The Fusionist Book 3 -- Chapter 48

Chapter 48

The absence of wind blasting into his face at full speed finally prompted Larek to open his eyes, only to find that the tears that had involuntarily leaked from them because of the constant pressure of the air had dried and acted as a sort of glue, keeping them closed. Reaching up with wind-burned and slightly numb fingers, he forced them open to see that they had stopped in the middle of the air, still a few thousand feet above the surface.

It was only at the point that he opened his eyes that Larek realized there was something pressing on his senses – and it wasn’t the overbearing presence of Chinli nearby. Looking up from the ground far below, he spotted a Scission ahead of them… in the middle of the air. He hadn’t even known that it was possible for Scissions to appear that far from the ground, and there had been no mention of this phenomenon in any of his classes at either Academy.

“Hold on, Larek; don’t try to move,” the winged Gergasi said to him, her tone clearly annoyed.  He had an irrational fear that she was somehow annoyed at him, brought on by the fact that he was suspended at least a half-mile above the surface, and he couldn’t imagine being dropped from that height if she was angry with him. The Fusions on his robe couldn’t save him from a drop of that magnitude, and healing would likely be of no use if he ended up dying on impact with the hard ground.

The yellow light around his waist suddenly disappeared and he dropped; his stomach was in his throat as he felt himself falling, but he was caught by something else before he moved more than a few feet. Still hyperventilating from the near-death drop, he watched as a semi-transparent yellow light surrounded him completely in an ovoid shape like an egg, and he could feel himself buoyed up like a log on the river. While there was no rush of air around him, Larek sensed that the yellow egg-like shield around him was based on some sort of Air spell, though so advanced that he couldn’t even begin to work it out.

Now secured against falling, but stuck where he was because he was afraid that trying to break out of the yellow shield would cause him to plummet to his death, the secured Fusionist looked up at the Scission and the Gergasi facing it.

Appearing in the air, it was difficult for Larek to gauge the scale of the Scission as there weren’t other objects near it to base its size. The only thing he could utilize to determine its Category was the strength of the pressure coming off of it, and even that was mixed because of the proximity of Chinli; there was a strange similarity between the two that he’d noticed before, but that was made even more evident now as there wasn’t much to distract him from the comparison. It wasn’t necessarily that one of them was supposedly “Corrupted” while the other was “Purified” form of Aetheric Force; while that was there, it was more of a resonance between the two that he could feel even within himself to a small degree. What that meant, he wasn’t sure, but he didn’t have time to analyze it further than that because the Scission was already changing color toward its threshold.

“Blasted Corruption! It’s becoming bolder than I expected.”

Larek didn’t like the feel of the Scission, especially as it settled on a deep purple color and its pressure reached a crescendo that outstripped the feeling the Aperture imparted earlier that day. “Can’t we go around?” he asked, unsure if the Gergasi could hear him through the yellow shield of air around him. The sense of danger he felt from the Scission only increased as it firmed up and made ready to start pushing out monsters; as much as he didn’t want to be a prisoner of the Gergasi, he more didn’t want to be ripped to shreds by a monster thousands of feet above the ground.

The giant woman snorted. “I could easily go around, of course. But the manifestations inside will follow me wherever I go now that the Corruption has my scent. I can’t risk it following me back to the Enclave. Better to kill it out here rather than—oh, blast it! Warped Void Hunters! This could get a bit nasty.”

Out of the deep purple Scission flew a half-dozen, slightly transparent, dark-purple winged beasts that looked like a cross between a bat, a wolf, and a hawk. They had the furry bodies of wolves – though with 6 legs instead of 4 – with leathery wings like a bat stretching out to their sides that were at least twice their body’s length in wingspan, while their tails were actually made of black feathers that appeared wildly incompatible with the rest of their forms, but somehow it still worked. Their head had the rounded shape of a hawk and a translucent curved beak that had a point that appeared specially made for rending flesh. What shocked Larek the most about them was their eyes, which looked like nothing but a dark, starry void, as if he was looking up at the sky at night, but there was a deep vastness to them that felt like they were pulling him in as soon as his gaze met them.

As Chinli pulled out her crystal-clear sword and swooped in toward the emerging monsters, Larek finally got a better size perspective of both the Warped Void Hunters and the Scission itself. Based on her 9-foot-tall form, the Void Hunters were approximately 50 feet long with 100-foot wingspans, while the Scission was at least 200 feet wide, one of the biggest that Larek had ever seen. The Gergasi appeared tiny in comparison, but the power that she exuded outstripped the threat he sensed from the monsters, if only by a slight amount. He felt confident that she would win in a fight against them, though not necessarily easily.

That was good news for the current predicament, but it was also worrying for his plans to eventually escape from his captivity. If the Gergasi were able to defeat even these strong monsters, then what chance did he have to find a way to extricate himself from all the torture and death they had planned for him?

Chinli flew with incredible speed at the lead Hunter approximately 500 feet away from Larek’s location, which meant he was easily able to observe the way she created a crescent of light that sprang from the tip of her sword as she slashed it down with a speed he couldn’t even see it move. The light arc sped away faster than she was flying to close the remaining distance away from the winged Gergasi and the monster, and it passed completely through the Hunter as if it wasn’t even there.

That turned out to be more accurate than Larek expected. As soon as the crescent of light neared the monster, it faded from view more than it had been before, and the Fusionist recognized that it was actually some sort of illusion that the attack passed through. The “real” Warped Void Hunter appeared directly behind Chinli with an audible *pop* and it struck out with its curved beak with blinding speed.

The Gergasi was obviously prepared for the attack as she had already whipped around and slashed her sword against the descending beak, causing the Hunter’s head to snap backwards from the force of the attack. Fire erupted from Chinli and enveloped the monster before it could recover from its repelled strike, until Larek couldn’t see anything but its wingtips that wasn’t covered in flames. The Fusionist thought that was it for the monster, as the fire appeared extraordinarily hot; the next second, his assumption was proven wrong as the fire seemed to be sucked into the Hunter like it was being absorbed. It was only when the flames dissipated enough that Larek was able to see that it was actually the Hunter’s eyes that seemed to pull in the magical flames, as if its bottomless voids were able to contain all the magic in the world without fear.

The winged Gergasi took advantage of her opponent eliminating her flames to strike out at it while it was distracted, as she flew over top of it, carving a deep, lengthwise furrow out its back with her sword. The Hunter painfully bellowed with a warbling screech that likely would’ve deafened Larek if he hadn’t been at least slightly protected by the shield of air around him; as it was, the piercing pain was just shy of causing permanent damage, but his hearing was still muffled afterwards. Larek decided to wait to heal himself with his Healing Surge Fusion until later, because if the Hunters screeched another few times like that, he’d have to do it all over again.

A rain of icicles pounded on top of the Hunter as soon as Chinli finished her attack with her sword, with more than a few of them piercing through the wound she had inflicted, but they were quickly absorbed by the Hunter’s void-filled eyes.  That seemed to be the plan, however, as the Gergasi went in for another attack, diving down low and cutting off more than half of its tailfeather and its entire left hind leg with a swift strike. She had to avoid a strike by the Hunter’s massive wing as it counterattacked, another louder screech finally deafening Larek as it screamed in pain.

A mostly invisible barrage of wind blades attacked the Hunter from all directions the next moment as the Gergasi cast yet another spell. Because they were largely transparent, only showing up as distortions with the hint of air magic around them, he could see exactly what was happening with the Hunter this time. It was clear that the act of absorbing the magical attack through its eyes required most of its concentration, as it basically just hovered in place during the process, which made it extremely vulnerable to other attacks. Chinli took advantage of this and he could see the Stama flowing through her body, through her arms, and into her sword, lighting it up like a beacon in the night. She flew next to the dangerous monster and struck out at the base of its left wing, her sword cutting through some heavy resistance to shear through the leathery skin, muscle, and bone of its appendage.

The absorption of the wind blades faltered from the attack and dozens of them managed to make it through to open relatively large wounds all over its body – but none of it was as debilitating as losing one of its wings. The Warped Void Hunter began to descend as it lost altitude, but it disappeared after a second and reappeared with a *pop* 100 feet above the Gergasi as it attempted to recover from its freefall.

Effectively taken out of the fight, Chinli turned her attention to the other 5 Hunters as Larek saw the Scission fade from existence. The fact that only 6 monsters emerged from the Scission made them all the more dangerous in his opinion, and it reminded him of the Pukwudgies that he had fought before and how strong they were; these Hunters, however, seemed many more levels of difficulty above them.

These monster were also quite smart, as they halted their advance when they saw that one of their number was being absolutely dominated by the winged Gergasi. Rather than charge ahead and potentially share the same fate, they stayed back and out of easy range for her to reach; this confused Larek at first, as he expected them to need to get close in order to kill the giant, but they showed that they had something else up their sleeves.

Each of the non-injured Hunters opened their hooked beaks simultaneously and a swirling vortex of black and purple formed a few inches in front of them. As one, the monsters launched these 9-foot-wide balls of whirling energy at the Gergasi, who immediately took evasive action. Dodging below the swirling orbs of what Larek could only assume was a powerful attack, the Fusionist was shocked to see the projectiles curve in their path and follow the winged woman as if they had minds of their own. A sudden wall of stone appeared in the path of one of the balls, and when the swirling black and purple orb hit the stone, he watched as the projectile reduced in size by about a third, while the stone that had touched it disappeared. It was only when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye that he realized that the stone had actually been teleported approximately 200 feet away to the east, though it was crumbled instead of solid, as if it had been smashed apart with a sledgehammer.

Repeated spells and even Battle Arts were used to slowly whittle the pursuing orbs of teleporting death down, all while Larek could see that the Gergasi was slowly attempting to work her way toward the otherwise stationary Hunters. Their relative inactivity gave the Fusionist a hint that they were still controlling their projectiles rather than the orbs acting on their own, so he assumed that Chinli was going to punish them for being relatively defenseless.

He was right in his assumption, but was wrong in its effectiveness. As she went to attack the nearest one after destroying one of the projectiles completely, the spell she used showing up a few hundred feet below her, the Hunter disappeared and reappeared with a *pop* approximately 300 feet away. A second attack a different monster resulted in the same thing happening as her victim teleported out of her reach.

“Aaargh! STOP MOVING!” Even though he was still deafened, Larek somehow heard Chinli’s frustrated shout, followed by a wave of Dominion Magic that passed through him as it erupted from the Gergasi. If he hadn’t already been stuck in place in the middle of the air, he would’ve frozen for a second or two; as it was, there wasn’t much effect on him after the command wore off.

There was even less of an effect on the Warped Void Hunters, because although he saw their wingflaps stutter for a half-second, the use of her Dominion Magic didn’t do much. He could see her getting angrier by the second, the flames in her eyes visibly even a thousand feet away; this increased even as the Hunters whose projectiles had been completely destroyed formed another one and launched them before the woman could react. Before too long, there was another full complement of deadly orbs tracking her, and everything she did to get close to the teleporting monsters didn’t seem to work. Despite her great speed, moving faster than he could fully track most times, the ability of the Warped Void Hunters to teleport was even faster.

Finally, he could see the Gergasi stop after she gained some distance from the pursuing orbs, the rage on her face evident as she moved her hands in a blur, creating an intricate spell pattern that was larger than she was. It took nearly 2 seconds for it to fully form, which he thought was likely the equivalent of a normal SIC Mage taking an hour or so, and just before the nearest of the projectiles reached her, Larek could see it completely fill with Mana. A split-second later, a pressure wave of flames, boulders, ice chunks, crackling lightning, and a hazy green mist erupted from around the woman, pushing out so rapidly that the Hunters didn’t have a chance to teleport away. The amount of magical power that flowed into them was more than they could absorb easily, and they were quickly overwhelmed. Larek couldn’t see more than that as the wave passed over his little bubble of air, and he flinched as it parted around him without harm.

But the wave of magical destruction had another effect that Chinli hadn’t expected. Deflected away from her, the projectiles sent out by the Hunters were cut off from the control of the overwhelmed Hunters, which sent them off with incredible speed in multiple directions. One of them, reduced to only a few feet wide, shot straight at Larek; it was moving so fast that he didn’t have a chance to react other than to put his hands up ineffectively.

The swirling orb passed through his air shield as if it was wet paper, shredding it apart and shrinking minutely in the process. He only barely saw this as he began to fall, but he didn’t move very far before the projectile was upon him. His Repelling Barrier didn’t even activate as the orb apparently wasn’t something physical, so it reached him without any problem whatsoever.

At least this means I don’t have to worry about being tortured now—