Ruthless V5Ch52-The Panther Queen Awakens

Mina was floating in the air, considering her next target, when she saw and felt something in the distance, and her heart skipped a beat.

Something was moving. Mina could feel it, moving into her Zone of Enchantment, rippling with overflowing energy with every step forward. It was larger than most of the Pantherfolk and distinctly more powerful.

The Queen!

Mina swallowed as she realized what was coming.

Oh no, we’re in trouble…

She was surprised that James was not waking up. He had been inside of the Panther Queen’s dream, she had believed, so why was he still sitting still?

Mina strongly considered giving James’s body a shake, but she hoped the fact that he was still unconscious meant that he was doing something to make them safer. She wondered if they would need to flee. Mina wouldn’t be as quick as James, assuming that he did not wake up. At least the Panther Queen could not fly as far as she knew.

The distant figure that Mina assumed was the Panther Queen was accelerating now. Mina held her breath as the mass of muscle and power came tearing through the underbrush. She stayed still and once more considered fleeing.

Then the Queen’s head came into view in a clear area, as she passed a tree. Mina saw something that flipped everything upside down. The Ruler who was crashing through the trees and bushes to reach the battlefield still had her eyes closed.

She’s sleeping, Mina thought numbly. Even now, she’s still sleeping…

The Panther Queen entered the zone of carnage, and in an instant, the bloodshed markedly increased. Dancing and leaping around like a bloodthirsty bestial ballerina, she tore into her own followers and began ripping them to shreds.

Unable to even detect their Ruler while still deep in the illusion James had cast, the Pantherfolk were sitting ducks. They responded with feeble flailing and agonizing cries as the Queen tore them limb from limb, slicing or stabbing into necks and chests with long, sword-like claws that grew from the place where her talons had been.

Mina guessed after about a minute of this that the casualty rate had increased by twenty percent. This was the power of a Ruler. Almost half of the Panther Army lay dead already, most of them killed before the Queen arrived. If this continued at the current pace, Mina estimated that no one but the Panther Queen would remain alive in half an hour.

As she thought this, Mina saw the Ruler bisect a Panther Shaman at the waist, slashing with her claws from both sides, and Mina had to turn away from the scene for the first time. The sudden explosion of entrails was just too much. The Panther Queen’s physical strength advantage was so devastating that she could tear some of her subordinates apart like their bones were papier-mache. The Ruler advanced across the battlefield like a living storm, leaving a path of destruction in her wake.

Mina wasn’t even sure how the Queen knew where her targets were. Throughout the slaughter, her eyes remained tightly closed, and although she might be too strong to fall prey to James’s Complete Illusion Magic, she was still asleep. In that condition, her senses of hearing and smell should not be enough to allow her to butcher her soldiers so prolifically.

As Mina was wondering how far this would go, she felt James’s body begin to stir in her arms.

She was confused for a moment. She had not done anything to wake him up, and now that he had brought the Panther Queen’s body to the battlefield and seemed to be actively piloting her body, it seemed like the worst moment possible to choose to wake up.

Still, a few seconds after she felt him begin to move, James opened his eyes and looked back at Mina.

“Hey, Sunshine,” he said, grinning as he blinked rapidly, clearly trying to wake himself up. “It’s awfully dark out here, besides this space right next to you, isn’t it?”

Mina smiled, despite the tension of their situation. Then she shook her head and frowned.

“Be serious for a little while, won’t you?” she said. “We’re in the middle of a battle. It’s no time for you to—to hit on me!”

He chuckled. “Worth it for the look on your face. The two different looks.”

“Skapi, why did you wake up?” Mina asked. She looked down, where she saw that the Panther Queen was surprisingly still wreaking havoc among her troops, having hardly slowed down. Mina looked back up at James in surprise. “Wait, you’re still controlling her?”

“Not quite,” James said. “I did get her sleepwalking with a night terror, and I was piloting her body for a minute, but most of the groundwork was laid for me by Hester. I decided to let her take over driving the Queen for a while. That’s partially just a reward—”

He frowned, and Mina turned to face the ground again. The Panther Queen had stopped moving.

“—and it’s partially because I could sense our control of the Panther Queen wasn’t going to last much longer. Once I shifted from trying to please her with visions of success to night terror mode, there was only so long that she would play ball. Someone like her is constitutionally incapable of accepting defeat.”

“What does that mean?” Mina’s voice quivered slightly as she spoke. She thought she had an idea of what it meant.

James sighed. “It means I’m about to be in a fight with the Panther Queen for real. She was going to break out of the happy dream, so I don’t feel bad about shifting her to the night terror for some added distraction. But this part could be annoying.”

Annoying? Mina thought. Don’t you mean dangerous?

“Just annoying?” she said after a moment.

Below them, the Panther Queen was opening up her eyes.

“Yeah, I said what I meant to say,” James replied. “I know what I’m doing with her. The last couple of weeks have been pretty illuminating as to her strengths and weaknesses.” He began ticking off his fingers one by one as if making a list. “The Panther Queen is strong in Will, or I would have just kept controlling her for the rest of the night—or even allowed her to fight alongside her troops, confident that she would fall for my illusion. The same trick worked on the Goblin King way back when I fought him, after all. She’s also probably around the pinnacle of what I’ve seen as far as Strength and Agility goes. A top specimen, best of any Ruler I’ve encountered, I’m almost certain.

“Including better than me, probably. Intelligence is pretty average, but despite having decent Will and Intelligence, her magic Skills are kind of deficient. Not something she’s ever emphasized, just something she has a working knowledge of for utility purposes. This actually hints at her big problem, in my opinion. A lack of versatility. She’s got high Fortitude, and her other physical Stats are impressive, but a Ruler should be more than a tank. Dexterity is another significant weakness. She’s got all the fighting subtlety of a brick. Specializing so hard in physical abilities is such an obvious flaw in her decision making that I couldn’t help but wonder, the more I got to know her, if she was overcompensating for something. Some time in the past when she wasn’t physically strong or fast enough for something.” He shrugged. “But I’m just here to kick her ass, not be her psychologist.”

The Panther Queen had begun blinking rapidly and looking around, confused at what she was seeing. The scene of carnage that surrounded her would have thrown almost anyone for a loop, at least for a little while. Especially once she noticed the blood still fresh and glistening on her long, sword-like claws, and the stale, crusty gore that painted her coat and her maw.

The Queen’s jaws quivered as if she was horrified or infuriated—or simply unable to make sense of the madness that surrounded her.

Of course, that couldn’t last forever.

Her eyes focused on her soldiers who were still killing each other, embroiled in James’s illusion, and then Mina felt the aura gathering around the Panther Queen—the sheer power comparable in quantity and intensity to James’s own. A moment later, everyone else in the Panther Army stopped moving, stopped killing each other, simply held still.

Most of them were dead already, but there were a lot of survivors—though the injuries on even those lucky enough to be alive were severe in many cases.

A few of them who had been injured badly, but not killed, began taking out Health Potions from bags and drinking them.

Darn, after all that work, Mina thought. It’s a shame to have to run away with our tails between our legs…

“So I was wrong,” James said aloud, in a musing tone.

“About being able to defeat the Panther Army alone, skapi?” Mina asked.

Of course it was unrealistic, she thought, but you have convinced any doubters who saw this that you were absolutely capable of it—

“No, I overestimated the Panther Queen’s abilities,” James replied. “I thought she might be able to break my illusion’s hold over the Army and get them fighting again, but all she was able to do was transmit a message to them telling them to stop killing—at least that’s what I’m guessing she said. If she had broken the illusion’s effect, the whole group would be helping each other now, or maybe throwing fireballs at us, depending on their strengths and weaknesses.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m still not worried about the Panther Queen,” he said, his lips spreading in a cocky grin. “She might be stronger than me, but she’s a one-trick pony. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Time to see who’s greater.”

“You’re not going to…” Mina let her voice trail off.

The Panther Queen’s eyes had lit on the Fisher King and his Queen now, and the enemy Ruler’s expression was shifting to one of mounting fury.

Mina had been preparing to suggest that she and James should make a graceful exit while they had the chance. Quit while they were ahead. Somehow, it was hard to imagine the Panther Queen letting them do that now, though.

For a moment, Mina had wanted to tell James a secret—to counter the resistance he might have to leaving. Something she herself was not certain about. She had not had a period since Junior inexplicably stopped taking the breast.

But now she did not want to distract her husband before he began what she guessed would be a difficult battle.

“You!” The Panther Queen let loose a wrathful scream, to which no one reacted. The Pantherfolk on the ground were all still under James’s Complete Illusion Magic, and they could only hear sounds that were within the framework of that illusion—or announcements issued with the Queen’s Ruler powers.

The Panther Queen stepped forward, onto the air, as if it was a solid object, and then she began hopping forward, as if jogging up an invisible flight of stairs. Her movements in midair were slow and clunky, but she would get to James and Mina—if they did not take evasive action, fly away or something.

“Are you certain you have this situation under control, skapi?” Mina asked, her words barely coming out above a whisper.

“Absolutely,” James said. He turned his cocky grin on his wife and winked. “I’ll win this so decisively that you won’t have any chance to worry about me, okay?”

She nodded weakly.

He looked almost amused to be getting into this fight, but Mina would never not be worried about seeing her husband off into battle.

James let go of her arm, leaving Mina floating by herself in the air.

He extended his right hand, and a shadow suddenly shot toward it from out of the night, streaking through the air until it clamped onto James’s arm. The shadow, Roscuro, quickly reformed into a long axe, the Soul Eater’s eye at the center of the weapon’s head.

And James began slowly descending toward the Panther Queen, his altitude delicately and carefully controlled. Every motion seemed graceful and precise, in contrast with the Queen’s clumsy hopping across invisible lily pads.

“I’m here,” James said loudly, his posture suggesting to Mina that he must be looking the Panther Queen in the eyes. “I’m ready to fight you for as long as you can endure. But you forgot whose territory you’re in. You should have gotten the rest of your people out of the way before you tried to challenge me.”

James clenched his left fist, and his wedding ring glowed through the darkness as if it was being forged anew.

And the thin layer of ground began to open up far below him, Mina, and the Panther Queen. None of the Pantherfolk reacted at first, stuck as they were in the power of James’s illusion, which with his upgraded Skill, manipulated all of their senses, not just sight.

This matter with the ground had been the last trick James had played on the Panther Queen, Mina knew. Redirecting her from the center of the Fisher Kingdom to this peripheral territory, where the tortoises and their fellow creatures had lived until James ordered them to evacuate to the main part of his territory.

A land marked by sinkholes and thin soil. Sinkholes that James had, with relatively little Mana investment, fused into a great pit, covered by a thin layer of earth.

By James’s will, the soil split and then tilted at a sudden, impossible, ninety degree angle, sending almost every member of the Panther Army tumbling downward into a deep, black abyss.