Chapter 2.6 - - - - Heroine – Part 1
9th Day, 3rd Moon, LE 2302
(Morning)
Over a long and periodically quite dangerous career, Andrew Martin had honed his skills down to a fine point, becoming the best he could possibly be at protecting his charges. Not the strongest, nor the quickest, nor the smartest, but enough of each. Men and women looked to him when the chips were down and odds were grim for a path back to the light, and he was proud to say that more often than not, he could deliver.
Part of that was knowing which way the winds would turn before they actually shifted.
To survive in this world you didn't just need talent, you needed to be in the right place at the right time. To say that the girl may be Andrew's ticket to greatness would be a criminal understatement, she was likely the only chance he'd ever get. He'd gone all in on this now, made deals and struck bargains that couldn't be taken back and would bury him if they were found out too early.
He'd never have risked it a year ago, too many potential points of failure. But the Truthseekers Guild were a shadow of what they were formerly. They tried to hide it, but prices were up and accuracy was down. The whole Diviner community were reeling from something, which meant opportunity was ripe.
He had to make the girl stronger. At current estimates he'd call her nearly his match, and she likely was holding enough in reserve to tip the scale the rest of the way. But that just made her the big fish in a small pond. The Dungeon was the key, the rarest of opportunities to jumpstart her already massive potential. She didn't even know about Dungeon-Ethea interrelations, which meant the boon she could gain from a successful suppression would be orders of magnitude larger. Maybe enough to make her not quite the small fish in the bigger ocean.
It was a balancing act. He could force her to subjugate it now, but she'd despise him in short order. But Andrew also couldn't take too light a hand and let her stall, the Ministry would be expecting his report on those chosen to receive the boon and he could hardly tell them the truth that it would all go to a single child (and they would know if he tried to lie). So much could go wrong. She could refuse, she could die, she could discard him after the fact anyway. But so much could go right. A name in the history books, perhaps a province and noble house bearing his heraldry in the kingdom she would carve out. The fact that Lilly seemed to possess a genuine kind heart was just icing on the cake.
He might even be able to win her hand… but best not to aim too high and get burnt by his ambition. He'd try to push mentorship to love, but it was more important to simply be within her inner circle.
"Most would call me mad," Andrew scoffed to himself. 'Perhaps I am. But if I didn't take this chance, I'd always wonder the rest of my life-'
Andrew ceased his idle musing when his ears picked up a strange deeply uncomfortable sound on the horizon, in the time it took him to stand up from where he'd been seated, the sound had grown from a low distant hum to a screeching thundercrack that stabbed painfully at both body and mind.
Crrreaaaowowwww !!!SMASH!!!
The sound that warbled throughout the entire encampment pierced deeper than mere skin. Andrew felt his {Bulwark} push back against the terrible tearing noise amidst the cries of the men around the camp who lacked such protection. {Man at the Front} told him all the new-years boys were bleeding from their ears and eyes.
Andrew was never without his armour when necessary, and so was armed and outside his tent within seconds. What greeted him was a sight alien beyond imagining.
Violet hues that drew the eye and beckoned madness set against a black darkness that ate existence itself. Tendrils and sharp shapes cutting and thrashing with technicolour displays of savage fury against a cold and cruel shadowed shroud.
Men screamed, some from what they saw, others still lost in different nightmares of the mind brought on by the cries that had announced the spirits' arrival.
Two spirits had crashed into the centre of the camp a short distance away, in the mere seconds since they'd arrived they were already at the centre of maelstrom of carnage. Shredded tents and people lay along the ground or floated in the air, some bodies distorted by wild and foreign magics into inhuman textures and shapes. Parts of the air itself thrummed with deadly intent, only sometimes giving away the danger that lurked there with a visible sign, usually from the dead bodies floating there.
In moments like this, lesser men cowed. Captain Andrew Martin was not a lesser man.
"To Arms!" he bellowed out over the chaotic din, his {Lion's Roar} pressing out in a wave and filling him with the knowledge that twenty-nine men nearby held their wits enough to aid him.
If he'd had more time, the Captain would have had any man beneath his twentieth expansion without some form of long-range capacity pull back, the fight was clearly beyond them. But the flailing mass of discordant whips and spires of energy were warning enough to stay away and he needed to step forward to soak the creatures' more debilitating effects before they carved a greater toll of lives through the camp.
So Andrew surged forward in strong leaping bounds that his enhanced body allowed him, the power of a charge building with his momentum. He swallowed down the fear that tried to rise as more of his vision became consumed by the roiling volume of impossible colours and gaps in reality that crashed against each other, ready to pay blood for blood.
The world made less sense the closer he grew, distances grew ill-defined, directions not entirely straightforward. But Andrew was no mere fledgling fighter, he was an implement of the Pithe. His instincts transcended base perception and logic, his strikes could fell the inviolable and assault the unassailable.
He crashed into the melee with the force of a horse-drawn carriage. His blade ignited in red shimmering fury and lashed out, severing a black shrouded tendril that was trying to flay a man apart.
- - -
Everything went a bit hazy after that. The Black creature, it was the bad one. Andrew couldn't explain how he knew. He'd certainly have attacked the Purple thing if he'd run into it in any other situation, but the Black one was so obviously worse.
Thinking was hard. Doing was hard. His body moved as he had trained it to, the magics within his armour, blade and shield working in concert with both his personal and support Pithe powers. Tovak, Moll, Garius, Basil and others joined him in short order, but it was hard to track them. Battles usually made more sense, but Andrew felt like a dancing walking along the tightrope of instincts the Pithe granted him. He could not remember how he fought, where he swung, what he deflected, he merely moved as a man a single slip away from death.
That was not an exaggeration, he nearly died a number of times, the Black thing could move faster than the eye could see. The only reason he and his men were not immediately eviscerated was the Purple thing's consistent interference when the Black thing tried to strike out.
Pithe, Mana, Essence and Oath were all thrown at the dark being, any man who chose to fight clearly felt its innate wrongness as he did. It was their duty as living beings to fight it, they knew this deeper than any man could articulate with words. Spells and abilities flew out, met by strange and unexplainable barriers that seemed different every time, but sometimes were broke through and made the terrible creature shriek in a way that left any unconscious man nearby convulsing and seizing.
Near the start, he'd thought they were winning. But it was all a lie.
Moll made the mistake of thinking his defence greater than the Black when a great mass of it surged outward, Andrew witnessed everything above the Watchman's abdomen fall apart like wet mulched clay when the darkness receded. Garius thought himself fast enough to dart in and out quickly with his fist of leeching ice, only his legs up to knees made it back. Tovak was saved by the Purple when the Black tried to sever his head, but lowered his guard and was bisected horizontally through the stomach.
More fighting, more dying. But that was not the worst of it. Sometimes when the Black felled a man its cruel tendrils would reach inside, ripping a screaming ethereal shape from within and stabbing it into the Purple. The Purple convulsed, shivered and tore slightly open each time the Black struck it this way, seemingly possessing no counter of its own.
More than once Andrew had to put his own men down. Those slain by the Black did not stay dead, but rose again wielding strange and deadly power. Even a cut to a still living man was enough for them to flail about, die and rise again serving a new master. Brave by foolish souls kept joining the fray hoping to help, but in the end more often than not it was Andrew himself that had to put them down. The ones with hollow lifeless eyes were the easiest, the ones that bludged and seemed to scream with agony while they tried to kill their former Captain were the worst.
Eventually, he felt he was alone. The others had either fled or fallen, the world had grown dim as his senses were drawn further and further taut. There was simply the Black's, the Purple's and his resolve dancing around each other.
Fighting had been a mistake, Andrew could see that now. The Black spirit had been strong enough to force the confrontation here, and the reason it had was now clear. For all their striving, his comrades had only served to further empower it. It had been a near thing, but the Purple grew weaker and more tattered with each strike of the Black's undoing nature and Andrew would be no match nor help without the allied Spirit's intervention. To turn his back now would simply be to expose himself and be struck down, his very soul turned into another barb to be stuck into the Purple. He fought because the only other option was to die, knowing that in the end the result would be the same.
Eventually the inevitable happened and the Black was able to manoeuvre around both his own guard and the Purple's, a single cruel tendril dragging across his forearm. In that moment Andrew understood the true depth of his failure, for what he felt was far worse than pain, it was Remaking. The very nature of his arm began to rebel, filled with the strength of a pure Abyss, a denial of the laws that bound reality, thick grey splotches that moved like liquid yet shattered like glass spread up through the arm as he desperately parried back further attempts from the Black. Pain worse than any he had every felt before yet still somehow growing worse every moment, wracking and pulsing along the full length of his body seeking to break his mind before his body could fall.
It was down to the final seconds now, Andrew forced the raw Resonance of the Pithe into his arm to hold off the infection of unreality, so much Pithe that it would have detonated his original flesh and blown apart the rest of his body too, yet now it only served to barely restrain the remoulding mass. He knew that in mere moments he would cease to be, a cold damp slithering feeling slowly flowing through his blood toward his heart from within. The Black was simply too powerful, an unrivalled being.
And then… it was gone.
Daylight shone through the camp once more, torn bodies and tents clearly illuminated where they lay strewn about. The last few shreds of the Black were torn apart by the Purple, in vicious glee.
Reearrrr!!!
Andrew collapsed to his knees as the exhaustion began to take hold, his mind returning to him free from the dark Spirit's corroding influence. The Purple one could slay him now with ease if it so wished, he was utterly spent. It needn't bother though, the corruption up his arm had slowed significantly with the banishment of the dark Spirit, but he was unable to do anything to stop it. The world started to go dark around his eyes as even the {Bulwark} could not hold his failing form together any longer under the infestation's crippling weight.
The purple Spirit looked upon Andrew, he did not know how he knew, but it was looking right at him. It was hurt, shedding large sloughs of itself into the air as other chunks fragmented and fizzled out of reality. One of its tendrils lashed out toward him. Andrew closed his eyes in acceptance. When he'd seen the two beings fighting, he'd felt it was somehow his cosmic duty to help.
A trick of the mind I guess, some manipulation from the Purple. I was fooled twice-over.
Andrew expected release. No more striving, no more trying, he was ready.
He waited for the cold freedom of death to claim him… …
…. except it didn't, he was still breathing.
Andrew opened his eyes, seeing the speck of the purple Spirit disappearing over the horizon toward the woods. He felt light, he felt calm, the weight of the corruption lifted.
Almost afraid to look, Andrew took a breath and raised his arm in front of his eyes. What he saw made him nearly choke. His entire left arm was a moving mass of grey and black fractal textures and shapes, no two alike. It drank in air and light, or sometimes gave them out, sometimes it felt the weight of gravity, other times it barely possessed mass at all.
"Captain…" one of the 'bodies' said. Tovak, he was missing everything from the waist down.
Andrew looked at his fallen comrade, feeling surprise as his own arm shifted back to regular flesh. Tovak's breathing was ragged, broken by weak wet coughs, "…why…?" before ceasing entirely. Tovak's eyes lay open and still, his face frozen in rictus. His final question, unanswered.
Andrew was kneeling in a clearing not of the Watch's making, but simply the space cleared when tents, men and soil alike were blown away by the vicious battle. It was hard to count the dead, but {Man at the Front} told the Captain he was but one of four to survive who had challenged the creature. Himself, Basil, Yola and Kylical. At least thirty partial bodies lay along the ground, fused into tents or simply suspended in the air as the blood drained from them unto the ground.
The Captain did what he had done too many times to count before. Let children and wives mourn, he was a fighter. He took the weakness of grief and pushed it beneath the {Lion's Paw}, right now the Watch needed a leader.
Andrew stood up, the sounds of more Watchmen returning in the aftermath growing closer. He looked once more at his arm, by an unnatural instinct willing it to turn to dark-steel like his armour, which it did in an inobservable instant. A boon from the purple Spirit, it would seem, a curse turned blessing.
He looked once more at Tovak's body along the ground. The word 'Why' ringing through his head. "I don't know, Watchman," he told the dead man, "but I intend to find out."
The weakness and unsteadiness left his legs as he felt Yola's influence negotiate through his {Bulwark} and come over him. He turned a grateful smile toward the woman, who nursed an arm severed at the elbow. He ignored the grimace that briefly crossed her face as she looked at Tovak. Andrew did not know if Yola knew the dead man had been planning to court her in the coming Gaia, it would have been seven years since Tovak's first wives passing and five years since Yola's own widowing. If the woman hadn't known, he certainly wouldn't tell her now.
"What now?" Yola asked, looking back at her Captain, voice a little unsteady.
Andrew turned his eyes in the direction of the Silas home, where the sounds had first come from.
Blood for blood, it was time for some answers.
