Ruthless V5Ch41-Magic Lightning

“It’s just not going to work, Mr. Roget,” Christian said.

“Explain it to me again, Christian,” Alan said resolutely. “Use small words this time. Please cut out the scientific stuff. No one goes to law school to specialize in math and science.” He let out a little chuckle. “Except patent lawyers! And I was not that.”

“Right, right,” Christian said, nodding. “So, the reason it won’t work, in simple terms, uh—” He picked up a twig and started fiddling with it for a moment. “The way lightning behaves, it’s related to magnetism. Lightning is drawn to the ground.” He poked the ground with the twig. “That’s why lightning tends to hit the highest point, though that’s not a universal truth. It’s trying to take the path of least resistance to the ground.”

“How does this relate to lightning striking water, Christian?” Alan asked through gritted teeth. “Please, you’re giving me too much information to keep track of. I’m still not sure what the difference between those volts and amps you mentioned earlier was—”

“I got it, I got it,” Christian said, scratching furiously at his scalp. “Okay, simplest version. Water is a good conductor of electricity. When lightning strikes it, it spreads across the surface. It doesn’t really tend to go deeper. Most of the time, it doesn’t really kill a bunch of fish, unless they’re already right at the surface. So if you’re worried that there are a bunch of predators in this water—” He gestured at the swamp—“if you shoot electricity at a bunch of water, it’s pretty much just going to travel over the surface of the water. You’re not going to randomly kill all the wildlife living in the water. The electricity might hit something that just happens to be in the way, but it’s probably not going to do anything beyond the point of impact.”

Alan nodded. “Now I think I understand,” he said. “Thank you for giving me the concise version.”

I only had to ask four times…

“Well, we are the Electricity Commission,” Christian said, shrugging, scratching, and giving Alan a slightly sad smile. “If I didn’t know anything about this stuff, I’d be pretty darn useless.”

“But you’re describing the natural behavior of lightning and electricity,” Mitzi said, interjecting for the first time in the conversation.

“Uh, yes?” Christian said, swallowing.

“Oh, I get what you’re driving at,” Alan said, nodding at Mitzi, a smile slowly spreading across his face.

“What am I missing here?” Christian asked.

Mitzi responded by pointing at a tree. A little jolt of electricity shot out of her finger, stabbed a hole right through a leaf, and continued until it hit the tree.

“This lightning is magic,” she said. “Who’s to say it follows exactly the same rules as natural lightning? As far as I can tell, it just does whatever I want.”

“Well, that’s—” Christian swallowed some saliva and looked thoughtful for a moment. Finally, he said, “Actually, you might be onto something. The unscientific approach can probably accomplish a lot in this world. I guess we can do the lightning thing, and I’ll take notes on the experiment.”

Mitzi quirked her lip slightly but managed not to laugh.

“Sounds good, Christian,” Alan said, slightly exhausted. He mouthed the words, “Thank you,” to his wife.

A few minutes later, all the casters gathered on the shore’s edge, chanted their incomprehensible incantations, and together, cast a wide net of forking lightning bolts on and through the water. They controlled the direction of the electricity specifically to defy Christian’s prediction—and, Alan supposed, to break the laws of physics as well, though proving Christian wrong seemed to him the more important achievement right now.

To Alan’s own surprise, the results were incredibly effective. There was no sudden surge of dead fish floating to the surface like someone had abandoned a fish tank, but instead, the “logs” that Alan had noticed and casually dismissed, floating along the surface, sprang to life.

Their bodies flailed and twisted in apparent agony, showing remarkable flexibility for logs. Then a quick Identify revealed these “logs” to be the River Pit Viper, as the System dubbed them—or, as Alan knew them from before the System, the Florida cottonmouth.

One of the deadlier snakes native to Florida, and very fond of brackish water.

These ones, being mutated by the System, were considerably larger than normal cottonmouths, and they appeared to have been deliberately camouflaged as logs, with their heads and tails curled to the side of the body or beneath the water level.

One of the larger specimens, still affected by the lightning, managed to get enough control over its body to start moving through the water. Alan thought it was going to swim away, and they would have to try and hunt it down, but its actual behavior was far more disturbing.

The big snake turned and began swimming straight for the shore—toward the Mages—somehow able to direct its body well enough to move quickly through the water.

Mitzi!

Alan took a step forward, toward Mitzi, his staff clutched tightly in his right hand, but before he could move any further, the entire group of Mages turned their attention toward that snake. As if one organism had produced them, all the lightning bolts moved with striking coordination to surround and then flood the snake’s body with electricity.

Looking to the side, it was apparent that all of the other, smaller, lesser snakes had died. Their bodies floated lifelessly, freeing the Mages up to focus all their attacks on this lone survivor. Once the lightning had it, the reptile stopped swimming and writhed in the water, overcome by the sheer unmanageable invasion of its nervous system.

It took several minutes for the snake to die. Alan only knew it had happened, because the Mages allowed the lightning to stop, ceasing their casting almost in unison.

Mitzi walked back over to her husband. He saw that her face had gone slightly pale, and she was sweating. She had used up a lot of energy electrifying the water.

“Big one’s dead,” she said, panting.

Alan nodded and swallowed. As he looked at his wife, still breathing heavily, a slight chill went down his spine.

We probably would have lost people if we had just walked into that water, he thought. It really was a trap. The snakes were positioned to attack anything that tried to wade into the water. Even assuming best case scenarios, I don’t know how we’d fight them off in that swamp without people getting bitten. Especially that big one.

He was tempted to ask her what kind of creature it had been—the group must have gotten alerts when it died, and those always had the Race name of the monster you killed—but decided not to bother.

Instead, Alan wandered onto a less productive train of thought. He had been reminded, for far from the first time, of how underqualified he was to lead an expedition like this, across unknown terrain and without any real fighting power to call his own. For some reason, they all trusted him, but it was a heavy burden at times like this.

There were only sixteen of the snakes in the water, he gathered from the Mages—they had received notifications for the kills by the time they stopped running lightning through the water—but that still felt like a lot. Alan tried to keep himself from guessing at how many of the group that number of snakes might have killed before they were slaughtered—and also tried not to imagine how things might have gone if, instead of the snakes dying quietly, they managed to attract more of their kind to attack Alan and his group.

On the bright side, given how deadly the trap the Fisher Expeditionary Force had just averted was, Alan felt confident in crossing the swamp now. Time became important, in fact, because he thought that they had opened up a temporary window of safety, which would only last until more snakes or other predators appeared to fill the gap the dead River Pit Vipers had left.

Without further delay, therefore, he ordered the group into the water, and they quickly stomped across the swamp, not bothering with stealth.

The twenty or so feet width of the swamp felt twice as long, but Alan, Mitzi, and those flanking them still managed to cross it without any further mishaps—besides getting wet and dirty.

The leaders emerged onto the other shore, and Alan watched, almost holding his breath, as the rest of the group followed.

Finally, the last member of the group, Mateo—who had insisted on bringing up the rear—stepped onto the opposite side of the swamp, and Alan could breathe a sigh of relief.

It was only then that he turned to scope out what exactly the environment was like on this side of the swamp.

There was a dense copse of trees before him, so Alan stepped around it and saw what appeared to be the remains of a road.

“That’s… civilization?” The words came out almost without him having had the time to think about them, but as they escaped, he knew it wasn’t quite right.

“It does look like there used to be suburbs here,” Mitzi agreed.

The operative part of those words was “used to be,” Alan recognized as he looked over the dilapidated structures. There were houses still standing almost everywhere, but huge sections of the buildings had collapsed with the massive changes to the landscape when the System changed the world.

Then his eyes settled on the single building that was somehow, miraculously, completely undamaged.

It was an old church, and Alan felt an immediate temptation to take refuge there. If he entered the building, it might give his group shelter for a few hours while they rested. It had been a long day already, and they had already traveled further than Alan had anticipated.

In the distance, the skyscrapers of Orlando were beginning to be visible—the very tops of those that remained standing, at least. They looked like toy buildings, but it was still incredible that they were within view at all, considering the many detours Alan and the rest of the group had been forced into taking to avoid potentially hostile territories.

But there was something that felt weirdly familiar about the church, too, though he was positive he had never been there before.

“What is it about that place?” he muttered.

Mitzi moved up beside him and stared at it, too.

“Nothing that I can see,” she said. “Just looks like a run-down church.”

“That’s right, it is run down,” Alan agreed. “Nothing like that really survived the System reshaping the Earth, though. Let alone a building that looks old and in shaky repair to start with. And now that I think about it a bit, isn’t it just like young Moishe mentioned?”

Mitzi’s eyes widened. She remembered the conversations they’d had with the nice young man after he woke up from his coma.

“This is the place,” she said with certitude.

Mateo stepped forward, interrupting their conversation.

“Excuse me, guys, but the others were wondering if we can pause for a while. Maybe take a rest in that building over there?” He pointed at the church.

It has some capacity to draw people to it, Alan thought, eyes narrowing.

He opened his mouth to answer, but as he did, a large shadow rushed by overhead. It was followed by three more.

The four wyverns, whose presence Alan had barely noticed that day, all moved in a coordinated fashion and flew straight toward the church. He thought about shouting a warning, but the creatures did not deviate in their elevation at all. They remained far above the church and simply stopped in midair above it, then flew in circles overhead. The creatures began making noises, almost like birds cawing, and Alan noticed that they looked agitated and kept their eyes on the church.

They’d probably make sure none of us entered the building, even if we tried.

“In answer to your question, no, we’re not going inside that building,” Alan said. “It appears to be a sort of trap, set by the same crazy religious zealots who tried to attack James—the King—back in the Fisher Kingdom not long before we left.”

In the air, something quickly changed.

One of the wyverns, the one Alan remembered used sound attacks, broke off from the group, and while the others continued circling overhead, the Great Sound Wyvern headed toward the humans on the ground.

At the same time, one of the other wyverns began glowing brightly. Alan could tell it was charging some sort of attack. It was something he had seen before, a kind of energy beam. But the important piece of information was in how suddenly and noticeably the behavior of the creatures had changed. They had suddenly shifted from a holding pattern to clear action.

James is here.

A few seconds after he had that thought, the wyvern charging the attack finished its energy accumulating process and fired a burst of what appeared to be concentrated sunlight straight down into the roof of the church.

Alan expected to see the building collapse, but on impact, the building only shook. It did not suddenly cave in. When Alan had blinked away the brightness of the attack, he looked and saw that there was barely a scratch on the roof, at least from what he could see at ground level. The church’s steeple still stood, though a window had collapsed in.

And then, before his eyes, the window popped back out and resumed its prior position with a little pop. The bricks around it reset themselves. The building was self-repairing, somehow.

The Great Sound Wyvern landed, and Alan automatically turned to face it.

“James,” Mitzi said. “Nice to see you.”

“Here in the flesh,” James’s voice said from within the wyvern. “Some of my flesh, at least.”

Alan suppressed a shudder. The creature was creepy, even with James’s voice coming out of it. But that was the least of his concerns right now, of course.

“I’m guessing that was the place where young Moishe was tortured?” Alan asked.

The wyvern nodded. “It looks like it’s not easily destroyed, but my Great Solar Wyvern will take another crack at it. And another. And another. We will keep going until this deathtrap is no more. That’s going to be my policy whenever we come upon a place like this, where humans are essentially being sacrificed to some deity.”

“Can we help?” Mitzi asked.

Alan smiled and shook his head, a little amused. After just exhausting herself and the rest of their Mages in the swamp, she was already volunteering to join in an attack with James.

Of course she is, he thought.

“I would be happy to have your help,” James said. “I really just came down to tell you not to let anyone enter the church, but I’m sure a multi-pronged attack would be more effective.”

As he spoke those words, the Great Solar Wyvern fired another blast of solar energy into the church. The building shook once more, and Alan saw that this time, there appeared to be more damage. Chunks of the wood and stone of the building were sent flying—only to be pulled back through the air. As the roof of the building reconstructed itself again, no piece went to waste.

“Are you sure it can’t just keep on doing that forever?” Alan asked.

“I’m not,” admitted the wyvern James had possessed. “But if it can, I’m going to force it to prove that fact. I’m not going to concede that it’s here forever by just giving up.”

Alan nodded slowly and smiled. This was something he liked about James. That stubbornness and pride, the insistence on having his own way, that could be a vice in some situations, was more often turned to ensuring that justice was done or that his obligations to other people were fulfilled.

“We’ll help however we can,” Mitzi said.

She walked off to the group of other Mages, who Alan saw looked tired already.

But there were sounds of assent from them almost immediately.

Even the monotheists among them persuaded themselves that this was necessary.

“Is this blasphemous?” Alan heard one say to another in a barely-lowered voice.

“It would be more blasphemous to let a place where such deeds are done continue to stand,” the other replied.

“This is the price of entry,” said a third. “This is what we have to do to be trusted.”

Alan frowned a little at that. It made him uncomfortable, these loyalty test sorts of situations for these citizens. But as the scene unfolded, he couldn’t deny that it was effective.

As the Great Solar Wyvern launched its next attack, it was joined by a barrage of fire, lightning, and earth projectiles from the Mages.

The same thing happened a few minutes later when it blasted out a fourth beam.

By the fifth attack, the building’s repairs were no longer keeping pace with the blasts of energy and barrages of magic.

On the seventh, the building crumbled to the ground, suddenly nearly disintegrating into a ruin—as if all the damage that had been dealt to it had accumulated and been discharged all at once.

There was a sudden surge of bright, blinding light, and then the shapes of people began to appear, over a hundred of them, within the frame of what had once been the church, but was now only rubble and dust.

Those were the people in the Dungeon, Alan thought numbly. They’re the ones who were trapped after Moishe…