Thank god, I thought as I walked forward and opened the door.
“It’s clear,” I shouted as I walked in. “I talked them into leaving.” I stepped into the chamber as casually as I could, still talking sarcastically. “They’re waiting outside for more help while I try to ‘save the captives on my own’.”
My eyes took in the room as quickly as my rapid-fire cognition would allow. Wide chamber, nearly the size of a high-school auditorium. Over fifty hostile Horde of all shapes and sizes packed in, in better gear than the ones outside. Three tall, horse-faced Spawn standing near the center, one in strange ornate robes, talking to four humans, three of which I recognized as men I had killed earlier during my prison break on Avalon.
And a massive pit full of a tar-like substance, twice the size of my old school swimming pool and full of thrashing, screaming shapes that all sounded like they were re-living their most horrible nightmare while being scalded alive.
“You actually convinced them?” the man who had been talking asked in disbelief as I walked a few steps forward to be out of my team’s way when they attacked. “I thought they pretty much kill you guys on sight now?”
The robed Spawn turned to look in my direction, sniffed his horse-like nostrils, and started shuddering.
“They nearly did,” I said tiredly, beginning to trace symbols into the air. “That hot princess of theirs spent five minutes trying to kill me, but I won her over. Let me finish drawing the map she gave of her base.”
“Really?” the man asked, interested, but then his eyes narrowed. “That’s not a map. And you’re not wearing—”
“Traitor-prince!” the Spawn screamed in the highest pitch I had ever heard a Hordebeast utter, pointing a quivering finger. “The traitor-prince is in our—”
Widen. Empower. Duplicate. Connect. Connect.
I scrawled the words out as fast as I dared, my finger tingling from scribing the words so carelessly. My vital guard was probably already interfering with the damage I was causing to myself. But the words were written, and I began punching my stored spells into them. The first three words were written in a tight circle, while the two connects were written right behind them and on opposite edges of the circle, curving and sweeping over my view of the throng of Hordebeasts on either side of the Spawn in the center.
“Tremble and fear!” I shouted, pitching my voice to invoke song magic as I punched my hands through the scripted words and began discharging my stored Ideal spells one after the other. My finger bolts blasted towards one side of the room, doubling in number and becoming crossbow bolt-sized instead of human digit-sized. The enchanted missiles actually blasted clean through the smaller Hordebeasts, impacted the Mongrels and Miscreants hard enough to knock the wind out of them, coursed through their bodies and then jumped over to the nearest upright monster.
My fireblast spell fired out toward the other throng, thickening and doubling into two basketball-sized fireballs far brighter than the ones I usually fired. The two orbs exploded with a rush, and their secondary explosions left the survivors running, screaming, and melting. That side wouldn’t need any further attention whatsoever.
I pointed my final stored spell at the group in the center. This group had already begun to react, with the Spawn beginning to cast their spells, and the Malus Members leaping to the side, out of the way of all my flashy scary boom magic. I settled for hitting the Spawn and fired out two lightning bolts that were as thick as small trees, scorching into the Spawn on the left and nearly knocking him into the Pit behind him. He sank to his knees, his entire torso smoking and jerking. These bolts were outside of my connect scripts, but at the Journeyman level they duplicated on their own anyway. In fact, my empower script enhanced that feature as well, letting each bolt duplicate twice, letting each bolt strike both of the remaining Spawn. The second loincloth-clad monster screamed while clutching his left shoulder, but the robed Spawn in the middle just gestured with a long claw, creating an oily half-shield that blocked my final bolt.
“You are not welcome here, traitor-prince!” the horse-faced monster bellowed. “This is no longer your home!”
“Never was!” I snapped, launching myself forward and summoning my axe and shield. I remembered how powerful the last Spawn I battled were and tried to activate my Battleform, but my mindscreen still insisted the ability had been overtaxed.
“Stop him!” the creature screamed, black magic streaming out of his hands and into the Pit. “And do not let him talk! His violations end today!”
Thank God, I thought fervently.
Because that feeling was entirely mutual.
But then a head broke free of the Pit’s surface with a howl.
“Traitor-prince! Traitor-prince!” The lupine head ripped the rest of its body free of the muck. “We have found the traitor-prince!”
The call was taken up by further heads, who also broke free of the muck.
“Catch and kill the traitor-prince!”
I grimaced as the new species of Horde tore their werewolf bodies free of the muck and raced toward me.
Howlers could be even more dangerous than Mongrels, and almost as dangerous as Spawn.
Even if they weren’t outfitted with armor and iron-tipped claws, like this pack had been.
Behind me, the doors slammed open as the Gaelguard, elves, and fairies entered the room, hurling missiles and magic into the Howlers and other surviving Hordebeasts.
I ducked under the sweep of an iron-tipped claw and slashed my axe through a canine knee, still charging for the Spawn. I had to reach them before their magic killed half of my team. I dodged a bite, then another claw swipe, then slashed my way past a third mail-clad Howler before I was stopped by a lupine monster over eight feet tall. He charged to take me down in a tackle but tripped and fell at the last minute, howling and clutching at his bloody ankle. Val’s shroud deactivated as she leaped on top of him and drove both blades down his throat.
See? she thought at me as she ripped her blades out of the Howler’s throat. See how much better this works with backup?
You were right, I admitted as I launched off of the still-twitching corpse. Hurry up and get used to it.
I felt her smirk at me through the mindlink as I dismissed the dagger I had been clutching behind my shield. I skirted sideways to slam the barrier into another Howler’s head, and then the Gaelguard slammed into the monsters trying to flank me from behind.
I rolled forward and then I was finally clear of everything trying to keep me from reaching the Spawn.
The one in robes stood tall, glaring at me with hateful orbs.
“This is as far as you come,” he growled as his hands began to smoke with power. “I will not let your depravity reach our next brood!”
“Bastard,” I growled. “We both agreed not to talk!”
Val burst free of the Howler throng a couple seconds later, her weapons coated with the blood of the last two Howlers she had hamstrung on her way out.
Wow, she sent as she caught up with me. These guys are really ugly.
Yeah, I replied, still sprinting for all I was worth. Try to take down the more wounded one as fast as you can.
The robed Spawn looked to be almost done casting, but he aborted his spell with a snarl when I hurled Toirneach at his hands. He immediately cast a second, faster spell, sending a column of tarry, smoldering smoke at me. It would have hit if I hadn’t already changed my direction moments ago, and my shoulder still burned from the close proximity of the smoky bolt.
I rolled forward one final time to close in on the Spawn with the wounded shoulder, summoning my Horde cleaver and swinging the weapon one-handed into the monster’s healthy shoulder. The Hordebeast moved backwards, but wasn’t fast enough. My glowing, unwieldy weapon cracked into his bicep. I let go of the weapon the very next moment, drawing my spatha and slamming the weapon into the Spawn’s gut, pushing the flaming weapon as deep into the creature’s gut as I could, until the monster bellowed and kicked me away. I let go of
the weapon before I flew away, landing in a roll and raising my free hand to catch Toirneach as it came whistling back towards me.
More magic crackled behind me as Breena and the Testifiers suddenly discharged their magic together, and I felt my warband gain the upper hand on the remaining monsters. Val swore as she was knocked tumbling away from the more injured Hordebeast before she came back up in a roll next to me. The three of them advanced forward, the middle one’s hands wisping again as he worked a third spell.
“Why do they have to be tough and creepy?” she growled, still holding onto her weapons. “They should only be able to pick one or the other!”
“Preaching to the choir, sis,” I replied, passing my axe to my shield hand to quickly work out some Air magic.
The Spawn-priest abandoned his spell to quickly create a shield of oily magic that encircled all three of the Spawn, doing so just before I finished my own spell.
I couldn’t help but grin as I completed my spell by pointing behind me, sending a Friction Slice at the last knot of Howlers still struggling with my Gaelguard. The crackling sawblade of air sliced through several Hordebeast ankles before it dissipated harmlessly at the feet of my own people.
“Um,” a human voice said off to the side. “Shouldn’t we do something? Or do we let him destroy the Pit?”
“He just blew up over half of the monsters in here on his own,” the Malus member in charge answered, a fellow wearing plain cloths and a heavy cloak. “We already missed our window to intervene. This Pit is lost. Now all we can do is stay alive so that we can actually learn his abilities when we report back. Both of which the two of you should have already done,” the man added angrily.
The other two Malus members blanched.
“We thought we already saw everything he could do,” one of them muttered weakly. “And that he’d be stuck on Avalon.”
“Well, you were wrong,” their leader growled. “So this time we’re making sure we see everything, and that we survive, so that we don’t risk coming back to Earth with scrambled brains. Like your colleagues did.”
Want me to shoot them? Weylin messaged. I sensed from his mindlink that my warband had managed to overwhelm the last of the Howlers, though many of them had gotten wounded and were requiring attention from the fairies.
Not until the Spawn are all out of tricks, I thought back, working a Lightning spell into existence. But coordinate a trap with Karim and Eadric so that they don’t get away with the key.
The Pit began to churn in front of us, making the people trapped in it scream even louder. That was another reason to act quickly. The priest-like Spawn held out both of his arms as a tentacle of muck from the Pit sloshed out and began to coat him and the other two Spawn, hardening into plate armor over their torsos, shins, and forearms. Then all three pairs of hands blazed with magic.
“Protect the Pit!” the center Spawn screamed. “Protect it with your lives, or he will taint it, and we will never be reborn!”
I finished my next spell just in time. The Spawn didn’t bother with blocking it, since they were coated in armor now. But I didn’t need them to block it, because my next spell was Light Screen, an intense flash of bright light.
The mindlink and fairy communication had let my team prepare for the magical flash bomb, but the Hordebeasts all shrieked in unison as they struggled to maintain their incantations. But in those scant few seconds we were all rushing forward again. A barrage of arrows from Merada and the elves whistled into the less-wounded Spawn, two of them striking off of the creature’s hardened skull. Val launched herself back at the Spawn with the scorched torso, hurling daggers from one hand as she jumped forward in a zig-zagging charge. The monster snorted with contempt as most of them bounced off his armor, but when he fully opened his arms Val was already next to him. She sliced through an unarmored portion of his leg with her short blade, flicked the longer upward to nick his fiery wrist, then suddenly phased her entire body upward and behind the creature, slashing one blade across his throat and another up through the back of his bottom jaw. She ripped her weapons free and fell with the monster, stabbing him all the way down until his vital guard was completely overwhelmed. I charged the middle Spawn, but his concentration had held completely, and the very next moment he was hurling a bubbling ball of burning tar at me. I hurled my axe to detonate it early and rolled under the blast, coming to my feet and closing the rest of the distance between myself and the Pit champion with an Air magic-enhanced leap.
He reached out and caught me with a massive hand, snarling in triumph as he raised his free hand to finish me off with a point-blank blast of Horde magic. This time, my Outer Current spell activated on its own, sizzling his arm, then dancing across his armor to fry the rest of his body. As the voltage shocked him Toirneach returned to my hand, letting me chop free of his grip. As I landed I slashed along the monster’s leg, and Toirneach crunched its way right through the Horde armor. The horse-like head growled in pain, but remained standing. My shield blocked a blazing punch from the monster’s other arm. As the Spawn priest’s eyes widened in shock at my strength I flipped my axe around to slam the hook end just where the Hordebeast’s neck met the breastplate. I dropped my shield to grab the weapon in both hands and yank downward, pulling the surprised monster right off his feet. I punched into his descending mouth and manually triggered the discharge on my Outer Current, letting the full current of electricity channel into his mouth with my fist and into his neck with my implanted axe.
He gurgled and spasmed until I threw his disgusting body off of me, ripped my axe back out, and decapitated him with a final two-handed swing.
I looked up to see Merada and the Gaelguard piled around the final Spawn’s prone form. They were stabbing it over and over until it finally stopped twitching.
Last wounded is back up, Breena messaged me. That went way better this time, huh?
Yeah, I replied. Guess a bunch of extra Rises and elite backup made the difference.
I looked up to see shocked faces on the remaining Malus members. Even the Pit had gone quiet for now, muffling the screaming bodies inside it somehow. When I looked at it, it seemed to shrink back, and the bodies inside of it suddenly relaxed, as if they had been sedated.
Submission, I realized. It’s trying not to antagonize me.
For some reason, despite being dangerous in their own right, the Pits I had encountered had never really tried to fight back. Even the first one never did any more than posture threateningly at me. But to avoid drawing attention, I immediately looked over to the Malus Members, who were still quietly watching me.
“Make a note,” the leader finally said to the other two. “Subject has not only regained his health and awareness. He has currently gained a level of power far exceeding his previous peak.”
“Thanks,” I said sarcastically to them from across the Pit. “The three of you are staying, though, right? Because we already made cookies and punch.”
“What, really?” one of the fairies asked. “When?”
“He was being sarcastic,” Breena replied sadly. “It’s like how we play pranks. But not as funny.”
“Oh,” Petal said as her face fell. “We should have.” She looked at the Pit. “It would help them get over this when we finally pull them free.”
I would have argued with Petal-bell, except she was the only member of our group that had actually been in a Horde Pit before. If she said food and refreshment helped in the recovery process then I actually had to take her feedback seriously. She turned to look at me hopefully. “Can you pull them free now?”
“As soon as we deal with the local solicitors,” I said, turning to glare at the Malus Men. “You heard the lady. We’ve got things to do.”
“We’re about to leave you to them,” Rhodes’ senior lackey replied, looking completely unperturbed. “Don’t mind us.”
“Actually I do,” I answered. “But answer me this, first: Back when I first encountered the Horde, how did they know to expect me? And wh
y were they surprised when I renounced them?”
The skinny man on the right cocked his head, confused.
“You knew they were expecting yo—”
“Quiet, idiot!” the middle one snapped, outraged at the grunt’s blatant stupidity. “And that’s classified.”
“The fact that it’s classified means that you knew they were expecting someone, which means they were probably expecting someone from your group,” I mentioned dryly. “But you were still trying to get to Avalon at that point, so you couldn’t have been communicating with them on your own. Except that the first thing your people did on Avalon was to create a Horde Pit,” I said, eyes narrowing. “Which means you probably always could have done that. Are there Horde on Earth too? Can they communicate with the Horde off-world?”
“That’s also classified,” the would-be middle manager answered with another grimace. “And it was a mistake for you to leave Avalon. Your base there will be gone by the time you return.”
Act dumb and don’t take the bait, I sent to everyone.
Duh, Breena snorted.
“What do you mean?” I asked with my best poker face.
“I mean now that we know you’ve become active there, we’re going to hit you with every spare resource we have. We’ve had fifty years to build up resources. And unless you’ve somehow managed to reverse the flow of time on that planet, then you’re still going to be weeks behind our own production for every day that passes there.”
Wow, he doesn’t know anything, Val noted.
Believe me, Breena grumbled. It takes time to get used to all the breaking your brother does with magic and physics. It’s why I try to never leave him alone for five minutes.
Speaking of which, Karim said quickly. We need to talk about how you almost lost your hand and throat by combining three different—
Focus, I sent quickly. “Do you really think I didn’t make any precautions for round two with you idiots? Aside from the fact that I was able to mop the floor with you guys pretty much on my own?”
Woad Children (Challenger's Call Book 3) Page 37
