NOVEL WEB 375. Make It!
Ike latched onto the door handle and yanked the door wide. The light still poured out. For a split second, hesitation came over him, but he quickly forced it down. Risk-taking was how he got here. They weren't going to defeat Lord Brightbriar without taking a few risks. He steeled himself, and jumped through the golden light.
He burst out into a cliff, hurtling down into a quarry. Sharp rocks jutted up at him from below. A sheer rock wall dropped away behind him, and the other three sides opened up to empty air.
Wisp laughed uproariously. Threads shot out from Ike's body and clung to the sheer rock wall. They swung back against it, bouncing to a halt.
"It was a good thought," Ike defended himself, as he hung there.
"It sure was a thought," Wisp agreed.
Overhead, a door creaked shut. They dangled there in the quarry, totally unable to do anything about it. Ike craned his head up in time to watch the door fade into the rock, its features smoothing into rock, its colors fading away. The crack around the door was the last to go, vanishing with a final sort of clunk.
"You know, on second thought, there were no more puppets coming out from the door when I got there," Ike commented.
"You know, that's so interesting," Wisp agreed. "You know, now that I think about it, it's never a good idea to hop blindly into doors that the enemy controls."
"You know, I think we should stop thinking," Ike grumbled.
Mag hopped off Ike's shoulder and took large bird form. He gripped onto Ike by the armpits and flapped up into the sky. As they came to the limits of Wisp's thread, Wisp released the threads from the wall and reeled them in. They vanished somewhere on her tiny spider body, which Ike had a sneaking suspicion was her mouth. Mag flapped hard and carried them up into the sky, up to the edge of the cliff. There, Ike stepped onto the edge of the quarry, then hopped up into the tallest tree he could find nearby to take stock of his surroundings.
As expected, he wasn't far from the city. Wizard's Towers could only reach so far, even at maximum energy invest, and a Moving Tower had to take more energy, since it was more mobile than an ordinary tower. The city loomed in the near distance, standing tall over the forest around them.
"Well, nothing for it," Ike muttered. He kicked off the tree and ran back to the city.
The initiative was now in Brightbriar's hands. It was annoying, but there was nothing for it. He hadn't recognized Scar's puppet as the fake she was, so now Brightbriar knew everything. He knew that Ike was aware of being part of the higher being, he knew which other fragments Ike had absorbed. He even knew that Ike was thinking about Rosamund, and wondering if she was part of his plan. Ike grimaced, frustrated. He'd handed all his information over to the enemy, and gained little from it.
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Not nothing, though. He knew Brightbriar could replicate people's faces and voices perfectly, now—he'd be on alert in the future. Brightbriar had played that hand, and Ike would now be aware of it forever. He also knew that Brightbriar had an ally with a Wizard's Tower in the city, and a moving one, at that, something he might be able to exploit. He even knew one of the entrances, and knew what it looked like out the window of another piece's window. Wisp was right that expecting to charge through the enemy's doors and have the advantage was stupid, but if he got close to one of those locations, he could memorize the mana signature of the tower, then use that to discover other locations of Brightbriar's ally's tower. He'd given up a lot, yes, but Brightbriar had given up a lot to get that information out of him, whether Brightbriar realized it or not. He intended to capitalize on every piece of it that he could.
It was a relatively short run back to the capital, and back inside. Wisp and Mag transformed again to pass through the gate, neither of them willing to take the chance on encountering another Som, even if beasts were largely allowed. Ike also vetoed Wisp's suggestion that she walk through to try it, since she was a happy man-eater, and if they had any method to sense it, they'd definitely sense it, and though Mag didn't offer, he also would have vetoed that; Mag also had human blood on his hands, whether he ate them or not, and although humans killed humans every day, they were still hypocritical enough to potentially stop beasts that had killed humans, while letting human-killing humans through with no problem.
In any case, their second time through the gates was far less eventful than their first pass. One of the guards squinted at them a little, confused, perhaps as someone who remembered them coming through the first time, but never leaving again, but Ike just breezed past with confidence, and no one questioned them. He extended his aether again, searching for Scar's mana. This time, he kept it extended until he saw her, and scanned her twice just to be safe.
Scar nodded at him. "I thought I sensed you earlier. How's it going, Ike?"
"I just got got by Brightbriar," Ike complained. He nodded at her. "He made a puppet that looked just like you, then ran it past me just before I ran into you. I fell for it. Told it everything."
Scar winced. "Yikes."
"Yeah, no kidding." Ike sighed deeply. He took his bandanna off, ran his hair back, and tied it back again. "But I didn't get got for nothing. Come this way." He started to walk off, then paused. He looked back.
"What?" Scar asked.
"You remember Vi? Your bestie?"
Scar wrinkled her nose. "Hardly. That bitch didn't even do her part in the trial."
Ike nodded. "Yep. That's more like it."
She tilted her head. "He didn't know about what happened in the trial?"
"Didn't seem to. Though, considering who made the trial, that tracks," Ike said. The King made the trial, and he hated Brightbriar more than anyone, maybe even more than Ike himself. He would have made every effort to exclude Brightbriar from his trial zone, to the extent of something as petty as preventing all Brightbriar's surveillance methods from entering.
"Who made the trial?" Scar asked.
Ike opened his mouth, then shut it. "Listen, let me show you something first, then we'll talk. If I talk at all. I just had a bad experience, and I don't want to do it twice."
"Right. Everyone's been gotten by Brightbriar at least once. I don't hold it against you," Scar agreed, nodding.
Ike nodded back and led her on, retracing his steps. Time to see if he could do anything to get back at Brightbriar.