BT IV - Chapter 36

Wind whipped past Micah’s face as he raced through the air.  The rest of the team was flying behind him, near enough that he could help them if necessary, but far enough away for Micah to fight freely.  Already a half dozen of the bird monsters and a single brensen had tried to attack them, but the combined ranged attacks of the entire group was more than enough to make short work of the monsters.

Forgotten on the castle walls were pointing at Micah’s team.  He could see their mouths moving, but couldn’t make out any of what they were saying as they ran back and forth.  It was clear that they were preparing some sort of defenses, but at least for now Micah had an opening.

A twitch of his scepter sent the two flying spears streaking to his right.  A couple of the forgotten were beginning to summon balls of green flames that they were throwing into the air.  The attacks moved much slower than the ordinary fire bolts, but that just made Micah more wary of them.

He dodged to the right, wholly unsurprised when the balls of energy curved through the air to track him.  A dive and a couple quick veering turns later and the magic lost track of him, instead floating off into empty space and detonating in explosions that sent a gust of ice cold wind streaking out in every direction.

By the time he had steadied himself, the forgotten had managed to gather up the energy to toss another 3 globs of fire in his general direction.  A hint of a frown creased Micah’s face as he cast Haste on himself.

As best he could tell, the defenders had the ability to attack faster than he could exhaust the energy behind their tracking abilities.  That meant that simply racing back and forth to dodge the balls of fire wasn’t an option.  He might eventually be able to run the forgotten out of power, but the Flight spells and the amulets protecting his team would run out in another 10 or so minutes.

Micah bit his lower lip, reversing his course in an eyeblink as he dove toward the castle wall and approaching attacks once more.  He tightened his grip on the scepter with his left hand and willed his body into a tight zig zag.   The spheres tried to track him, but they couldn’t keep up with the hairpin turns and dodges, allowing Micah to open up more room between them and him.

Then, both of his spears hit the diamond atop the nearest tower of the castle, punching holes through the tough gemstone and puncturing the core beneath before flying out the other side.  Reality itself seemed to freeze for a fraction of a second, and then the all pervasive stench of Elsewhere lightened slightly.

More importantly, the globs of energy seemed to stutter and grow fainter.  Micah took advantage of that half second to swerve up into the sky, climbing too suddenly and quickly for the attacks to properly track him.

They launched a third volley of attacks just as the second exploded, but it was too late.  Micah’s crystal spears arrived, weaving back and forth with the sharp precision of a sewing needle as they pierced and shredded the 10 to 15 forgotten that had been charging the anti flier attacks.

Then, there was no one on the walls.  They could still hear the sounds of people shouting deeper inside the fortress as well as explosions from the battlefield below as Micah sent the crystal spears toward the next tower crystal, but there was no one left to challenge their arrival.

The team landed on the wall of the castle, touching down on the stone bricks just as a massive wave of energy erupted from the battlefield, blowing most of the guild back up into the air.  Micah looked over the battlements as the rest of his team circled around and came in for another landing.

The Dragon had found the greater daemon that resembled a hairless gorilla.  The creature had destroyed an entire battalion of soldiers in only a minute or so, but now it was sorely overmatched.

Now that the original burst of energy was done, Micah could still feel the aura pouring off of the Dragon from half a league away.  The greater daemon was trying to punch it with grotesque scarred, muscular arms, but the giant lizard was easily fending it off.  Unless something radical changed in the next couple of minutes, there was little doubt in his mind that Gwen would be joining them shortly.

Almost on queue, a responding pulse of sinister energy came from the heart of the fortress.  Micah’s breath caught in the back of his throat, but it was like the rest of the team didn’t even notice.

The Prince was awake.

Micah’s spear claims the second crystal just as dormant enchantments began to activate across the surface of the castle.  His eyes widened as the ghostly image of ritual after ritual, hundreds if not thousands of spellforms, sprang into being accumulating energy as they prepared to unleash their payloads on the unsuspecting world.

“Together!” He shouted, giving the rest of the guild a bare moment of warning before the rituals activated.

He felt Telivern brushing against his arm, followed by a wave of the stag’s confidence.  Then Uncontrolled power erupted all around them as over 50 luoca were summoned at the same time.

Micah didn’t wait, he ignored the thrill of shock and worry from Telivern and began casting Time Slip.  The strange words slipped off of his tongue, squirming unnaturally as they fought against the strange conditions of the Elsewhere field created by the remaining gemstones.

The air was filled with the steady buzz of bug wings as the daemons hovered overhead.  Some of them darted toward the battlefield below, preparing to add more death and chaos to the already dystopian environment.  The rest flew figure eights in the air as if they were looking for something.

Baron Harris and Drekt were shouting orders as he cast the spell.  Frantically organizing the blessed into teams of 4 or 5.  A handful of them could combine to hold a luoca at bay, but outside of Trevor and Drekt themselves, Micah couldn’t count on any of them to actually defeat the daemons.

His spell took hold and Micah felt time slow to a crawl.  He leapt into the air, taking the quickest course toward the nearest daemon.  It moved like it was mired in treacle, trying to flip on its back in mid air and expose its underbelly to him so that it could lash out with all six spike legs at the same time.

Micah twitched slightly to the right, letting a scorpion tail flash past him and thrust forward with his spear.  The first attack hit the daemon’s human head right in between the eyes, shattering the armor plate that was its skull.  The follow ups punched deep into its torso, disrupting its internal structure enough that the creature fell from the sky.

Through his future sight, Micah confirmed that the daemon would ‘die’ and return to Elsewhere before it hit the ground, and he turned to find another target even as he began activating the river kraken summon.

The spirit’s power was hardly impressive compared to a luoca, but what it lacked in explosive power it made up for in bulk.  It likely wouldn’t turn the tide of the battle, but it could help cover his team’s blindspot as they were attacked by the luocas, and given the daemon’s numbers, that was all Micah could do for his friends.

He dodged to the left, letting a luoca’s scorpion tale zip past him.  His spear flashed through the air, striking the spots where the wings connected to the monsters’ sides, shattering the joints and sending it tumbling from the sky.

Micah managed to kill two more daemons with precise, hyperfast pinpoint strikes before the rest seemed to become aware of him, living up to their locust-like nature by swarming toward him.  Quickly, Micah lost track of the fight’s specifics in the ebb and flow of combat.

On the castle wall, his team was fighting 5 of the luocas, not a huge number, but enough to take some pressure off of MIcah as he pushed his body to the limit dodging the wings, feet and tails of two dozen daemons.  Time Slip let him see their attacks before they launched them and move faster than most people could see.  Against an ordinary foe, his precise spear strikes would have crippled or killed all of them in a matter of seconds.  Against the storm of attacks from the luocas, Micah could barely return their blows.

He would twist to the side, avoiding the stab of a scorpion tail only to be forced to twist himself into a corkscrew to avoid a crisscrossing double strike of a second daemon’s wings.  Just as he was preparing his spear for a strike, he was forced to lash out with it in defense parrying 4 attacks at once as one of the locust monsters pounced upon him in the air, all of its legs trying to stab him at the same time.

In the distance, his crystal spears clattered to the ground as Micah lost his focus on them.  As important as it was to eliminate the diamonds generating the destruction aura around the castle, fending off the attacking daemons and surviving was more vital.

His previous attacks had destroyed 2 of the 4 generators, doubling the time his team could survive in the alien energy.  15 minutes wasn’t a lot, but it would have to be enough.  He had done everything he could for the rest of his guild.  At some point, their survival and success would have to rest on their own shoulders.

A luoca fell from the sky.  Then another.  Micah’s body easily resisted the destructive auras put off by the lesser daemons, tempered in the crucible of fighting their larger siblings, but that didn’t make his body resistant to their attacks.

The Maarikava armor managed to turn aside a half dozen blows in 30 seconds.  After all, Time Slip let Micah see a handful of seconds into the future as well as giving him superhuman speed.  Even if there wasn’t enough room in the tightening sphere of chitinous bodies to dodge, the spell would consistently warn him to twist and angle his body in order to best deflect the flurry of oncoming attacks.

It wasn’t enough to protect him fully.  His left forearm ached from blocking a luoca leg without the help of his spear.  Blood streamed down his forehead from a cut left by one of the bug daemon’s wings.  Same with his right hip where another wing found the gap in his armor between his chest plate and greaves.

But despite the pain and confusion, luoca kept dying.  Given the upcoming battle with the Third Prince, Micah was loath to trade wound for wound with the slavering monsters, but their numbers gave him little choice.  Occasionally Leeka or one of the other archers would help a little by shooting an arrow up and injuring one of his attackers, but even with the absurd speed granted by his tier IX spell, he was fighting too many of the monsters at once.

So he kept fighting.  Blood spilled from a half dozen minor wounds and luoca venom pumped through his veins, but the sky grew less crowded with each stab of his spear.  The daemons died hard, but they died nonetheless, and with each locust that fell from the sky, it became easier for him to dodge the grouped attacks of the survivors.

It felt like ages, but barely 2 minutes later, Micah’s chest was pumping as he renewed Time Slip.  There were only 5 of the daemons left, and despite the numbness spreading through his extremities from the 3 times he had been struck but the monster’s tails, the battle was almost in hand.  He just needed to hold out a little longer and-

A blast of energy from the keep in the central fortress almost knocked him from the air.  His head whipped around as Micah watched an old heavy-set man, long gray hair and unkept beard hanging off of his face, stalk out onto one of the tower’s balconies.

The luocas around Micah attacked with renewed vigor, moving faster and striking harder than ever before.  He dodged a pair of wings with some difficulty, a feint with his spear scraping off the underside of the daemon.  While its attention was drawn by the quick attack, Micah swung his scepter in an overhead blow, adding a wave of telekinetic force to the strike and crushing the monster’s head.

All the while, the man stared up at him, glaring with baleful eyes.

Micah tried to fight down the butterflies in his stomach and focus on the battle.  He recognized Baron Hurden, even from a distance.  The body that the Prince was puppeting was in shambles, its skin sallow and armor dirty.  Really the only thing that had any life to it were its eyes which spat flaming hatred at Micah as he killed the luoca.

“MICAH SILVER.”

The Prince didn’t raise its voice.  It didn’t need to.  Every brick of rock and pane of glass reverberated with its rage echoing the words across the entire castle.

Micah snapped a kick into one the last luoca’s head, spinning the flying creature just enough for his follow up spear thrust to punch through its chitin just under a leg joint.  The weapon’s head erupted from the monster’s other side in a fountain of ichor.

“Prince,” Micah acknowledged, pulling his spear free.  “It has been a while.”

“YOU ESCAPED ONCE PLAYTHING OF THE GODS,” the middle aged man ground out, flecks of bloody spittle coating the body’s mustache and beard. “I WILL NOT MAKE THAT MISTAKE A SECOND TIME.”

It shifted its gaze to the battlefield below, looking through the rocks of the castle as if they were as substantial as a clear mountain stream.

“I SEE THAT YOU HAVE BROUGHT AN OLD FRIEND, HUMAN.  IT IS NOT ENOUGH.  IT IS FAR FROM ENOUGH.  THE TWO OF YOU NEVER HAD THE STRENGTH TO CHALLENGE ME, BUT YOUR SENTIMENTALITY HAS MADE BOTH OF YOU WEAK.”

“Talk is talk,” Micah replied, shifting his head to the side and popping his neck.  “If you’re going to kill me, do it.  Otherwise, stop blabbing and return to the mists.”

It bellowed, a primal sound of madness and rage that reached across the intervening space and smacked Micah with the force of an out of control carriage barreling down a hill.  He grunted, armor taking most of the blow but blown backward nonetheless.

When he steadied himself, the Prince was right in front of him, green wings of flame stretched out to either side as his mouth leaked a pink froth of spit and blood.

Micah got his spear up in time to block the first punch.  There wasn’t any elegance to the attack.  Just enough force to shatter a boulder.

He was knocked back through the air, arm sore from absorbing the blow.  Before Micah could react, the Prince was on him once again, reaching with both clawlike hands for his throat.

The Baron’s hands seemed to move in slow motion, but Micah felt like was trapped.  Time Slip displayed the creature’s future, and any way he dodged it would catch hold of him and begin to wring the life from him.

If he couldn’t dodge the attack, he wouldn’t,  Micah’s spear stabbed into the daemon’s stomach only to be stopped cold by the creature’s ordinary looking armor.  He knew for a fact that the stab he had just used could have killed a luoca in a single blow.  Even a greater daemon would have been grievously injured.  But the Prince simply ignored it, mad eyes focused on Micah’s face as its hands closed around his neck.

His bones creaked under the pressure.  Whatever the Prince had done to the body it was using, it was strong beyond belief.  Frantically, he cast Infest, unsure if the spell would even work on a being like the Third Prince.

For a millisecond, a smile blossomed on Micah’s face as the spell took hold, planting the seeds of a terrible parasite in the monster’s decaying body.

Then, even as the spell took hold, Micah’s collarbone cracked, the daemon’s talon-like fingers punching through the Maarikava scales and into his flesh.  Icy flames burst from the Prince’s fingertips ravaging Micah’s flesh as it entered his veins and began to work its way backward toward his heart.

He could see the future.  In maybe 2 seconds, the corrosive, frigid flames would find Micah’s core and assault his soul.  After that he would be able to hold out for a short while, seconds but not minutes, before the fire inexorably erased everything that he ever was.

An arrow, glittering and beautiful, zipped through the air and struck the Prince in the forearm.  Somehow, where Micah’s attacks had been ignored entirely, it barely penetrated the entity’s armor and drew a single drop of tar-like blood.  It welled up, all too slowly before falling ponderously from the wound.

Micah slammed his scepter into the daemon’s chest, using the artifact’s telekinetic might to throw his assailant away from him in its moment of pain and confusion.

Scales sprayed from his back as the Prince’s fingers were ripped free, destroying his armor in the process, but with no one feeding the ice cold soul flame, Micah began to rapidly overwhelm the invader.

Below he saw his companions looking up at him.  Ravi with pleading eyes, Telivern with quiet confidence.  Eris and Esther with a mixture of worry and hope.  He could feel the weight of their hopes and expectations settling on him.

Meanwhile, Leeka was terrified, bow in hand as she reached for the second of the two crystal arrows he had forged for her beneath Sandrovok’s palace.  Drekt, Trevor and the Kraken fought on, working together to bring down the final remaining luoca that assaulted their diminished group.

Micah didn’t have time to count the dead, but at least a third of the people he had brought to the castle were down.  Dying to buy him time because they believed in him.  They knew that they couldn’t fight the Third Prince, but they still put their bodies and souls on the line so that Micah could have his best shot against the abomination.

He wasn’t allowed to die here.  He wasn’t fighting for just himself.  This battle was for everyone.

“She did it!”  Baron Harris yelled, pointing with his sword at the drop of blood falling toward the castle floor.  “If it bleeds, we can kill it!”

He launched himself into the air, 10 or so scouts using the last of the Flight spells that Micah had cast upon them to charge toward the daemon.

Micah bit his lower lip, swallowing the pain of his flame ravaged flesh.  Regeneration was doing nothing inside the destruction field created by the gemstones.  The daemon inflicted wounds festered, and he swore that he could feel them growing slowly but steadily worse rather than healing.

The Prince turned its sneering visage from Micah and took in the rest of his party, noticing the humans that dared to attack it for the first time.

Harris swung his sword, sending an arc of light at the daemon, but it ignored the attack, letting it shatter on its armor as it extended its left hand.

The humans were moving in slow motion.  Both the Third Prince and Micah were under the influence of magical time dilation, granting their actions speed that bordered on teleportation, but even without the spell, Harris never stood a chance.

A cone of emerald flame launched itself from the Prince’s hand, consuming all of the soldiers before Micah even had a chance to shout out a warning.  It wasn’t just their bodies.  Micah could feel their souls’ connections to the great runes snap as well.

Then the Prince turned back to him, a slightly more serious expression on its face as it summoned a burst of green flame that hardened into an emerald greatsword.

“THIS IS IT GODLING.  TODAY YOU DIE AND NO GAMES WITH THE HOURGLASS OF TIME WILL SAVE YOU.  I WILL HAVE MY DUE.”