Chapter 145: Chapter One Hundred Forty Six

Walking into the chamber where the heart was waiting, I wasn't really  sure what to expect, but it definitely wasn't what I found. The place  was a war zone. I saw the redheaded form that had to be Fisher  straddling a motorcycle, with his arms outstretched to either side.  Standing off to either end of the chains extending from them were a pair  of people. One of them was the stone woman from before, and the other  was a blue skinned man with a third eye on his forehead. They were both  straining against the chains, holding him in place while a shorter  blonde guy wailed on him.

I wasn't sure why he didn't  phase out, but I imagined it had something to do with the chains being  hooked into their flesh. The stone woman was hauling on hers as hard as  she could to try to stop him from tearing her leg off or pulling her  from her feet, and the blue man had the hook in one shoulder and seemed  to be purposefully digging it into his own flesh. We stuck by the  entrance, trying not to get involved, and I slid up next to the wall to  try to figure out what the hell was happening before we got involved.  The others followed my lead.

I watched for a bit, noting  several odd aspects of the fight before voicing my opinion. "I think...I  think he's stuck. I can't swear to it, but if I had to guess his  phasing ability takes the chains with him, and anything on the hooks  probably counts too. He can't go intangible because he'd have to take  both of them with him, and I'm guessing a pair of huge obviously  powerful G rankers are too much for his abilities to manage."

Or  at least partly. The blonde guy was wailing on Fisher full tilt, and  his punches were landing so hard the air was literally cracking when he  threw them, but Fisher was offsetting the damage or something, because  he wasn't turning into meat paste under the fists of the man I could  only assume was MacDonald. Whatever was going on, the situation  looked...stable-ish, and that gave us time to figure out what to do.

Callie  frowned nervously at the fight. "Whatever is going on it can't keep  going on forever. Something is going to break the status quo here, which  means we need a plan. The question is, what do we do? We can try to  help one of them and hope the other will be able to keep them busy after  we do, we can attack them both and hope they don't try to team up  against us, or we can avoid them entirely and hope they don't notice us  sneaking past them to try to get our hands on the heart. Also HOW do we  take the heart? It's huge."

Seeing the insane power the  two older freshmen were wielding it was obvious she was starting to  freak out a bit, and I didn't blame her. I was freaking out too, but  hearing my girlfriend sound so panicked brought me back down to earth. I  put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. "We use the box, it should  work fine for that. As for the plan, whatever you decide we're right  there with you. You've got this. They seem impressive but they're no  different than any random villain you dealt with back in Velan."

She  looked uncertain for a moment, but her face firmed with determination  and she shot me a grateful smile. "You're right. Sorry. Shook me up  there for a second. Let's go with a combination plan. I'll try to sneak  around with the bag to get to the heart, Cark, you use that staff to  smash them all with a huge wave of fire, Agria, keep him topped up so he  can hammer them too thoroughly to pay attention to anything else.  Clockwork and Solomon, guard their backs so no one interrupts her energy  transfer."

As soon as she decided on a course of action, I  saw the conviction in her eyes as she found her footing. I was pretty  sure that recursion made doing things like this easier as you got higher  level. My own experience with Stricture kind of proved that. I'd been a  random H ranker who had barely stepped onto the path of cultivation  behaving like I was a hardened warrior. Aside from specific recursion,  that was probably something more general to cultivators as a whole, or  at least heroes. Still it was helpful here since it snapped her out of  her worries.

Cark looked thrilled to oblige and grinned  before pulling out the staff and stepping forward. Jessie stepped up  behind him, putting a hand on his back, and started pumping in energy.  With a grunt of effort our pyrokinetic funnel his power through the  staff and dropped an absolutely massive wave of blue flame onto the  gathered combatants. I heard a confused roar of pain, though none of  them seemed to be actually seriously injured from what little I could  see. Still their shadows in the light of the flames seemed to be wilting  under the heat as they tried to resist the damage.

Whatever  Fisher was doing was protecting him, MacDonald seemed to be using his  force field to hold back the heat, and the other two were obviously  physical types who were more durable than most. Even with all of that  though it was clear this was not a comfortable or easy attack to resist.  It was the perfect distraction as Callie slipped off to the side and  vanished. Between her ability and the stealth Skill she was more than  qualified to bypass some thugs, and that became even easier with a huge  fireball smashing them in the face to draw their focus.

Unfortunately,  the good times didn't last. With a howl of anger, MacDonald put both  hands out and started to PUSH. I expected that to be useless, until the  bastard started opening up an actual bubble in the flames with his  telekinesis, shoving away the flames to buy himself some breathing room.  I could actually see the strain on his face as he shoved the fire even  further back, staggering to one side so he could cover the blue guy with  his shield. He snarled over at us, saying something to the blue guy I  couldn't hear, probably because of the shield.

I pretty  immediately figured that he was going to get the guy to attack us, so I  triggered Sucking Mud without any hesitation. Considering these two were  stuck in a small confined area by the bubble, it was pretty effective,  and they were distracted enough by plotting our demise not to notice it  for a few seconds. Sadly, the skill really shined against huge enemies,  and people could pull free if they noticed it early enough. That  normally would have been a difficult feat without any leverage, but  MacDonald had other means.

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His snarl deepened and his face  turned bright red as he heaved and...lifted the whole bubble off the  ground. He hauled the telekinetic construct slowly out of the flames,  and I watched in horrified fascination as they slowly but inexorably  inched toward the edge of the flames. I could hear the roar of the  flames as I watched them float out toward us. I paused. The roar I'd  been hearing grew louder, and then, without warning, a massive  motorcycle came barreling out of the fire.

My eyes snapped  back to the floating shield, where I noticed that the chain had fallen  out of the blue guy's chest as the two of them were jostled around  inside. Fisher had apparently taken that opportunity to go fully  incorporeal and take the rock woman with him, driving his bike full  speed through the flame and then through CARK as he roared across the  chamber and pulled into a sharp turn cutting off the exit to the cavern  as the rock woman returned to solidity and swung wide into the wall with  a teeth rattling crash.

I bellowed to Cark. "Defense!"  And our pyrokinetic condensed the massive cloud of flame covering the  room into a tight spherical shield around us. It was MUCH hotter than  the dispersed flames and much better for keeping the bastards off us,  though it was also a huge risk. Callie was still out sneaking by them, I  could only hope that the sphere was distracting enough to pull focus  while I came up with another plan. These guys were WAY too strong to  fight head on.

We'd outnumbered The Wavestriders like four  times over counting the wolves, but these people were all as strong and  the last fight had proven in no uncertain terms there was no way we  stacked up this early. We needed to fight smarter, not harder.  Unfortunately Cark was clearly exerting massive amounts of effort to  keep all that fire packed down so tight. His face was bright red and  dripping sweat, and if Jessie hadn't been here topping him up I doubt he  could have even managed this.

I was  kind of freaking out. We were trapped in here while a whole bunch of  powerful G rankers were getting ready to attack us, my girlfriend was  alone outside with only all the hatred we had just stirred up keeping  anyone from looking for her, and I didn't know what to do. I spent a few  seconds panicking, and then realized it wasn't helping anything and  forced myself to stop. I closed my eyes, breathing deeply, and tried my  best to figure out our next move. We needed to distract them all, and  that meant I needed to see what was going on.

I  looked around at the surprisingly muted dome of blue fire and noticed a  few things. First, Cark was literally pinning the heat into place. We  should have been sweating our asses off at least, but I felt basically  nothing. He was straining hard to make sure this shield didn't cook us.  Secondly, he hadn't covered every inch of space, which made sense  because we could still breathe, and being trapped in a dome of flames,  even if you had a way not to get air fried, should be a one way ticket  to suffocation city.

Third, and  lastly, he wasn't going to last much longer, even with Jessie helping.  She could top up his energy, but despite a slightly euphoric feeling  when you got charged there was nothing dulling the edge of mental  exhaustion he must be feeling at the moment. "Cark, can you open a small  hole in the top of this thing? I think I have a plan." The straining  pyrokinetic slowly turned his head to stare at me, shaking with effort,  and nodded slowly and tightly. Almost too subtly to be noticed a window  opened up on top of the dome. Not big enough to be noticed from the  ground, but just enough for me to see.

I  stared up at the ceiling of the cavern silently. The whole thing I'd  gone through getting in here was easily one of the most uncomfortable  things to ever happen to me, but it was also a new direction for my  abilities. DS Mastery especially had a lot of ways to be used other than  direct confrontation. I had options for applying my skills, not just by  altering their nature, but by taking advantage of it. I scanned around  the top of the chamber for a minute or two before finally finding what I  was looking for.

I'd  needed a specific spot, somewhere near enough to the enemy to implicate  them and cause chaos, but far enough that Callie wouldn't be in any  danger, and I found the perfect place. Once I did, I cast Sucking Mud  again, but not on the ground this time. At least not the ground we were  standing on. I leveraged my skill up and created a plane of liquid stone  right through the base of a hanging stalactite a hundred or so feet up.  We'd been slowly moving down since we got here, and this chamber was  huge.

The H rank rock wouldn't kill  our competitors, but it wouldn't be fun. I didn't even need to flex the  skill, all I had to do was create the weakness in the stone and the  incredible weight of the stalactite did the rest. The huge spear of  stone came barreling down into the chamber, smashing into the ground  with the speed of a charging bull elephant, and a massive boom shook the  cavern as it hit. I barely kept my feet as it made contact, but I  couldn't help but grin. Let's see them ignore THAT.

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