The fighting stopped. No shots came in from the slope, and none left the dome. For a time the only sounds were the screams of the wounded and the crackling of the bonfires and the burning tents.
"Thank you!" the booming voice called out, heavy with relief. "Please! I know that you do not understand, but in maintaining Splinters like this one you have caused terrible harm to the world. We must find a way to destroy them!"
Around her, Ana's Party was silent, except for the occasional whine or moan. She didn't need to look at them to know what they were feeling, but she did so anyway. They weren't convinced, and they weren't charmed or spellbound. They were terrified. Despite the protection Champion gave them, every one of them was paralyzed by fear. And Ana felt that fear trying to do the same to her, clawing at her mind but finding no purchase.
One other person, at least, was unaffected. "Karti!" Pirta roared back from somewhere among the tents. "I prayed! When I heard your name, I prayed that it was not you. The Class was wrong, and I prayed that it was simply someone with the same name. What happened to you? What happened to the kind and generous Priest I knew?"
Karti's voice faltered "Pirta? Is that you? Lord be kind, it is, isn't it? I did not know that this was your Splinter, I swear! But you need not perish with your home. Give us the Wayfarer's Chosen and stop your attack! Let us finish our work, and I will explain everything. We have a way out! We will take you with us! We will take you all with us!"
Give us the Wayfarer's Chosen, Ana thought. She looked at her Party, kneeling inside the tent, frozen with fear. She looked at Messy, who was staring blankly outside, her eyes glazed, unfocused, and brimming with tears.
Ana, the goddess herself said, drawing the name out into a warning. But Ana wasn't listening.
"I'm sorry, but I've got to go," she whispered to Messy, then bent down and kissed her on the forehead. Messy's eyes focused on her for just a moment before going blank again. "Take care of yourself, alright?" Ana said as she straightened. "Don't you dare get hurt."
She stepped outside without looking back. Around the corner of the next tent she could see cultists cautiously leaving the dome, no doubt to round up the Bluesky Guild members. Hopefully nothing worse. This would be over soon.
But not in the way they hoped.
Ana summoned her wings. Whatever powerful intimidation or fear effect it was that had a hold on the minds of her Party was banished, but she barely had time to hear their gasps before she launched herself into the air. Her wings were no less affected by her Strength than any other part of her, and the force of them threw up dust and made tent cloth snap and ripple as she covered the few dozen feet to the dome in a heartbeat. She'd seen cultists enter, and she'd seen them leave. She only hoped that there wasn't some kind of guestlist, or this was going to hurt.
The cultists hadn't even had time to react when Ana passed through the dome. Fortunately, the shimmering barrier was nothing but hot air, distorting light but not slowing her down in the slightest. Inside, the air thrummed with barely contained energy, the flow of mana reminding Ana of nothing so much as a collapsing Delve, except that there was an overall movement toward the obelisk. And in the general feel or flavor of the aligned mana that dominated: Fire, wild and smoky; and what must be Death, cold, still, and all too seductive.
The higher Level cultists, the Binders and Summoners, were clustered around the obelisk, a few demons and revenants hanging around listlessly to guard them. In front of the group stood an elven man who could only be Karti: an [Elf Grand Summoner (37)], tall and lithe like Pirta but with long, flowing black hair and wearing a cream robe similar in cut to a cassock.
The cultists had less than two seconds from when Ana blasted off to see and react to her. Ana herself had less than a second to choose her target after she passed the dome. Not enough to even formulate a conscious thought. There was no time for words, only a feral shriek of absolute rage, but the feeling accompanying that shriek as she looked at the elf and his cadre was, You want me? Here I am!
The whole attack had been a gamble; a gamble that they wouldn't expect her to do exactly what she had. A gamble that she wouldn't be shot out of the sky by massed magical firepower. The Wayfarer had told her that there were rules in place about to whom a deity could speak directly. Ana had bet that the Sentinel didn't have anyone who met the requirements, and that someone called the Lord of Order would be too proud or too rigid to break those rules outright. She'd bet that Karti and the others would have been warned about her as a danger, but that they probably wouldn't know about her wings. She'd bet her life on it.
It had paid off. At a glance, Ana counted sixteen people, Karti included. Of those, three reacted before she dropped among them. She didn't go for Karti immediately. No, she picked a cluster of three Binders near the middle of the group, and her Class name be damned, she fell among them like an angel of vengeance.
Ana gave the woman in the middle the honor of breaking her fall. She'd flared her wings, but she was still moving at breakneck speed when she hit the woman's chest knees-first and felt her ribcage cave under the force. The two to her sides didn't even have a chance to turn before she'd backfisted the one on the right with her shield and brained the one on the left with her hammer.
Then there were thirteen.
She'd picked the unfortunate Binders for two reasons: she had no idea what the Summoners could do, but she'd seen Binders use Death-magic offensively; and she still hoped that killing or disabling them would make them lose control of their bound demons. That hope bore fruit as a sapient revenant and two possessed animals, a wolf and a badger, suddenly turned and fell on the nearest cultists. That was when the shock of Ana's arrival truly hit them, and the screaming began.
Killing massed casters, it turned out, was harder than killing massed changelings. There was one main reason for that: while the changelings had come to Ana, the cultists were not mindless. Nor were they fighters. They had no stomach for a melee, especially one that they were losing, and most of the casters ran from her. But Ana had always been fast; her biggest hurdle to using her speed had been a firm enough footing. Her wings removed much of that, letting her capitalize on any opening, and there were lots of those.
Some few of the cultists tried to Shape, or drew daggers or swords. Some of them may have tried to surrender. They only died sooner.
Ana leaped around the small area, identifying and targeting first the Binders, then anyone who tried to stand their ground. Her feet broke knees, her knees broke hips or ribs, her shield broke throats and faces, and her hammer and axe broke skulls and clove through any limb unfortunate enough to get in her way. With every blow she roared out her rage and frustration, and the thunder of her fury and the overwhelming emotion of her unbridled aura drove the cultists back as much as the carnage she wrought.
In the chaos that rose when the cultists tried to flee, the demons fell on them like cats on mice.
And all the while, as Ana slaughtered his minions, Karti screamed. He begged her to stop, to understand why this was all necessary, but she didn't care. His words meant nothing to her. He and his band of bastards had come here to destroy something that had become important to her, and they had two options: surrender convincingly, or die. And if none of them had the presence of mind to try the first, she had not a single fuck to give.
Time became an ephemeral thing in the heat of it. So did pain, especially with Fight Through. She'd taken a few cuts, one of those green bolts had sent her to her knees for a moment, and she'd taken a bite to her magically hardened arm from a demonic wolf. But at some point there were more bodies than fleeing cultists, and they were getting far away and apart. Most of the demons were down, some by her hand, others by those of the cultists. The rest were chasing down the fleeing casters.
The hardest thing to deal with was the storm of emotions. Ana had thrown herself into a pack of mid-Level casters. Some of them kept their hold on their auras, but most didn't. Not when bone broke and blood spattered. The air around Ana was thick with anger and terror, despair and desperate hopes that were soon shattered. Being looked at with fear was an awful thing, one that Ana had suffered much of her life. That, it turned out, was not true when that fear came from your enemy.
A weaker woman could have lost herself. Ana had never understood sadism, but in that moment she could see the appeal.
But that wasn't all she felt. At some point she'd become distantly aware of her frontliners going from general terror to immediate, mortal fear. The cultists must have found them, or they'd found the cultists. Part of her screamed to go to them and protect them, but in the midst of the fight, as she was laying waste to the core of the group that had tried to take everything from them, that was impossible. Then those casters were dead or fled, and Ana still wanted to go to her Party. To Messy. But she couldn't, because Karti was still before her.
Stolen novel; please report.
Karti hadn't fled. He still stood, pleading with Ana, trying to reason with her, begging her. There was no fear in him, neither in his body language or in his powerful aura, but only frustration and desperation. He believed. He truly believed in what he was saying, and that she might see reason. Only when Ana looked him in the eyes, and he understood that all she had to offer him was death, did he do anything that looked like an attempt at Shaping.
Ana ran two steps then launched herself at him, driving hard with her wings. She hit him in the midriff, and a blue light shimmered around him and held, absorbing the force of her impact as she pushed him back several yards. The first Summoner that Ana had killed, six weeks earlier, had something similar; it had stopped the first bullet she fired at him. Whatever Karti had seemed sturdier; she wrapped her legs around him and punched him rapidly in the short ribs, but each time the light flared and he remained unaffected.
"Stop!" Karti pleaded again, alternately trying to punch, slap, or futilely pry her off.
"Fuck you," Ana growled back. Running on pent-up anger and adrenaline she caught each of his arms and wrestled them close to his body, then wrapped her arms tight around him again and beat her wings as hard and fast as she could.
They rose. Not quickly, but a few feet per second was plenty. Plenty to bring her as high as the top of the obelisk before her remaining time grew dangerously short. Then she dropped him.
The surprise on Karti's face was a thing of beauty, only matched by the despair as he tried to grab her, and she smacked his hand away.
Karti fell a full hundred feet onto the packed dirt around the obelisk, and his protective blue field flared and flickered in a way very unlike how it had behaved previously. Ana wasn't far behind, having dropped when Karti did. Her wings dissipated as she was braking, and she landed on him, the impact jarring but not hurting her as her knee drove into his gut.
"This is your fault!" she screamed, driving her fist into the elf's face. The blue field flickered madly.
"It's your fault that I'm here!" Another blow, another flicker, longer and more chaotic. Karti bucked and thrashed, but she locked her heels under him and held on. He didn't stand a chance of getting her off.
"It's your fault that Nic's dead! I just wanted a life! To get comfortable! Get somewhere people couldn't fuck with me! Make some friends who wouldn't leave me!" With every sentence, a punch, as hard as Ana could make it, bounced the elf's head off the ground. With the last one the protective field flared, flickered, and shattered outward.
In the background she was aware of voices calling her name. She ignored them.
"They would have died!" she screamed, spittle flecking the man's face right before she smashed his nose to paste and the bucking stopped. "They would have all died! Mess, Ray, Tor, Irry, everyone!" She punctuated every name with a blow, splitting his eyebrows, his cheeks, and his lips. "Because you had to fuck everything up!" She'd switched to English at some point, and she couldn't say when. "Well, guess what! Fuck around—" Both jawbones caved under her fist, teeth cutting deep gouges in her knuckles and her fingers. "And find out!"
Her fist sank an inch into the man's face. She was still screaming, barely even words at that point, and she'd pulled her arm back for another blow when multiple arms wrapped around her, two different voices calling her name, telling her to stop. She still tried to punch, and found Tor jerking forward to roll in the dirt beyond the elf's mangled head. The surprise was enough to make her actually start listening and pay attention to anything but the bloody mess under her.
"It's over!" Pirta was shouting. Ana turned her head, and saw the captain kneeling beside her. "It's over, Ana! Please release him! If there's any way he's still alive, we need him! Please!"
"It's over?" Ana asked, breathing heavily. "We won?"
"We won! The demons have been put down, and we're rounding up the surviving cultists. But we haven't stopped the ritual. Whatever the obelisk has been doing, it's still doing it. We still need to stop that, and Karti might help. And even if he can't, he knows things! Please, Ana. Release him."
Ana looked down at the elven man beneath her. His face was a bubbling mess of torn flesh, shattered bone, and blood. He looked like he'd been in a severe car accident more than anything. She'd done that. With her fist.
She felt no regret. No remorse or shame. But she did feel some measure of awe at herself. And pain. A lot of pain. Her bonuses had vanished, and she couldn't say when.
"My Party? They were fighting," she asked, but the question was unnecessary. She could feel them; Dil and Deni still far to the back, Trig quickly coming closer, and the frontliners moving around nearby.
"Either tending to the wounded or watching the prisoners," Pirta said. "Don't worry. They're fine. Your Party made it out better than most. But you need to drink a potion and get looked at."
"I'll live," Ana said reflexively, then added, "Really, this time. Some burns, bruises and cuts, but nothing that can't wait until I see Touanne or one of the other Life-mages. Let's save the potions for those who really need them."
Pirta gave her an evaluating look and said, "Agreed." She put two fingers to Karti's neck and nodded to herself. Then she pulled out a healing potion and carefully poured it over what remained of his face.
"Seems like a fucking waste," Ana muttered.
"It's not," Pirta said in a tone that brooked no argument. "I told you. We need him. Possibly to stop this thing—" She gestured to the obelisk that towered over them, "but also to learn what he knows. He and his cult here can't possibly have been alone. There must be others. And on a personal level, I… I have to know what happened to turn him from the wonderful man I knew into someone who could do this."
"Better get that Ari guy down here," Ana said as she got off Karti. She couldn't stop herself from giving him a relatively restrained kick to the short ribs. Pirta frowned at her, but she ignored that. "If I see a high-Level religious fanatic caster running loose, I will put him down, whatever your wishes may be."
Pirta sighed. "Ari, unfortunately, didn't make it. But we have others who can craft the ritual and restrain him. Don't worry."
"Oh." For the first time Ana really looked around. The dome was gone, and around the camp groups of Guild members were moving bodies, helping the injured, or directing small groups of cultists to do the same for their own. Ana had known that there would be casualties, and she'd seen people go down, but she had no idea what the numbers looked like.
"How many?" she asked. "Do you know?"
Pirta sighed. "Seven dead that I know for certain, with over a dozen wounded. But those are only the ones I've seen myself or had reported to me. I expect the final numbers to be at least double, perhaps triple."
Twenty dead, perhaps. There was no way that Ana didn't know some of them. As Pirta tried to feed the remainder of the potion to Karti, Ana looked at Tor, who'd been sitting by quietly since Ana threw him. "Kaira?" she asked. "Omda?"
"Kaira took a pretty bad burn on the leg back on the slope, but she's used to burns," Tor said. "We left Omda shooting from the treeline, so I assume that he's fine. The Falks are both injured, but not badly. Brosden is worse, but he'll live. We lost Perka… do you know him?"
"Afraid not. Who was he?"
"The other Water-mage that survived the Delve. Poor bastard. At least he got to see the sun and breathe fresh air again."
"Did you know him well?" Ana asked. She didn't really care. She was looking around for Messy, who must have been behind the tents since she couldn't see her. But that was the kind of thing you were supposed to ask in situations like this, and she didn't know if Kaira had told Tor and Omda about her. She might as well pretend to be normal.
"Not really. Spira's pretty torn up about it, though. Who're you looking for?"
"Messy. I don't like that I can't see her."
"So go find her."
"Can't leave Karti until he's either dead or under control."
Tor frowned and shook his head. "I can't believe that he's alive at all. Gods beyond, you made a real mess of him, Ana."
"Yeah," she agreed. She looked at her hands. They were burned, bruised, cut, and covered in blood from the tips of her fingers to the wrist on her right hand, and almost to the elbow on her left. She wished that Perka guy had survived, or that Sendra or Spira or one of the other Water-mages would show up. She needed a wash.
"I would hope that you'll stay even after we have Karti properly secured," Pirta said, standing up. "He may not be able to speak for some time, but there are others, surviving Summoners, who we can ask. Having you there would probably be beneficial."
"To scare the shit out of them and get them to cooperate?" Ana asked.
"Just so."
"Yeah. I can do that. Tor, could you find Messy and tell her where I am, and that I'll be tied up for a while? And tell Irry I'm glad she made it."
"Sure," Tor said. "I can do that."
"Once you've done that, Mister Barlo," Pirta added, "please find your mother and father and ask them to come here with the device they've been working on. There's no time like the present to test it."
"Of course, Captain," Tor said, then walked off in the direction Ana had been looking.
"Marshal, can I rely on you not to kill our prisoner if I go check on Captain Falk and some others?" Pirta asked. At first Ana thought that she was joking, but no, she was entirely serious. Apparently the possibility of Ana simply executing the man as soon as no one was watching was a real concern.
"Yes, Captain, you can," Ana said, looking her in the eyes as she did so.
After a few moments Pirta nodded and said, "I'll hold you to that," before she also walked off, leaving Ana alone with Karti and a small field of bodies.
Ana couldn't pretend that the idea of just slipping one of her daggers between the man's ribs didn't occur to her. But Pirta was probably right about him being useful. Whether Ana liked it or not didn't mean much as long as their survival was still up in the air.
She looked down at the bloody mess she'd made, which was somehow still alive. Her fist clenched hard enough that she felt a sharp, cutting pain where nails met flesh. Then she spat, "Lucky you," and forced herself to relax.
It was over.
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