Chapter 23: 11.3: Containment III

The blades of grass were moving with a mind of their own, expanding and stretching far beyond what a meadow should ever be capable of naturally. The green grass we’d been striding across had been a little more than ankle height to begin with, tickling our shins but not being much of a nuisance besides.

The grass around us was at our knees now, and it was still increasing in size. Even as I built my sphere of power, I could feel them at the fabric of my pants, slashing through it and lacerating my legs. I winced as a dozen knife-sharp strands sliced into my lower half, choking down a gasp as I felt the grass buried in my legs try to pull me down. There was a white-hot burn in my calves, like someone— multiple someones— had grappled onto them and twisted so hard that the skin had broken. That comparison might not have been far from the truth of the situation, I had to admit.

I rode a burst of adrenaline, trying to ignore the pain, and I cast my magic downwards, belatedly realizing that I hadn’t even considered using a spell to clear the creeping growth beneath me.

The sphere didn’t affect me, my magic recognizing its owner as it fell from my hands. It did, of course, affect the grass, even including the pieces that had gripped onto my flesh from the inside out. I hadn’t even fully processed the grasping hold that the grass had had on me until it began to wither and disintegrate under my magic. Warm blood flowed down my body, a sensation that I was unfortunately beginning to get used to. Though my legs were beginning to lose sensation I could still feel stinging pain across them, the primordial’s grass leaving its mark even as it died. A quick glance down revealed that I had removed all traces of life from a two-meter wide dirt circle only to immediately begin staining it with my own lifeblood. I looked at my legs, examined the red, slippery mess they had become, and gauged that I probably wouldn’t bleed to death in the next few minutes. I could worry about this injury later.

First, the others. I gathered unstructured magic, ready to either toss it or infuse it into an overcharged spell.

It had taken me some difficulty to remove the primordial grass around me, but that had been in large part because of my slow reaction and the time spent building up my charge of unstructured magic. This part of the primordial’s influence, at least, was no more immune to magic than your average grassy field, and it had died easily under the influence of my destructive sphere.

The rest of the party had not been prepared at all.

Lasi had tossed up an impromptu half-dome of a shield, turned upside down so that it would face downwards and stop the grass, but its range was not great enough to encompass more than the people immediately next to him. Inside his shield was Jasmine and another. I couldn’t tell if the second was Sunsbridge or Lukas, as the three of them were only half-visible, the grass around them almost wholly encompassing the shield and battering at it with razor-sharp edges, though thankfully the spell didn’t seem to be in danger of collapse just yet. Lasi was visibly slower than he’d been, a disturbingly large amount of blood coating a thigh, but Jasmine was healing him so he would be alright. Lasi had been blindsided and hit, then, which was why he hadn’t immediately purged the area with fire. He’s gotten sloppy.

The grass around the edge of my artificial clearing must have been able to sense me in some way, because as I began to look for the other members of our impromptu party the primordial-influenced plants reached out for me, alternately slithering out of the ground or rearing back for a strike.

I threw up a Ceretian shield to cover my flank, overcharging it with the unstructured magic I’d introduced to the air. A blade of grass killed itself when it hit the shield at speed, so hopefully that’d make these things think twice before attacking me from the back.

In front of me, I forced myself to form a spell that I’d learned just a day ago. The classical school’s fireball was incredibly powerful for a simple, lower-class spell, but it took a lot less influence from the flavor of magic provided by a given oath and used a lot more of an oathholder’s energy to cast. This spell wouldn’t have the same ruinous attributes that my Ceretian spells would have, but that would hopefully not be a problem if I simply dumped a massive amount of power into it. I pulled on the ambient threads of magic, forming an elaborate pattern with my hands and enunciating a word in the oathtongue.

An orange-red sphere of heat and force sprang forth from the pattern, twice the width of my head and significantly more damaging to local wildlife. It detonated a couple meters in front of me with a satisfying crack, and I realized that I hadn’t quite accounted for its effects when the force of the blow sent me tumbling off my feet. I braced myself on my shield, controlling my fall, and I took a second to appreciate the fruits of my efforts.

I’d appropriated Jasmine and Lasi’s roles as the resident pyromaniacs for a second. The flame from my spell was not catching on every blade of grass, but a fair portion of the now chest-high greenery had been set aflame, the primordial’s influence leaving them as they burned. Another handful of square meters had been cleared, the grass flattened or blown apart. I mentally noted that the primordial seemed to not be able to continue controlling these plants if they got hit hard enough. That might be important later.

I turned and dispelled my shield, casting another classical fireball as I did. There was something about spells from the classical school that just felt… less wrong. The “proto-Ceretian” school, as some called it, focused more on achieving one specific, repeatable result rather than the modern Ceretian’s method of picking a general effect and influencing it with the type of oath held by the user, and the former felt somehow more removed from my unstructured magic and yet less alien to my sensibilities.

I swore to myself that I would practice this spell a lot more if we made it out of here alive.

The immediate threat had been dealt with, and now I could fully assess the situation of the others.

I winced as I turned, a half-step out of sync with my own body, and I nearly fell over. Right. Just because I wasn’t fully feeling it didn’t mean that my wounds had disappeared.

The first people I saw were the two adventurers we’d ostensibly saved earlier. One of them was dead now, ripped to shreds in the initial onslaught. The other had used what might have been a Naan’ti variation of a freezing spell to turn the living grass around them to ice, but they were no longer fighting, having stopped after the immediate danger was gone. The living adventurer was cradling half a body in their hands, ignoring how they were getting the bloody remnants of what had once been their adventuring partner’s intestines all over their robes. Those two were out of the fight, then.

Immediately after, I saw Lukas, and while he was holding his own his situation was even worse than mine. He was crouched on top of a barrier of dirt, having ripped it out from underneath a pile of now-dead grass, but he wasn’t currently putting up any form of active resistance, choosing instead to block its attacks with a series of shields. I didn’t have the best angle to see him, but he was leaning on a wall for support and bleeding heavily from a shoulder. His other hand was clasped to it, and from the way he was using only one arm to cast his series of spells, I was fairly sure his other had been crippled. He was still standing, though, and that counted for a lot.

That left only one party member, since Sunsbridge was in the shield with Lasi. I panned all the way around, searching for Soren, and I found her sooner than I’d hoped.

She’d been pierced through wholesale, a hundred different blades of grass demonstrating why they had been named blades in the first place and impaling her at every point in her body. Soren had fallen at an angle, and the malevolent grass had kept her from fully hitting the ground. One emerald blade had stabbed into her at the small of her back and punched through her at an angle, exiting at her heart. Soren’s head lolled limply, her body little more than a rag doll for the primordial to play with, and I knew that she was irretrievably gone.

Lukas needed help the most, that much was immediately obvious. My magic was too lethal to risk tossing it at him, and so I instead palmed the frost-knife that I still hadn’t had a great opportunity to use. I dispelled the unstructured magic I’d placed on it, not wanting to risk the magical ruin to spread from my target into Lukas’ construct and potentially the man himself. Instead, I passed in a small amount of magic, intended not for ruin but to power the runes on my blade.

I focused on Lukas again. On a closer examination, I was fairly sure that he had lost an arm— with that much blood spurting from that half of his body, it had to have been that. His construct was slightly bowl-shaped, resting atop a meter of solid dirt, and still the grass was reaching up and around the earth, reaching for the man inside. They were encircling him from all sides, a grassy hand grasping the underside of the bowl he’d made, already halfway up. I saw packed earth crack, clouds of dirt falling from the construct. If the primordial’s grass didn’t get over to him, it would crack open the eggshell that was his protection and get to him that way.

Eight meters from me to him, give or take. I lined up my arms and flicked my wrist forward, smoothly releasing the knife. I followed it, casting a normally charged Ceretian shield as I did. I had to angle it downwards such that I could step on it. I’d cleared out a solid four or five meters around me, and while the next patch of grass either hadn’t sensed me or were more focused on other targets I was absolutely not going to risk stepping into them without shielding now.

Casting the shield spell hadn’t been any less odd than it had been before, and sprinting across it redoubled that sensation, alien pinpricks in my mind telling me that something human-shaped was making contact with the spell I’d just cast.

As I ran across the disc, formed just large enough to span the remaining primordial-influenced area between me and Lukas, I took a look at the result of my throw.

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It hadn’t been enough, but it had helped. The dagger had buried itself halfway to the hilt in the earth, and a meter-wide section of Lukas’ “bowl” was frosted over. The grass there had wilted away, dead from the intense cold put out by the knife. Whatever adaptations the primordial had been gaining, a resistance to ice was not among the powerups given to this patch of grass. It wasn’t incredibly effective, but it was at the very least not ineffective at getting the plants off of the bowl.

I finished my sprint to the bowl, bracing myself against the just cleared segment of the construct to keep myself from falling over. I was still ignoring the stinging across the entirety of my legs, but the injury was making itself known from time to time. As I extracted the knife from the dirt, I heard rustling around and under me.

I’d been noticed.

I could still feel magic pumping away inside the enchanted dagger. Good.

A good chunk of the impossibly thick grass— each strand had to be at least twenty centimeters in diameter— that had been trying to pop Lukas’ construct open peeled off of it, drawn to the appearance of a new, easier to reach target. Even better.

Focusing on me and not the construct freed up my ability to use my own magic. I needed a little time or space, though— while I would always be able to freely build up unstructured magic, my ability to cast multiple spells at the same time still needed to be developed. A blast of unstructured magic would risk hitting Lukas, and casting a magic missile meant dropping my shield and exposing myself to the grass under me.

I chose a middle ground, drawing another dagger and beginning to pour unstructured magic into that. The grass rudely didn’t want to give me the time to do that, and it prepared to strike from my front and sides. These offshoots had an attacking pattern that I wasn’t quite used to, almost like that of a dangerous coiled snake rather than anything more traditional. The sight of grass preparing to pounce on someone might have been comical in another setting.

While its style wasn’t something I was generally prepared to address, in this particular case it fortunately came with the side effect of heavily telegraphing its attacks.

First, from the front. I swept my frost-knife in a wide arc as the head-height grass uncoiled and struck from around my shield. This bunch seemed to be avoiding my shield, making extra effort to go around it as they struck. Something to keep in mind, for sure. Even when I wasn’t intentionally using their apparent fear of my magic, the awkward positioning it forced out of them was weakening the leverage and strength with which they dashed at me. What might’ve been a sonic-speed lash of grass was reduced to simply a very fast attack, one which was met with a glinting blade made of steel that was not just cold but freezing. Blades of grass met my blade of magical steel, and whatever primordial magic was supporting these offshoots, it didn’t extend to keeping these plants alive after frost tore into their already slashed strands.

Next, the left. I dropped to one knee and once again made a methodical sharp sweep of my personal space with a knife, this time the one I’d been dumping unstructured magic into. A clump of grass met my magic and it crumbled at the touch, my dagger passing through it and killing all it came in contact with. These offshoots had little to no magical resistance, at least.

Unfortunately, they did possess some form of intelligence. An instant after I killed the first blades of grass, they turned to ash, revealing still more grass behind it, already releasing itself from its coiled state. A strand hit my arm side-on and sliced it, lacerating the flesh as easily as any knife. Another burst from the ground towards my center of mass, a lethal blow armed and ready.

I dropped to the ground fully, grimacing as the process of doing so tore a piece of offshoot out of the inside of my arm. That injury would probably be a cause for concern later. In the moment, though, dropping prone meant that the strike intended for my torso went wide, sailing over my head. With my uninjured arm, I swiped at my two attackers, the unblooded blade closer than the one that had successfully hit me. It was the former that took the hit from the frost-knife, not dying immediately but slowing enough that I could bring my bloody arm up and end it with my ruin-knife. The second began to withdraw, but I tossed the knife infused with my magic at it. It was a glancing hit, the trajectory thrown off by the new wound in my left arm, but a glancing hit was all I needed.

No time to worry about my injuries now. I’d dealt with the majority of the blades plaguing Lukas’ position, but that didn’t mean he was out of the woods quite yet.

“Lukas!” I shouted. “Mind letting me up?”

“Who- oh, oh, o-okay,” Lukas said, his voice unsteady. “Y-yeah, I got you.”

The upper part of the bowl that had been facing me warped, a makeshift ramp extending from it to connect it with my shield. I walked up it carefully, bleeding all over it as I did, and in a few moments I had made it inside the bowl.

Lukas had been hit hard. His right arm was missing from the elbow down, the remnants looking more like ground meat than anything else. He’d been mauled, the side of his body crisscrossed with various cuts, and only his face had escaped fully unharmed.

“Th-thanks,” Lukas said, and he sounded like he was about to collapse on his feet.

“Shit,” I said. “We need to get you to Jasmine as soon as possible.”

“You t-t-too,” he said.

I looked down at myself. My legs were a bloody mess, the fabric of my pants soaked through with warm, sticky blood, and my arm probably wasn’t going to be faring much better in a few minutes, either. I took a step and realized that the pain in my legs had been a little muted, but that had been a side effect of all sensation beginning to disappear from them.

“Okay, you’re right,” I said. “You first, though. Come on. I’ll take you there.”

That was much easier said than done. Jasmine was ten or fifteen meters from us, ten or fifteen meters that were absolutely covered with malevolent fields. She was just about done healing Lasi, but he wouldn’t be able to do anything incredibly flashy now lest he risk the integrity of the healing, so all he had cleared were the plants immediately threatening them. He looked to be preparing for a larger working, a lot slower than I was used to seeing him.

This fight wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.

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