NOVEL WEB 405. Giant Puppet Monster Man
The hand, formed of human-sized puppets, swept toward Ike and Mag, while Wisp skittered over the monster's back, pulling puppets off the giant Brightbriar puppet, slowly tearing it apart. Strangely, the puppets didn't fight back much after Wisp pulled them off, struggling a little as she dropped them away—nothing compared to the autonomy and combat power of a standalone puppet. Ike noticed, but simply tucked the fact in the back of his head. It did make sense to him that the puppets, when all controlled by Brightbriar, would have less personal power, but it was a dramatic decrease compared to basic puppets.
Mag beat his wings hard, but he couldn't fly fast enough. The enormous hand closed in on them, the faces of the puppets enraged, furious at the two of them.
Ike glanced up at Mag. He looked at the hand, closing in on them at speed. He could heal, with his powerful recovery skills, but Mag was a bird, and a bird who didn't handle pain well and was used to hanging back at the rear of the fight at that. If they both got hit, Mag was the one who would be worse harmed.
The choice was easy. He released Mag.
Freed of his burden, Mag burst upward. He'd been beating his wings hard enough to carry himself and Ike, and without Ike's weight, he escaped the hand with ease. Ike, on the other hand, dropped straight into the giant puppet monster's palm, the puppets reaching out to grab him out of the air.
"Ike!" Mag shouted.
This is going to hurt…wait, hold on. As he dropped, Ike's adventures passed before his eyes, and a giant, fat, grub-like mother centipede appeared in his mind's eye. His eyes widened, and he called forth that skill for the first time in a long time, as his entire body went soft and flexible. He impacted the monster's palm and bounced off, all but undamaged by the contact.
He grinned. Good thing he'd remembered that skill. It hadn't hurt at all!
The puppets grabbed him and dragged him in, trying to subsume him into the palm. Ike cancelled the skill, releasing the softness. The leftover relaxation and unwillingness to move clung to his mind, but with some effort and a little adrenaline as the puppets cut off the sunlight, he broke free and smashed outward, breaking puppet limbs as he climbed free of its palm. The hand curled toward him, puppet-people fingers closing in. Ike bashed out with the Hungry Sword, smashing the puppets back as he clambered out of the inside of the monster's hand. Their tough bodies resisted his hits, but just like he'd noticed with Wisp tearing them off the monster's back, the puppets didn't fight back at the same ferocity that they did one-on-one. He fought his way to the surface of the hand, only for the puppet-monster to turn its hand over, trying to knock him off.
"Not today," Ike muttered. He grabbed onto the puppets' bodies and clambered over them, not climbing to the back of the hand, but clambering diagonally, as Wisp would, to the back of the monster's wrist. As the monster's arm turned, he jumped back to his feet and raced up the back of its arm, strangely familiar with running monster arms. The whole time, he kept drawing in aether and mana and pouring it into his spell. The storm darkened overhead, and the aether thickened in the air.
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The puppet monster roared. It slammed its other hand onto its arm, but too slow; Ike had already escaped. Puppets spilled from its hand and from its arm alike, crashing down onto the street below. The mages below had long escaped, so puppets shattered on empty streets and roofs, but injured no one. Ike hurtled toward its head, building the mana the whole time. As he reached its head, he lashed out with the scepter, forming the magic like a sword's blade and slashing at the thing's throat. A compressed whirlwind shot out, flattened to almost two-dimensional but still full of all the wrath and power of a full-sized, fully-charged whirlwind. The puppets howled to no avail, opposing it, but powerless to stop it. It scythed through the puppet-monster's thick neck, slashing many puppets into pieces as it passed. The surviving puppets reached for one another, trying to reattach its neck, but Ike's eyes flashed, and a grin appeared on his face. He spun the scepter in a circle, and the flattened whirlwind, which had been soaring away from him, turned around and flew back toward him again. As it about-faced, it burst into its full size, no longer suppressed into a disk. The supercharged whirlwind, raging with the Prince's skill's power, Ike's Storm Clad, and—no, but it was true: Accais's wind as well, slammed into the puppet monster.
Ike blinked. He looked internally. Accais stood forward, silver hair hanging over his shoulder. He shook his head. He'd seen what Ike had seen, the flashback Ike had witnessed, and he'd made his own decision. He would oppose Brightbriar, too.
Ike nodded. Didn't really expect that. The flashback hadn't made that much of an impression on him, but then, he'd already thought Brightbriar was a bastard. If he hadn't already held Brightbriar in the lowest regard, then it might have changed his opinion, too. As it was, it didn't do anything for him, but thinking back on it, he did get it being a game-changer for someone who'd already been scrapped by Brightbriar once.
The whirlwind struck the puppet monster and tore into it, ripping puppets out of the body. Behind it, Wisp yelped and bailed to a nearby ceiling, and Ike grimaced. "Sorry!"
"Warn me next time!" she complained, uninjured but annoyed.
Burrowing into the body, the whirlwind dug deeper into the monster, throwing puppets in all directions. It burst apart, dissolving into its component bits. Puppets rained down from the sky, crashing onto the ground all around. Ike hopped free as the monster dissolved, and Mag swooped down and grabbed him, hoisting him over to Wisp's roof.
"Is that it? Did we kill him?" Wisp asked.
"I hope so," Ike muttered, looking at the puppet carnage. Limbs went every direction, and black goo flowed like blood in the streets. He lifted his hand, calling down lightning from the sky, and pointed it into the goo, igniting it. Thick black smoke rolled up, full of mana.
With a hideous yowl, a Brightbriar puppet emerged from the crumbling monster. It leaped up and lunged at Ike, hurtling toward him.
Ike whirled his sword and met his charge. Brightbriar pressed against him, glaring into his eyes. "I'll start over. I'll start over. I can still—"
Ike smashed his head off. The Hungry Sword caught it in its teeth, chewing against it, then slammed its jaws shut. Porcelain and black goo shot everywhere. "Nope."