Brace For the Wolves

by Nathan Thompson

  “Dragons,” Breena said tersely, as she fired off a stream of sharp icicles from her hands. “The Detrite are a failed answer to dragons on ancient battlefields.”

  It’s true, Pain said quietly in my mind, and without his usual menace.

  A strange and fragmented image leaped quickly through my mind. Something large and powerful tore its way through cheap and numerous obstacles, shattering and scattering the objects like they were chain links from inferior metal.

  These things are not weapons, I realized. They are chains.

  I know what to do with chains.

  “Alright everyone,” I said out loud, feeling my teeth itch again for some reason. “New plan. The things are just going to drain resources from us if we fight them slow and carefully. So instead, conserve your energy and just try and support me. Eadric, watch my rear and keep any of them from ripping my throat out or something. Everyone else just try and help me stay on my feet.”

  “That...” Karim began. “Doesn’t sound like a very good plan.”

  “Sure doesn’t,” I agreed. “Wish there was a better one. Actually, hold on.” I turned and looked at Breena, intoning the words I had used to link the other three men with me to my battle group. “Battle with me, sister.”

  “Sure,” Breena nodded in confusion. “But…”

  Her eyes suddenly snapped wide open, as new information poured into her. Breena and I were already linked by the magic that made me a Challenger, but this new link pushed another layer of contact between us, pushing our original bond deeper into us both. A deeper understanding of both of our abilities, another layer of comprehension added to understanding each other’s motives. In that brief moment, information I had only factually known about Breena suddenly bloomed in the center of my cerebrum.

  Breena enjoyed, with almost every single molecule of her constantly growing and shrinking body, two things:

  Processed sugar, and the color pink.

  For her part, Breena seemed to gain an understanding of what I was planning. Her eyes opened even wider.

  “Wes, you can’t be serious—drat, you actually can.”

  “What exactly is the new guy about to do?” Weylin asked carefully, looking away from his last shot.

  Something pulsed out of Breena, and I felt a tiny aspect of our awareness spread out to Karim, Weylin, and Eadric, giving them each just a tiny bit of the connection Breena and I had shared previously.

  “Shit,” Eadric said, but before he could shout again I was charging forward.

  Battleform fully engaging, my mind-screen said. My teeth and gums itched even more, and I couldn’t figure out why. But the strange magical effect that helped me break out of prison suddenly surged, refreshing to its full power.

  I surged quickly through the now-silent-and-still battlefield, nerves crackling with extra energy. I took a powerful, wind-and-earth-assisted leap, and brought my long arming sword down onto the closest Detrite’s head with a mighty two-handed swing. My three magics, Earth, Air, and Lightning, seemed to surround my weapon in a strange, whirling, dirty-blue haze. The long sword crashed into the undead monster’s skull, meeting resistance, then beginning to pass clear through as part of its body phased out, then re-entered contact with flesh, blood and bone as the blade encountered another part of the body that couldn’t phase out of existence. I grunted as my weapon cut, crackled, and cracked its way through dry, decayed flesh, and the monster crumpled before I could completely bisect it.

  I ripped my weapon out of what was left of the body, then took two empowered steps forward into the range of the next Detrite. The monster moaned and swiped a hand at me, but another step brought me clear as I brought my blade over in a horizontal swing through its neck. I felt the magic surrounding my weapon somehow counter the monster’s semi-corporeal state, damaging it even when its neck became transparent. The monster’s skull went twisting through the air a half-second later, and I gave one of its knees the same severing as a safety measure.

  As the second creature collapsed, I turned to three more undead lumbering toward me all at once. Their hands flailed at me almost in sync, but leaning back was all it took to be out of reach, and when they all missed, their mismatched bodies caused them to stumble forward. A current of air helped me twist around them, landing me at their backs as I slashed at them with a glowing blade and earth-enhanced strength. Limbs and heads flew through the air moments later, and I turned to look around for more foes.

  Every shriveled head was turned in my direction.

  “No,” one hoarse voice croaked, pointing at me with widened eye-sockets.

  “King,” another corpse added, trembling as it spoke.

  “Here!” a third Detrite finished, staggering toward me as its undead brethren all took up the new chant.

  “No...king...here!”

  “I respectfully disagree,” I growled out, and charged the next pack.

  My speed let me zig-zag around their awkwardly flailing hands, and once again I took my weapon in two hands to make broad, sweeping swings. It wasn’t ideal—I’d still prefer to use a longer blade—but my height, reach and speed still gave me an incredible advantage over my slow and misshapen enemies. And my weapon tore through their dry husks with an ease that shook me. I had to remind myself that my weapon was meant for hacking and stabbing, and that these things were probably only holding together at all by the thinnest thread of magic.

  Still, it felt as though there was a tempest, an earthquake, and a super-cell thunderstorm inside of me. I had too much energy, and I felt like I would explode if I didn’t launch another attack soon, or if I tried to pull back my blow. It was a dangerous state to be in, because it forced me to be aggressive, and if my power had been insufficient my foolishness would have let my enemies tear me apart.

  If it doesn’t work, Pain said calmly inside my head. It isn’t real power.

  I was hearing far, far too many voices inside my head these days.

  After another sweep of my blade, the weapon now smoking in my hands, I noticed that the ground around me was clear for yards. Detrite were still slowly advancing upon me from every corner, but they felt so far away. I needed to attack them now, I thought, and charging into the next batch just felt like it would take too long.

  So I let go of my blade with one hand, and began to make the twisting motion for a spell.

  Their speed did them no favors, and a Friction Slice took out the nearest pack of them. I repeated the spell moments later, severing another group of the monsters in half. And then another group. And then another group.

  The strategy was imperfect. Not every slice was an instant kill, and sometimes the phasing nature of the zombie-like monsters would kick in and protect a single one of them from the spinning disk of air.

  But it still cleared out dozens and dozens of the two hundred-strong horde very quickly.

  Still they came forward, moaning over and over that I was no king of Avalon.

  And my teeth itched every time they did so.

  Three more Friction Slices and I began to feel a drain on my mana. That brought down three more thick groups of Detrites, but roughly half of them were still moving forward, and these were not grouped together. I panted, and I felt my Battleform start to flicker, the magics from the three Ideals beginning to separate.

  Sucking in another breath, I charged the most isolated Detrite and tore it apart with my sword. I repeated the process two more times before I felt a stocky hand grip my shoulder.

  “That’ll do,” Eadric said. “We’ll take it from here. Take a time out and rest.”

  I nodded and knelt down, bracing against my sword so that I wouldn’t have to let go of it. Breena and the three Testifiers took position in front of me, although my fairy companion took a moment to give me a dirty look that promised we’d talk later.

  “I’m thinking we can ward that group there to slow down the rest,” the dwarf said casually while pointing at the largest remaining pack. “Then we can handle those half-dozen gat
hered over there. Lord Idiot here has shown us we can outpace them pretty well, so as long we move around a bit we’ll all be fine.”

  “That works,” Weylin said, and Karim nodded.

  I wanted to object to my new nickname, and that what they were doing was something that gamers back on Earth had called kiting for decades. But a quick read of the room, so to speak, told me I should shut the hell up.

  The three of them stepped together carefully, benefitting from the strange link that was forming between the five of us. Eadric took out a blocky, heavy carving. Then he drew back a meaty hand and chucked the block out to land right in front of the aforementioned throng. Something pulsed out from the carving, and the lumbering zombie-things slowed to a lurch. Karim began tracing more strange symbols into the air, and the foreign words shot from his hands in a streak of light to land on the ground ahead of the Detrite. Foggy blue light billowed from the traveled script to create a viscous-looking substance over the ground, creating an effect similar to my Sinking Earth spell.

  As the horde of Detrite collapsed into the sinking ground, the three warriors and one fairy maneuvered to keep them in the way of the rest of the ghouls. Traveling after my companions in a straight line, pack after pack wandered into the same mushy area, with none of the other monsters learning from the experience. At this point Eadric and the others were free to slice, stab or crush any of the stragglers, working their way through small groups no more than three Detrite large. They would maneuver and refresh the sinking spells as needed, and less than an hour later the field was clear of all enemies except for a large pack in the middle that kept stumbling over themselves trying to get out of the mushy ground.

  "Reckon you can do the honors," Eadric said to Karim.

  The dark-skinned man nodded, and began to slowly, meticulously write a very large wall of symbols before him. He took the amount of time I used to take to cast my older version of Shock Bolt, and then a large blue fireball erupted from in front of him, trailing into the pack in front of us. The attack slammed into the thirty-strong throng of monsters, quickly consuming their parchment-dry skin as it leaped from ghoul to ghoul. The creatures flailed and swatted at it uselessly, before they were all consumed several minutes later.

  "Wow," I said out loud. "I didn't even know you could do that.”

  But as soon as I said that, a sense I thought I gained from the link triggered, and I got the impression that the spell had cost Karim greatly, and been one he had been hesitant to use save for a last resort. The look in his eyes confirmed my suspicion.

  "You can't do that often, can you?" I asked. "And the text you wrote... it was more to restrict the spell from consuming anything else, wasn't it?"

  The word-wizard leaned on his spear as he looked at me, and nodded.

  "Our Lord Idiot is smart, when he so deigns to be," he replied dryly.

  I sighed.

  "I'm sorry," I said out loud. "The idea just came to me, and I couldn't do anything but run with it. We can talk about how to do better when we're safe. But for now it looked like the right call, even though I needed you to back me up, or rather take over, in the end. I'll try not to underestimate you all in the future."

  Eadric shrugged.

  "I'd be a little more careful in the future, but it worked out in the end. Except for one thing," he added.

  "What" I asked curiously.

  "You ruined your sword."

  "What do you—" I finally looked at my weapon, and swore. The blade was blackened, twisted, and slightly bent at the tip.

  "Not really supposed to channel that much magic into a mundane sword," the dwarf added ironically, then gave Breena a sideways glance. "Little surprised the Holy Fairy didn't teach you about that yet."

  "He hasn't been able to do that yet," the pretty pink woman grumbled. "He's been too busy breaking all the other laws of nature."

  Eadric just shrugged and gave a snort that suggested he was glad I was someone else's problem. Breena, however, flew up next to me, bunching her shoulders up the way she normally did before she started yelling at me.

  "Alright," she said, "We'll talk later, but did we learn something from this, Wes?"

  "Yes," I sighed. "There were probably were a couple of lessons wrapped up in that little exercise that I need to process."

  "Good," she harrumphed. "Then I'm going to just say one more thing."

  She flew in front of my face and locked eyes on me.

  "That," she growled. "Was. Awesome."

  I blinked. She kissed me on the nose.

  "We'll talk later to make sure you're okay."

  And then she fluttered away.

  We marched farther in.

  We had spent a few moments waiting for our friendly ghost. She never came back, and I got the feeling that she wasn't safe either.

  "Breena," I asked as I sat on a rock, trying to recover my energy, reactivate my Battleform and see if there was anything that could be done to ensure my arming sword would last beyond a few fights. "Was that the first time you had seen the Detrite here?"

  My little sprite nodded.

  "It was the first time I had seen them ever," she affirmed. "I heard the description from Stell, though. She had heard of the stories from her people."

  Stell's race of people was another topic of deep interest for me, but one thing at a time. I let Breena finish.

  "It was back when dragons were more prominent, especially dragons that could travel through the night sky to other planets. Some did that to take part in planetary wars. The Detrite were one such answer to them."

  "Maybe I'm dealing with my own preconceptions about dragons," I offered. "But from what I saw, there was no way an army of those things could be an answer for even one of the beasts you just described."

  They would use several armies for each of us, Pain noted smugly inside of me. Like grains of sand on the seashore. And they still failed.

  "They weren't ever able to bring down even one of the great dragons," Breena said uncomfortably. "They were the last attempt of a dying, and particularly mad race. But the process of making them carried on and was passed to other worlds as an easy way to make cheap armies."

  "Why did worlds stop using them?" I asked. "Were they too horrible?"

  "Of course not," Breena snorted. "Not for the Ancient Races. They just found more effective pawns."

  "Like what?" I asked.

  "Like the Horde," Breena said uncomfortably.

  My children, Pain said proudly.

  Okay, I said back. You go back to shutting the hell up. You don't get to transition all the way from Internal Torturer by going straight over to Sinister Tempting Vizier. Go sit in a corner.

  "Alright," I began, turning my mind back to our conversation. "But you swore up and down this place wasn't dangerous. And I still believe you," I added firmly, seeing her guilty look. "So something must have changed. I know with Stell's absence, a lot of wards and rituals on Avalon have stopped working. Now that I'm Lord of Avalon, a topic you and I should probably go over more later—" the fairy nodded very firmly at that—"I should be able to start reactivating much of Avalon's power. I'm already getting vague instincts on how to do that. But I don't know how to act on more than a handful and something tells me I'm going to need to do specific actions at specific places to reactivate the rest. Let's start with why you think these things are coming back."

  "Stell said she kept a number of her own spells running as soon as she came here," Breena replied. "I think she was always scared that..." The little fairy swallowed. "Whatever happened to her home world would follow her here."

  The fact that her fear had actually happened made us pause in awkward silence just for a moment. That was another thing I needed understanding on.

  "That was also the reason she never let a whole bunch of people come to Avalon," the little fairy continued after swallowing. "I think these monsters were one of the things suppressed by her wards. And I think they had also gone dormant when this planet became extinct."
<
br />   "I see." I nodded. "What else do you think we can find here?"

  "I don't know," Breena admitted. "Probably more of the restless dead... they're rare," she added. "I mean we still get Trials where some necromancer raises armies of skeletons or whatnot, but undead coming into existence via events themselves is almost unheard of. But previously unheard of events have unfortunately become par for the course recently," she grumbled as she crossed her arms.

  "Sorry," I said with a shrug. "Swear I'm not doing it on purpose."

  "Sorry, Wes," my little fairy said as she shook her head. "That wasn't even supposed to be directed at you. In fact, technically everything went wrong even before you showed up."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Remember when you came here? The first time?"

  "Sort of," I said carefully.

  "We were all crying our eyes out, and I think you were trying to be a gentleman about it," the fairy said.

  "Ah, yeah, okay." I admitted. "I heard all that."

  "I know," the fairy said. "That was sweet of you." She put a tiny hand on my shoulder. "But anyway, we discovered on that day that we were going to have a massive Challenge, of the Trial or even Tumult level, on every world. And most worlds would have several of them. That has never happened before," the little fairy said firmly. "Especially so quickly after the last Tumult, which we had just Called a Challenger for. And since Stell can't normally Call for a Challenger more than once in one of your Earth's centuries, we were supposed to be doomed. Sooooo," the little sprite drawled, cheering up suddenly. "Maybe you're just what we've needed: an 'impossible' kind of Challenger, so that you can deal with these 'impossible' kinds of problems."

  "Thanks, Breena,” I said, smiling at her. That was a really kind thing that she said to me. "Hey..." I began, hesitating slightly.

  "Hmm?" she cocked her tiny head.

  "Who," I swallowed. "Who was the last Challenger?"

  "Oh," she said, processing this question. "The one before you. He'd be a bit older than you. I doubt you'd know him... but you have hair like his," she said slowly.