Chapter 176: 42: Potent Silence

“I’ll meet you at the bottom,” I said quickly, and fell backwards into the shadows.

From there, I moved down to the base of the tower and peered around, looking for enemies. Nothing had made it here just yet, but I sat there in the shadows just in case. I’d make sure my friends could get out safely. From there, it was up to Bassi and Leon to figure out the next move.

A pair of gurg arrived at the base of the tower before the others got down, and silently, I materialised behind them. My sword strike was swift and methodical. Their heads rolled free, but I was already one of many shadows again by the time they hit the ground.

The party piled out of the door as they came to rest, and judging by the way their shadows paused, they were taken aback by the dead gurg.

I reformed myself next to Bassi, which earned me a startled look from her snake-like gaze. “You’re becoming very comfy in the shadows, my dear Mist.”

“They feel safe,” I shrugged, and then with a wolfish grin, I added, “And it lets me cut my enemies down without them even knowing I’m there.”

My cocky attitude was doused instantly as she grabbed me by the jaw and frowned. “Open your mouth again.”

I did so, and I watched in confusion as her eyes widened. “Your teeth. They’ve grown. Both the top and bottom canines are longer.”

When she released me, I reached up to feel them with my hand. “Uh, that’s new. Cool though.”

“That’s it?” she chuckled, shaking her head. “That’s your reaction? Cool?”

“Oh no, woe is me, I look even more badass now,” I said with a theatrical sigh, the back of my hand coming up to touch my forehead. “Whatever will I do?”

Bassi just rolled her eyes before getting serious again. “We need to get out of the city, and fast. Right now, they just know that something caused a racket. That will not last.”

“As the crow flies, then?” Leon asked, pointing with his hand towards the fastest route out of the city.

“Aye,” Basilisk nodded.

We’d already used up our hourly quota of banter, so as a group we took up a jog for the countryside. Horns were sounding behind us as we ran, and I kept dropping in and out of the shadows to keep an eye out for foes.

Dashing down the dry, dusty, debris-ridden streets, I couldn’t help but wonder what life had been like here before the city’s fall. There were hints everywhere. Old shop signs, hanging half off their mounts, detailed stores for fine ladies’ dresses or duelling weapons for men. It was clear that society had been very patriarchal back then.

There was also a sign that piqued my interest a whole lot more than the rest, and I filed that little scrap of information away for later. I had an idea forming, but we had to get the hell out of harm’s way first.

Unfortunately for us, harm’s way could move. Harm’s way was intelligent. A cohort of gurg blocked our path as we turned a corner, and at their head were three Alabasters. There was a moment’s stillness as we met their dark, weeping eyes. I suppressed a shudder. Sickly sweat glistened on their pale foreheads, reflecting the light of the dim sun.

“Kill them,” Bassi told us all, breaking the silence with her urgency.

As if in answer, the Alabaster’s circular, serrated mouths all opened at once, releasing a guttural scream. Their hands moved with rapid, shaking movements, and a wave of sharpened rot surged out.

Bassi was able to leap up and out of the way, while I dropped into the shadows to do the same. The rest of our friends weren’t so lucky.

I appeared back in normal space to see Leon gasping with pain and exertion, his arms wrapped around Jitters, protecting her. My heart jumped into my throat, her eyes were wide with fear, but my friend had saved her. Good boy.

The rot hadn’t physically hurt them, it wasn’t like what the crawlers had been spitting at us. This stuff looked like it sapped their strength instead.

“This hurts,” he hissed, gently setting Jitters back onto the ground.

I didn’t wait around to talk about it, though. I leapt into battle, calling my shadow blade into existence with a casual flick of my wrist. It crackled with magical power, having consumed most of the darkness that I could manifest, condensed into its sharpened edge.

Rushing the creepy white humanoid slugs, I skipped forward through the shadows to slash at an exposed neck. My sword failed to connect, the Alabaster’s body flickering in a thousand different directions like a disturbed hologram. The palm that slapped into my chest was entirely real, however, and I flew backwards from the blow. My inhuman reflexes saved me from a nasty impact, but not the winded, breathless feeling.

God, what the fuck was that? It went full matrix on me!

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Several Gurg rushed me before I could re-engage, and I was forced to deflect a blow from a large axe. The crude metal sizzled and boiled on contact with my sword, momentarily surprising both me and its owner in the process. I was faster to recover, slashing up and and across its body. Armour and flesh parted with equal ease under the new sword I’d managed to forge.

Holy hell, this thing was terrifying. My follow up blow was a thrust that punched right through another monster’s chest. In a matter of seconds, the rest of the gurg who had rushed me met the same fate. Still, they weren’t the real threat. The Alabasters were with their rot magic streaming from their hands.

When I attacked this time, I was careful to avoid the retaliatory blow. I needed to know what they were doing to avoid my strikes. Maybe I could figure it out from the other side.

Stepping into the realm of shadow, I glanced around at the skirmish playing out around me like a shadow puppet performance. I could immediately see the Alabasters by the way their shadows fluctuated like their bodies did when I tried to stab them. Sadly, there wasn’t any pattern to it on this side either, so I stalked closer to examine.

My first hunch had been something like time magic, because the concept was fresh on my mind, but this was something else. It almost felt as though they were manipulating probability itself.  I wonder what would happen if I pinned their shadows down?

I hadn’t tried shaping the shadows in this place, and I was surprised and confused to see that over here, the stuff I made was a bright white. With that incandescent railway spike in hand, I walked over to the fluctuating shadows and flipped it around my wrist, then down into the ground. The effect was immediate, the shadow struggled, twisting, writhing, and very, mercifully immobile.

My blade and I materialised in the real world mid-slash. The growling scream of one Alabaster was abruptly cut off, silenced by impossibly sharp shadows slicing through its vocal cords. The other two stopped their magic, turning to look at me with surprise registering in their ugly, pallid faces.

My grin was feral. They were mine now.

Returning to the shadows, I pulled another white spike from the stuff of that place and shoved it into the fleeing possibilities. Another Alabaster fell to my blade, bisected at the middle in a quick, merciless stroke as I popped out of the shadows. This whole shadow realm thing was getting to be a bit overpowered, in my honest opinion. Then again, this was life or death, and I wasn’t about that bushido life.

My eyes scanned the chaos for the last of the white monsters, I heard the blood curdling scream of the bat things overhead. Five of them circled up there, with Alabaster riders on their backs readying deadly spells of rot and decay.

I rushed back to my friends, my heart dropping when I saw a few of our comrades had fallen. Two were wounded but standing, and another two had… less luck. A callous part of me was relieved that none of our casualties were people I’d been close to. Still sucked though.

“What do we do?” I asked, looking to Bassi for a plan.

“I don’t know,” she replied, the colour draining from her face as more Gurg and Alabasters began to arrive.

Jitters, who’d overheard our conversation, swore, “By the bloody god of destruction himself, how the fuck do we get out of this one? I’d really rather not die.”

I had to agree with her. Death by rot magic and Gurg did not sound like a pleasant experience. Although, I also knew that Bassi and I could easily escape at any time. In reality, it was our friends who would die.

Then, because of course it did, shit got even worse. The ground began to rumble. It was a slow thing at first, just the barest hint of sound, well below the threshold of human hearing. Suddenly, a switch was flipped. The first jolt tore through the ground like a mighty fist had just struck it. Masonry tumbled from the buildings on either side of us, and steel reinforcing beams groaned and twisted under the strain.

Beside me, Bassi stumbled, then grabbed a desperate hold of me. I wrapped my arms protectively around her and dispelled my sword, using the shadow-stuff to form huge claws on my feet, along with a strong tail for balance.

The world was chaos around us. Stone tore like paper, the earth was sundered, and more terrifyingly, the ground literally broke apart. Massive cracks appeared all around us, some big enough to fall into without touching either side, and from those cracks… something rose.

Thin serrated tendrils of magic began to snake up out of the many rifts in the tortured earth. They were a deep black, shot through with veins of glowing, angry red, close to the colour of magma.

To our surprise, they didn’t come for us. Instead, they moved with deadly speed towards our enemies. Gurg and Alabaster alike were torn apart or dragged down into the deep with an efficiency of movement that indicated vast intelligence.

Clustered together and shaking with both fear and the shuddering of the planet beneath our feet, the party watched as every monster in sight was slaughtered. Not even the bats in the sky were spared, with the tendrils reaching several hundred feet into the air to snag them and drag them down. We could still hear their panicked cries echoing up from within the smashed mantle.

The silence that followed the massacre was heavy, and filled with a false peace. What had just happened? How in the fuck were we still alive? Why had we been spared, and by whom? No answer came from the chaotic devastation around us. Nothing but that potent, satisfied silence.

 

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