CHAPTER 1229: PINCER ATTACK

Finding a place in the fortress’ battle wound to safely disembark turned out to be harder than Daryun had initially estimated. Having Alix there was a gift from the gods since she was able to get better angles and maneuver around better than the larger transport ark. Unfortunately, none of the blasted halls were large enough for either the Ulta suit or the transport, these decks at least if not the entire fortress having been designed with rather cramped, narrow halls barely wide enough to allow two average-sized men to walk shoulder-to-shoulder comfortably.

With that realization, there was only one option left: a quick insertion from the transport into the fortress, exposing the team to the Void. A shiver ran down Daryun’s spine at the thought, but he maintained his calm exterior. Everyone had armor that could survive a short time outside of the safety of the arks, but longer than ten minutes would leave the weaker mages debilitated.

The longest hallway that they found was the one chosen as their point of ingress. The transport hovered close by while Alix parked her Ulta suit next to it.

“Opening canopy,” Alix said, her voice ringing throughout the transport. A moment later, Daryun watched as her cockpit opened, a burst of white gas practically exploding outward the moment the first cracks appeared in the shell. When Alix herself was revealed, she wore her glittering plate armor and was busy undoing the straps securing her to the control chair. Fortunately, at her tier, she didn’t need to breathe, but prolonged exposure to the Void still wasn’t healthy. Only a post-Apotheosis mage could freely stand long-term exposure, but as a tenth-tier mage heavily armored in Adamant, Alix likely had plenty of time.

When she was free, she drifted out of the chair before pulling the suit into her soul realm. She drifted around a moment, gravity having no hold over her before her magic righted herself and propelled her through into the broken hallway.

“Door, fifty feet in,” she confirmed. A second later, she added, “No power. Any reports from the other teams about power and air inside?”

Daryun glanced at the transport’s comm officer, the only other permanent crew member of the transport. The officer shook his head, his hands otherwise pressed down on a pair of runic glyphs hovering over a dozen small comm slates.

“No,” he said aloud for Alix’s benefit. “Manual controls?”

“If there are any, they’re not visible. Might have to cut inside.”

Daryun frowned at the thought of possibly depressurizing the interior of the fortress, but a glance over his shoulder gave him his answer to that problem. “Anyone here an earth or ice mage?”

Several among Alix’s dozen retainers raised their hands. With a nod of his head, Daryun asked, “How well does magic work in the Void?”

“Easily enough,” Alix replied. “Might be even easier, honestly. Not a lot of ambient magic out here to fuck with you, even in this Nexus-current-thing.”

“Then let’s cut through the door,” Daryun suggested. “I can conjure wind if need be, and we can seal the breach with ice or stone.”

“That’ll take tons of power,” Alix murmured thoughtfully. “But I’m not seeing anything else. All right, get out here, and let’s get to it.”

Daryun tapped the pilot’s shoulder, and a moment later, the transport was depressurized, completely muting the world around them. Only then was the transport’s door opened, and the team was allowed to exit.

Immediately, Daryun felt a horrible tug all over his body, as if the universe itself were trying to pull him apart at the seams. Fortunately, the pull was weak, and only made weaker by the enchantments in his armor. Still, he didn’t want to linger, especially since several of Alix’s retainers looked much worse off than he did.

He coated himself in his elementless power, the sensation alleviating the pull of the Void considerably though not entirely, and used that power to gently toss himself into the hallway after Alix. Even after being careful, however, he overshot it, unconsciously correcting for gravity that wasn’t there, and practically slammed into the hard, unadorned wall with a dull thunk that he felt more than heard.

Alix waved at him as her retainers followed him with much greater grace, to his mild consternation. With a few hand gestures, two of Alix’s retainers advanced with softly glowing fire enchantments on their gauntlets casting the dark hallway in reds and oranges. Fiery scalpels erupted from their held-together fingers, and together, they slowly cut their way through the door.

The door was thick, though not as thick as Daryun might’ve estimated. He guessed if the door had been closer to the outer hull, it might’ve been thicker, but as it was, the fortress’ damage allowed them to pass that outer layer. Given that he could physically see nothing on the other side of the door save another dark hall, he supposed a thicker door might not have been warranted in the first place…

In barely more than a minute, the team was filing in one by one through the hole, Alix taking point and Daryun just behind her. Notably, there had been no escape of gas when the cutting began, leading Daryun to think the interior was completely air-free.

‘Not promising…’ he thought. ‘Lorgas, Sky King, Lord of Heaven, keep my feet firm and my heart steady… Let the radiance of my duty blind me to all else…’

As the last of Alix’s retainers entered, one of them conjured a boulder from his soul realm and used magic to slide it into the hole and morph it into the perfect plug. Alix then glanced at Daryun and another of her retainers, and after that retainer called upon her magic, Daryun understood what she was saying: they needed air.

With a wave of his hand, Daryun summoned magic to his fingers and pushed. The wind magic within him erupted from his fingers, gusting out several feet before being torn from his control. His heart skipped a beat for a moment, but as he and the mage slowly filled the hall with air, keeping control over his power became easier and easier. Sound, too, returned, almost startling Daryun as suddenly he was able to hear the clinking of the team’s armor and weapons again.

After a minute or so, the pull on his body had abated with air settling around him, and Alix startled the entire team by taking off her helmet. To Daryun’s shock, she took a few deep, obvious breaths, and then said, “It doesn’t taste good, but it’s air.”

Despite a minor tremor in his hands, Daryun followed his fellow Paladin’s example and removed his helmet. Indeed, breathable air filled the long, dark hall, but it was wrong, almost sickening, with hints of rotten eggs, garlic, and other things both bitter and sweet. Acid rose in the back of his mouth, but a swallow forced it back down.

“A mortal wouldn’t be able to breathe this,” the other wind mage said as she removed her helmet and took a few tentative breaths.

“It’s not real air,” Alix explained. “More like we’re breathing in a magical fake or something. Don’t know the details, I only heard the King and some of his smartmen talk about it. Something like needing origin power to make it ‘real’, I don’t know.”

“We’ve bought ourselves time,” Daryun replied as he carefully controlled his face, not wanting his disgust at the air around them to be too evident, “that’s what counts. Let’s press on and see what we can find.”

“Right!” Alix agreed, and with a few barked orders, her retainer formed into two ranks. The hall here was no larger than it was on the other side of the wall, so each rank staggered to keep out of each other’s way. Alix and Daryun moved up front, pressing deeper into the dark of the fortress.

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Now that they were inside, Daryun’s eyes darted back and forth, scanning the environment. Old instincts from inspecting the defenses of Alamati and his castle came back to him, even if the materials were different—enchanted brick and stone at his home; dull, dark metal here—but things still stood out. Scratches here and there from, he guessed, moving large objects around; slight furrows pressed into the ground from uncountable years of foot traffic; slight warping in the metallic panels, likely from the damage the fortress had taken.

There were no doors, however, save for the next one blocking off their path another two hundred feet in, or so. Curious, Daryun checked the furrows on the floor again, giving them more attention, and found some of them seemingly veering off into the walls. Another round of cutting with those fire scalpels saw that there were more doors in the hall, they’d just been seamlessly melded with the walls—at least physically since the lack of magic in the fortress made it difficult to imagine what the place looked like before its ruin. Daryun could easily imagine the bare dark gray walls illuminated by magic lights or something similar to the magical murals in Westmount Palace.

Through several ‘hidden’ doors they explored, Daryun and the other wind mage often using their magic to conjure more barely breathable air for the team as they went. Most of the rooms they found were relatively narrow and squat but stretched hundreds of feet into the distance. They were filled with pipes and gears and levers and all sorts of other mechanical stuff that Daryun had little idea how to even describe. It was as tangled and complicated as a forest untouched by human hands for thousands of years, but all various kinds of metal instead of more comforting wood and leaves.

Alix guessed they were on a maintenance level, and Daryun took her at her word, trusting that in her time following King Leon, she’d seen similar things.

“Should’ve brought Mari…” Alix murmured as they entered their fifth such room, dull metal stretching out into the dark and tangling amongst itself in ways that made no sense to Daryun.

He almost responded when a sudden burst of magic power had him and Alix pivoting to the right just in time for Alix to block some kind of long, scissor-like pincer from clamping down on one of her retainers. She’d pushed him out of the way and brought her Adamant sword up, the blade sparking with golden lightning.

The pincer, on the other hand, was as black as night and extended out of a shadow hitherto unseen in the darkness of the fortress’ interior. For the shortest of moments, Alix and the pincer contested each other, but just as Daryun lunged forth, sharp wind gathering at the head of his spear, hundreds of eyes opened within the shadow and Daryun felt like the hand of Yrati himself had closed around his skull. This pressure squeezed harder, and everything seemed to go black…

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Alix shouted defiantly at the monster she contended with even as Daryun fell beside her. Her retainers, all of whom had long served in the Tempest Knights with her, fell beside him, their weapons clattering to the floor. The pressure around her head was eye-watering, but she managed to maintain herself and fight back, her lightning magic not only rippling across her blade but also dancing across her head. She didn’t bear the Thunderbird’s power, but she knew a mental attack when she saw one, and she fought it with her own power as savagely as she could manage.

Slowly the pressure was alleviated, but before she could breathe a sigh of relief, one of the nightmarish eyes in the dark morphed into another pincer and lanced into her in a blow that might’ve cut her in half were she not clad in Adamant. Instead, she was thrown further into the mechanical hell that only Mari could love, bouncing first off the floor and then the ceiling.

Grateful for the zero gravity training that all Tempest Knights underwent, Alix righted herself just in time for hundreds more eyes to open in the dark all around her and for the pressure on her head to suddenly increase. Outraged, she screamed herself hoarse as she let loose with a blast of lightning, endless bolts striking every eye she could see, melting and shattering metal all around her, but also banishing the darkness and the eyes within it. The thunder around her seemed to shake the entire fortress, but her team remained unconscious even as one of those damned pincers closed around Nikos, a man so veteran to the Tempest Knights that he was among the very first to be accepted into the order following Leon’s accession back on Aeterna.

A river of lightning flashed from her sword, and in a perfect display of House Raime’s fighting style, she launched herself at the pincers and engaged them, forcing them to release Nikos and take a more defensive posture as she did her best to force them back into the patch of shadow they extended from.

She maintained her situational awareness, however, and so easily adapted even as a third, and then a fourth pincer snapped out at her. She pushed back, using lightning to try and crack the black shell of whatever this was, or striking at the thin tendril of shadow connecting the pincers to the wall.

She made little progress in that regard, but her speed as a lightning mage meant that as a fifth and sixth pincer appeared to strike at her team, she was able to engage them, too. Her heart sank when a seventh appeared, and then an eighth. With darkness still pressing against her mind, engaging them too seemed out of the question.

But still, she fought, the flashing of lightning and booming of thunder hopefully calling reinforcements, or at least notifying everyone else in the fortress that they weren’t alone. One of the pincers, cracked and releasing droplets of something dark and foul to careen through the air, slammed into her as she deflected a blow from another pincer. She struck the floor, the pincer holding her down by the waist even as her lightning shattered the black carapace. However, as the black blood and bits of broken carapace filled the space around her, she felt herself going woozy. Her magic faltered for a moment, allowing another pincer to lock around her sword arm, immobilizing it. A third closed around her legs while a fourth snapped up her other arm.

All four pincers squeezed, and for a moment, she thought her life was over.

Her Adamant armor held firm, however, and she held her breath and let loose with blast after blast of lightning, attempting to fight off these pincers. She was doing damage, she could see that, but the other four pincers had taken hold of four of her retainers and were dragging them into shadow…

“NO!!!” she cried as she redoubled her efforts to free herself, but a ninth pincer suddenly erupted from the floor just behind her and closed around her throat. She choked, her vision suddenly going dark as a migraine obliterated all thoughts within her. For the briefest of moments, she thought she saw something, some many-eyed nightmare with a spherical body, a hundred tentacles, half of which had pincers at the end, glaring back at her with malicious intelligence. One of that thing’s tentacles reached out for her, threatening to wrap around her head…

… until the pincer around her neck suddenly went limp. The magic pressing against her mind abated, and when she opened her eyes and projected her magic senses, she found a shaky Daryun hovering next to her, his spear brandished, his aura trembling slightly but otherwise solid.

Two more swings severed two more pincers at the base, freeing her sword arm and her waist. She wasted no time snapping up her weapon again and finishing the job, but as she finished, another pincer lanced out from a shadow, nearly taking her head before she’d fully regained mobility. Daryun threw himself in front of her, cutting wind slamming into the pincer’s carapace even as it closed around him. The carapace cracked, but enough strength remained within it to restrain him.

“I’m… fine!” he shouted as she contorted herself to return the favor he’d just given her. “The others…!”

Her retainers were still down, and two of the four taken by the pincers had been almost completely submerged in shadow.

She didn’t question Daryun’s judgment; he said he was fine, and she trusted that. She shot out at her team, her sword flashing as quickly as her lightning. Her two less-entangled retainers were freed, but the other two were too far gone to stop. She felt her stomach drop as she momentarily contemplated losing them, but just as the thought crossed her mind, an aura cut through the mind-numbing—literally—darkness surrounding them. It was wild, furious, and had it not so much as gently nudged Alix, she might’ve thought it utterly unrestrained.

But that aura, heavy as an ocean, was completely under control, and when Alix turned her head, she beheld its source: a woman who was, in that moment, the most beautiful person in all the world.

Naiad.

The Queen of Queens among river nymphs wore a look of deathly wrath, and with a snap of her fingers, serpentine dragons made of water materialized around her. A moment later, the pincers assaulting her team were banished, and Naiad appeared beside her two nearly-lost comrades. She plunged her hands into the shadow and ripped them both free with what looked like little more than raw strength.

But the nymph was hardly done; with murder in her eyes, her body seemed to morph into a strangely pliable ice dragon and tore through the room’s tangle of machinery. Darkness receded at her coming, and soon, she was tearing the very nightmare Alix had glimpsed out of its shadow.

Out in the physical world, it was a pathetic thing, no larger than a trout. Its pincers and tentacles were equally tiny, having only been as large as they were through the use of its darkness magic.

With savage ruthlessness, Naiad impaled it upon a thousand icy needles, killing it instantly and releasing its hold over her team’s minds. Immediately, they began to stir, but Alix found her gaze drawn by Daryun, who looked mildly injured.

He’d saved her ass; that was no small debt given how much work she put in to maintain that particular physical asset. Moreover, he’d saved the rest of her, too, which was an even larger debt.

She hurried over, pressing a few healing spells against his armor, which seemed to help as he flailed about less with their magic aiding him.

“You all right?” she asked.

He groaned. “Never better.”