WIEDERGEBURT Act VI: Chapter 29

“It looks like this one uses Thurisaz to create a directed force of destruction and defense. That must be the rune that the strange shield is based around. However, they’ve combined it with Kenaz and Ise Merkstave. It looks like all the other runes are dummy runes meant to trick people into thinking they were important. I’ll call them false runes for now…”

Kari was sitting on the floor in her room, the four control modules she had acquired during the last battle laid at her feet. She had been studying these all night. They were completely fascinating.

“This one is the reverse of the other one. It uses Thurisaz Merkstave, which would normally cause defenseless, but it’s been combined with Ansuz and Raidho Merkstave to disrupt Spiritual Techniques instead of blocking them.”

Siv was fast asleep, lying on her stomach. When Kari looked up, it was to see the petite woman’s face staring right at her, eyes closed and mouth hanging room. She smiled just a little when she saw some drool leaking from Siv’s lips.

“If Eryk were here, she’d be drooling all over his chest.”

The thought both amused her and sobered her up. She missed her husband so much. If it were not for Siv’s presence, Kari could honestly say she wouldn’t have survived--and she meant that emotionally. Having someone else to help shoulder her burdens in this realm allowed Kari to keep herself firmly grounded in reality.

She went back to studying the control modules after making sure Siv was still fine, something she found herself doing often, almost as if she was afraid the woman might disappear.

These control modules were things of beauty. The rune array flowed seamlessly together to create an effect that was like a work of art. If it wasn’t for the many hours she put into studying runes, their meanings, and their effects, she would have never been able to even discover which runes were dummies and which were real--nevermind disarming them as she had. To make matters even more shocking, if she had messed with the dummy runes, the reaction would have reversed the flow of Spiritual Power and made her body explode.

“Whoever made these is an absolute genius,” she said with a sigh of admiration.

Kari wanted to reverse engineer these control modules. She wasn’t sure what she would use them for, but even having the practical experience at creating them might invoke inspiration for other devices. More than anything, Kari wanted to create something that would benefit her home when she returned to Miðgarðr.

Of course, that would only be after she found Eryk.

“I could probably create something similar to this to protect buildings,” Kari murmured as she rolled the control module over. “I’m fairly confident I can remake this… the problem is that I didn’t get to study the siege towers themselves.”

The siege towers had also had runes engraved upon their surface. Someone had no doubt used the Inscribe skill to permanently embed the rune array into this device and each siege tower. Kari could not even imagine how long it must have taken. Even if used the light element to create a dozen hands to help her, it would still take over a month to get just onedone. It seemed almost impractical.

“Sister…?”

At the sound of suddenly hearing Siv’s voice, Kari turned her head to find the petite Drakvar pushing herself into a sitting position. Her wings extended in a stretch and her long tail wagged behind her. Kari smiled.

“Good morning, Siv.”

“Morning…” Siv rubbed her eyes. “What are you doing?”

“I’m studying these control modules. They are very fascinating… and also terrifying.”

Siv climbed off the bed and crawled over to her. She sat down beside Kari and looked at the control modules with a curious frown.

“Terrifying? How so?”

“How to explain it…” Kari tilted her head and thought for a moment before coming up with what she believed was the perfect explanation. “While the effects themselves are very powerful, I am more concerned by what their creation means. That someone on the Sekbeists’ side is skilled enough in runes that they can create something like this is an utterly terrifying concept. Even the most talented Dweorg I knew at runes was not this good.”

Siv listened to Kari’s concerns in silence, not speaking at all. She just blinked several times. Kari was almost tempted to ask if the girl was listening, but then she spoke.

“They could have enslaved several Dweorgs… like they enslaved me.”

“I… didn’t think about that,” Kari admitted. “It is very possible they enslaved a very talented Dweorg grandmaster. Only a grandmaster would be capable of creating something like this.” She worried her lower lip and twirled a strand of hair between her fingers. “But now I wonder who they could have enslaved. I only knew one grandmaster… he was the king of the Dweorgs back on Niðavellir, but… I think he should still be there.”

In their previous lives, she and Eryk traveled to Niðavellir, met with King Hriedmar, and helped his people travel to Miðgarðr. However, he had remained behind to close the Warp Gate.

She assumed they would never see him again, but he turned up several years later under the Sekbeist’s control and undid the seal keeping the Great Overlord of the Seventh Realm trapped. Kari was not there for that. Eryk had been the one who told her and Immig--a Dweorg who had worked for Brave Vesparia.

“Then who could it be?” asked Siv.

Kari wore a wry smile. “That is something I’d like to know.”

Before the discussion could move any further, a familiar alarm began blaring through the base. Kari stored the control modules into her storage and stood up. Siv had also jumped to her feet, her tail standing on end as her emerald eyes narrowed.

“Sister…”

“I know.” Kari took a deep breath. “We’re under attack again. It didn’t take them long to come back.”

Kari and Siv nodded to each other and raced out of their shared room. If they were under siege once more, it meant there would be more siege towers. Kari would be instrumental in destroying them, and she would need Siv around to watch her back.

***

The battle had already begun by the time Kari and Siv emerged from the fortress; screams, explosions, and the sounds of battle filled the air.

Just above them were several Drakvar battling against the winged mounts. One Drakvar came close to them as he breathed fire into a horde of approaching Sekbeist, but he paid for looking at the ground when he should have been looking at the sky. A Sekbeist Shaman mounted on a Giant Horned Lightning Eagle summoned a javelin of darkness and threw it. The weapon pierced into the Drakvar’s eye, making it roar as blood burst from the now destroyed orb. The siege towers hadn’t arrived yet, but Kari knew it would happen soon.

“Come on!” Kari shouted to Siv as she joined the battle.

Kari transformed into a streak of light as she combined time with her light element. The world around her seemed to slow down, though she knew this was merely her perception. She was not slowing down the flow of time. She was slowing down how she perceived time, which was a useful ability for someone who could move at the speed of light.

Not even a single second had passed, but two hundred Sekbeists--Grunts, Elites, and Warlords--died instantly under her assault. Some had their heads removed. Others had gaping holes blown in their chests. One had even been sliced to pieces when she cut into him with a ranseur she created from the light element.

She wondered how so many had managed to breach the wall when there were no siege towers, but then she looked up as several dozen Sekbeist leapt from mounts and landed on the wall. Oh. So that was how.

Siv burst from the ground with a flap of her wings, turned into a fierce gale, and swept over a horde of Sekbeists. A dozen of them were sliced into bloody chunks of flesh. They didn’t even have time to scream as they died.

Kari followed after her, and the two found themselves fighting side by side as they made their way toward any Drakvar that was in danger of losing. They could not afford to lose anymore of their people. Their forces were already dwindling.

A roar from the left alerted her to one of their comrades. A woman in her Drakvar form swept aside dozens of Sekbeists, but then several Shamans slammed their hands into the ground and summoned a massive bed of spikes. The woman screamed in agony as several spikes penetrated her thick hide.

“Siv!”

“Right!”

Siv roared as her arms and legs transformed into smaller versions of her dragon form’s limbs. She raced forward and used the incredible might of her dragon form to swat Sekbeist away like they were bugs. An elite tried to stab her in the chest with a prismatic broadsword, but Siv grabbed the weapon, crushed it with her hand, and punched her foe’s face so hard his head exploded into shattered bone fragments and brain matter.

Siv cleared a path for Kari, who took control over the Shaman’s shadows with her own darkness manipulation. The spikes that had been skewering the Drakvar suddenly went into the ground and impaled the ones who created them. Their last gasps were ones of shocked anguish before their bodies hung limply, the spikes keeping them aloft--at least, until Kari canceled the technique.

She rushed over to the Drakvar and manipulated the water element to heal the woman. Her injuries weren’t terrible, but it looked like one of the spike’s had pierced her liver. Kari healed that first, then the rest of her internal injuries, before finally healing the hide. It only took ten seconds. However, ten seconds in battle was a long time.

“You’re good to go!” Kari shouted.

The Drakvar roared in thanks and charged the enemy lines, the world around her growing distorted as she manipulated dimensional energy force Sekbeists into a dimensional gap of her own creation. They would probably die there. Alone. Starving. And unable to escape.

“Sister! The siege towers!” Siv suddenly shouted.

Kari could see them too. Several siege towers were getting closer. There had been around twenty last time, but this time there were only sixteen. She imagined they did not have the materials or the time to replace the twenty she and Siv had destroyed.

“Let’s go!” Kari shouted.

“I am afraid that you two are not going anywhere,” a voice suddenly said in her ear.

Kari’s entire body jolted in shock, but she didn’t let herself lose focus and activated her ability to stop time. It had a limited range of one hundred meters. There were other limits like the more she extended her range, the less time was stopped. Right now she focused her ability only ten meters around herself. She leapt away from the voice and spun around to find… two Sekbeist Lords standing just a few meters from her new location.

Both of them were much taller than Kari. They were probably even taller than Eryk by a good meter. Dark gray skin covered every centimeter of their muscular bodies. Strange, glowing red marks like runes ran along their bodies, which possessed spiky outcroppings along the elbows, shoulders, and knees. The one on the right had a crown of horns jutting from his head. The other one possessed two horns, but his sloped backward in a curve that ended in sharp points.

“This is the one, right?” asked the one with two horns. “She’s a human, so she must be the one.”

“I believe she is,” the other said, staring at her before answering.

Kari felt sweat trickle down her forehead as she watched these two. The last time she had fought against a Sekbeist Lord was when Dunherr attacked Midgard. She nearly lost her life from a stray attack during that battle,and she could tell these two were far more powerful than Dunherr had been.

However, Kari had also grown much stronger.

Siv landed on the ground next to her. “Sister…”

“I know, but there’s nothing we can do about the siege towers right now.” Kari kept her eyes locked on the two Sekbeist Lords. “Who are you two?”

“I am Durmuz,” said the Sekbeist Lord with a crown of horns on his head.

“You don’t really need to know my name, but I guess you can call me Zugarod,” the other one said.

The one called Durmuz stared at Kari like she was an oddity. “I never thought I would see a human aside from Ask who had learned a high level concept. Your comprehension of time is impressive. However…” Kari felt like her heart might stop beating as she found her body completely frozen. “My understand far surpasses yours.”

Kari understood what he meant. She could feel the time lock keeping her body trapped in place. She could also see the threads of time energy wove around her body, tightening and constricting her movement by locking her limbs in time. Durmuz’s mastery was so impressive that Kari couldn’t even more.

However, she could think.

She could still channel Spiritual Power.

Kari began analysing the threads of time energy.

“Ho?” Durmuz’s eyes widened. “It looks like she is trying to remove the time lock. Zugarod, hurry up and kill her.”

“With pleasure,” said Zugarod as he cracked his knuckles and stepped forward. Dark flames erupted from between his hands as he stretched them out in front of them. The flame turned into a sphere. Swirls of black energy gathered around this sphere, which crackled with repressed power.

Kari found herself terrified as she realized this was the Concept of Negation--the so-called Void that made these Sekbeist Lords so terrifying.

Zugarod slid his feet against the ground and pushed both hands out, palms facing her, and unleashed a powerful beam of black energy that threatened to engulf her and Siv. She worked faster than she ever had. Kari quickly analysed the threads, understood that each thread was linked to the others, and like a ball of yarn, she unraveled the threads around herself.

Once she was free, Kari didn’t unravel the time lock around Siv. She didn’t have time. She gritted her teeth, placed one hand over the other, spaced a few centimeters apart, and then channeled time energy between them. She unleashed the energy seconds later and created a time distortion that the black void beam struck.

Of course, the void was the Concept of Negation and therefore negated everything it touched, but there were laws it still had to abide by. If the Spiritual Power used in another technique was equal to or greater than it, the void attack could be blocked or at least diverted. Kari diverted the attack.

A gasp escaped her lips as she sent the attack soaring into the sky. Sweat poured from her forehead in rivulets and her clothes were caking to her skin. However, with this, the attack was diverted and Kari could unravel Siv’s time lock, freeing the Drakvar.

Siv knew better than to sit still while they were fighting against such powerful foes, and she erupted with spatial energy. A swing of her claws caused two two waves of spatial energy to slice toward the pair. This was spatial severing. It was an ability that could cut through the fabrics of space, splitting apart the very fabric of reality. Any physical matter or energy caught within the severed spatial area was cut.

Two Sekbeist Lords were no exception.

And they knew it.

Zugarod and Durmuz leapt away from each other as the attack cut through the space they had been standing. That was not the end of it, however. Siv gnashed her teeth together as she spread her arms apart, causing the spatial waves to split up and chase after the pair.

This would have killed anyone else, but Zugarod and Durmuz were not normal.

Zugarod cackled as he unleashed a wave of black fire that took the shape of a lightning bolt. It slammed into the spatial attack and negated it. There was no great explosion, no massive eruption of energy. The two attacks just disappeared as if they were never launched.

On the other side, Durmuz had manipulated the time around spatial attack. Threads of time energy spun around it like a tornado. The spatial wave slowed to a crawl, then stopped, and then Durmuz merely clasped his hands together and crushed the spatial attack with an even more powerful time attack.

Kari was not remaining idle during that time. She’d already determined Durmuz was the more dangerous opponent, so she should take out the weakest link first. She appeared behind Zuragod in a burst of time and light. She tried to copy what she’d seen Durmuz do and lock Zuragod in time by weaving threads of time energy together, but he shattered her technique with an overwhelming burt of negation energy.

Turning, Zuragod grinned as he launched a punch at Kari, his entire hand encased in negation energy. Kari knew better than to let herself be hit. She exploded into particles of light and reformed behind him. However, he seemed to have predicted what she would do. He was already spinning around by the time she appeared, his foot launching out in a powerful kick that clipped her shoulder.

Even though it was just a clip, the pain was agonizing. She spun in a circle and flew away from him. Landing on the ground several meters away, she gripped her now broken shoulder before channeling the water element into her broken bones to heal them.

“You humans are quite tenacious,” Zuragod said with a laugh. “You struggle and cling to life despite knowing how futile it is. If I was you, I would have given up a long time ago.”

Kari smiled at him. It was her elegant, beautiful, graceful smile, and it was filled with enough derision to drown a Rock Golem.

“That is because you are a pathetic waste of space.”

“What was that?!” Zuragod didn’t appear to take her insult well. “A waste of space, am I? We’ll see if I’m a waste of space when I’ve got you down on your knees and sucking my dick, you stupid little whore! I’ll have you calling me daddy by the time I’m done with you!”

“I doubt you’ll be able to have me call you anything,” Kari retorted, still smiling. “And if you shove that disgusting thing in my mouth, I will bite it off.”

Kari didn’t waste any more time on this man and launched several light attacks that she sped up with time energy. Each attack looked like a spear of light, but they appeared next to Zuragod in an instant. None of them touched him, sadly. Zuragod’s body erupted with dark energy that transformed into a perfect sphere, which her spears slammed into before dispersing.

Siv had already begun battling against Durmuz. It didn’t look like that battling was going very well for her sister. Siv was launching numerous spatial attacks and combining them with wind and fire, but Durmuz’s control over the Concepts of Time and Negation allowed him to erase all of her attacks. She spun around and unleashed a whip-like spatial severing attack, but the attack slowed before it reached Durmuz, and then it was consumed by black negation energy shaped like a mouth.

To make matters worse, the siege towers had arrived and Sekbeists were pouring out of them by the hundreds. Their forces were being overwhelmed. Several Drakvar had already become buried under piles of bodies. If something wasn’t done soon, they would most definitely die.

Kari flew into the sky as Zuragod unleashed a massive wave of black negation energy. His attack swept over the battlefield, consuming ally and enemy alike. Everything his attack touched just disappeared.

Looking up at her with a grin, he raised his hand. Kari felt danger behind her. She swerved as several dozen spears sailed through where she’d been. That wasn’t the end of it. The spears soon combined to form an abominable creature unlike anything she’d ever seen. It looked like an amorphous blob with tentacles, which lashed out at Kari.

She dodged. There was nothing else she could do. Sweat stung her eyes as she turned, twisted, and danced out of the way as dozens of tentacles tried to impale her.

She tried to think of something to destroy this creature, but she could already tell nothing would work. Only overpowering it with an even more powerful attack would do the job. Sadly, this strange creation was made with more Spiritual Power than she possessed.

Just when the situation was looking hopeless, a white spear of energy flew down and struck the creature. It sliced through the top of its head and exploded inside of it. The white energy was so powerful that the creature was wiped out, detonating from the inside out and dissolving into particles.

“Who did that?!” Zuragod demanded.

Kari looked in the sky to see three figures flying in, one of them traveling way faster than the others, like a streak of lightning.

Several dozen other white spears around this person and shot toward not just Zuragod but also Durmuz, who was pushing back Siv. Both Sekbeist Lords were forced to move away from their opponents and eye the people in the sky. However, the person who attacked them seemed to blink out of existence. He then appeared right before Durmuz, whose eyes widened as he was punched so hard in the face that his body flew back and slammed into the wall of the fortress.

Kari’s eyes were on the person who had appeared before her. She felt like she was in a dream. That long green hair tied with a leather band at the back, those broad shoulders, and that intimately familiar presence. There was only one person who it could be.

“Eryk?” she asked in a whisper.

Eryk turned to her, grinned, and then he was right in front of her. He looked at her for a moment, his eyes soft and tender. Then he shifted his eyes toward the two other people who were coming in hot.

“Chloe! Tora! Take care of the one called Durmuz! Siv! Come over here! The three of us will take out Zuragod!”

It was only after he mentioned their names that Kari realized the two people with him were beautiful women. One of them was a blonde woman with light hair and blue eyes, while the other was a busty beauty with dark hair, dark eyes, and pale skin.

“Don’t fucking tell me what to do!” the dark-haired woman barked. Even though she snapped at him, she and the other one both traveled toward where Durmuz was pulling himself from the wall, and they quickly engaged him in combat.

Siv flew over quickly, her eyes glittering with happiness.

“ERYK!”

She probably would have flown right into his chest, but a powerful lance of negation energy forced them all to dodge. The person who had launched the attack was Zuragod. He glared at them with a vein throbbing on his forehead. After another moment, Kari realized he wasn’t glaring at them but at Eryk.

“You!” the Sekbeist Lord shouted. “What the fuck are you doing here?!”

Eryk glared down at Zuragod like the man was an insect. “I’m here because my wives are here. Why are you here? No. You know what? I don’t care. Since you’re here, you can die. Kari! Siv! Will you fight him with me?”

“Of course I will,” Kari said with a smile. “I can’t let you show me up.”

“I will also help you,” Siv added.

“Then let’s go!” Eryk said as he created a massive ruler from a dark and vile energy. It was death energy. Kari didn’t have time to marvel at her husband’s understanding of the Concept of Death because Eryk was already traveling toward their opponent. She and Siv flew after him to renew what would hopefully be their last battle for awhile.