The light changed again, taking on the blue-green tint of ocean water, and the shifting ceased entirely. A Verdantun male now lay on his back, with no evidence of injury. Lorelei breathed a last sigh, extinguishing the light and allowing her arms to fall, and collapsed completely into Rodrom's arms.
"The grand general is safe," she murmured.
Then the entrance to the tree exploded as something slammed into it from above.
Chapter 58
The Exile
A brilliant light appeared ahead of the Exile, a spotlight between the trees. She could feel the hunger and excitement of the Shadow as she turned towards the light. This was the energy it had wanted her to seek out. This would be her undoing. She ran towards it, pulsing her Shell into her thighs and abandoning all pretense of stealth.
The dagger at her hip started vibrating, and tendrils of Shadow twisted around her. The light ahead grew more vibrant, and the black fingers streaked past her, drawing in the light as they shot like bolts through the forest. As she drew closer, she heard screaming, a long, ragged note.
Even with her Shell pulsing to keep up her speed, and the energy snapping through her body, she still felt drained and beaten as the Shadow reached towards the scream.
She couldn't beat it, couldn't run fast enough to keep up with that power. Any power she held over their bond would be nothing once it reached the light.
The dagger was close to vibrating right out of its worn leather sheath, the hunger rolling off it with an intensity that churned Exile's stomach. She regretted ever using the blade.
Above the Shadow, a fighter drew closer, and the sound of the engine drowned out the scream.
She squinted into the storm clouds to spot the silver ship plowing down through the storm, rocketing towards the light, where the tendrils had gone.
The dagger tugged her forcefully, knocking her from her feet and sending her sprawling in the mud. The crisp energy of her Shell waned with her concentration, and she was forced to rip the weapon out of its sheath before it shook apart her bones.
What have I done? she thought.
Ahead, the fighter smashed into the ground in a cacophony of shrapnel and fire.
The black stone connecting her to the Shadow ceased vibrating. A crack in it leaked white light. Exile threw up her good arm to shield herself, and then the dagger shattered into countless obsidian shards.
The connection was severed.
She was freed.
Exile screamed.
Chapter 59
Vincent
It was Ele. It had to be. She was always right there when fires broke out. The surface of Bastogne, when she had screamed that it was chasing her. The fire on the ship—she had been at the center of that as well. The torn and burnt uniform she had worn when he rescued her was another puzzle piece. Block stencil lettering, jumpsuit. She had to be some kind of scientist. Or worse, an experiment.
Vincent had flown up against flame elementals in the past. Phoenixes, salamanders, even sprites. Nothing had looked like, or burned as hot, as the creature Ele had become.
How the hell was he supposed to vape something that could absorb his missiles, that he couldn’t even approach? Even if he could, did he want to? Ele had never seemed like anything more than a confused and frightened woman trapped in a war. If it was her in there, why was she attacking?
Vincent thought to reach out to her, to stop her before she destroyed another world, but could not think of how. The best he could hope to do was broadcast on a wide brand of frequencies and hope that she could hear him.
"Rover, could we jury-rig something to give off heat in a specific pattern? Find a way to communicate with her?" Vincent asked. Something made of fire would be drawn towards heat, wouldn’t it?
Details of a plan scrolled across one of his screens. He didn't concern himself with the specifics, he just needed to know it could be done. Something about shunting heat into ablative armor.
Rover moved onto the top of the craft, and began cracking open panels and pulling out wires. Vincent concentrated on following Ele along her blazing path.
The map on his leftmost screen showed the estimated positon of the elf camp. Ele was getting close to reaching them. He needed to get the colonists out of there before she torched the place.
He put on speed, soaring around and past Ele. She didn't seem to notice his ship. The camp was just ahead, close enough for his sensors to start picking up the AMIs of the trapped colonists.
Immediately, he identified a cluster of them in what appeared to be large pits. There were more transmissions from the treeline; the Condemned would be fast approaching. As his computer crunched the incoming data, another tone alerted him to his worst fear: Rodrom was not among the refugees.
Vincent made two more passes, ordering the computer to continue its assessment, and in that time, the Condemned had reached the pits and begun drawing the prisoners out. The guards had been killed at some point between runs.
"Condemned Actual, this is Reaper One. Have you found any additional survivors? Over," Vincent commed.
There was a pause. "Reaper One, Condemned Actual. One of the doctors was taken into the camp. Our lieutenant's in there, causing a distraction. Over."
Vincent barely listened. Without a thought, he turned his ship and roared back towards the camp.
He was distantly aware of an inner voice telling him he was breaking every rule in the book. A tight strafe on an enemy encampment in broad daylight without air superiority and unknown defenses? Tantamount to suicide. But Ele wasn't slowing down, and neither was the wildfire of her wake.
Vincent strafed low over the jungle as he lined up his run. He had no plan, only that he would fly as fast and as well as he could over the camp, avoiding whatever came at him until his computer picked up Rodrom and Vincent got him the hell out of dodge.
Vincent turned his attention back to his wingmates. His pilot’s vital sign readouts showed an anomaly in the Duchess's biorhythm, and she wasn't responding to any of the communications sent to her. Vincent twisted in his seat, trying to spot her in the cloud cover.
A violently bright light filled the area, lancing out from the ground below. In the flare of light, he caught sight of the Duchess. Her fighter was pointed straight towards the ground.
Vincent pulled up, trying to get closer, to see what had happened to cause her tailspin.
"Duchess! Duchess!" Vincent called, but she didn't respond.
She was picking up speed, shooting down towards the trees below like an artillery round. There was no way Vincent could get to her in time.
It was all too much. Ele, Duchess, Rodrom.
Something inside Vincent snapped, and he did the unthinkable.
Reaching up with both hands, he grabbed the two handles beside the transformation controls and twisted to break the seal. Jets of white fog pulsed from the air vents, and Vincent called out, "Machine meld activate, authorization tango three mike four."
He pulled down hard on the handles, then released them and went limp. Needles shot out from his seat to pierce the ports on either side of his spine, and he felt a stab of sharp pain followed by numbing warmth throughout his head and back.
Details flooded into his mind at an unbelievable pace as a blue liquid filled his cabin. His seat unfolded so he was lying on his back. Everywhere the liquid touched, his skin went numb, and as it reached his neck he could no longer tell where he ended and the ship began. He opened his mouth and tried to relax as it filled over his head, and he nearly blacked out from panic when it filled his lungs.
Then his whole body was numb, and he was no longer a pilot. He was the Chimera.
The fighter also changed as the cabin filled with fluid. The wings bent back away from the canopy and angled toward the tail, while panels opened and inset turbines were revealed. They spun up, providing lift as the engines dimmed. The tail split in two and reconfigured into legs, the engines glowing
on the back of each ankle. The craft’s belly also split, and the two halves twisted out to become arms, the Gatling cannon mounted on one, the laser cannon on the other. The nose collapsed and moved to complete occlude the cockpit, and the missile launchers rotated forward to form shoulders.
The panels locked into place, the wings rotated again, and the engines roared. Vincent shot towards the ground.
With all the information flooding his mind, time slowed. Vincent saw everything fall apart through his new eyes.
Black tentacles erupted from Duchess's craft to coat her ship. The darkness seemed to suck in all light, and it twisted and writhed like a hundred serpents.
Rodrom's AMI had been located; he was inside a tree directly below. The place from which the light had originated, and the place where the Shadow was heading.
Ele came charging through the storm cover overhead, her wings held tight to her body, the clouds boiling away in her wake.
The Shadow smashed into Rodrom's tree.
A psychic scream tore through Vincent's mind.
He hit the ground on armored feet, sweeping his weapons ahead of him, mud and debris churning beneath him as he slid to a stop just beyond the wreckage of Duchess's ship.
He had fourteen minutes.
Then he would die.
Chapter 60
Rodrom
Rodrom shook his head to clear away the ringing. He had been too close to too many explosions in the last two days. He could barely hear his own groan over the obnoxious whistling in both ears. He really needed a change of profession.
"Lorelei, are you..." he began. Then he saw the pool of pitch dark oozing into the chamber.
Rodrom tried to get up, feeling the tear in his lungs as his heart demanded more oxygen than his synthetic blood could carry. The best he could manage was to push himself up on one knee. Yeah, Derek, go down on your knees. Isn't that the way we always pictured it.
The shadow finished dripping into the chamber and formed into a two-foot circle right in front of him. It looked like motor oil, or maybe ink, only decidedly evil. Rodrom tried to engage his clinical mind, to take in the details and make a plan, but he was too rattled. He looked back towards Lorelei.
She was lying on her side, one snow-white arm draped over her face. The black tattoos that came with her wardrobe change were the same shade of sinister as the pool forming at the door.
Rodrom needed a weapon. What he would do with it, he didn’t know. But whatever force was behind the explosion, and the Shadow, was something he needed to fight.
Still wheezing, Rodrom pushed himself over to where Lorelei had dropped the end of her staff. It wasn't much, but it was more than nothing. Maybe he could strap his homemade scalpels onto the end of it. A quick glance over his shoulder showed the Shadow still congealing on the floor. Maybe it would just stay there, and he could pull Lorelei and her...
In all the confusion and chaos, he had forgotten what she had told him just before she’d fallen unconscious. This warrior on the table wasn't her betrothed, or any such nonsense—he was some sort of leader. A general.
If he hadn't already been struggling to breathe, Rodrom would have laughed at himself, but he had precious little time to pull together a plan and get everyone out in one piece. Better to laugh later than not at all.
He pulled himself far enough around the table to see past Lorelei and the general, to where she had pulled out the dagger and done whatever insane magic had given her the makeover. Drops of her blue blood littered the floor, along with five feet of white painted wood. Rodrom had never bothered to pay all that much attention to the weapon before, but as he looked now, he saw that it was similar to the ones all the healers carried—a sort of twisting staff of branches woven so tightly they looked like a single piece.
The last time he had touched one of those staffs, he had felt like he’d been strapped into an electric chair. But he moved the last meter without even thinking and reached out to grab it.
The moment his fingers wrapped around the smooth wood, he felt a thousand little pinpricks in his hand, like he had just grabbed a live wire. Then a wave of energy and power radiated through his body. The pendant on his chest shuddered and hummed, but Rodrom heard none of the music he had come to associate with the elves’ abilities.
No, there was no music, but there was plenty of power. It hummed in the weapon and flooded him with wave after wave. He had no idea how to use the thing, but he pointed it over towards the Shadow and tried.
While he was fumbling, the Shadow had started pulling itself together. Already, a head and neck emerged from the dark pool. If left unchecked, it obviously intended to form a humanoid shape. Rodrom stepped forward and pushed the staff ahead of him like a lance, hoping to engage whatever mechanism would unleash the power it so obviously contained. No such luck.
The Shadow grew a torso, and Rodrom tried more combinations of thrusts and shakes, running his hand down the length of the staff to check for a recessed trigger. Rodrom tried not to think of how ridiculous he looked, and was for once thankful that Vincent wasn't around to see him.
He found absolutely nothing useful, and nearly threw the weapon down in frustration.
"Just fire, damn you," he cried, and the energy poured from him into the wood. It grew warm in his hand. He stared at it. "Please don't explode."
Then he thrust the weapon forward again, and the energy rushed from him towards the Shadow. The air within the chamber kicked up like a tornado had just swept in. The heat beneath his fingers was enough to make him want to drop it, but he had no choice but to hold on. His hand seemed to be fused to the wood.
All his equipment was blown to the floor and the wind tore at his beard. The pool of Shadow churned but stayed in place.
"More attack, less storm," Rodrom shouted, hoping the weapon would respond.
Luckily, the elf magic was listening, and the twisting whirlwind died down. Then to Rodrom's extreme displeasure, the wind shifted and blew a violent gust that threw him to the back of the room. He landed with a dull thud against the root walls. As he slid to the ground, he saw that he had finally affected the Shadow—in the worst possible way. The wind had disrupted its attempt to form into something vaguely human, and instead had blown it over to the elf lying on the table.
Just as it had with Lorelei, the Shadow seemed to stain every part of the warrior it touched. Unlike Lorelei, it did not stop with a tattoo pattern. It covered everything.
Rodrom pushed himself up with the staff, still unable to release it from his hand, and hobbled over to the table where the Shadow was consuming his charge. He pulled one of the scalpels off the ground and tried to pry the darkness away with the crystalline blade.
It was like trying to cut through tar. Wherever Rodrom pressed the blade into the Shadow, it just pooled and twisted, and when he tried to pull away it clung like glue. He released the scalpel before the Shadow connected to his own skin. He wouldn't be of any help if he was consumed along with the warrior.
The dark slime pulled in the scalpel, along with all the other tools that had fallen around the warrior during the miniature storm. Like some sort of symbiotic copycat, it absorbed them and then churned out more. Before Rodrom's eyes, the warrior went from a bear-skinned humanoid to a void of light studded with blades. A mohawk of knives erupted from between the creature’s eyes all the way over and behind his head, then down his back. Longer blades erupted from his wrists and descended down the backs of both ankles.
The thing had become a living nightmare.
"Lightning, you need to shoot lightning now," Rodrom screamed at the stick grafted to his hand. Then he raised it over his head with both hands and slammed it down on the head of the monster.
To Rodrom’s relief, the weapon did not sink in and replicate like the scalpel, and the screaming seemed to do the trick—something violent and loud struck the tree above hard enough to shake it.
Rodrom realized his mistake just as the Shadow sat up, swung a bladed arm towards him, a
nd raked scalpel-sharp scratches of darkness across his face.
He staggered back, the staff finally falling free of his hand, as hot blue blood gushed from his wounds. He wasn't blinded yet, so he had an excellent view of the Shadow as it stood up, grabbed Lorelei, and dragged her outside the tree and out of view.
The blood was pouring between Rodrom’s fingers and he already felt lightheaded. He had nothing left in the way of supplies, but Lorelei was in trouble. He needed to get to her before he bled out.
He stumbled towards the exit.
Chapter 61
Vincent
Vincent charged between the trees, using his ankle-mounted jump jets and turbines to gain extra speed. In the machine meld he was the fighter, so he could “feel” every truck he slammed into on his armor, but there was no exhaustion, and no real pain. Only him, his armor, and the mission.
Vincent had only experienced the meld once, when he had been forced to in his training. All the test pilots of the Mark 1 had gone insane from the stress of the mental transition from man to fighter. So the gnomes went back to the drawing board, watched one too many science fiction movies, and came up with the Mark 2. If humans couldn't handle becoming a fighter, they’d have the fighter become a man. That led to the transformation circuits, nanotech seals, and the augmentations that made the Chimera the versatile fighter it was.
But it went from the ultimate weapon to a last-ditch resort when they realized no pilot could survive more than fourteen minutes. Vincent had no intention of seeing what the end of those fourteen minutes looked like. He would charge through to Rodrom, grab him, and then charge right out again. Let whatever shadow magic that had attacked Duchess and the flashover that Ele had become sort one another out. Vincent had more than enough of magic, and he wasn't about to pit his ridiculous science fiction battle suit against any of it.
Forged by Battle (WarVerse Book 1) Page 22
