliated, lettings his daggers shift into their physical state for only the instant it took to attack.

  The black contours of Gregor’s face split into the ghostly image of a vicious smile.

  Pestilence stopped attacking or retaliating against any of the others then, only dodging their attacks if moving wouldn’t impede him from attacking me.

  I lashed out as viciously as I could, pushing myself faster and harder as I felt the drain of the Other Place start to take real effect. Still, I began to falter. And though Pestilence was growing weaker, he began to gain the upper hand, noticeably. Several times, I escaped a crushing blow or grapple only with one of the others’ help. I tried to keep my body heated, warming my own blood with the faintest whisper of Chaos, but something about the Other Place ate at you with more than just physical cold.

  The outcome was inevitable at that point, I suppose.

  I lashed out with a horizontal cutting wave, and Pestilence ducked beneath it, pushing himself forward and up at me.

  An ink barrier from Adam blossomed to life between my opponent and me.

  I turned to leap away, but I stumbled, my limbs reacting just a little too slow. “Animus,” I blurted, letting the ink wings spring to life at the base of my shoulders. Before they could complete a single flap, a hand reached around from behind and grabbed my chin.