The Fusionist Book 5 -- Chapter 47

Chapter 47

Stone shards tore up yet another Red Spring Daisy that attempted to land on Larek’s head, as the Stone Shredder Dome Fusion he had placed on the ground near his feet protected him from above. As its spring-like roots were shredded, the rest of the plant monster was flung away, landing among the remains of two others that the Martial Fusionist already slice apart only moments ago.

He dodged another barrage of sharp leaf projectiles sent by a different Daisy before diving with his weapon toward a third opponent, bringing its blade down in a chop that cleaved the flower in two from petal to root. As he stood up, he felt his Automatic Ice Repulsion Field block another leaf barrage, but he was already moving back toward the temporary protection of his Stone Shredder Dome. It was the only thing preventing him from being piled upon from the bouncing Daisies that continued to arrive, but the plant monsters were beginning to smarten up and—mostly—avoided being torn up from the Fusion’s effect.

Unfortunately for them, the surrounding area wasn’t that much better for them. Having set up a half-dozen Frozen Zone Fusions in a loose circle around his defensive center, there weren’t a lot of places they could land and attack from. Nearly a hundred of the Daisies had been killed already, either from their roots being torn apart by the Dome, the moisture inherent in their forms freezing and cracking their stems and petals by the Frozen Zones, or through Larek’s own efforts with his halberd, but they never seemed to stop coming.

Thankfully, the Fusionist was also able to use his second Pattern construct to attack from afar. Utilizing his Logger’s axe in Pattern form, he was able to send it flying out to chop down the tall flower monsters up to 70 feet away.

Even with those advantages, his combat awareness was working overtime to keep up with the constantly arriving Red Spring Daisies, especially once they learned to avoid the death traps where the Frozen Zones had devastated their early numbers. But this also worked in Larek’s favor, as they were concentrated in three main areas that were free of offensive Fusions, and all that he needed to do was chop through them like he was felling trees with his Pattern axe, or venture out from his overhead protective Dome to finish them off with his halberd. It wasn’t exactly easy, but at no point did he feel like he was in trouble.

It might have been an impromptu battlefield, but he was controlling it better than he would have just a few months before. His time training with Torge at Fort Hilltower really paid off, as he was relying on his own senses, his superior movement, and Martial Skills to obliterate his opponents.

It wasn’t all perfect, of course, as he’d had to rely on his Automatic Ice Repulsion Field multiple times to block some projectiles that he either didn’t sense coming or wasn’t able to move out of the way in time. In addition, he could sense the Mana density starting to thin out quite a bit in the area due to so many Fusions being active at once; when he combined the Fusions on his clothes, his axe, his halberd, the six Frozen Zones, the Stone Shredder Dome, the Secure Hideawayprotecting Nedira, the Fusions on her clothes and her staff, and even the two Void Pocket bags they possessed, it was starting to add up.

After only a minute or so into the fight Larek he could feel the density starting to reach critical levels; to alleviate some of the strain on the nearby ambient Mana, he reached out and mentally deactivated the Secure Hideaway and half of the Frozen Zones. A few seconds later, he could sense the density stabilizing as additional ambient Mana rushed into the area, and a few seconds after that it even started to climb.

With the Pattern dome concealing Nedira exposed, Larek tapped into his Stama to increase his own speed with Fleetfoot, moving out from underneath his Stone Shredder Dome as two Daisies landed next to his Pattern construct. While they couldn’t get through it, he didn’t want to take any chances as he swung his halberd through one of the flowers’ stems, effectively killing it instantly, but the other one managed to avoid his follow-through strike with a bend in its stem that would be hard for someone even with high stats in Body and Agility. Instead of attacking him back, it launched its leaves at the dome, and he watched in consternation as one of the leaves managed to slip through one of the slits he’d added so that she could look out.

He sensed rather than saw the Automatic Ice Repulsion Field on her clothes activating to block the sharp natural projectile, but his anger at her being attacked had him cancel the protective construct so that he could create two floating Pattern axes simultaneously, before using them to cut the offending monster into a dozen different parts.

“Finally! You can’t just keep me locked away like that, Larek! I can fight, too!” Nedira shouted angrily at him, getting up from where she had been sitting underneath his Pattern construct.

“But—” he began to protest, even as his combat awareness detected another barrage of leaves that he stepped out of the way to avoid.

“No! Let me do this!”

Nedira turned her staff on the landing Daisies and unleashed barrages of stone slivers, cutting through three of them as soon as they landed. She even moved to avoid being struck by additional leafy projectiles; more than that, she cast a spell from her other hand and a wall of thick roots broke through the hard obsidian ground, protecting her from her left-hand side. As Larek watched a Red Spring Daisy launch more leaves at it, instead of cutting all the way through, the sharp projectiles stuck into the root wall.

“Go!” she shouted once again toward him, seeing that he had paused in his own attacks to watch her. “Stop watching and don’t make me do all the work here!”

The Fusionist shook his head with a small smile, mentally chastising himself for his treatment of her. Ever since the attack by the Sand Vultures, he couldn’t help but think that it was his responsibility to protect her, even if it meant keeping her locked up behind barriers. Even with all the traveling they’d done since then and the monsters they’d killed, it had always been from a relatively safe position up in the air, so those situations were different; now that they were on the ground and more vulnerable, he fell back on the thought that she needed to be kept locked away and safe – because he didn’t want her to get hurt.

But he had momentarily forgotten that she wasn’t helpless, nor was she fragile and in need of delicate protection. She was a Mage trained by the SIC and had been fighting monsters in all the years he had been caught in the void. Plus, unlike what had happened while ineffectively fighting the Sand Vultures, she had Fusions on her person that would provide more than enough protection for her.

Taking her order to move as a hint that he should get his head out of his butt and start killing deadly flower monsters, he took to the task with renewed fervor. As he closed with the incoming Daisies, he sliced through their relatively fragile stems with his halberd and two Pattern axes, finally able to let loose now that half of his focus was on protecting Nedira. Stone shards flew out in conjunction with his advance as the Naturalist used her staff to aid him, obliterating the monsters when they were distracted by his attacks.

Exactly as the Mage and Martial relationship should be.

More thick roots emerged from underneath two of the Daisies, entangling with their own roots and binding them in place; Larek took advantage of their lack of mobility by slicing through multiple sets of leaves that attempted to be launched from their stems, before using his Fleetfoot Battle Art to move up to them before they could extricate themselves. An Empowered Strike was all that was needed to cut through both flowers with one large sweep of his halberd, before he was on the move once again.

Their coordination wasn’t completely perfect, unfortunately, as twice he accidentally ran into a stream of stone slivers that she had been shooting out, only for his automatic defenses to kick in; overall, he had to say that their teamwork was a step above doing it all himself. It was not only more effective working together, but they tore through the Daisies with such speed that they eventually started pegging them in the air before they could even land.

Seemingly hours later, but was probably only about 20 minutes after the fight on the ground began, the last red-petaled flower was blasted apart before it could land with a barrage of stones, as the Daisy had been preparing to land on Larek and saw the projectile attack too late to dodge. Looking around at the vegetative massacre, with roots, stems, leaves, and flower petals filling the local landscape to the point where he needed to wade through a few areas of heavy activity, he noticed Nedira leaning heavily on her staff. He was by her side in a second.

“Are you alright? You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

She shook her head. “I’m fine. Just the pressure of the fight draining away.” Looking at him, she waggled her finger at him. “Don’t do that again. You can’t just hide me away whenever we get into something dangerous.”

“I’m sorry, I just thought—”

“I can guess what you thought,” she said, laying her hand on his arm as he began to explain. “But get those thoughts out of your head. What happened against those Sand Vultures was a mistake and we weren’t prepared for it; now, though, I have ample preparations and might have been able to handle all of these by myself on the ground.” Thinking about what he’d seen her do, he didn’t doubt that she would’ve fared better than most Mages when facing that kind of attack. “But going forward, if we’re going to work together, then you can’t hide me away again. We’re a team, you and I, and you need to be able to count on me to have your back without needing your full protection.”

He nodded, knowing what she said was true, but it was still hard for him to fully embrace that kind of thinking. Even after his Group Tactics class at the Fort, where working with multiple people was more effective than going about things alone, he still had trouble remembering that he wasn’t the only one capable of doing great things. It was a mindset that he was trying to change, especially as it had embedded itself in his actions while traveling through the Empire, but it was a work in progress.

“I’ll… do better, I swear I will. I can’t help but want to protect you, is all.”

“I know, and I love that about you,” she said with a smile – before smacking his arm playfully. “Just as long as you remember that I’m not helpless and can take care of myself.”

“I think I can do that.” He wrapped his arms around her and bent down to give her a kiss, happy that they had both gotten through the fight unscathed, but a distant roar echoed off the surface of the obsidian ground. “Ugh… looks like this isn’t over.”

“It certainly sounds that way. We better get a move on it.”

Larek quickly had his Pattern box up around them and they were airborne, floating 50 feet above the surface.

“Where to now?” he asked, seeing what looked to be a massive pack of black and white-striped hairless cats with six legs racing toward them from the southwest. He wasn’t sure what they were, but they didn’t seem like they’d be able to reach them high in the air. Just in case he was wrong, he brought them up to 100 feet and held them stationary, while he reviewed his notifications.

Bladed Weapon Expertise has reached Level 31!

Bladed Weapon Expertise has reached Level 32!

Pattern Manipulation has reached Level 68!

Dodge has reached Level 33!

Stama Subjugation has reached Level 24!

He’d gained enough Aetheric Force through all the recent fighting to allow him to increase some more Skill maximums, so he did that for some of his Martial Skills for a change. He was able to increase the maximum for Bladed Weapon Expertise and Dodge since they were getting close to their current maximum of 35, bringing them both up three points to a new maximum of 38. He now had less than a 100 AF to spend, but he suspected that he would soon be able to acquire more with the way things were going.

“I’m not even sure anymore,” Nedira said to his earlier question, looking around them. It took Larek a few seconds of perusing the nearby landscape to try to figure out where they had even ended up, and even then he wasn’t exactly sure. They had been fleeing from the Locusts and then the Daisies for a while, and while he knew they weren’t on the other side of the Calamity, they seemed to have gotten off the route they had taken to get to that point. “If those are Striped Cazorts,” she continued, pointing toward the incoming monsters from the southeast, “then we’re way off-track.”

She pulled out a few of the maps they’d taken from the Strike Faction compound and spent a minute or so reading them. Eventually pointing to a spot on one, he saw that they were indeed a bit further away than he expected. He hadn’t realized they had fled that far, and while he thought that they had been going south during their flight, they had actually been heading northwest. It reminded him a little of the Lowenthal desert when he had been mixed up and turned around multiple times, though he hadn’t read or heard of anything like that happening in the Calamity.

“I think the best thing to do is to go back down south and see if we can find any hint of where the Strike Faction went after departing from the route,” Nedira said after a moment. “I have to admit that I wasn’t paying attention to alternate pathways they could’ve taken at the time, but now we don’t have any other choice if we’re going to find—”

Before she could finish, a low buzzing filled their ears, and the both of them looked south simultaneously. It was fairly faint at this distance, but Larek soon spotted what appeared to be a very small grouping of Razor Locusts flying directly toward them.

“How? We killed them all, right?” Nedira asked.

Pulling out some of the notes in his Void Pocket sack, he found what he was looking for after a few seconds. “It says here that, ‘Once reinforcements have arrived from a different subservient Aperture, they will continue to spawn monsters and send them out until their target is either dead or has left the Calamity. The only exception to this is when the central Aperture is attacked, which prevents all the subservient Apertures from spawning new monsters.’ What I can only assume that means is that we’re going to be perpetually attacked by small swarms of not only the Razor Locusts,” Larek said, waving toward the approaching insects, “but everything else we’ve encountered, such as the Red Spring Daisies.” A glance at to the southeast, which was where he thought the Daisies had originated from, saw a single one bounding on its roots toward them. He thought that it was likely spawned at some point after they had killed the first one near its territory, and had finally caught up.

“That’s… not good,” Nedira said a bit worriedly.  “We can leave and come back, I suppose, but we’re at least a day’s journey into the Calamity. Can you make it that long?”

He thought about it for a few seconds before shaking his head. “No, we’d have to stop every 8 to 10 hours or so to let my focus recharge. Add in the fact that we’re both going to need to sleep at some point and we have a problem.”

They decided to wait until both the Locusts and the Daisy arrived before killing them, rather than move on and have to fight them somewhere else that might be less effective. As for the Striped Cazorts, the hairless six-legged striped cats, there were approximately 80 of them underneath the Pattern box. It turned out that they could jump nearly 25 feet into the air—and did so repeatedly to try to reach the two of them above—but they were far from actually doing them any harm.

“How long until a new one spawns?” Nedira abruptly asked.

Larek knew what she was asking and had seen it in the notes. “The reinforcement monsters spawn at an average rate of every 20 minutes.” The Fusionist thought about the arrival of the small Locust swarm and the Daisy and thought this was fairly accurate based on the first ones killed.

“Hmm… alright. I think I have an idea, then.”

“You do?”

The Naturalist turned to Larek and smiled innocently. “I think you’ll like it, too. It’s dangerous, reckless, and probably foolish, but it’s our only option unless you want to leave the Calamity altogether. We could probably find a way to get to the border one way or another, but then we’ll be even further behind the Strike Faction’s lead and no closer to finding them.”

He only hesitated for a moment before saying, “Let’s hear it.”

It took her a few minutes to fully outline her idea, but halfway through it he was already nodding along as it took shape in his mind.

There was no hesitation as he voiced his approval. “I’m in. And you’re right, it’s exactly the kind of thing that I would do.  I’m surprised you thought of it, considering how dangerous it is.”

“Well, I just had to think of the opposite of what was safe and sane, mixed in the belief that you always seem to figure out how to do the impossible, and out came this wild and likely suicidal plan.”

“I don’t know about suicidal,” he joked, even as he put his halberd away and brought out a pair of staves. “I give it a 50% chance of working, after all. Even odds is better than probable death any day.”

Nedira leaned over the edge of the box and pointed her staff downwards, mimicking what Larek was doing. As the two of them let out a barrage of fireballs at the Striped Cazorts below, she said, “Knowing you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you find a way to improve those odds in our favor even further.”

As the first of the Cazorts died below them, he couldn’t help but think of ways to do just that.