Splinter Angel: Book 1, page 24
Nobody argued.
Ten minutes later, they found the demon. It was some kind of bovine, Ana thought. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. When they got close enough for her Inspect Skill to work, though, it showed as a [Possessed Aurochs (Threat: Extreme)]. The thing was pacing around the foot of a relatively thin but massively tall tree, the ground churned to mud and the bark and outer layers of wood smashed to Splinters from the attacks the demon launched at it with horns and hooves.
“Shit,” Kaira hissed. “Lethal to me. Petra?”
“Considerable,” Petra answered.
“High end of Lethal, then. 21 or 22. Don’t know what in all the hells that thing is doing this far north. We should—”
“In the tree!” Rayni said urgently, interrupting her.
Everyone looked up. High up, slumped over some branches and looking like they were barely hanging on, was a figure, unidentifiable and covered in a filthy, white cloak. Every time the demon struck the tree, the entire trunk shuddered, and the figure tightened its grip on its perch.
Kaira’s mouth formed a straight, firm line for a second before she spoke. “I won’t judge any of you who want to pull out. If you don’t want to risk fighting this thing, go. Now. Put as much distance between us as you can, as fast as you can. But the more of us there are, the more likely we’ll be able to take it down without anyone getting hurt.”
No one spoke, and no one moved.
A feral grin split her face. “No? Then, Petra?”
Petra nodded and a moment later there was a notification.
Kaira, Themion Evoker (15), has joined your Party.
“Right. Petra, Messy, Ana. You go in first. Spread out, give us room to shoot between you. Defensive, yeah? Joints and tendons if you get a safe shot. No heroics. Just distract it while we wear it down, and if it charges, try like hell to buy us time to get out of the way. Archers, go for the face if you can, and hope for a lucky shot on the eyes. Deni, joints. Sendra, try to mess with its movement. Everyone ready?”
There was a soft chorus of nervous “Ayes” and “Yeahs”. Deni just swallowed thickly and nodded.
“Right. Melee fighters, when I cast, move in.”
Kaira didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. She immediately stood and started moving her lips soundlessly, her hands held out low and to her sides, and Ana could feel something happening. A stirring in the air around her, as though an invisible current were moving toward Kaira. At the same time, Sendra also began to Shape, eyes closed in focus and one hand held out toward their enemy.
Everyone gave them plenty of room, watching with everything from awe to curiosity as the two finished their Shapings almost simultaneously. Kaira whipped her hands forward, two blindingly bright bolts of energy shooting toward the demon. At the same time, Sendra exclaimed one unintelligible word and brought her hand down in a sweeping motion, and a wide patch of the churned soil around the tree turned dark and soft.
Kaira’s attacks flew true. They slammed into the thing’s hip with twin Whomps, but while they left deep, scorched craters in its putrid flesh, they didn’t have the explosive, penetrating impact that Ana was used to from Kaira’s attacks. But there was no time to think about that. The aurochs rounded on them, and as Petra and Messy began to move, a familiar, welcome, wonderful surge of power filled Ana.
Half drunk on a sense of near invincibility, Ana effortlessly pulled ahead of the others with a wordless yell, covering the hundred feet between them at Olympic speed. Grab the thing’s attention, she thought, that’s what Kaira wants, right? Distract it? Here’s a fucking distraction!
As the demon began a charge, aborted as its feet sank and slipped in the muddy quagmire around it, Ana stepped, twisted, and brought her buckler around in a lightning-quick haymaker, the bronze boss in the center smashing into the demon’s snout. There was a squelching crunch as foul flesh was pulped and bone broke, but Ana had miscalculated.
Oh, shit, was all she had time to think as her action was met by an inevitable reaction. The aurochs’ head moved to the side, and it almost, almost, stumbled. The much lighter Ana, however, hadn’t anchored herself. When her buckler connected, she not only stopped but was thrown backwards slightly as she spun clockwise, doing a quarter turn before hitting the ground. Even in the confusion, her boosted stats gave her the wherewithal to end in a clumsy three-point landing instead of crashing down, which was something, at least. She immediately had to roll out of the way as the demon roared and stomped the ground where she’d landed, hooves sinking half a foot into the soft ground.
“I said, ‘No fucking heroics,’ you maniac!” Kaira screamed, and then the fight was truly on.
INDIVIDUAL SUMMARY
Name: Anastasia Cole
Race: Outsider, Summoned (Human aspect)
Age: 26
Classes: Guardian Angel (6) (Hidden, shown as Companion (6))
Experience: 0/2450
Storage: 2 Shard, 1 Growth Crystal (Minor), 4 Growth Crystal (Medium)
Attributes: Base Multiplier Effective
Strength 18 1.3 23
Endurance 20 1.2 24
Vitality 19 1.3 24
Agility 21 1.1 23
Dexterity 18 1.1 19
Perception 16 1.3 20
Acuity 16 1 16
Willpower 18 1 18
Charisma 21 1 21
Connection 16 1 16
Advancement Points: 0
Abilities:
Hidden Class (Guardian Angel) (Guardian Angel 1)
Guardian Angel (Guardian Angel 1)
Devotion (Guardian Angel 1)
Danger Sense (Special) (Guardian Angel 3)
Companionship (Guardian Angel 5)
Perks:
Iron Body (Unarmed Combat 5)
Skills:
Acting 3
Charm 3
Command 2
Crossbows 1
Defense 2
Inspect 2
Intimidation 4
Long Blades 2
Negotiation 2
Sense Motive 2
Shields 2
Short Blades 3
Unarmed Combat 6
Chapter twenty-four
Cursing herself for her own recklessness, Ana got to her feet, facing the Possessed Aurochs as Messy and Petra closed in. What had gotten into her? Charging in like an idiot wasn’t—
She had no time to chew herself out as the demon began a furious assault on the three women arrayed before it. Unable to gain enough purchase or distance for a proper charge, it instead kicked, stomped, bit, swung its horns — of which it had two extra pairs, sprouting at random angles from its skull — and attempted to gore them. It never let up for a second, its relentless assault keeping all three frontliners on the defensive. But that was fine. It was part of the plan. All they needed to do was to keep the thing distracted and in more or less one place while Kaira killed it.
With that in mind, they also had to make sure to leave openings for the backliners to get their shots in. They formed a lopsided triangle in front of the creature, with Petra in the middle. While they yelled, swung and slashed at it, arrows and bolts came zipping past them, most of them doing little except further enraging the monster. When they even stuck, that was — the thing’s skin was covered in randomly placed plates and spikes of bone, which effectively deflected any arrow that hit them. Despite that, two minutes in, its head, neck, and shoulders were festooned with arrows and pocked with weeping craters, but none had hit anything vital. Meanwhile, the ground under its feet shifted constantly, growing muddy and hardening in turns as Sendra worked to ruin its mobility or, ideally, trap its feet in hardened mud.
In return, the aurochs had managed to get some hits in with its many sharp horns. Messy bled from a long, angry red scratch along her left forearm, and Petra was hunched over, gritting her teeth from a puncture in her side. They were wearing the demon down, but they wouldn’t get out unscathed.
What’s Kaira doing? The thought popped into Ana’s head as she lunged, dodged, and cut. The bolts that had come in were all too weak to be Kaira’s. What was she…?
“Petra, Ana, open up!” Rayni shouted frantically, and Ana risked a glance over her shoulder. She didn’t quite freeze at what she saw. Instead it made her jerk and immediately scramble to her right, putting another three feet between her and Petra as the older woman did the same, but she couldn’t pull her eyes away.
Kaira was standing with her arms raised, lips moving silently and sweat pouring off her, as a miniature sun the size of a basketball hung between her palms. Her voice slowly became audible, rising until, with a final, screamed syllable, the basketball collapsed into a marble, blindingly bright, and Kaira snapped one arm forward, pointing at her target. Ana barely saw the point of light move. A loud, tearing sound and a black-and-purple streak in her vision accompanied an immense flash of heat that was gone as soon as it had come, and then, before she could see what had happened, she got a couple of notifications:
Congratulations! Your Party has defeated: Possessed Aurochs (Threat: Extreme). Based on your contribution, you have been awarded: Growth Crystal (Least). For fighting in the defense of your Object of Devotion, you have been awarded: Growth Crystal (Shard) as a bonus.
Congratulations! You have completed the Achievement Hunting Party II! 5 cumulative Advancement Points awarded!
Hunting Party I: While in a Party, slay an opponent with a Threat Level of Serious or higher to the highest-Level Party member.
Hunting Party II: While in a Party, slay an opponent with a Threat Level of Considerable or higher to the highest-Level Party member.
Blinking to clear her vision, Ana turned back as she heard sizzling and a wet, heavy thump beside her.
Right. Achievements. She’d gotten one after they got out of the Delve, too. And they gave Advancement Points, which was great, but she didn't know what she wanted to spend them on. This wasn't the time to worry about that, anyway.
The demon was decidedly dead. There was a hole the size of her fist going from roughly where one eye should have been, taking most of the skull with it as it passed through into the neck and then the torso. Behind the thing, the mud steamed, and grass and bushes burned around a line of black, bubbling glass. Somewhat stunned, Ana walked around the dead thing and verified that, yep, the little marble had gone straight through.
“Potions! Potions!” Sendra shouted, and Petra and Messy rushed toward the backliners. Ana looked up and followed suit when she saw Kaira collapsed on the ground, her breathing quick and shallow, eyes fluttering at the edge of consciousness.
“What’s wrong with her?” Ana asked, kneeling by her prone friend. It looked like she was in shock or something.
“She overdid it,” Sendra said tersely as she slowly poured small sips of a shimmering green liquid into Kaira’s mouth. “Overtaxed her mana channels. Kept pouring more and more mana into her Shaping until it became self-sustaining, drawing her mana uncontrollably. Fortunately, she was able to finish the Shaping and cast before it drained her completely, so all she got was some severe mana depletion. Stupid, reckless thing to do, but that’s Kaira for you. She wanted to be sure, I guess.”
“Ana, the range of your recovery ability is thirty feet, right?” Petra asked.
“Right.”
“Well, I don’t want you further than that from Kaira until she wakes up, preferably until she’s on her feet. Consider us camped.”
“Got it,” Ana said. She wasn’t going to argue. She liked Kaira, and if staying close was the best way for her to help, she’d be staying close.
“Good. Dil, come with me. Let’s get that poor bastard out of the tree and see who we’re dealing with.”
Kaira was sleeping peacefully when the two returned with their rescuee. Her breathing was still shallow and her temperature a little higher than Ana would have liked, but she wasn’t sure what was normal for a themion. She’d never seen Kaira sleep before.
“Come on, Jay. Accept,” Petra was saying gently as they dragged the stumbling woman into what was slowly becoming a camp. “Ana has a Party recovery Ability, alright? Accept the invitation!”
It took some more coaxing, but after a moment, there was a message, followed by a soft sigh.
Jancia Versil, Human Lumimancer (18), has joined your Party.
That jogged something in Ana’s memory, but when she remembered where she’d seen that name and class, she couldn’t connect them to the face she saw. Jancia, Lumimancer. She was too pale and gaunt, her eyes too haunted. It took a long, careful look before Ana recognized her. She’d met this woman briefly, together with her team, the first time she went to the baths. Kaira had introduced them. But there had been two more, a darker woman with incongruously ginger hair and a nearly white-skinned one with long hair so black and fine it looked like ink floating on the water. Med and… Tellak, if she remembered correctly. So what had happened for Jancia to be alone?
And what had happened to Jancia herself? She’d been in a fight, that was obvious, and it was just as clear that it hadn’t gone well. The woman had been holding her tattered and bloodstained robe and cloak closed, but when she collapsed onto her butt on the ground, they fell open. The armor beneath had a wide gash going down the center of the stomach, exposing torn skin. Something like small, whitish blue crystals glittered along the wound, making Ana pull back instinctively.
“Is she sick?” she asked the group at large, but no one seemed to know what she was talking about until Rayni, with her Perception even higher than Ana’s, gasped.
“Shit,” she said grimly, “look at her wound! What the hell is that?”
“Don’t…” Jancia said, her voice faint as she tried feebly to pull her robe closed. “Nothing to… it’s nothing.”
“Nothing, hells,” Rayni said, pulling the injured woman’s hand away. “Look at this. Petra, you’ve got the most experience. Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No.” Petra’s voice was clipped, her face concerned. “Give her a healing potion for now. If nothing else, she’s feverish, and she’s lost a lot of blood. Then we need to get her to Touanne as soon as we can. Once Kaira can walk, we’re going straight to the settlement.” She knelt by Jancia and put her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Jancia, you need to drink, okay? You’ve been injured. If you can’t walk, we’ll take you on a stretcher. Do you understand?”
“Nothing…” Jancia said, laying back on the ground. “It’s nothing, it’s… why can’t I feel anything? Where’s everything gone?”
“Jancia,” Petra said urgently, taking her hand. “You need to stay awake, okay? We don’t know what this is. Ah, thank you, Rayni,” she said, as the Huntress handed her a potion bottle. Then she reached out, grabbed both halves of Jancia’s robe, and pulled her back into a sitting position. “Here, drink this.”
They took turns talking to Jancia to make sure that she stayed awake. The potion together with some rest gave her back some energy, but she stayed mostly incoherent, and all they could get out of her was that she’d been in a fight and that “It got me. It must have got me.” She didn’t know where her teammates were, and kept asking after them as though she didn’t remember doing so every ten minutes.
Nearly two hours after they’d rescued Jancia, Kaira woke up. The first thing she said was, “Aw, Wayfarer take my head and throw it in the void! Fucking depletion hangover is going to kill me.” The second, after she’d looked around, was, “What the hell is Jay doing here, and what’s wrong with her?” The third, once she saw Ana, was, “What the hell were you thinking, and what’s wrong with you?”
Since Ana had been singled out, the others left it to her to answer. She scowled with embarrassment. “I wasn’t. I got too excited and I didn’t think. It won’t happen again.”
“It better fucking not!” Kaira said, though her anger cooled a little. “If you’d been a little slower, the damn thing would have killed you right there!”
“Yeah. Well, it didn’t. And we got Jancia out of the tree, so… we don’t know what’s wrong with her, though. She’s hurt. Some kind of weird growths around her wound, and she’s feverish, confused — hell, she’s half delirious. We need to get her to Touanne. Can you walk?”
Kaira looked at Jancia, taking in her pale, drawn skin and her erratic breathing. “Right. Oh, shit, right! Yeah, I can walk. Can she?”
“We don’t think so. Rayni and Sendra made a stretcher for her, so we’ll take her on that.”
“Good plan,” Kaira said, forcing herself to her feet with a wince.
They packed up quickly and got going. Petra and Ana, being the strongest of the group, took the stretcher, with Rayni ranging ahead as usual. Despite their best efforts, Jancia fell asleep, or passed out, more like it, after the first hour. By the shortest route, it took them the rest of the day to reach the cleared stretch of land between the forest and the outpost. There, Kaira told them to set the stretcher down, sending Deni and Dilmik in to get the Healer.
“Why?” Ana asked as the two jogged off. “Why not just take her in?”
“The Waystone,” Kaira answered. “It absorbs most of the mana within a couple thousand feet of it, and this is already a low-mana Splinter. Close to the Waystone, it may as well be a dead zone. Touanne’s strong and skilled enough to do most regular healing even inside the settlement, but for really serious injuries, you need to get outside. The edge of the clearing kind of marks where it’s worth bothering to try any serious Shaping.”
“And whatever this is…” Ana trailed off.
“Yeah. Whatever this is, I bet it’s going to take a lot of mana to fix.”
Sendra came over and sat down with them, speaking in a low voice. “You feel it, don't you, Kaira?”
“You mean I don’t feel it, right? Yeah.” She glanced at Jancia where she lay unconscious on the stretcher.
That jogged something in Ana’s memory. “Sendra, wasn't Jancia saying something like that, before she passed out? How she couldn’t feel anything?”
