The ambush went precisely as expected, as the target’s forces surrounded the obviously suspicious patch of darkness that Shadow kept active. Prime watched with detachment and a slight tinge of remorse as the other members of the Unspoken Response leadership council started blasting the wooden transport vessels out of the sky. It was a bit disappointing that they had to eliminate so many promising individuals who, despite actively following the orders of their target, were actually doing an impressive job at safeguarding the Kingdom, but those deaths were necessary if they wanted to maintain the status quo. Not just because Prime and the others with him in the Unspoken Response wanted to keep their positions as the strongest in the Kingdom, but because from what interactions he’d had with the Gergasi, or Guardians as they called themselves, the powerful giants were likely to strike out and start eliminating entire swaths of the Kingdom if there was any hint that they had unlocked their full potential.
The thought of being able to access Martial stats and Skills was intriguing, but he’d witnessed the power of the Guardians firsthand, and even with the entire council working with him, Prime would have difficulty killing more than a few of them – and definitely not the Grand One, who still caused him to shiver in fear when he thought about the meeting with them. He could well picture that individual having the power to completely wipe out entire cities with a thought, which could happen if they didn’t get this whole thing under control.
So, the deaths of these individuals here was disappointing… but necessary. It was for the benefit of the Kingdom as a whole, after all.
The plan was going perfectly, as Shadow’s wall of darkness was strong enough to deflect or absorb the magical spells sent against it, a powerful flex of his specialty that very few in the world had ever seen before. Prime, himself, had only seen it in action once before, but never on this scale; he was actually quite impressed. His own mastery of shadows wasn’t quite adept enough to handle anything that was about a third of the size of what was being maintained by Shadow.
Then again, every member of the Unspoken Response leadership council was a master of their own element and stronger than Prime, so this was expected. Prime only had a fraction of that mastery compared to someone like Shadow or any of the others, but he made up for it by having partial mastery of every element. Overall, he was still more powerful than any 3 or 4 of them combined, which was the reason he was holding back on attacking the vessels above himself. The point of their attack was to provoke a response, and he and the others watched the projection that Light had created and was maintaining in the middle of their camp, waiting for it to happen.
Anytime now, the target will intervene directly to prevent the loss of more of his people, he thought. All that they’d learned about their target told them that he would go out of his way to prevent loss of life, especially regarding those he considered his friends or companions, so it was only a matter of time before he acted. Once he did, likely by taking his own transport vessel in close or leaving it himself, the Guardians with them would reveal their presence and take him down. Then Prime and the other leadership from the Unspoken Response would wipe out the remainder of the people the target had brought with him.
That was why he was waiting. In reality, if he and the others had gone all-out and not restrained their attacks, they could’ve wiped out all of the vessels within seconds. They were well aware that the incoming forces knew that there was some sort of trap awaiting them, thanks to the spying that Light had done on them over the last few days, but they didn’t know exactly what they were flying into. It wouldn’t do to scare them away too quickly. If they did, some of them might flee before all hell was unleashed.
He and the others were waiting for the expected response from their target when he felt it. A sudden yanking of Mana from his body staggered him for a moment, and he looked around to see that everyone else was similarly affected, looking around in confusion. The pull on his Mana pool didn’t stop, either, as he felt its fullness continue to drop; it wasn’t being replaced by the ambient Mana in the environment, for some reason—
“Mana Siphons! Find the ones casting them!” he yelled, even as Light’s projection cut off, and the shadows that had been concealing and protecting them in their camp began to thin and disperse. Well knowing the power of such a spell, as well as its limited range, he figured that some group of sneaky Mages had somehow managed to penetrate far enough into the shadows to cut them off from their Mana, and they needed to eliminate them as soon as possible. While they all had enormous Mana pools to draw from, the fact that it was draining from their bodies meant that these Mana Siphons were even more powerful than the ones that Responders typically used – something that he didn’t think was possible.
“There’s no one here!” Air shouted almost immediately, even as Prime searched for the culprits himself. He knew that Air could easily detect vacuums in the air that would denote the presence of others in the area, even if they were hidden by an illusion – but she had to be wrong. If there wasn’t anyone nearby, then that meant—
“It’s not localized,” Light said with a bit of strain in her voice. “It’s blanketing the entire area, somehow.”
That’s… not possible. Is it?
He couldn’t even imagine how someone would cast a spell that powerful and at that size, especially one that was as Mana-intensive as Mana Siphon. Even the Grand One, as strong as they were, would likely have difficulty – because Mana Siphon inherently pulled the Mana from the spell, which meant that it had to be constantly fed with more Mana, growing more greedy for additional Mana as the spell went on.
Since he doubted that the Grand One was there to betray them, that could only mean one thing.
It was coming from the target.
While they were strong, they weren’t anywhere near the same level as the leader of the Guardians. Instead, this had to be some sort of Fusion; but if that was true, then it had to be impossibly strong.
While he tried to work out how this could be happening, he looked up through the dissipating shadows to see the two Guardians with them, Farmas and Syrlia, shoot up from where they had been waiting up above. They were only supposed to reveal themselves once the target made his appearance. While he didn’t detect any sight of the Fusionist yet, he supposed that this whole situation with the Mana Siphon had spurred them to move. Especially since the darkness was breaking apart, now that Shadow couldn’t easily maintain something that size with the drain on Mana in the area.
While their campsite wasn’t yet visible to those above, that didn’t stop the vessels from attacking. The first explosion sent their way by the airborne forces was deflected by the remnants of the shadowy shell around them, but the next one penetrated about 50 feet inside, blasting away the less-structured darkness, revealing a vulnerability that hadn’t been present just seconds before. This triggered another barrage of attacks that ate away at the failing defenses with a rapidness that was frightening.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“I can’t maintain it at this size!” Shadow hissed. “I’m shrinking it down to just cover us.”
The next moment, the dissipating darkness solidified around the campsite, creating a relatively dome-like shield that would stop the incoming attacks, but Prime could already see the strain on the council member’s face as he struggled to maintain it. It didn’t take long to see why, of course, because the siphoning effect was draining the Mana that was being infused into it, which meant that Shadow had to keep pumping his own dwindling Mana pool into it.
“I won’t be able to hold it for long!”
That was Prime’s cue to unleash hell upon the forces above, and he looked at the others, who nodded at his look. “Don’t hold anything back; we need to wipe them out as quickly as possible.” As he prepared to start casting, he looked at Light, waiting for her to create another projection – but she looked anxious. “Light?”
“I can’t do it! I can’t connect to any sources of illumination anywhere!” she screeched, clearly panicked by this point. It wasn’t a state that he’d ever thought he’d see her in, as even when she experienced their target following her connection back to her, she’d still been in control of herself. This, however, was much worse than that, as it looked like she was about to collapse in fear.
If Light couldn’t connect to the illumination above them, before projecting it for them to see, that meant they were essentially blind. All of them had a high enough Magical Detection Skill to detect sources of magic above, of course, which – combined with Light’s projection – had allowed them to pinpoint their targets before. But now, all the information he received from the Skill was a hazy distortion up above. It was as if the strength of the Mana Siphon was warping everything in his perception, making it completely unreliable.
As he scrambled to find a solution, he winced as a strong barrage of explosions could be heard outside of the shadowy barrier, meaning that the forces arrayed against them were probably closer, as he was fairly sure the range on their attacks wasn’t high enough to reach them from the distance they were before.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll hit them if we send everything we have at them. Wide area-of-effect spells would be ideal,” he told them, before putting his words to the test as he created a net of boulder-sized fireballs stretching 100 feet in width upwards, disappearing into the darkness. Without any feedback, he wasn’t sure what or even if he hit anything, but he didn’t wait to create another one and sent it upwards at a different angle. The others followed his plan and sent their Mana into spells that were larger than normal to hit the vessels above, which brought their strength down a bit, as it was expensive in terms of Mana to make them large and strong, but he was sure that would be at least somewhat effective.
He switched around his elements a bit as he experimented with lower-Mana cost spells to keep himself from running out too quickly, and over the next minute, he thought it was working; the strain on Shadow was still present, but he could see and hear that the assault against their shield was lessening. He figured that they must have been whittled down by the powerful attacks of the Unspoken Response, backing off to lick their wounds, giving them a bit of breathing room.
That was when Prime heard an ear-shattering roar that shook the ground beneath him. At first, he thought it was some sort of new attack by the people on the vessels above, but then he remembered the monster they’d seen nearby when they first arrived. Since they hadn’t attacked anything or presented much of a threat, the highly evolved monster hadn’t attacked or even acknowledged their presence, but something had obviously changed to wake it up from where it had been standing guard near the Calamity.
“It’s fine. Better than that, actually; it should attack the others first, allowing us to pick them off after they’ve been whittled down,” he told the others as silence descended amongst the group.
Another roar above them proved that this was exactly what was happening, as it seemed the monster was targeting the enemy forces. Movement near Prime pulled his attention away from listening to what was happening above, and he looked over to see one of the SIC advisors heading in his direction.
He mentally sighed. These damned pretentious Nobles are annoying. We should’ve left her and the other one elsewhere, but they already know too much.
“When are we leaving?” the Noble woman asked flippantly, her nose almost permanently stuck up in the air.
“Leaving? Why would we leave, Blackwind?”
“Lady Blackwind,” she retorted, annoyance in her tone. “There’s no reason to stay, now that the Great Ones are taking care of The Fusionist.”
Great Ones. She was one of those who, despite the hold that the Guardians had over most of the Nobility for centuries being recently broken, still considered them their masters.
“We can’t leave yet,” Prime answered. “We need to eliminate as many of the ones he brought with him. Otherwise, it will be more difficult to track them down later.”
“But this is entirely too dangerous now. Almost my entire Mana pool is already drained, and I can’t see it getting any better anytime soon. We’d do better to leave now and come back later once we’ve recovered.”
“No, that’s not going to happen. We need to wait for the Guardians to eliminate the target, which should end this Mana Siphon effect,” he explained impatiently. “If you want to make a run for it right now, though, I’m not going to stop you.” He really hoped she took him up on that offer.
Lady Blackwind appeared highly offended – not that he cared. “Are you crazy? I demand that you and these others bring me out of this damned place!”
That actually brought a little chuckle out before he could stop it. “Demand? Lady, you’re in no position to demand anything right now. You wouldn’t even be here if we weren’t worried about our plans leaking out before this. You should just be thankful that we didn’t kill you before this and leave your body to rot in a ditch.”
“How dare you! Your entire organization only exists because of—” she began to screech in a rant, but she stopped when something dark bounced off her head, falling to the ground below. It didn’t look like it hit her hard enough to do much more than leave a bad bruise on anyone else, but her eyes rolled up in the back of her head and she collapsed onto her side. Prime could’ve caught her before she roughly hit the ground, but saw no reason for it.
Instead, he looked at what had fallen onto her head, as it rolled a short distance before coming to a stop. It was a pitch-dark sphere, a softly glowing orb that looked familiar for some reason, but he couldn’t remember why. It was only when he picked it up and felt a slight drain on his physical body that he realized what it was. He quickly dropped it and wiped his hands on his robe, wondering what one of the condensed orbs – containing the aura of death they’d seen their target create with a Fusion – was doing there.
As he began to plan their assault on the remaining forces up above, a *thump* caught his attention nearby, as he saw yet another dark orb impact the ground and bounce once before coming to a stop. This was only the start, however, as a series of *thumps* quickly turned into a veritable rain of black spheres falling to the ground throughout the campsite, and everyone hunkered down under low-Mana defensive spells to deflect the falling projectiles.
“What the—?” he wondered aloud when it finally stopped, only to be interrupted by yet another roar.
This time, however, it was much, much closer. Right above their campsite, in fact.
He glanced down at one dark orb near his foot for a moment before he looked upward at where the roar had come from. A chill of fear spiked through his body as he realized what had just happened; he knew about the way the Bone Wraiths had seemingly been drawn to the dark orbs that their target’s Fusion seemed to create, after all.
But what would happen if a Necrotic Wyvern got ahold of one?
He did not want to find out, but it didn’t look like he was going to have much choice in the matter, especially as he saw Shadow collapse to a knee as an impact against the barrier of darkness drained him more than nearly any other attack up to that point.
Perhaps Lady Blackwind was right. We should’ve left when we had the chance.