This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 149

Chapter 149 - Long Live the Queen

A horrified look spread across Alex’s face, though she didn’t direct it at the door trapping them inside. She directed it at Eve. “What have you done?”

“That’s it,” the obsidian woman growled, “I’m killing her.”

Eve snorted. “You can try.”

“No!” Alex shrieked, rounding on her boss. “Carly, you promised! If I could keep her here, you’d let her live.”

“That was before she trapped us too,” Carly snapped, tossing her gaze around to appraise the various enchantments. “Bandir’s blue balls, it’s gonna take a week to break through these enchantments.”

“Ooh, that’s a good one,” Eve said, filing away the expletive for later.

Carly glared at her. “And it’ll take even more time if I have her trying to kill me while I work. Time I don’t have.”

“Then flip her!” Alex pleaded, the desperation growing in her voice. “Talk to her. She can let us out, I know it.”

“She’s proven her allegiance,” Carly said tilting her head back and forth as if to crack her neck. “I’m ending her.”

Eve smirked. “Good luck.”

Even as Alex begged her to stop, Carly waved a hand through the air, and a massive slab of stone pulled away from the ceiling—the only un-enchanted surface in the room. At once it shattered into a million razor-sharp shards, each hanging menacingly in the air for a brief second. Carly grinned. “Say goodbye.”

Eve waved and laughed. “Goodbye!”

Carly clenched her first.

The cloud of stone stilettos shot through the air, crossing the short distance to Eve in under a second. She didn’t even try to dodge.

The high-level attack tore through her, ripping armor, cloth, and flesh alike to shreds. Of the three, only the former didn’t immediately knit itself back together. Eve flashed Carly a look of mischief. “You missed our early conversation, didn’t you? About choice of location. Isn’t there this rule about not fighting people within their domain? I think so, at least. Well this…” Eve pointed at the floor below her. “This is my domain.”

Again Carly pulled a few tons of stone from the ceiling, forming it all into a single, giant spike. She launched it at Eve. Again, Eve didn’t bother to dodge. The spike ripped through her, and she knit herself back together.

Eve laughed. “You see, the thing is, by certain definitions, I’m not technically alive.” She reached a hand up to grasp the bone club at her back. “I don’t actually have Health anymore. I haven’t for a while. My only resource is Mana, and as long as I have some, I’m good to go.” She gestured down at the three leylines raging beneath her. “Now guess who decided to attack me on top of an infinite supply of Mana.”

As she talked, Eve pulled more and more power from the leylines below her, until a quick glance at her Mana pool gave her pause.

Mana: 226,050/45,210

Her eyebrows shot up. “Well that’s new.” She’d been able to gather five times her normal cap. It must’ve had something to do with one of the notifications she hadn’t read yet. She’d have to go through those later.

“Eve, no!” Alex cried, trying to deescalate the situation. “This isn’t a fight you can win!”

“Maybe.” Eve shrugged. “But down here, it’s not exactly a fight I can lose either.” She Charged in.

Carly was fast. A veritable wall of granite dropped from above, blockading Eve’s advance.

Eve popped Mana Rush. To make sure she always had some extra to work with, she only spent the same forty-thousand Mana per second on the skill, but this was hardly the same ability as before. Because she’d Charged first this time, her Mana Rush counted the temporary Willpower bonus in its calculation.

As it turned out, three feet of solid granite didn’t prove much of a match for sixty million Strength.

For a brief moment, an Eve-shaped hole appeared in the stone before the entire wall exploded in a cloud of dust. The good news was that Eve came through unharmed. The bad news was that cloud obscured her vision just enough for Carly to slip away from Eve’s attack.

Eve Jetted away, disassociating and re-associating her eyes to clear the dust from them. She glanced up at the ceiling to see a web of enchantment running across it, revealed now that Carly had pulled away so much stone.

“Of course,” Eve laughed. “Of course they built the enchantments to stop someone from tunneling in.” As Eve spoke, Carly pulled away the last of the free stone and slammed it into the ground to fill the air with more dust. Eve didn’t mind. She could handle a bit of dust, and now Carly was out of stone to work with.

With a grin, Eve launched a weak Mana Burst in a wide cone before her, imbuing the spell with annihilation Mana. The dust, low density as it was, vanished. “No hiding now.”

Carly snarled.

Eve darted in, allowing the few projectiles Carly had left to rip right through her as she closed in. This time, her club struck true.

The obsidian woman exploded into a hundred shards of black glass. No kill notification appeared.

“Figures it’d take more than that,” Eve breathed as she watched pieces of Carly float through the air, each poising itself to strike from a different angle. “Good thing physical force isn’t my only option.”

Three shards at once shot through Eve’s neck. She let them, simply pulling more Mana from the leyline to mend the damage. Her dragonhide armor was little more than a pile of scraps on the floor by now, and she knew even that wouldn’t survive what came next. Instead of dodging, Eve dumped ten thousand Mana into an annihilation-imbued Mana Burst at three of the floating shards. The spell struck two of them, and those pieces of Carly were no more.

From there the fight devolved into something resembling a shooting gallery, as Eve leaned back against the stone table taking potshots at the various floating obsidian shards. It was almost fun. She knew, of course, that without the leylines she would’ve died in the opening salvo, but she never would’ve gotten herself into this fight otherwise. She almost drooled at how much exp She Beneath the Earth had to be worth.

Carly dodged as well as she could, slowing the fight down by spreading herself out, and never once did she give up trying to overcome Eve’s obscene Mana regeneration. She never came close.

It was while Eve had her back turned to take aim at a pair of shards floating behind the platform that Alex’s voice raised above the roar of the leylines.

“Eve!” she yelled with a ragged throat. “Stop!”

Eve whirled around to find Alex standing wide-eyed with a razor sharp floating obsidian edge pressed against her throat. Eve froze.

The remaining shards slowly came together, coalescing to from a head and torso. Not enough material remained for a full body. “That’s enough,” Carly growled.

Eve cursed, holding up her hands peacefully. “Alright, alright. I’m stopping.”

Carly stared her down. “I see so much as a flash of Mana from you and she dies, understand?”

“Eve, listen to her,” Alex begged. “She’ll do whatever she thinks she has to.”

Eve nodded, biting back her tongue.

“Now, since you’ve been so kind as to trap me here, you get to sit and watch while I work my way out,” Carly snapped. “And don’t even think about laying a hand on that table. I don’t trust you not to kill us all.”

“You’re the one who attacked me, remember?” Eve said, regretting it immediately as the knife pressed harder into Alex’s throat. “Fine, fine, no table.”

The obsidian shard relaxed a bit.

“I think there’s one thing you’re missing, though,” Eve said, taking a slow and deliberate step back. “You seem to be under the impression that we’re all trapped here.” She slid her foot back, feeling for the edge of the platform. “And that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Carly glared at her, pressing the shard tighter against Alex’s neck. A drop of blood welled.

“Oh, and Alex?” Eve said, gesturing her head at knife to the Defender’s throat. “You might want to reevaluate who the bad guys are in this whole mess.” She looked up at Carly and winked. “See you in a week, I guess.” Leaving no time for a reply, an attack, or any more threats, Eve took a casual step back, fell from the edge, and plummeted directly into the leyline.

——

As soon as he heard the entry slam shut, Wes raced back down the awkward stairway in the desperate hope Eve had made it through. She hadn’t. With a curse, he slammed his hand into the enchanted door. It felt like slapping an anvil.

“Wes, what are you doing?” Preston called from a few stairs up. “She told us to run.”

“And then she locked herself in with Alex and a high-level that wants her dead,” Wes snapped. “We have to help her.”

“Wes, I don’t think…”

He set his hand alight. “I can burn through this. I know it.”

“Wes!” Preston shouted, his voice sharp. “What’re you gonna do once you get that door open, fight the high-level yourself? Eve can handle herself.”

“It’s the fucking Mana wraith all over again. I’m not letting her sacrifice herself for us. Not again.”

“Wes…” Preston tried to step forward, but the earth quaked around them and he stumbled, colliding with the fire mage’s back. “Wes, she had a plan in mind then and she has a plan in mind now. If you burn through that door you’re just going to throw a wrench in it. We need to go.”

Wes shook his head. “I can’t lose her, Preston.”

“And I can’t lose you.”

Wes froze. Preston could see the muscles in his back tense. “We’re not abandoning Eve.”

“No,” Preston said. “We’re doing what she asked. We’re just going to have to trust she didn’t bite off more than she could chew.”

“This is Eve we’re talking about,” Wes replied. “Biting off more than she can chew is kind of her thing.”

“And so is coming out on top.” Preston reached out and grabbed Wes’s hand. “Now let’s go.”

With a sigh, Wes finally turned and allowed Preston to pull him up the spiral stairs. This time, he didn’t gripe about the uneven steps.

The mood was heavy as they first caught up to Art and then left the stairway to rejoin Reginald and Lumy in the main hall. The trellac had already informed the others of the situation.

As at last they turned to go, taking one last look at the open passage down to where Eve was fighting for her life, Art called them to a halt.

Wait! I feel something!

As if in reply, a chorus of trumpets blared their heraldry, recognizable even muted by the door between them. Preston gave Wes a sideways. glance. “What the hells?”

Wes was the first to reach the entrance to the throne room. He tore the door open, ready to rain fire on whomever lurked within. Even with the lights dimmed and fanfare blaring, he had no trouble taking in the room’s contents.

There, upon the throne, Eve sat in her underclothes, leaning back and picking at her nails. Beneath her, a small, redirected portion of a leyline ran from one side of the throne to the other. She grinned. “What took you so long? I thought I told you to run.”

A smile spread across Wes’s face as he allowed the tension to drain from his shoulders. He laughed. “In our defense,” he said, scratching the back of his head, “those stairs are awkward as fuck.”

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