Mage Steel Alice Ch. 2

TWO

Alice slipped to the side, allowing the Lupine’s axe to pass by her to embed itself in the metal floor of the space station. A howl of frustration assaulted her ears as the pup voiced his frustration. Alice’s second axe ended the yowling before it could truly grate on her nerves. Blood sprayed to coat the ceiling as the head slammed to the ground at her feet. 

With a grunt she kicked the headless torso, sending it flying down the hall toward two charging cultivators. All three fell in a tangle of limbs as Alice tried to catch her breath. Blood covered her body where the wolve’s sharp axes had found skin, parting her thin armor with ease. Her energy reserves were mostly full, Regrowth constantly sending a trickle of healing power through her as she fought her way through the security station. 

“Are you done yet?” Daniur’s asked, her voice loud through the earpiece. 

“Almost to the top. There were a lot more of them in here than you said,” Alice said, foring her breathing to sound normal, affecting a bored tone. A snort of derision from the ancient cultivator showed her it was for naught. 

“They’re weak. I’ve already destroyed their fleet, but for this to work, I need you in the control room,” Daniur said. Alice stopped and thought of the four heavy frigates that had been stationed around the terraformed moon. That the woman could destroy them with such speed was terrifying. 

“Five minutes. I got a few more to deal with then clearing the top,” Alice said, starting to trot toward the downed guards. They’d mostly untangled themselves from their dead companion, tossing the corpse aside like it was trash. 

“Make it three,” Daniur said and Alice growled internally at the woman’s harsh deadlines. She sped up, accessing the runes she’d imprinted on herself years ago. Force and haste, both of them critical to the Momentum rune, flared to life and her speed tripled. 

She crossed the distance in the blink of an eye, her axes descending to end the two cultivators before they could raise their defenses. She stepped over the corpses, moving toward the lift that would take her to the final part of the station she hadn’t had time to clear. 

“I would have turned these off ages ago.” The Lupine were a warrior race, or had at least culled those who didn’t have the violent tendencies. Even facing a superior fighter they stayed the course, refusing to back down. Alice almost admired them for their resolve, but simply venting the station would have prevented this slaughter from occurring. 

The lift opened noiselessly and Alice grunted in pain as a set of aura wreathed claws buried themselves into her stomach. Fangs opened and closed with bone crushing force on her shoulder. Regrowth sprang to life as Alice fought through the pain, slashing with her axes at her attackers legs. Even with the awkward angle and the limited space, the heavy axes cleaved through flesh. 

Fangs pulled out of her shoulder as the creature howled in agony. Her eardrums burst and the world went silent. Pain had become a constant to her, a drowning sea that she floated upon, kept only moving by years of discipline and experience. A growl of her own bubbled up in her throat as she kneed the cultivator, the blow ripping the Lupine’s claws out of her abdomen. Her rune quickly sealed the wound but the pain lingered, the torn muscles and ruptured organs taking longer to heal. 

“Bitch!” Alice spat as she kicked the cultivator, flaring her force rune right as her heel hit the wolf’s chest. Bone shattered as the wolf was flung away from her, smashing off of a wall to tumble bonelessly to the ground. Alice advanced, ears popping as her eardrums repaired themselves. Her opponent was the only one in the room filled with technical stations. 

“Why?” the Lupine rasped as she got to her feet. Her chest was warped where Alice’s foot had broken bone, each breath blowing pink clouds of blood from her maw, her tongue lolling as she panted through the pain. 

“Paybacks a bitch. Your people killed my people, now I kill you,” Alice said, biding her time as she continued to heal. Her opponent was somewhere at the low end of D-Grade and a straight fight would be tough. Time was her ally as she let herself heal. 

“The Warpack is gone. We are just the leftovers, servants, guards too old, and pups too young,” the cultivator said. She straightened to her full seven plus feet of height, bone cracking and shifting. 

“Shit. How’s she healing?” Alice threw one of her axes, it tumbled once as it slammed into the wall right where the wolf had been, the cultivator spinning in a blur to avoid the blow. 

“Yeah, we had kids on my ship too!” Alice roared, anger flooding through her as she thought of the students that had filled the Dragon’s Maw. How many cadets had met a wolf’s blade or found their way into an insatiable stomach? The fury propelled her to move faster, runes aiding her, smoother and faster than she’d ever summoned them. 

Alice was a blur of murderous rage as she dueled the D-Grade, her aura beginning to leak out of her tight control. Violet energy clashed with forest green mixed with ruby red swirls, the smell of the forest and blood filling the room. They clashed twice, the wolf losing both bouts. Fingers lay on the ground, her energy control not enough to prevent the shearing edge of her axe from losing them from the wolf’s hand. 

“I am Vthra’shak! My bloodline shall continue! The Hunt will never end!” Energy boiled around the cultivator at her words, her aura contracting about herself for a moment before exploding forward. 

“DAMNIT!” Alice screamed as an aura phantasm appeared, salivating jaws snapping shut over her left arm, taking the limb from her yet again. 

“I just got that!” Alice yelled as she focused her energy and snapped open her force rune, shattering apart the weak technique in a blast of energy. Alice followed the energy attack with a physical one, crossing the ground in an instant to slam her axe into the stupefied wolf’s chest. 

“The hun…” Vthra’shak’s words trailed off as she slumped to her knees before falling over, dead. 

“Station cleared,” Alice reported instantly. She swept her sense across the station and couldn’t feel any other energy emanation to indicate another cultivator. 

“Took you an extra minute. Two more bouts in the ring with me. No runes,” Daniur said. Alice sighed as she focused all her energy on Regrowth. Watching flesh split and bone regrow was always grossly fascinating. Her arm appeared again, scarless and milky white. 

“No way to hide I lost an arm. That’s going to suck.” For all of Alice’s many complaints about the ancient cultivator, Daniur knew how to fight and how to fight well. Even though the B-Grade couldn’t help her progress with her runes or growing stronger, she’d helped refine Alice’s fighting style to the point she felt like she was a new person. 

“Hurry up and get the camera’s pointed toward the moon and get my mic hooked up and recording,” Daniur said. Alice walked over the dead corpses and went to the master control and stared at the foreign controls before sighing. 

“I’m not the most technically minded, give me a few,” Alice said, pulling her holopad out of the protected holster in the small of her back and quickly syncing it to the station’s control panel. From there a pre-bought program began to eat through the station’s defenses until her holopad had control of the station’s security functions. 

“Done yet?” Daniur asked after five minutes. Alice grunted but quickly finished setting everything up. The security stations came to life, thousands of feeds from the moon below filling the room, all of it being recorded as Daniur’s voice came over the stations’ systems. 

“You’re good to go. Recording starts now,” Alice said. She looked over the feeds and froze at the sight of the four burned out frigates. Each of them had been cored like an apple, metal melted from intense blasts of lighting. Alice forced herself to swallow and focus on what the B-Grade catastrophe was saying. 

“My blood was shed, housed in descendants who stretched generations. Children slain, breaking our ancient covenants. This is their retribution. I am Daniur Hthior, the Living Storm and this is my Judgement!” Daniur’s voice rang, overlaid a dozen times as energy began to swirl across the moon.

The wolves had transformed the moon into a paradise for themselves. Thick, ancient woods with hundred meter tall trees. Thick, lush grasslands filled with animals, predators and prey. Carefully maintained rifts were everywhere around the planet, buildings full of Lupine hunters around them. 

From those rifts, from the earth, from the water, from the air itself, energy rose in great streams, thick enough to be visible. An aurora of colors they painted the atmosphere for a second under a glittering shell of swirling colors. Alice looked to see hundreds of Lupine coming out of their shelters, looking up in awe at the rivers of power that filled the sky. Up and up the energy went until the entire moon’s atmosphere was filled with power, bursts of lighting starting to fire off from the sheer amount of power there. 

“Survive the tribulation and your sins shall be forgiven!” Daniur said, her voice frozen in wrath. The nebulous colors began to coalesce, turning light gray, charcoal, iron-black, then it became a void, light not allowed to enter. Lightning began to descend in sheets that turned continents to glass, evaporating lakes only for the water to be sucked back into the storm. 

Ice fell in ten meter spears that tore through cliffs, stabbing deep into the earth, exploding in razor sharp shrapnel that shredded anything it touched. Thousands were dying, carbonized by the lightning, killed by the ice, swept up by the gales of horrific winds that came from the heavens, twisting cyclones tens of kilometers wide. 

Alice swallowed as she saw death on a scale that was hard to comprehend. The moon was small and sparsely populated, but there were still tens of thousands on the surface. The storm worsened, rifts shattered as their treasures were plucked by questing winds, dragged free of their homes and lifted high into the sky. Alice watched in awe as they broke apart, their energy feeding the storm that continued to rage. 

Hundred meter trees were plucked from the earth as if they were saplings, picked up and flung about like toys in the hands of a petulant giant. Water was unleashed from the heavens, drowning deluges that caused floods of biblical proportions. Tidal waves rose up from the only sea on the moon, drowning an island chain in an instant before turning a peninsula into a swamp. 

The smell of ozone and rain filled the room and Daniur appeared next to her, a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead. She peered around Alice’s shoulder to look at the screens and let out a low whistle of appreciation.

“Wasn’t sure if that’d work, but it seems those treasures will keep the storm going for a few centuries. I threw that C-Grade core into the mix to anchor it all. This place will make a good hunting ground in a few centuries if anything survives,” Daniur said. 

“I don’t think anything can survive that,” Alice said as the feeds began to go dark, one by one as even the hardy systems that kept them operating fell to the storm.

“Something will always survive. That and I unleashed enough energy aspected to storm that some good C-Grade rifts should open up. Maybe bring little Diur out here when she’s ready to cultivate. Now what did you find out?” Daniur said, hooking a foot around a chair and flopping down in it. If the fact she’d just killed thousands bothered her, she didn’t show it.

“The Warpack is gone. We just got the dregs and children,” Alice said. 

“Explains why their pack guardians were so weak. Low D-Grade at best. The moon was a peak D-Grade moon, should have had a few peak D-Grades or a C-Grade cultivator to keep the weaker pack members safe. Now it looks like we need to hunt for the Warpack,” Daniur said, sighing and hooking her hands behind her head as she leaned back in the chair. 

“I’m going through their mail right now. Lots of correspondence with a group called the Exiled Swords. Do sects really name themselves pretentious names like this all the time?” Alice said.

“Exiled Swords is an organization for the exiled, banished, and those who have fallen out of the good graces of the greater cultivator society. These dogs were likely talking to one of their agents about a contract. Do you see where they were going?” Daniur explained.

“No. But there are multiple mentions of the Tournament of the Forgotten.” Daniur laughed instantly, deep bellowing laughs that ended in a coughing hack as she wiped at her watering eyes. 

“Oh, that’s perfect. I know where we’re going next,” Daniur declared. 

“The tournament? Why?” Alice asked, already dreading the answer. She was starting to get antsy about returning to her people and Chapterhouse. The experience of training with Daniur had been invaluable, but she was needed back home with her squad. 

“There is a reason that we host tournaments. It’s to showcase the best of our talent and to hone our strength. Get you a mask and some robes and we’ll throw you in as a body cultivator. Something with life to explain your healing. Can’t have you using your runes. While you do that,  I’ll find who they were talking with and try to shake it out of them where the Warpack has gone off to,” Daniur said, a wide smile on her face as she got up and headed toward the lifts. 

“Not a tournament arc,” Alice growled, well familiar with the media around them. She gathered her weapons and followed after Daniur, shaking her head and already dreading the upcoming pageantry.