We are not immortal. Sometimes new Archmages forget this. I did. There was so much power at my fingertips, so much strength as the material world unfolded in my mind, and it made me arrogant. Reckless. But remember that we are still flesh and blood, or the Dungeon will remind you in my place.
Having said that, we are Archmages. Desire it enough, will it enough, and even Fate itself can be made to bow.
Excerpt from The Beasts of the Dungeon.
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Joining Elly with his own uttering of a dramatic one liner did not, unfortunately, make the situation any less pressing. The Calamity wasn't particularly wounded, though angered beyond its limited capacity for clear thought, and the army of Hounds and Champions was still rapidly approaching.
A quarter of the hunting party was dead, his arm was gone, Elly was missing an eye—which though technically still inside her skull wasn't providing much vision anymore—and both of them were running dangerously close to exhaustion.
And yet he was having fun. And yet the decision to fight felt proper, like the cosmos itself was singing in approval. The great void reaching down and patting him on the head, except not as condescending.
Oh good, those kinds of thoughts were back. Next thing you know he would be dreaming about the massive fuck-off suction cup in the center of the galaxy again.
Right, the plan. Distract it, get Elly to its face, then distract it some more as she carved and butchered her way towards its brain. Which they were assuming was there, but at this point they didn't have any other options.
Not good ones, anyway.
And Elly was good at butchering. He had his spells for raw damage, had his spatial arcs and fireballs, but where he complemented those with movement and healing and more, Elly just became more lethal. More focused on killing, no matter the enemy.
Both of them had their strengths and weaknesses, but in the end it was rather simple. She specialized in killing, he could move in ways she couldn't. Thus the plan.
The Calamity roared, something it just wouldn't stop doing no matter how many grenades he shoved down its non-existent throat, and Marcus nodded towards the rest of their party. They'd be buying them as much time as they could, though Marcus wasn't expecting miracles.
A horde of Hounds that size wouldn't be distracted by just over a dozen souls, but it was better than nothing. And while some part of him wanted to send them away, they couldn't leave without him. Literally couldn't, as they'd be run down and eaten long before they got back to the Eastfort. Cold logic demanded it was better for them to have purpose.
Their healers finished Elly's recovery, as much as they could do in these conditions, and joined the remainder of the soldiers. Then it was just the two of them, facing down a massive monster from what might actually turn out to be the depths of the Hells.
The plan. He kept thinking about it, but the plan. It was the plan. The solution. The way forward.
…how much blood had he lost when his arm had been ripped away?
Ah, the Calamity was forcing the issue. Another sweep of illusion-destroying magic, another wild charge, another moment where he lamented his failure to become a master illusionist. He was sure the Empress could have found some way to protect her work, even during the heat of battle.
Right, Calamity. Yeah, they needed to wrap this up. Because either way, in half an hour his mind was going to go to even stranger places, and no one wanted that.
Marcus teleported to the right, the Calamity following as if it was personally opposed to the idea of his existence, and he double stepped away from the detonation of spikes. It was a good trick, it was, but once played he could learn to counter it. To anticipate it.
The Calamity didn't learn. Didn't anticipate. Elly was moved closer to the creature and started slicing at its limbs again, getting it used to her presence, and Marcus only needed to teleport a rock into its mouth for it to focus again.
It hesitated, not quite flinching but definitely waiting for the—presumed—pain. Which didn't come, it being an ordinary rock and all, but the confusion only seemed to anger it more. Marcus snorted when it threw a boulder, kicking the thing towards him with surprising accuracy, but he wasn't there by the time it arrived.
More rage, more anger, even less reason. It was working itself into a frenzy now, stomping and charging and screaming, and Marcus fed it another stone. No hesitation that time, which meant the plan was a go.
The creature roared in pain, which meant Elly had found something soft inside the pillars, but he wasn't going to start improvising now. He looked at her, hoping she was ready.
His last grenade was deposited into the Calamity's mouth, making it flinch in confusion when this one actually did explode, and it never even noticed when he moved Elly onto its face. Too busy being upset, which was good. One of the big risks of the plan was that it might smash its face into the ground to kill her.
He'd be ready in case that happened, but they were running out of time. Elly felt the same, apparently, because the Life energy inside of her went into overdrive. Rising and rising until it was at the level Marcus knew she couldn't sustain for long, tearing her body apart sooner rather than later.
But oh boy did it provide, and it took her maybe fifteen seconds to climb upward. To find what she was looking for, Marcus giving it an obvious target to focus on when she did.
The Calamity noticed her when she found her prize. It noticed when her blade, infused with Life and growing such a fierce green he could spot it from the ground, started carving away through its face. Where his spatial arcs had done little, where even her arrows had failed to kill it, the sword sliced.
It screamed as she carved, and whole segments of stone fell away to create a pocket. A hole she could hide in, Marcus teleporting another rock into its mouth before it could think of some way to get rid of her. The thing flinched back, unsure, and by the time it determined no explosion was to follow, Elly was safe.
Just in time, too. The Calamity smashed its granite face into the floor hard enough to nearly make him fall, and he was two thousand feet away. When it rose Elly was still clinging on, supernaturally strong limbs—and a freshly healed foot—holding her in place, and she resumed her butchery the moment it rose upwards.
The Calamity focused on Marcus again, and he only just about managed to suppress a grin. It couldn't feel wounds, then, and assumed Elly was dead. It made him wonder why it hated the grenades so much, but he wasn't about to question some good fortune.
Especially because the army of Hounds was rapidly closing in, Marcus teleporting further away when the Calamity raced towards him. Every second he bought them was another moment where Elly could explore, another moment where she could find its brain and kill it from within.
And if she couldn't find a brain, well. They would cross that bridge when they came to it. Presumably moments before it collapsed under the weight of the Calamity, because he wasn't sure that thing was ever going to stop chasing him at this point.
Things looked good then, for a while. Whole seconds, even. Marcus almost counted to thirty in relative peace, moving away from the raging Calamity but otherwise keeping safe. Elly was still carving —presumably, he couldn't actually see her anymore—and the hunting party, while not doing great, were limiting the damage to an orderly retreat.
At the thirty fourth second, however, the ground opened up beneath him. He teleported away the instant his footing shifted, but when he looked back, he would have almost preferred it to be another trick of the Calamity.
Instead he saw a Burrower retreat back underground, probably having dug upwards from a tunnel that was already here—and having gotten lucky—, and a flood of Hounds surged out of it. Centaurs and birds, bovines and bats. All monstrosities, all warped in some manner, all frothing at the mouth and charging towards him.
Marcus scrambled back, trying to multitask and failing. The stone that should have kept the Calamity focused on him skittered off its closed mouth instead, the thing ramming its head against the earth over and over now, and the teleport that should have smoothly repositioned him far away from the new threat made him lose his footing not a hundred feet away.
Falling was embarrassing, instinct trying and failing to move his body into a roll, and it was a bad fall. Worse, it was a costly fall, the long seconds where he scrambled and rose to his feet allowing one of the birds to close the distance.
Marcus grabbed his mace and pulped it to death, the fourfold increase in applied power enough to almost make its body explode, but that cost him the seconds needed for the others to close the distance. A wild spatial arc killed thirty of the forty Hounds, and the rest would only take a moment longer, but that was the problem.
His defenses were strong, and even with one hand he could have killed them. But he didn't want to kill them, didn't have time to kill them, and all the writhing flesh was fucking with his line of sight.
He forced his perspective to shift, teleporting a good thousand feet away, and a wave of weakness swept through his body. There was a reason he didn't like to do that, and the increased magical cost was only part of it.
Marcus wiped a trail of blood from his nose, forcing himself to focus through the exhaustion and turning to the Calamity. He almost expected it to be right there, a leering face to judge him as he was crushed to death, but the creature was still… resting its head against the floor?
Collapsing. It was collapsing. Marcus teleported closer as quickly as he could, keeping a wary eye out for any tricks but mostly focused on finding Elly, and let out a startled laugh when he found her kicking at its face.
She looked well. Hurt, and covered in dust, but alive. Energized, and using her sword to pry out its eyes? They did look a lot like gems from this close, but-
Elly turned to him, frantically tugging at her sword. "Quickly, before it shifts and its face gets trapped under the bulk."
Right, well. Who was he to deny her a trophy? Marcus stepped closer, slicing the eye free with a few carefully placed spatial arcs. Then the other one when she gestured for it, the fist-sized gemstones seeming kind of small for a beast that big.
"I don't mean to spoil your fun," he said after another moment, pointing. "But they seem somewhat upset at the abrupt death of their Calamity."
Elly looked, seeing the wave of Hounds rushing closer and closer. She paled at the sheer size of the horde, something much easier to see now that they covered basically their entire field of view, and nodded rapidly. "Yeah, I'm good. Let's get our people and get the fuck out of here."
Questions could wait, questions like 'so how did you kill it?' and 'what the fuck I didn't even see it die?', but he was a man of practiced patience.
Marcus cast one last look at the dead Calamity, a distinctly pleased feeling rising up in his stomach as he teleported them away.
The first of many.
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"So I was digging around, trying to hold on as that stupid creature slammed its head against the earth, and you know what I found when I located its brain?" Elly asked. Marcus didn't reply at once, Xathar grumbling loudly. The demon was… displeased not to have fought a Calamity. "Marcus?"
"One second."
Elly simmered down, which gave him a moment to look for a new location. Reality blurred and they were past the dried-up river, another few minutes bought until the Hounds were nipping at their heels again. "Sorry, what?"
"I said, do you know what I found when I located its brain? Which was tiny, by the way."
"No, I don't know what you found when you located the tiny brain. Am I right in assuming you're about to tell me?"
She rolled her eyes. "Losing limbs makes you rude, but yes, I am about to tell you. I found one of my arrows. Missed my target by ten inches. Do you know how awesome it would have been if I'd killed it with one arrow? Do you? The legends that would be written, the songs they would sing. I would have been glorified."
"Five minute break," Marcus called instead of answering, their party slowing. Xathar still wasn't talking to him, the child, and everyone else was far too tired to distract Elly and her 'complaining'. Just her way of dealing with stress, but he had something to take care of before he indulged her. "Put her down."
Mitzi was taken from the spatially enlarged box they'd put her in, eyes darting around wildly as she returned to the world. Her stomach was bleeding again, but that wasn't half as bad as the injury to her spine. And unlike Elly, Mitzi didn't have enough raw power to ignore the damage. "Thoom."
Their last healer dismounted his own demonic horse, janking his hand away as the summon snapped at him. That one was definitely going to be a temporary contract, not that they'd had much choice. The nine remaining Life Enhanced soldiers could run fast enough to outpace the Hounds, but them? No.
"I only have power for general healing," Thoom warned, any fearful deference long since gone. The man was tired, missing part of his liver and generally teetering on the brink of a stress-induced breakdown. It was probably a bad sign that he was one of the more stable survivors. "Realignment?"
Marcus grunted. "I didn't want to risk it, but it looks like we don't have a choice. Keep her as healthy as you can while I work."
Thoom nodded, Mitzi whimpered something he didn't quite catch, and Marcus got to it. He had absolutely no time for bedside manners, none of them did, and even as he weaved a fourth-tier healing matrix he felt his reserves grow emptier.
At least the Life in her body parted easily. He'd assumed all of it was as pure and stubborn as Elly's, demanding him to work around it, but apparently that wasn't the case for everyone. Which was good, because he didn't have the patience for it right now.
He did the medical equivalent of tugging her spine back into place, the right words failing to come to mind, and Thoom coaxed her body into healing itself. Not a permanent fix, but she'd live. Back into the box she went, though Thoom did her the kindness of putting her to sleep.
If she lived it would be the third one he saved since they'd started their trek back towards the Eastfort, and he was reminded why he'd never wanted to be a healer.
Saying he hated helping others wasn't accurate, but he couldn't imagine spending every moment of his life focused on mending broken flesh.
Marcus rose, his left knee clicking in a rather alarming manner as he did, and turned back to Elly. "Sorry. So, glorified?"
"The moment's passed," she replied, deflating. "Also, you're bleeding again."
Shit. Marcus wiped the blood from his nose, using the least amount of magic he could to spread a soothing wave of recovery through his body. The consequences of manipulating space first without a matrix and then from an altered perspective, neither of which was easy on the mind.
He shook his head, drinking his second-to-last energizing potion. They'd brought quite a few, but then he'd kind of expected the Hounds and Champions to run after killing a Calamity. Which they hadn't, so quite a few turned out to be not enough. "Thanks. You holding up alright?"
"I have a fundamental force of this world running through my veins, and unlike magic, it is directly tuned to healing. Amongst other things, of course, but healing is part of it. I'm doing better than anyone else here."
"And the extraordinary stress you've put your body under using said fundamental force?"
"Mending."
"How quickly?"
Elly huffed. "Not quickly. Weeks, at minimum, before I'm back to full strength. Any true use of my abilities before then will only damage me further. Happy?"
"Are you asking me if I'm happy one of my only friends is wounded, and will be for some time?"
She glanced at him. "Yes?"
"No, I'm not happy. But we're both stubborn and consider self-sacrifice better than sacrificing one another, which while an assumption is the reason we 'work'."
Elly snorted. "Hi Vess. Didn't know you could shapeshift into such a convincing copy of my husband."
He didn't dignify that with a reply, the silence not quite as relaxed as it usually was. The others were resting, out of direct earshot and keeping to themselves, but still there. He had no magic to spare for illusions, not now, but frankly he didn't really care if they overheard.
Elly would probably catch and stab anyone who tried to eavesdrop, anyway. Marcus grunted. "Why do you think it hated the grenades? I didn't see them do much, if any, damage."
"No clue. I assume you got a theory?"
"The shockwaves might have literally rattled its brain, but then so would smashing its head against the ground, and it wasn't shy about doing that."
"Or maybe it just didn't like them."
"Or that," he allowed, sighing. "And there's more of those. Everything we've learned fighting this one will be mostly useless for the next, and the Empress did say this was one of the stupider ones. How much damage could a Calamity do if it looked just like any other Champion? If it could scheme and direct the unending armies pouring out of the Dungeon? If it could do magic in a more elaborate manner than spikes and low-level disruption?"
Elly hummed, nudging his shoulder with her own. "I don't know. But what-ifs will drive you crazy, and we killed this one. We'll kill the next soon enough, then another, and another, and I'll build a trophy room so filled to the brim with their corpses there'll barely be room for chairs."
"Let's just get to the Eastfort first, please."
She hummed, Marcus watching their pursuers arrive over the horizon and letting out a low groan. "That's the spirit. Up and at 'em, everyone. Break's over."