230 - Feel The Burn

Lexie instantly grabbed Tate’s arm, keeping him from going further.

“What is it?” he asks. 

“There’s a dungeon underground,” she says. “Just appeared underneath our feet.”

“What?”

She didn't respond. She took out her phone and tried to reach her father.

“Lexie." He answered instantly.

“There’s an underground dungeon beneath me.”

He didn't even skip a beat, like he'd been expecting something like this to happen. “I’ll be right there.” 

“No. I don’t want them to catch you using your powers.”

“I can conceal it.”

“Better yet, you can get the town evacuated, just in case this is bigger than we can handle. We're next to the lake, and Green Fox is right around the corner. And Max and Luke aren't too far out either. We're not sure what's coming out of here, so alert the heroes and send people to safety."

“Lexie–”

“I can handle it, Aiden. Please, just trust me on this. Just try to get everyone as far away as possible. I’m going to try to prevent the dungeon from spawning, but barring that, I will fight whatever comes out. It can't kill me, probably, but my powers can be very exposive. Just in case, I want everyone as far away as possible. Maybe when you're done with that, you can come help me."

She hung up before he could argue with her and turned to Tate. “What are you still doing here? Didn’t you hear what I said?”

Tate looked taken aback by the commanding tone of her voice, and Lexie realized belatedly that she’d never used that tone before, at least not on Earth. She was used to using it with Ryn and co, though. 

Mostly because Ryn and co typically did what she said without question, trusting her strength implicitly. Tate wasn’t so inclined. 

He shook his head. “No.”

“Tate–”

“You really thought I was going to leave you here by yourself.”

“Tate, I do not have time to argue with you. You’re mundane, and it’s–”

“I’m not mundane. Not anymore.”

Lexie narrowed her eyes. She wanted to ask questions, but she really didn’t have time to argue with the boy. If he wanted to die so badly, that was his prerogative.

But Lexie also knew that she would likely have to save him if it came down to it. 

She went to her feet and touched the ground, reaching out to the dungeon below. It burrowed deeper into itself, as though trying to hide. So it was an intelligent dungeon. Good to know. 

The second Lexie made contact with it, it tried to consume her in images, but she held back this time. She didn't need to activate her soul card, since she could simply communicate with it directly.

Which of the Lord Lines do you hail from? Lexie wondered. Did Neqal send you?

It didn’t respond. Lexie almost immediately activated DECODE, and she was hit with an assortment of scents as she picked apart the dungeon.

It felt different from Neqal’s dungeon. It also felt different from Belsycht’s dungeon. Beyond that, she couldn’t figure out where it was from.

Tell me, or I will make you tell me.

Before she could do more than utter the threat, the dungeon suddenly spawned. 

“Shit.”

Lexie encased Tate in a forcefield and swept them away just as the ground burst open and flames emerged. They were black, not unlike Lexie’s VOID flames, but they didn’t eat away at everything they burned. They simply spread rapidly as far as the eyes could see. 

So much so that Lexie was shocked by the speed of the spread and how fast it grew.

She immediately created force fields to encase the flame, but they turned gold when they touched the force field, burning right through them, even though Lexie turned them metal, and then obsidian.

It didn't help. The force fields were undamaged, but the flames continued.

Lexie gaped. How did that happen?

Were they phasing through objects? Or fake flames?

No, not fake. Even from here, Lexie could feel the heat emanating from the fire that licked across the ground, spreading rapidly. The lake didn’t stop it. It crawled right on top of it and kept going.

Lexie's follow-up VOID and VOID FLAME didn't stop either. Lexie figured she could fight fire with fire, and she spread her power as far as it could go, making her feel a tad breathless.

But even as the VOID ate up some of the flames, they continued to grow anyway, seeking a path around it and spreading through cracks in the ground.

It was as insidious as could be, and Lexie couldn't hold the VOID indefinitely, not with the mana environment.

Luckily, Lexie and Tate were suspended in the air, higher than the flames could reach. 

But she didn't know how to stop the fire from growing when even the VOID didn't do the trick.

What kind of fire was this?

“Let me down,” Tate said. “We have to stop the fire from spreading.”

“Yes, but on the ground, I can’t protect you.”

“It’s fine. My body is impervious to fire.”

“How?”

“I don’t really have time to explain it.”

Even if Lexie accepted that as an explanation, there was one more thing to take note of. “We don’t know what type of fire it is. It’s burning through my shields and through the literal void.”

"All the more reasons why you should let me at it."

Lexie sighed. "Tate…”

He phased through the forcefield, somehow dropping to the ground, and then started running toward the other side of the fire, which was spreading to Green Fox.

His magic left Lexie gaping. 

“How the heck did he do that?”

More importantly, she had to contain the fire somehow and keep it from spreading to the other side, where there was a whole forest just waiting to be burned down.

Lexie instantly sped there and used <True Windbreaker> to start a whirlpool, trying to spread the fire in the other direction. Tate had a similar idea, but his whirlpool was slower, darker. Almost like thick fog, the droplets of water touching the flames, turning them to smoke.

It kinda worked. As the smoke twirled into the sky, it slowed down the rate of the spread, but it didn’t do much more than that. Lexie needed to figure out what the fire was and fast. 

She activated DECODE again, and it burned as it took over her senses, making her feel like the fire was internal.

It also hurt to use it because it was a high mana skill, and she was in an environment that didn't like her using high mana.

Furthermore, it was slow to work.

All she could tell about the fire was that it wasn’t physical, but it wasn’t psychological either. It was some other third thing that she could not quite figure out. She closed her eyes, tried to reach out to the dungeon itself to figure out the source of all this, when she heard a scream. 

Her eyes popped open, and she gaped.

The flames had engulfed Tate. 

He was the one screaming, his face twisted with pain, but he wasn’t burning. Not entirely, anyway.

His skin looked red, hot, but it wasn't showing the signs of anything higher than a first-degree burn.

It sure looked like it hurt, though.

“I thought you said you were impervious!” Lexie yelled, and he ignored her. The flames had turned golden when they were around him, too, but it wasn't charring him to a crisp like she thought it would.

So maybe his body was impervious? Or maybe the burn was internal? Psychological?

Was the grass not really burning?

It was hard to tell without putting the fire out. It all just looked black to her.

This was so hard to figure out. She didn't know whether to focus on the dungeon or on the flame itself.

Watching the burn alive certainly didn't help.

Her heart skipped a beat as he fell to his knees, but he kept working to contain the fire, and Lexie was frozen in indecision for a second, wondering whether to turn on DECODE or do something about Tate. Eldritch Lexie would have focused on the dungeon, but the human side slowed her decision-making down.

She should encase his skin in a VOID suit so that at least the flames wouldn't hurt him.

“Tate!” The new voice was Aiden’s, who appeared on the scene. The flames immediately sped toward him, and Lexie understood something else.

The flames weren't spreading indiscriminately.

It specifically sought out humans. It wanted to burn them. It was sentient; could it be tricked?

Lexie made clones of herself and sent them toward the centre of the fire. Aiden did the same thing, leaving his clones to take the damage and sending the flames back with the wind. He also did something with Tate that she didn't understand.

One second, Tate was there, and the next, he wasn't.

Teleport? But it didn't look like it.

There was no rune appearing or teleport circle.

He'd simply ceased to exist.

Whatever it was, it worked. When Tate disappeared, some of his flames had gone with him. Plus, between the fire chasing the clones and the wind pushing its procession back, the fire began to eat itself.

"Keep going!" Lexie told her dad, turning up the windbreaker.

But then she felt like her heart literally stopped.

She fell to her knees and retched.

"Lexie!" Aiden yelled, and that moment of distraction was enough for the flames to break their confines once more. It sped for Lexie, but she launched into the air once more, just barely escaping it.

Enough.

She didn't have the mana to spare here. She had to figure it out, and the only way to do that quickly was to actually interact with the flame. Since she didn't have the time to find the caster inside the dungeon, it was the only other way.

Unless...

She tried to weave a link with the flame, but while sentient, the fire wasn't operating itself. There was something else behind it that she couldn't read, which was why DECODE was so slow to work.

The only way to get it to work faster–even as Aiden struggled to keep it from exploding out of control by ripping pieces of the fire and sending it to...somewhere else–was to interact with it. Which meant feeling it herself.

"Dad," she told Aiden. "Don't do anything, okay?"

Aiden frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Just trust me."

She let herself drop to the ground and dropped the shield. She encased her skin in VOID, except for her hand, which she stuck out to touch the fire.

It all dropped on her all at once.

DECODE worked on the pain first.

It took it a part until it got to the root of it, the thing that was causing the agony.

Desire.

What did she desire?

Everything. First, she saw her father, and then she saw her brother. She also saw Xena and Dewie, and Tate, the images clashing into each other.

She felt a wanting so deep it would never be satisfied, so vast that it constantly gnawed at her.  

It was similar to her hunger for power and knowledge, but somehow it felt different as well. It was hard to pinpoint exactly how it felt different, except to say that it was like the difference between two similar spices or scents.

When she hungered for power, that hunger felt more distinct, more approachable. It was easy to understand. She wanted to be the best at everything. She wanted her supremacy to be acknowledged, her self-doubt and fear to be conquered, and she wanted the certainty that she would fight and win over everyone and everything.

But this desire did not feel as distinct. It felt scattered and dragged her in different directions, pulling everything into its vortex. The more she felt it internally, the more it burned externally and eternally.

It sincerely felt like the burning would never end, and she would continue to want something she could never have. 

Like seeing her brother, Logan. 

Like being Aiden's real daughter.

Like her friends, accepting that she was an Eldritch.

Like having the Eldritch accept her as a Lord.  

Lexie felt something wrap around her wrist, a grappling hook, and it dragged her out of the fire. She heard someone who sounded like Uncle Max screaming her name, but she was too caught up in her emotions to understand.

Her hand hurt.

She wrapped it in VOID, and the flames immediately ricocheted down the length of the lasso, heading for Uncle Max.

“No!” Lexie yelled and used a VOID to temporarily sever the connection. The fire didn't care. It cut across the grass for Max, but Lexie launched him above their heads with the fire nearly licking the bottom of his feet. Aiden kept working on ripping huge parts of the fire into something and making them disappear.

"What are you doing?” Lexie asked him.

“Containing it in a pocket dimension,” he said.

"You can do that?"

“Not for all of it,” he said, and Lexie realized, while she had been out, the fire had spiraled out of control.

It wasn't a united front. The flames streaked across the land in separate paths, but Green Fox was now entirely on fire.

It was headed to Lexie's home, too.

Everyone has been evacuated," Max said when he noticed Lexie's gaze. "The Heroes should be here soon."

Lexie nodded, and she let her mind go back to the pocket dimension thing.

It was a smart idea, and technically, it should work just like VOID did, but it seemed like it was more effective at eradicating the flames.

Why?

Maybe because the VOID had nothing to attract the flames toward it. Maybe it had nothing to anchor. It had no life, no light, nothing.

Perhaps Aiden's tiny pocket dimension had more 'life', hence something to hold onto.

“Have you figured out what's causing all this?” Max yelled down at Lexie.

"Almost. Do you have a gun that can create sparks?"

"I did. Unfortunately, someone forced me to leave it behind in the dungeon."

Oh. Right. They could go back for it, just not now.

While Lexie caught her breath and thought about what to do next, the Heroes arrived. Stella Firebringer was one of them, and so were Torin and Theo.

They, of course, began fighting fire with fire, but that didn't help.

Not even when Stella's incredible fire morphology and Theo's attempt to swallow it all.

Lexie wanted to help, but she was much better suited to them figuring out what this thing was made of.

Lexie closed her eyes again. She thought about the flame, about what she'd felt.

It made her want things. It fed off desire. The creature wasn’t really psychological, but the fire itself was more a metaphor for the burning internal desire she had felt.

Which meant that it was turning their desires into literal fire. The fire had formed a link with them, so Lexie had to somehow either stop everyone here from feeling that desire by taking them out of the picture, like what Aiden had inadvertently done to Tate, or by unlinking the flames. 

The question was how to do the latter? There were too many people to teleport at once, and even if she did that, there were too many things keeping the fire going, down to the very organisms in the soil. And the only way she could stop them all was by unlinking all of them from the flame at once, or potentially breaking their link with the source.

But she had no idea where the source was.

A third idea struck her.

Could she make a metaphoric void, one that would temporarily remove all desire from everything in the atmosphere?

She flipped through her card catalog searching for something that would work.

End all desire. Embrace the void. 

Lexie closed her eyes. She remembered how she'd first created VOID, by having something and going down the path, eradicating everything that made it something so it would become nothing.

Now, activated VOID and walked backward, searching for the part of the VOID that simply signified a lack of meaning. She planned to try weaving that to the fire at first, and if that didn't work, she would do it with everyone else, protecting them from the flames.

But she was too slow. And she was also tired.

Before she could enact her plans, thunder struck across the sky, and a sleek, smaller spaceship zoomed into being.

It hovered on top of the flame and began to glow.

Just then, the fire started to dissipate. Lexie felt the dungeon withdrawing, closing up, disappearing again.

Then, everything was back to normal.

Well, the ground glowed gold for some strange reason, and some of the grass was burnt, or wrecked by Lexie's VOID and others were not.

Strange.

What was even stranger was when the spaceship finally landed on Earth, and the Fae ambassador was beamed out.

Lexie was disappointed. 

And then suspicious.

"Is everyone alright?" he asked, but before he could get another word out, Lexie pointed accusatorily.

"Did you set this up?” 

He raised his eyebrow. "That is a ridiculous accusation."

"You didn't answer the question."

"Why would we set this up?"

"To take over Earth. Make us a colony rather than a mere partner planet."

"We prefer the term protectorate," the Ambassador said, and Lexie's ire grew.

"So you did plan this."

“Why would we bother?” he said. “Something like this was bound to happen either way, with how many attacks Earth has sustained lately.”

“I notice that you did not answer the question.”

"No. We did not  set this up as you asserted.” He looked around at the Heroes panting and watching. “We do not have a need for childish games like these, and it would be destructive to unleash things like this when Earth is bound to become a protectorate anyway.”

"Earth will never become a protectorate.”

“It might not have a choice. The way I see it, Earth is very much on its last leg, and it all it needs is one ill-placed match to burn it down." His eyes zeroed in on Lexie. "However independent you might think you are, you still lack the basic understanding of how magic works. The Fae have had millennia to learn, and are millions of Earth years ahead of you. And you still need us, Lexie Sparrowfoot. I hope by the time you realize it, it’s not too late.”

***

"Great. Just fantastic. Another scheme to kill Lexie Sparrowfoot that didn't work." Vulcan threw up his hands and flopped onto the couch to sulk. He knew he was acting like a baby, but he didn't care.

He was so tired of losing.

"That scheme wasn't about killing her," The Alchemist responded mildly. "At least not yet. "

Then what was it about?

"Why spoil the surprise?" The Alchemist said. "Just watch and see."