The Ruler of Ruin

“What is an Orebiter?” I asked Chrys when the small door we’d used to leave the safety of Subterra sealed shut behind us. We had gone from well hewn stone tunnels to the roughly shaped, natural caverns I had been forced to stumble through before reaching Schieferon. Thanks to the light stone Chrys held I had enough light to see by, but the uneven terrain, outcroppings, pillars, columns, holes, shelves, and other formations meant there were a lot of shadows and ambush spots to watch. I felt my paranoia, already stoked by Arx Maxima, ratchet up even higher.

The air waivered around my right hand, and Delirium of Ruin’s comfortable haft dropped into my right hand. The platinum blade gleamed with a light all its own, and while it didn’t truly help me see any further, holding a weapon of its quality kept my heart-beat from getting even louder in my own head.

“They are flying rodents. Like us Gneisslings they ‘see’ via acute vibratory senses and have a penchant for eating Gneisslings. One on one, they pose no threat to even the weakest of Gneisslings. They are not solitary creatures, however. They hunt in large swarms, the largest swarms can easily number in the hundreds.” While Chrys spoke, she lifted up her free hand and created a cloud of copper, which formed an orbiting cloud of glinting metal around her.

“Hold an attack at the ready, Orebiter’s close distances fast, and rely on their ability to swarm and overwhelm you. The Scavs are known to breed and unleash swarms in proximity to our territory to deter us from exploring the ruins, which they consider their territory. We have waged a silent war with them for the last ten years.” Chrys didn’t stop with the copper cloud that orbited her. Beneath the copper cloud, the air shimmered with multi-colored waves of light, like the reflection of a prism.

“What are these Scavs, anyway?” Until now I’d just gone along with the idea that something out in the tunnels was an enemy of the Gneisslings, and they called them Stalking Scavs. What they were seemed much more relevant out here than it had back in Schieferon.

“They showed up out of nowhere and forced us out of the ruins. We aren’t sure what race they are, they go to great lengths to retrieve or destroy their own fallen. Ambush tactics are their favorite, especially using intermediary creatures to set up an ambush. Ore Biters were hardly a threat before their arrival, their swarms rarely grew larger than a dozen. They’ve bred them to be more lethal to us,” Chrys said, and it marked one of the first times I’d really heard hostility enter the voice of the artisan.

The mystery of it all tickled my fancy, but before I could follow it up with a question I heard a rock fall from the top of the tunnel, impact against the floor, and roll, and the sound of wings.

“They’re here,” Chrys hissed and the copper cloud around her grew denser.

By the time my eyes tracked the location of the noise, a black swarm of wings had already descended and crossed dozens of feet towards us. I immediately summoned standard bolts of black lightning into my left hand and hurled them at the on-coming mass. The currents of black electricity arced through the flying creatures, each bolt killing dozens. The multitude of Orebiters were so thick that the loss of dozens might as well have not happened.

Chrys pulled a vial from her spatial pouch, and it disappeared in a flash of light. Immediately, I felt strength surge through my body, and when I swung Delirium of Ruin in a wide arc to try and slow the swarm the blade cutting through countless Orebiters didn’t even strain my muscles, no matter how many new bodies the bladed tip cut through. Then the bastards were into my proximity, and it felt like someone dumped a bucket of lava through my veins as all the synapses fired in unexpected, previously unknown, ways.

My vision spun around, showing me the OreBiters from different angles while time seemed to stop. Each individual OreBiter had tiny bodies, smaller than the palm of my hand, with black wings that had ominous appendages that gleamed in the light of the sun stone. I had expected an entirely fleshy creature, but they looked to be hewn from obsidian on a more thorough inspection. If I named them, I’d call them obsidian bats, given the remarkable resemblance they had to the flying creatures that filled the night sky in the True World.

With time frozen around me, I could see the trajectory the swarm would take, and where to be if I didn’t want to get hurt. My vision filled with warning paths, places I absolutely shouldn’t be, and places I needed to be to avoid injury. Intuitively, I knew this wasn’t a guide to win the fight, and following the paths I saw would only result in me being uninjured. It was up to me to figure out how to incorporate attacks into the contortionist pathways the newly awakened sense indicated.

“Sense Danger is the basic version of this ability that my chosen used to possess. I have upgraded it to Instincts of the Gossamyr for you. Part intuition, part precognition, part hyper-evasion, part threat identification, part hyper-sense, combined with my years of data gathering on the Gossamyr. The interface with the Mask of Azazel is a work in progress. Trust your instincts before the visualization, take the small movements instead of the large. You are the first to bear an ability of this magnitude. Make me proud.” Arx Maxima bragged up the coalesced power of Instincts of the Gossamyr, my second ability of the Envoy concept bound to my strength attribute.

The pressures of imbalance within me slackened, time unfroze. I shifted this way and that, each tiny move of my body allowed me to pre-emptively avoid a blow or a bite from the swarm, and let me swing Delirium of Ruin in quick arcing slashes between half-spinning steps. Every opportunity I had use only one hand to follow through with a swing, I unleashed another blast of black lightning from my left hand, and when the swarm threatened to overwhelm me, I used Modify Vector to launch the leading OreBiter straight into its companions.

I would love to say that I danced through the entire swarm like a spear master of legend, a graceful figure smiting my enemies with lightning and spear. Instead, even with Modify Vector, the hundreds of enemies threatened to overwhelm me, until the copper cloud around Chrys drifted into their midst.

One after another, dozens, then hundreds, of OreBiters fell to the ground in piles. While I darted around like an idiot, killing ten or twenty, Chrys entrapped the entire clump of enemies inside a cloud.

“Hit the rod with lightning!” Chrys commanded as a rod of copper formed in the midst of the biggest clump. I obliged, dumping as much energy into Bedlam Bolt as I could muster. A one-hundred energy blast of electricity shot from my hand into the copper and bat after bat died, as the arcs of power jumped through the conductive cloud of metal, then blasted out the rear of the swarm to obliterate a few feet of the tunnel. Crispy bits of flesh and stone littered the ground, and Chrys laughed happily.

“I’m glad we have a winning double-attack off the bat,” Chrys said between laughs, obviously amused at her own pun.

I took in the heap of corpses and thrust Delirium of Ruin repeatedly to finish off stragglers. Nothing triggered my new danger sense, but I still felt wary.

“Your metal cloud does pair very well with my lightning. How big of a cloud can you make?” I envisioned an entire tunnel filled with a copper laden cloud, black lightning flowing through it in a deluge of death.

A red dot appeared on one of the crystal adornments on Chrys’s forehead. A second appeared, tracking quickly to almost touch the first. When the third appeared, my stomach churned and I lifted the blade of Delirium of Ruin as swiftly as I could. The blade sliced through the air, sliced a foot long metal rod in half, and I negated its movement with Modify Vector to allow me to slap the first half of the projectile out of the air and into the ground with a quick reverse motion of the spear.

“Scavs,” Chrys said darkly, but unshaken.

“Ambush tactics,” I muttered. “More like assassins.”

“The hunt is on. Once engaged, they won’t retreat unless we kill them, or we withdraw back to the safety of Schieferon. They are tenacious hunters, and as difficult to remove as a fungus.” Chrys pulled the remainder of her copper cloud back around her, and reinforced the presence of copper in the aura, my lightning had diminished it.

I took a deep breath and eyed the over-abundance of dark recesses, cubbies, dead ends, columns, and countless hidey-holes. Dealing with an assassin in this environment would be a nightmare, dealing with an unknown number of enemies who used guerilla tactics was anxiety inducing, but I had a counter to their sneak attacks.

“Then I guess we make sure to kill them all, and don’t let our guard down,” I answered with a grin to show my resolve. Apparently, the grin must have looked quite grim, because Chrys grunted dourly. Not for the first time, I rued my inability to look in a mirror. How was I supposed to learn to not be a terrifying dragon-man when I had no way to see myself in action?

Thus, we began a game of cat-and-mouse. We made cautious progress through the tunnel, and periodically we had to block projectiles. Then came the traps, which radiated a sense of danger so strong I didn’t think I would fall for one even if I had been sleepwalking. Trip wires. Pit falls. Drop chutes. I laughed at the dull glint of a bear trap concealed in thin strips of webbing. It seemed laughable that anyone would fall for any of these, and even without a danger sense, Chrys spotted many of them before I did.

How could we kill them if they kept hiding from us?

After the seventh time I blocked a projectile in mid-air, Chrys cackled and whispered under her breath, “I’ve got you now.”

Only Chrys didn’t seem to have anything. We continued on our way, but I quickly noticed she expanded her copper cloud along the floor of the cave ahead of us. Her casual, yet sneaky, dispersion of her cloud continued for minutes until suddenly the cloud rose from the ground to person height.

I shot it with a Bedlam Bolt immediately, and the figure of a humanoid appeared in the copper cloud, its strange armor and helmet sparking and sizzling, before the creature fell over.

“Quickly!” Chrys demanded, and we jaunted up to the prone, smoking figure.

Up close, the figure wore a mixture of leather and chain armor. Its entire head was hidden behind metal sphere of a helmet. Only by looking at the body could you tell which part of its head was forward or back, and the armor had been crafted to look quite similar backward and forward too. Even without being invisible, the creatures armor had some form of a camouflage effect that matched the colors and textures of the surroundings.

Chrys bent down to take its weapons, and I had to step forward and swing Delirium of Ruin. With a quick thrust I severed most of its right shoulder and pinned the creature to the ground. The cylinder it had been about to throw at Chrys dropped to the ground, a red light blinked on it once. My stomach lurched. The light blinked again. I pulled Chrys back and a wall rose between us and the Scav.

BOOOM.

Flames danced along the sides of my EternaStone wall, but nothing pierced through the wall itself. When we looked, the charred corpse of the Stalking Scav lay before the wall, most of its armor and flesh burned away by the fiery explosion.

“Thanks,” Chrys said and patted my shoulder.

“These guys are crazy. You didn’t mention that they’ll happily die to kill you too.” I stared at the smoldering, exploded corpse and wondered how fanatical these Scavs were, and what possibly drove them to be this way.

I felt danger, and saw multiple red dots converging towards Chrys’s forehead.