“Yes, Chinny.”
“I’m taking a vacation after this.”
“Chi, we’re all taking a vacation after this. In a place where there is absolutely no possibility of there being monkeys.”
“This is why you’re my favorite,” Chi informed him.
The silver lining of the situation was that we were apparently through the monkey portion of the day. What came after us next was such a mix of wildlife that it boggled the mind. Deer, wolves, mountain lions, bears, more wolves, a moose, even an alligator. They looked warped and strange under Toh’sellor’s influence, these more obvious than the other changes we’d seen recently, but not quite full on minions. I had a feeling these were more the shielded type that gave my wife trouble.
The ground shook a little as the grizzly bear lumbered forward, and the stench of the minions became nigh overpowering. Naturally, bears didn’t smell bad, but something about Toh’sellor’s influence and having this many minions in such a narrow opening with already stale air…not a good combination. Chi’s arrows flew, taking out anything getting too close, and I hefted a few daggers that direction as well, mostly for misdirection. Rena needed every second we could buy her.
I recognized the words, having heard them often enough the past three years, and knew her to be almost done. The minions were almost on us now, but I worried most about the bear. He’d made better time than expected, and even now, those long arms reached out to hit us.
Vee stepped forward, Seton in one hand, sword in another, and went toe-to-toe with the bear. Part of me thought her insane, even if she basically stood at the same height, but if anyone could take on a bear and win, it was Vee. The bear opened his mouth and roared a challenge.
The giantess laughed.
Laughter on a battlefield was a little disturbing. I was used to Chi’s sarcasm, the jokes we exchanged between us, but laughter? Not so much. I glanced at her sideways, questioning, and then she leapt forward, clearing the first line of the deer, Seton swinging out. The bear threw an arm out as if to catch it. For the second time in my acquaintance with Seton, I saw why he was called a magical weapon. His lights flashed strongly, a shield erecting around himself and Vee’s side, and he leant strength to her attack. The bear didn’t stand a chance. He blew backwards, impacting strongly against the side of the cave wall like a dirty dish rag.
Vee stepped forward to finish him off, Seton whirling in her right hand. She made it two steps when every minion in sight vanished into ash again. I held my breath, but fortunately Emily’s wind spell swept it all away from us before we could get another mouthful.
Turning, Vee pouted at Rena. “That’s not nice.”
“Vee, you can play later,” Rena responded with an eyeroll.
Leaning in to Chi’s side, I muttered, “I thought she was supposed to be the sane one in your relationship.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” Chi muttered back. “It’s not that she’s the saner one, it’s just that most mere mortals offer no real challenge for her. They’re boring. She has little berserker moments when things like bears show up. Now you see why we get along so well.”
“Yes, because you’re both crazy.” It also explained why we’re all friends, too. I was not exactly sane.
We all listened hard at that point, almost paranoid about facing even more minions. We stayed still, but nothing came down the tunnel except vague sounds of something…I couldn’t put my finger on it. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. With the way the tunnel veered ahead, turning, we had no clear line of sight either. Let me just say, the idea of walking into the unknown with strange noises and no indication of what it might be? Trifle nerve-wracking. I looked forward to it with the same anticipation of having a little arsenic in my morning coffee.
Everyone paused, looking at each other, murmuring questions, hoping that someone else might know what was up ahead. Facing the known or suspected was one thing, but facing something unknown? No thanks.
Proving to have nerves of steel, my wife marched straight forward without faltering, bypassing Vee without even a glance in her direction. She was truly, incredibly sexy when she did stuff like that. I fell in love with her all over again. Because my mouth had no filter, I said to her, “You’re sexy, honey.”
Rena laughed, giving me a quick glance over her shoulder. “Thanks, hubby.”
Everyone fell immediately in behind her, stalking forward with weapons at the ready. The other agents thought it funny I’d said something like that, but that just proved they didn’t know me very well. We crossed over the distance in a steady stride, pacing ourselves, but making time, as no one wanted to stay in these cramped quarters longer than necessary.
Then we reached the bend and Rena stopped dead in her tracks right at the mouth of the cave. I stepped immediately up past her shoulder, ready to be her immediate shield and defense. It didn’t matter.
I couldn’t fight this.
Ahead of us the tunnel branched out into a large opening, nearly circular, tall and wide enough to put a capital building into. Any hint of stalagmites or stalactites had been broken away, the area round and unnaturally smooth. Mage lights hung from the ceiling at random intervals, throwing the area into stark white lighting, which didn’t help the atmosphere any. The noise was ferocious, beating at my ears, pounding at my temples like a wave of sound.
My eyes quickly took in the situation, marking targets and threats, analyzing what would be able to hit us first: perhaps two dozen men along the back wall, all in black, frantically running back and forth and yelling things at each other. Cages along the right and left side with various creatures, some of them Toh’sellor touched, some not. Crates along the left side with a few magical-looking artifacts poking out of the tops.
Toh’sellor dead in the center.
I stared at the monster with rising bile. It was not the small flame that I’d seen before in Z’gher, nor was it the huge monstrosity we’d battled at such great cost seven months ago. It was something in between—larger than the shards we’d battled, certainly, with greater menace than any shard could hope to duplicate. My eyes traveled over it, gauging it, even as I swallowed down bile over and over again. It had grown as tall as a one-story house, wide at the base, flickering and moving in that chaotic mess of every possible spectrum of color, light, and darkness. Even as I watched, it grew again, straight up, the ceiling of the cave disappearing entirely, opening up to show clear, blue skies above it.
“Team Two, tell me you have a shield over it,” Maksohm snapped into his TMC.
“Team One, we confirm the shield. We had to push it out over the knoll itself instead of just the top. Location?”
“We’re inside.” Maksohm left it at that.
Not that he had time to say anything else. The men in black noticed our entrance and rushed around the sides, carefully skirting Toh’sellor, already pulling out weapons and grimoires. Maksohm shifted ahead of us, his own grimoire in hand, throwing up defensive barriers that sealed the tunnel opening, preventing them from rushing us.
I fell back behind them as the first attack spells hit, not splashing off like I expected, but hitting with enough force that it knocked Maksohm back a step. Alarmed, I stared at him but he didn’t look at me, his teeth gritted in a fierce expression of determination. I’d never seen him once get thrown back, and we’d fought some pretty interesting monsters. Just how powerful were these rogue mages? Nora immediately came to stand at his side, her own grimoire out as she threw up another layer of barriers. It was patchwork, even I could see that, but it kept them from breaking through on the next try.
“Rena?” our team leader asked.
Rena hadn’t looked away from her analysis in spite of the attacks. This didn’t surprise me, she likely hadn’t even registered them. She grew incredibly focused when getting ready to destroy something. “Five minutes.”
Maksohm didn’t expect that answer. I didn’t either. “Uh, honey, why five? It normally takes you like three.”
>
“They’ve done something to Toh’sellor,” she gritted out, tone black and flat with anger. “I think I know what, but I’ll have to do something about it first before I can even begin to tackle Toh’sellor.”
That seriously did not sound good. “You sure about that five minutes?”
She glanced at me, grey eyes cold, and I shivered. I’d only seen that expression a handful of times, but a wise husband remembered that look. He survived longer that way. My wife was completely and utterly pissed off. I didn’t know what those idiots in black did, but apparently it was even worse than stealing Toh’sellor, and that…that was not a good thought, right there. That scared me right down to my little toe.
“No,” she finally stated. “I’m not. But all things considered, I’d best be right.”
Blanks stepped in and ordered, “I need two ranks, either side of Rena, one standing, one kneeling. Fire at will.”
Mages moved at his command, agents scrambling around each other with admirable efficiency, their grimoires rustling as they flipped to the right pages. I couldn’t help with this, so stayed directly behind Rena, as that seemed the safest place to stand. For the next few minutes, it became nothing more than a light show of magic being thrown back and forth, the snap and crackle as they impacted against multiple barriers, the hiss of pain if something got through a shield. That didn’t happen often, but even once was enough to worry me.
The rogue magicians didn’t seem to be fazed much by these ferocious attacks. They kept throwing one spell at us after another, their own personal barriers up and strong. I couldn’t say the same for our barriers. Both Maksohms struggled hard to keep ours up and one of the other mages actually stopped attacking to back them up, layering yet a third barrier for protection.
I wanted to ask, but couldn’t, as everyone stayed very focused. Stepping up to my other shoulder, Blanks filled in the missing piece for me in between flinging two attack spells of his own. “Maksohms’ shields won’t last another five minutes under this assault. Neither will the shield that’s containing Toh’sellor above, not at the rate it’s growing. The rogue mages are somehow tapping into Toh’sellor’s energy and it’s literally eating away at our shields. We’re outgunned here.”
Were we really? Was it that bad? Ten veteran agents, a Void Mage, and me against two dozen men in black, and we won’t come out on the winning end? Even as the questions whirled through my brain, I analyzed the fight in progress around me. Chi’s arrows couldn’t land a target, even though he tried, but there were some serious deflecting spells going on. None of us could get out past the shield enough to attack with swords or even staff, as the magical attacks were so furious that even sticking a hand out would get it sheared off. We were pinned, Maksohm’s shield already showing spiderlike cracks in it…sarding deities, but I now saw what they meant.
We literally wouldn’t survive more than five minutes in here. The first time we’d ever combated with another mage, my wife had destroyed the other mage’s grimoire. Surely that would even the playing field quickly. “Rena, grimoires?”
“I’d love to,” she answered tightly, the words hissing out between clenched teeth. “Can’t.”
“What are those?” another mage behind me asked in climbing frustration.
“Barriers are up around each mage,” Rena informed me, “kind of like the barriers up around the monkeys and corpses we saw bef—oh sarding deities, really?!”
My head snapped around and I saw what she meant. The rest of the kidnapped familiars, altered as they were by magic and Toh’sellor’s energy, charged our direction with mania in their eyes. No, wait, we had more familiars than the ones reported kidnapped. A good number more, at least another twenty. That sat ill with me, and I had a bad feeling about where those extra familiars had come from, but the mystery could wait for now. My more immediate concern was how quickly we could defeat them. I didn’t need to ask the obvious question, if they were under those special barriers as well, because the look on Rena’s face gave an adequate enough explanation.
Yeah. We might be in trouble.
The phrase ‘between a rock and a spear point’ adequately reflected the situation right now. I could feel Bannen practically vibrating with the urge to fight, but he couldn’t manage to get past the shields without losing an arm. There was so much magic in front of me, both from the barriers and the spell attacks, that it all snarled and tangled together. I couldn’t quite differentiate it all because of the overlap, which made a bad situation worse.
Each mage sported a different barrier, a reflection of the person who crafted them. I couldn’t latch onto any part as a common thread to unravel. I’d have to battle them one by one, and frankly, the mages with me, my teammates, had more brutal and faster ways to defeat them than I did. I gave that part of the fight over to them and focused on the familiars, the other barrier stopping us in the cave’s entrance. Too many familiars to be accounted for, but I shoved that aside for now, because numbers didn’t matter as much as the barriers surrounding them.
I turned sideways, knelt, stood, changing my angle of perception every few seconds, trying to see around the mages to the familiars. Eventually I found a good angle and finally got a good look at them and winced. “Saaaards.”
“Barriers?” Vee guessed above my head.
“Each of them is unique, too,” I complained to her, having to raise my voice to be heard over the din.
Chi drawled the understatement of the year: “Well that’s not ideal.”
A fine fracture shot through the Maksohms’ barrier like a lightning strike. It likely wasn’t visible to anyone else but I could see it. I called to Blanks behind us, “Reinforce barrier!”
He shuffled forward, people shifting to give him room in the cramped quarters, his grimoire flicking to the right page before he put a reinforcement spell over the Maksohms’ handiwork. It helped, but it was like patching an already leaking boat. We’d be in the water sooner enough.
I gamely tried to dust the familiars anyway, choosing a universal component—attacking them at a fundamentally mammal level. Even the flying or mythical races of familiars still had a mammal’s body. I could see the common threads of blood, bone, muscle, and all of the minerals and tissues that made up a body. I chose the three common elements—water, iron, and carbon—and used those to build the spell with. It took two precious minutes to get the full spell invocation out. The words barely left my lips when I watched in growing horror as the energy barriers around each of them flared. The damage I did worked, to a degree, but the energy barriers absorbed part of the attack, and because of their proximity to Toh’sellor, they regenerated quickly. Much more quickly than I could manage to destroy them in a batch lot. They must have felt it, as they screamed in unison, but it was more in alarm than in pain. I winced at the cacophony against my eardrums. I’d go half deaf at this rate.
Grinding my teeth, I searched for another way, but I’d have to tackle each familiar individually and there was no way we had time for that. “Can’t do anything about the familiars in the next five minutes,” I said in a low voice to Maksohm. “They’re all under different types of barriers. Same with the mages.”
He didn’t swear. Out loud. I bet my team leader had a few choice words going through his head, though. “Alright. We focus on them, you focus on Toh’sellor.”
That was really the only realistic option. I focused my eyes on Toh’sellor once again, mostly the barrier that surrounded it, and chewed absently on my bottom lip. The sound of people screaming out spells overlapped, the tones guttural and harsh. I heard them, it was impossible to tune them out completely, but I didn’t respond to them. I didn’t lose focus. We’d die if I lost my concentration now. I trusted my team to protect my hide, and I saved all of my attention for the problem in front of me.
It was quite the problem.
I’d told Bannen that the mages had done something to Toh’sellor, and while accurate, that was also the understatement of
the century. I hadn’t known how to explain it, simply because it was incredibly complicated. I’d theorized in Njorage that they’d directly harnessed the chaotic energy Toh’sellor threw off. What I saw here only confirmed it, as I could see the design of it clearly enough. Whenever Toh’sellor fed energy into the nearest living organism to create a minion, this construct of theirs took part of that energy—roughly half—and diverted it into a different source. The harness shield plus the energy barrier directly connected and fed into each other in mutual support. In a way, it was ingenious. I’d never suspected Toh’sellor had any use whatsoever. I would applaud them for their design if it wasn’t so incredibly stupid. In order for their design to work, they had to turn Toh’sellor loose, they couldn’t put any sort of constraints on it. Waesucks, the utter fools were more imbecilic than I’d suspected, and I’d given them an IQ matching their shoe size.
I hated people some days.
The structure of the harness looked very odd to my eyes. There were several panels in different shapes, from octagons to hexagons, rigid and overlapping. It looked cobbled, as if a dozen people had crafted different parts of the spell and then smooshed it together. It had about as much elegance as a train wreck. Unfortunately, it was fully functional. Dismantling this thing would normally take me a few minutes, but Toh’sellor’s energy weaved in and around it—not only feeding into it, but supporting it. The energy acted like magical glue, which just made this situation all the more fun. And by fun, I meant painful and tedious.
Alright, no hope for it, the best I could do was tackle the individual segments of the spell and try to work quickly. Disappearing Toh’sellor’s energy wouldn’t work, it’d be immediately replenished. That section, the one off to the right-hand side, looked the least complicated out of the bunch. I might as well start there, hope that by taking out one part, the rest would collapse.
Fire base in the elements, core locked with two wind components in a frankly appalling mathematical bungle. I didn’t have to compensate for mass in this, just power and elements, and I could feel my magic sing to a happy state now that it could come out and really play. The first segment fell in seconds, splintering and shattering like fairy glitter.
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