Forged by Battle (WarVerse Book 1) (25 page)

Chapter 60

Rodrom

Rodrom shook his head to clear away the ringing. He had been too close to too many explosions in the last two days. He could barely hear his own groan over the obnoxious whistling in both ears. He really needed a change of profession.

"Lorelei, are you..." he began. Then he saw the pool of pitch dark oozing into the chamber.

Rodrom tried to get up, feeling the tear in his lungs as his heart demanded more oxygen than his synthetic blood could carry. The best he could manage was to push himself up on one knee.
Yeah, Derek, go down on your knees. Isn't that the way we always pictured it.

The shadow finished dripping into the chamber and formed into a two-foot circle right in front of him. It looked like motor oil, or maybe ink, only decidedly evil. Rodrom tried to engage his clinical mind, to take in the details and make a plan, but he was too rattled. He looked back towards Lorelei.

She was lying on her side, one snow-white arm draped over her face. The black tattoos that came with her wardrobe change were the same shade of sinister as the pool forming at the door.

Rodrom needed a weapon. What he would do with it, he didn’t know. But whatever force was behind the explosion, and the Shadow, was something he needed to fight.

Still wheezing, Rodrom pushed himself over to where Lorelei had dropped the end of her staff. It wasn't much, but it was more than nothing. Maybe he could strap his homemade scalpels onto the end of it. A quick glance over his shoulder showed the Shadow still congealing on the floor. Maybe it would just stay there, and he could pull Lorelei and her...

In all the confusion and chaos, he had forgotten what she had told him just before she’d fallen unconscious. This warrior on the table wasn't her betrothed, or any such nonsense—he was some sort of leader. A general.

If he hadn't already been struggling to breathe, Rodrom would have laughed at himself, but he had precious little time to pull together a plan and get everyone out in one piece. Better to laugh later than not at all.

He pulled himself far enough around the table to see past Lorelei and the general, to where she had pulled out the dagger and done whatever insane magic had given her the makeover. Drops of her blue blood littered the floor, along with five feet of white painted wood. Rodrom had never bothered to pay all that much attention to the weapon before, but as he looked now, he saw that it was similar to the ones all the healers carried—a sort of twisting staff of branches woven so tightly they looked like a single piece.

The last time he had touched one of those staffs, he had felt like he’d been strapped into an electric chair. But he moved the last meter without even thinking and reached out to grab it.

The moment his fingers wrapped around the smooth wood, he felt a thousand little pinpricks in his hand, like he had just grabbed a live wire. Then a wave of energy and power radiated through his body. The pendant on his chest shuddered and hummed, but Rodrom heard none of the music he had come to associate with the elves’ abilities.

No, there was no music, but there was plenty of power. It hummed in the weapon and flooded him with wave after wave. He had no idea how to use the thing, but he pointed it over towards the Shadow and tried.

While he was fumbling, the Shadow had started pulling itself together. Already, a head and neck emerged from the dark pool. If left unchecked, it obviously intended to form a humanoid shape. Rodrom stepped forward and pushed the staff ahead of him like a lance, hoping to engage whatever mechanism would unleash the power it so obviously contained. No such luck.

The Shadow grew a torso, and Rodrom tried more combinations of thrusts and shakes, running his hand down the length of the staff to check for a recessed trigger. Rodrom tried not to think of how ridiculous he looked, and was for once thankful that Vincent wasn't around to see him.

He found absolutely nothing useful, and nearly threw the weapon down in frustration.

"Just fire, damn you," he cried, and the energy poured from him into the wood. It grew warm in his hand. He stared at it. "Please don't explode."

Then he thrust the weapon forward again, and the energy rushed from him towards the Shadow. The air within the chamber kicked up like a tornado had just swept in. The heat beneath his fingers was enough to make him want to drop it, but he had no choice but to hold on. His hand seemed to be fused to the wood.

All his equipment was blown to the floor and the wind tore at his beard. The pool of Shadow churned but stayed in place.

"More attack, less storm," Rodrom shouted, hoping the weapon would respond.

Luckily, the elf magic was listening, and the twisting whirlwind died down. Then to Rodrom's extreme displeasure, the wind shifted and blew a violent gust that threw him to the back of the room. He landed with a dull thud against the root walls. As he slid to the ground, he saw that he had finally affected the Shadow—in the worst possible way. The wind had disrupted its attempt to form into something vaguely human, and instead had blown it over to the elf lying on the table.

Just as it had with Lorelei, the Shadow seemed to stain every part of the warrior it touched. Unlike Lorelei, it did not stop with a tattoo pattern. It covered everything.

Rodrom pushed himself up with the staff, still unable to release it from his hand, and hobbled over to the table where the Shadow was consuming his charge. He pulled one of the scalpels off the ground and tried to pry the darkness away with the crystalline blade.

It was like trying to cut through tar. Wherever Rodrom pressed the blade into the Shadow, it just pooled and twisted, and when he tried to pull away it clung like glue. He released the scalpel before the Shadow connected to his own skin. He wouldn't be of any help if he was consumed along with the warrior.

The dark slime pulled in the scalpel, along with all the other tools that had fallen around the warrior during the miniature storm. Like some sort of symbiotic copycat, it absorbed them and then churned out more. Before Rodrom's eyes, the warrior went from a bear-skinned humanoid to a void of light studded with blades. A mohawk of knives erupted from between the creature’s eyes all the way over and behind his head, then down his back. Longer blades erupted from his wrists and descended down the backs of both ankles.

The thing had become a living nightmare.

"Lightning, you need to shoot lightning now," Rodrom screamed at the stick grafted to his hand. Then he raised it over his head with both hands and slammed it down on the head of the monster.

To Rodrom’s relief, the weapon did not sink in and replicate like the scalpel, and the screaming seemed to do the trick—something violent and loud struck the tree above hard enough to shake it.

Rodrom realized his mistake just as the Shadow sat up, swung a bladed arm towards him, and raked scalpel-sharp scratches of darkness across his face.

He staggered back, the staff finally falling free of his hand, as hot blue blood gushed from his wounds. He wasn't blinded yet, so he had an excellent view of the Shadow as it stood up, grabbed Lorelei, and dragged her outside the tree and out of view.

The blood was pouring between Rodrom’s fingers and he already felt lightheaded. He had nothing left in the way of supplies, but Lorelei was in trouble. He needed to get to her before he bled out.

He stumbled towards the exit.

Chapter 61

Vincent

Vincent charged between the trees, using his ankle-mounted jump jets and turbines to gain extra speed. In the machine meld he was the fighter, so he could “feel” every truck he slammed into on his armor, but there was no exhaustion, and no real pain. Only him, his armor, and the mission.

Vincent had only experienced the meld once, when he had been forced to in his training. All the test pilots of the Mark 1 had gone insane from the stress of the mental transition from man to fighter. So the gnomes went back to the drawing board, watched one too many science fiction movies, and came up with the Mark 2. If humans couldn't handle becoming a fighter, they’d have the fighter become a man. That led to the transformation circuits, nanotech seals, and the augmentations that made the Chimera the versatile fighter it was.

But it went from the ultimate weapon to a last-ditch resort when they realized no pilot could survive more than fourteen minutes. Vincent had no intention of seeing what the end of those fourteen minutes looked like. He would charge through to Rodrom, grab him, and then charge right out again. Let whatever shadow magic that had attacked Duchess and the flashover that Ele had become sort one another out. Vincent had more than enough of magic, and he wasn't about to pit his ridiculous science fiction battle suit against any of it.

Despite being over-the-top, the armor could move. There was none of the delay that came from recognizing an obstacle and twisting a stick or pressing a rudder to avoid it. A fallen tree was in his way—he jumped over it, simple as that. A gap too small to run straight through—he twisted and leapt, firing the thrusters so he passed sideways between two trees. He hit the ground in a tumble, and was back up on his armored feet in seconds.

He landed close enough to Rodrom's signal that it was a short run, and within a minute Vincent saw the wreckage of the Duchess's ship, and the hellish creature that was crawling out of it.

Vincent had seen a lot of strange and impossible things come out of the portals, but he stopped dead in his tracks now. The thing was the size of a man, only covered in blades, and had impossibly black skin. It was carrying a female elf colored all over in black and white, and it was absolutely terrifying.

It was the same kind of terror Vincent had felt when he thought a member of his team was in danger, or even the kind when he had watched his father die. This terror was so overwhelming, so uncontrollably strong, that his mind fractured under the strain of it. He tried to reach for his father’s knife, to find some comfort in the familiar, but his hands were cannons. He was trapped inside the metal body of his fighter.

The only thing that saved him was the meld. It wasn't just Vincent controlling the craft. His AMI unit was just as involved, and as much as he hated to let the computer do his work, in that moment he was glad to have it step in, and let loose with everything the Chimera had.

Missiles streaked from his shoulders; their payloads were smaller in the atmosphere but no less deadly, and they blossomed into violent fireballs all around the monster. His Gatling cannon roared, spitting out thousands upon thousands of armor-piercing incendiary rounds, each of which could obliterate a main battle tank. His laser cannon blinded him with its ferocity as it ignited the air between them, producing an unending stream of light as it fired continuously.

The AMI held nothing back, acting upon Vincent's irrational fear and firing until the barrel of the Gatling cannon melted to slag, the missiles were emptied, and the laser cannon had fired through every frequency.

Smoke curled up from his arms and spent missile pods, and he shook against the fear. Nothing could be left of the monster, not after that.

The smoke was too thick for Vincent to see the body. A part of him wished he had been more in control. He was helpless now, with all his ammunition and weapons spent. If he had to, the best he could do was try and punch it. The gnomes had been vetoed when they’d suggested adding a sword.

All of Vincent's scanners focused onto the Shadow. In the back of his mind the clock still ticked. He only had... eleven minutes left. He needed to get Rodrom and get out. His AMI was still blinking in the tree behind where Vincent had leveled.

And what about Ele, who would demolish everything if she passed close enough?

His sensors couldn't pick up anything. The smoke was too thick. It clustered around where his missiles had erupted, and wasn't dissipating, even in the wind.

Vincent took a few tentative steps forward, and set his feet against the ground. Kneeling slightly, he braced himself with his arms and rotated his wings so the turbines were facing ahead of him. He poured on the juice, blowing gusts strong enough to lift his suit over the smoke. He needed to see that the thing was dead, destroyed.

Still, the smoke didn't move.

The fear started to creep in again. Vincent poured more power into the turbines,  digging long furrows in the dirt as he was pushed backwards. But no matter how much wind he generated, the smoke stayed in a strange lump, almost as if it were...

The thing uncurled.

It was shaped like a bear, with a large bulky body and squat legs, a low-hanging head, and no tail. That was where the normal stopped, and the impossible took over.

A man made seemingly of pure darkness had been the most horrifying sight he could imagine. That man had now grown several times in size, taken on the proportions of a violent beast, and was covered from head to toe in what looked like swords.

Had Vincent’s lungs not been full of fluid, he would have laughed. The fear was too much, and he couldn't handle the strain. For once, he took a page out of Rodrom's book, and just laughed.

The thing turned towards him, opened its mouth, and let loose a roar so loud and violent that Vincent was thrown backwards. When his back collided with a tree, he slid down to the ground, and felt one of his wings snap from the blow.

Before the monster could take his life, however, the universe decided to add insult to injury, and Ele, in all her flaming glory, slammed into the ground in a cloud of ash and dirt. The Shadow turned on her, and let loose another roar. The wave of pressure pushed aside trees and managed to dim some of her flame, but only for a second before she became too bright to look directly at again.

His chance of escaping gone, and with ten minutes left on the clock, Vincent laughed silently in the goo of his cockpit.

Only you can prevent forest fires.