The creature moved quickly, but Leon was initially unable to do anything about it since the creature’s third wail tore through his Ulta suit and hit his ears like ice picks. The magic in his body trembled and raced out of control. Were he not already sitting down and strapped into his Ulta suit, he would’ve collapsed.
While what he experienced was painful, what was far more concerning was the scream of pain he heard from within his soul realm; the Thunderbird appeared to feel the wail, too.
“Divine One!” Siddi cried out in alarm. Leon’s head lost contact with the cloud glass, depriving him of the ability to access the suit’s sensor suite, but he still felt the suit shoot upward. Projections on the inner surface of the plate flickered on, letting him see what was happening outside.
Immediately, he saw the creature being engaged by Anastasios and Eva with fervor, both powerful mages pushing it back yet apparently unable to immediately inflict a mortal wound. Their ability to use their power was limited, however, for they didn’t want to destabilize the cavern, but more importantly, more than half of the soldiers joining the expedition had collapsed, as well. A dozen of the Ulta suits rose to join Leon’s, their pilots possibly just as debilitated by whatever power this creature possessed as Leon was.
With his power so constrained by concern for the environment and the people around him, Anastasios darted forward, and an enormous sword that a mortal would’ve struggled to lift appeared in his hand. His aged, but still quite powerfully built, body was covered in an instant by silver plate armor, obscuring the former Lord Protector completely.
He crashed into the creature to try and grapple with it, but the creature was enormous and strong, and despite its odd, flickering aura, caught Anastasios in one hand and bit down on his helmet. Leon heard the old man scream in pain, and Eva roared in fury, charging with Valeria and Cassandra by her side.
Eva struck the monster in its chest, while Valeria sliced at the wrist holding Anastasios and Cassandra went for the sides of its jaws. Despite their weapons having been made by Leon himself, neither were able to cut through the monster’s tough scales. Eva’s attack, however, caused the creature to release its grasp on Anastasios’ head, at least, and the old man was able to lift his sword and channel his magic into it. The blade began to glow red with heat as runes all along its edge illuminated. Anastasios brought the sword down, cleaving into the creature’s forearm, forcing it to release him. He dropped to the ground, his helmet looking a little chewed up, but apparently still hale and hearty.
A dozen Ulta suit pilots then entered the fray, their weapons of blue light extended, allowing Anastasios, Eva, and Leon’s wives to fall back.
The Ulta suits were much larger and more protected than the others, and when they moved, they were like a wolf pack, with several drawing the creature’s attention while several more lunged to exploit that moment of inattention. They targeted the creature’s joints, and especially went after its right arm, which Anastasios had already injured. Against the monster’s scales, however, their weapons were of limited effect.
Suddenly, the creature wailed again, the sound of its cry reverberating through the cavern. Immediately, Leon felt like throwing up as the magic in his body rebelled against him, and he wasn’t alone; those who’d been affected by the third wail were affected by this one, too, nearly all being rendered essentially comatose.
“The pilots with us are out of commission!” Siddi reported. “Their suits are piloted by their giants!”
Leon groaned as he tried to speak, to take control of the situation. His brain knew that something had to be done, but he was woozy and completely devoid of strength; even the groan was his limit. The more the creature wailed, the more it seemed that the awful feeling he’d had since arriving in the cavern intensified. Already, he could feel pressure against his eyes, while his head throbbed with his every heartbeat. He was desperate to join the fight, to slay the creature attacking his people, but he couldn’t even lift his head to touch the cloud glass, let alone fight.
Another wail ripped through the Ulta suit, and Leon felt like he was hit in the head with a whole bag of hammers. He closed his eyes in a desperate and futile effort to drown out the pain, but when his eyes flickered open, he found himself lying almost face-down in front of the throne in his Mind Palace.
Collapsed on the stairs only a few feet away was the Thunderbird, looking terrible. She was in human form, but her usual olive skin tone had turned ashen gray, while her dark brown locks that normally sparkled with flecks of gold had splayed out around her, and seemed to be turning white before Leon’s eyes.
“Leon!” Xaphan roared as he ran over. “You’re under a soul realm attack! Channel your origin power to create a shield around us!”
Now disconnected from his physical body, Leon felt just a little bit better—better enough to struggle into a sitting position with his back against his throne and do what Xaphan had so forcefully suggested.
The dome he created wasn’t large, especially since his supply of origin power wasn’t particularly large, but he was more than able to form a protective barrier around himself, his Ancestor, and his demonic partner. He lost sight of everything around him as the barrier thickened and darkened until it resembled dark storm clouds. The only light source within the barrier was Xaphan’s orange-yellow body.
Once the barrier was in place, Leon’s condition started to improve. Energy returned to his body—his magic body, at least—and he pulled himself over to his Ancestor.
“What’s… happening?” he croaked.
“Soul realm attack,” Xaphan repeated, his voice trembling with concern. “And a strange one, at that.” The demon glanced around, then extended a hand and conjured a small ball of demonfire in his palm, letting the dark red flame burn for a second before snuffing it out. “It seems… that I’m unaffected…”
“What about my Ancestor?” Leon demanded as he rolled the Thunderbird over onto her side. She was completely catatonic and seemed to be aging before his eyes, the wrinkles on her face already making her look about eighty years old by mortal standards.
“Keep the barrier in place!” Xaphan ordered, to which Leon complied, a quick check confirming that his barrier remained strong. The demon breathed deeply and stated, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with something like this… But the easiest thing I think you can do is to try and wake up the glorified pigeon. She’ll have better answers for you.”
With a thought, Leon summoned a stack of his most powerful healing spells through his barrier, his vision swimming for just a moment as they passed through the ‘clouds’.
“A good idea but one unlikely to work,” Xaphan stated. “For now, channel a few aetoi of origin power into your Ancestor, and if you can, add a tiny amount of Mist of Chaos…”
A single aetos was such a paltry amount of power that Leon was momentarily at a loss as to how to only channel a few into the Thunderbird, but he supposed that was what decades of practice in control was supposed to lead to. He sat down with his Ancestor and summoned the tiniest amount of origin power he could reasonably control and brought it close to her body. Then, he reached outside of his barrier to pull a wisp of mist. Given the size of his soul realm, it took a couple nerve-wracking minutes for it to arrive, but when it did, he pushed the glittering origin power into his Ancestor first, and then followed up with the mist.
The effect was immediate; the Thunderbird began to stir. Her yellow avian eyes flickered open, and with a shaking arm, inscribed an ancient rune in the air with light magic. Leon had never seen the rune before, but it incorporated familiar elements, including a recognizable piece of a ‘lock’ rune and one from a ‘mind’ rune. While that barely encompassed half of the rune as a whole, he felt he could get the gist.
As soon as the rune was formed, Leon let his power flow into it, not even needing the Thunderbird to ask. Practically as soon as the rune was backed with his power, the pressure upon him ceased, and he started to feel somewhat normal again.
“Are you all right?” he asked the Thunderbird as she flopped over onto her back despite still lying on the stairs. Promisingly, her usual skin tone was rapidly returning, as was color to her hair. Her wrinkles were taking longer to smoothen out, though, but he took comfort in seeing that they were smoothing out.
“Something… disrupted your power,” she gasped. “And hit me through it…”
Leon and Xaphan exchanged a worried look.
“How is that… possible?” the demon asked, speaking the words since Leon was far too stunned to do so.
“I… don’t know,” the Thunderbird admitted.
“Did it… affect everyone else?” Leon wondered aloud, thinking about the other members of his expedition who were felled by the creature’s wail. After a moment, though, his thoughts switched from them to something else. “And… the Great Black Dragon?” he asked.
The Thunderbird scowled as she pushed herself up into a sitting position. “Maybe,” she stated, her voice trembling, though whether more from pain or fury, Leon couldn’t quite tell. “We’ll see. For now, you should be more resistant with this rune. We’ll talk more later; right now, go kill that thing!”
Leon gritted his teeth and nodded, then practically threw himself onto his Mind Palace’s throne.
In a moment, he was opening his physical eyes, and immediately took stock of the situation.
Siddi’s projection was flashing, and he noted that his Ulta suit was fighting without his input—likely all from Siddi. She was engaging the creature on a rocky hill poking out of the mist covering the cavern’s floor, the blades of blue light that extended from the suit’s wrists flashing as she struck and parried and dodged around the creature’s own animalistic lunges.
Scattered around the battlefield were several trashed Ulta suits, along with a couple dozen fallen Thundermen. Leon grimaced at the sight, and was about to press his head against the cloud glass behind him to join the fight when the creature used its arms to hold both of the suit’s arms away, then struck with its stinger.
The stinger pierced the Ulta suit’s plating with startling ease, pushing in several feet and almost impaling Leon’s shoulder. At the end of the stinger, Leon was rather disturbed to see tiny holes in regular intervals. He had no idea what the holes were for, nor did he want to find out. Leon called upon his power and hurled the stinger back out of the suit, but the flow of power through the suit was already catastrophically disrupted.
“Losing power!” Siddi shouted. “I’ll have to reroute through other channels! I can’t continue!”
“Open up!” Leon shouted back as he took a second to make sure that his armor was still sitting well on his form.
With hardly a second passing, the pilot’s compartment opened, and Leon charged out with Iron Pride in hand. As soon as his fingers tightened around the hilt of his weapon, where the Iron Needle resided, power filled him, banishing any sense of sickness the creature’s wails had filled him with.
He came face-to-disturbing face the moment he left the compartment, the creature staring back at him with its cloudy white eyes. It growled and hissed at the same time, the ‘Lord’ rune glowing on its forehead brightening for a moment.
And then it attacked, darting toward Leon with a speed and ferocity that belied its size and odd aura.
Leon ducked under a clawed swipe. He stabbed outward, but the creature twisted out of the way. Lightning flashed across its scales, eliciting a mild cry. It then wailed again, and Leon’s power again trembled as fury lanced through him.
‘It wants to separate me from my power?’ he indignantly thought. He bared his teeth and lunged, deflecting the creature’s razor-sharp claws and stabbing into its chest in one fluid motion.
His Adamant weapon pierced the creature’s hide, but it felt like stabbing into a tree; the creature cried out once more and shook its body, removing Iron Pride from its body and throwing Leon back at the same time.
Arcs of lightning flashed across his blade, and Leon prepared another strike, but at that moment, Anastasios came careening in, striking against the back of one of the creature’s legs with his enormous sword. Bolts of bright white light struck the creature’s other side repeatedly, courtesy of Eva, each hit boring into the creature’s hide like the most terrible of insects.
The creature cried out in pain, and Leon lunged toward it, driving Iron Pride into the monster’s neck. He then leaped into the air, assuming his Thunderbird form so quickly that he was able to grab both of the monster’s arms in one set of talons each, then curl his back downward, impaling his beak into the back of the creature’s neck.
His beak bit deep, slicing into the monster’s hide and grazing against its spinal cord. Utterly putting banshees to shame, the monster shrieked, then began wildly shaking, trying to dislodge Leon, but he held on. The muscles in his neck screamed as he drove his beak deeper, ripping and tearing at the muscles and nerves running down the creature’s back, while silver-blue lightning raced over his form and into the monster.
Flesh cooked, then popped. Bones crunched, nerves were severed, and hide was burned. The monster fell silent.
Leon was almost thrown from the creature when it finally collapsed, and he smoothly returned to his human form and looked back at the creature, ready to strike again.
The creature, from where it had fallen, seemed to stare back at him, its milky white eyes open and turned in his direction. However, the monster was silent, and Leon couldn’t sense any magic power radiating from it at all. The creature’s body was burned and scorched, its right leg from the knee down severed by Anastasios while its left arm where Eva’s magic had been sinking in was simply gone. Leon’s lightning had opened gashes all along its torso, and Leon could see nothing but charred flesh and blackened bits of shattered bone beneath the creature’s shredded hide.
“Is… is it dead?” Valeria pantingly asked as she darted forward, her face covered in sweat while her glaive was still brandished.
Leon walked over and pulled Iron Pride from where it still rested in the monster’s neck. With a single swipe, he took the creature’s head off, its muscles and hide now as resistant as a single sheet of paper.
“Yes,” he growled.
He took a deep breath, his awareness slowly widening away from the fight he’d just won and to the rest of the cavern.
Bodies lay strewn everywhere, some looking none the worse for wear while others were covered in blood and missing extremities. Some were clearly dead if their lack of aura was any indication. He even saw half a dozen trashed Ulta suits, with at least one so broken that he could see the body of the pilot inside—it seemed the monster’s stinger hadn’t just pierced his suit, and the dead pilot looked like he’d been impaled just as Leon almost had been.
Perhaps most startingly was Red, who had assumed her wyvern form, but now lay on the ground, her eyes blazing with fury even as blood seeped from numerous gashes in her wings and scales.
“Treat the wounded!” Leon shouted. “The threat is passed! Secure the area!”
His people sprang into action, and those wounded who hadn’t already seen some medical attention were gathered together. Marcus and Gaius quickly took charge, organizing triage for the wounded while Leon, his wives, Anastasios, and Eva gathered around the creature.
“What in the Ashen Fields was this thing?” Eva asked in a disgusted tone as she kicked its remains.
“Some foul Nexus monstrosity,” Anastasios dismissively stated. “Hopefully it was the only one of its kind.”
“Unlikely,” Valeria argued. “At least, we should assume there’s more. We need to secure these caverns; we can’t have these things running around beneath Artorion.”
“Agreed,” Cassandra replied. “But how quickly can we secure all this?” She gestured at the cavern all around them, especially at the ghostly forest and the cavern’s misty floor. “And didn’t you say that the magic here could be toxic over sustained exposure?”
Valeria grimly nodded. “That’s what the stories say, anyway…”
She looked to Leon, and he felt her gaze land upon him. However, his eyes were glued onto the severed head of the creature. The rune inscribed upon its head had stopped glowing, and he couldn’t help but wonder just what in the hells it was doing to the monster. And that was to add to his questions about what in the hells it did to him, where it had come from, why it so resembled the creatures on the frescos, and if someone else had managed to figure out how to let people with Inherited Bloodlines transform with their Ancestors’ power.
The possible answers then led to more questions that kept stacking on top of each other endlessly. As they flitted through his mind, Leon didn’t look up from the creature until Valeria’s hand found his shoulder.
“Leon…?” she asked hesitantly. “What do you want us to do?”
He scowled and finally looked up from the monster’s carcass. “Secure this thing,” he ordered. “Get our wounded seen to. Then we’re getting the hells out of this place. Send people out to call back the other teams. Seal most of the entrances. We’ll lead a greater expedition down here to secure the whole place, but for now, let’s just get everyone back to Artorion.”
Valeria nodded, and as Leon’s orders were carried out, he found his eyes being drawn back to the rune on the monster’s forehead.
‘Who was this ‘Lord’?’ he wondered. ’Was it you?’ he silently asked the dead monster. ‘Or was it someone else?’
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