Underworld - Book 7 - Chapter 45

I glanced over and saw Shamash was having no trouble keeping up with us. Even Xaphan was distancing himself. I’d hoped he would’ve been getting frisky seeing such a big monster, but it seemed he had little trouble holding himself back from the fight.

I hadn’t given up yet. Even if I couldn’t brute force Scorching Sun into being, it seemed creating a small nuclear fusion reaction was much easier. That didn’t mean I’d reached fusion ignition. It wouldn’t be self-sustaining until it was heating its fuel faster than it cooled. Did that just mean I needed to make it bigger, or maybe hold it together longer? Why had it been so easy with the focal lens?

We caught up with our friends quickly. There was no time to slow. The Dire Wolves outpaced the others. Jeremiah ran, while Debra flew on a cloud of light. Travis held himself back in his Werewolf form even though I knew he could’ve sprinted ahead. Mel was the biggest surprise in that he’d taken the form of a giant bat. It looked like he had the mouth of a broad-jawed lion, with long pointy ears and some vicious fangs. He was far from the slowest.

The question was, were they fast enough. Perhaps, but it was impossible to say for sure since the Colossal had some tricks to eat up distance fast.

I continued draining orbs to restore as much as my mana as possible. I still had three quarters of it left. Maybe I’d used too much. Maybe not enough. The approach had partially worked. But how could I push it over the last hurdle?

I called out, “I’m going to stop when we’re about five miles from Sanctuary. I want everyone to keep going. I should be able to give it one more shot.”

A glance at Aeris made it clear that she had no intention of leaving. She was a Wisp, which gave her some extreme survivability, but this was one creature that had the means to threaten her. If she was swallowed and couldn’t get out, it was only a matter of time before she lost her mana and was for all practical purposes absorbed. How many creatures were stuck inside the abomination in such a state as we spoke, fighting with everything they had to stay alive?

No one argued with me. As soon as we reached the location, the three of us stopped and the others continued on.

As Aeris and I faced the encroaching meatball of mass destruction, she didn’t say anything. Both of us were in awe at how fast it was coming now.

Shamash concluded, “There are too many variables. I don’t have any advice to give. The best you can do is to change it slightly and hope for the best.”

As far as summaries go, it was as good as it comes. There was no obvious thing missing from the equation. I created nuclear fusion with my Solar Magic, and it still wasn’t enough.

I cast Artificial Sun as I’d done the first time. It grew to the size of a decent size hotel before it began to condense. I planned on not just creating one core to the spell but many. If I could create several fusion reactions in a tight space, then perhaps they would feed off each other.

The Colossal showed some intelligence. In reaction to seeing my Artificial Sun, a wave of flesh rose up. It was when mana started to build at the wave’s peak that I realized what it was doing. It seemed my spell had hurt it enough that it didn’t want it to happen again and aimed to explode a segment of itself to interrupt my spell.

The notion was foolish. As a Grandmaster Light Mage, I wasn’t forced to stand in one place while casting. My spell itself could be moved as I willed, so I simply readied to reposition myself as I prepared to cast several instances of Laser.

Its mana didn’t stop surging. I was suddenly facing off with billions of mana in opposition to my own. It was like a wild west showdown, except instead of six-shooters we were wielding nuclear warheads and both standing in the dead zone.

It struck out and I was ready. I started to move but didn’t go far before the monster didn’t do what I expected. Instead of blasting off a big part of itself, it dove to the ground. The earth ruptured, and the Underworld shook.

The blast was incredible, but it wasn’t enough for more than debris to reach us.

Three Lasers shot from my fingertips. I used my middle finger, pinky, and thumb just to give the beams some visible separation. They struck the Artificial Sun cores. I’d transformed just my mind to Solar Being and made use of Time Crawl to its full. The reaction happened just as with the first time, but… it still didn’t work. All that I needed were a few seconds to observe. It was still cooling too quickly.

I cut my mana immediately to conserve as much as possible. The moment my time dilation ceased, an ear rupturing crack sounded from behind us.

Aeris and I spun to see a grand tendril fracture the ground beneath our friends. Jeremiah must have sensed it coming, for he’d bound over to his wife and launched her out of the way. The ground opened as if to swallow him, but a volcano of rock and flesh burst forth.

The Colossal was too greedy to let the rock have him. It reached out and pulled him in.

Then a fleshly tower rose up amongst our shattered friends.

It was too shocking to believe what we were seeing, but our dismay didn’t linger. Both of us flew toward them but almost before we could get started the upper section of the corpse tower burst into pieces. The echoes of Liulfr’s sonic howl were visible as his body rocketed through it with the pastor in his mouth.

While they were still flying, the rescued man leaped out of the Dire Wolf Alpha’s teeth and scaled his way to his mane. Once he was in place, the high-level wolf’s paws glowed, and it raked its feet against the air as if it were a well-trod path. It turned around the way it had come and dodged past the ever-growing tendril as it ran through the air.

To give them room to escape, the last person I expected appeared. Mistress Nava had flowed up toward the ceiling as this segment of the Colossal pushed itself higher. One of her two forms was pure Corruption Aspect, or Vitality as she called it, but she always seemed to cover herself in Shadow. The succubus hovering above the fray was no longer hiding. She was like a living purple-pink spark that never stopped crackling.

She lifted her hand then simply pointed down. Dark Lightning flashed. It lit up the inside of the mile-high Colossal, rending it in two. From top to bottom the flesh tower split, but within seconds it sandwiched itself back together.

Mel swooped down and lifted Debra by the shoulders with his Bat Form. At a far faster speed than they’d been moving originally, he raced away with the Dire Wolves following. Travis delay just a moment, but once he got going, he was even faster.

I glanced back to see that we were sandwiched between the main body and the recovering segment our friends had just escaped. Then I looked at Aeris and our eyes met.

What it had just done was only possible under the right conditions. “It’s in the Dungeon Level,” I warned her.

We both knew what that meant. There were no tunnels below that connected directly to Sanctuary, but there were those leading to the Outer Perimeter. If the Colossal went in that direction it could simply flood the tunnels with its own body and completely cut off our fleeing friends. There’d be nothing they could do.

A look of horror covered Aeris’s face. She had the thought before I did. A ringing cry sounded from her as she called out, “Xaphan.”

He’d promised me that he wouldn’t let my territory suffer. When I spotted him, he was much closer than I thought, though still standing off to the side.

He was already looking at us with that ancient cooled-magma face. Then he lazily turned away from us. He made sure we saw it. Then he walked away.

“No…” Aeris half snarled and half whimpered.

The Primordial had lied.

I flew over to her and got so close she couldn’t see past me. “Go. Save everyone you can.”

“Come with me,” she demanded.

“Its skin isn’t difficult to pierce, and its mana isn’t that dense. You saw what I did to the Leviathan. This thing can’t hold me, and I can easily outrun it. Do what you can in case I fail, but there’s still a chance I can stop it. I have to try.”

Her lips curled into a grimace. “I should insist that I’m staying, but—”

“You know you can make a difference.”

Her jaw trembled in anger, then she shot over and kissed me.

I felt the swelling of her mana. Usually there was a freedom to her casting. A natural flow. But this channeling was violent. And then she was gone. Sonic boom after sonic boom thundered as if the air itself was unraveling. She had already shot past the flesh tower and would likely catch the others in seconds.

That meant there was only one thing left to do.

“If you get caught in a Scorching Sun, then I can’t save you,” the lich said through mind-speak.

It seemed he already suspected what I was going to try. “If Aeris gets into trouble, save her, Shamash. Please.”

“It’s as our contract decrees. Best of luck, Light Mage.”

The lich unraveled his hidden mana hydra heads, and he took off at a speed that might even give a Wind Wisp a run for her money. Maybe he’d been a max level hydra in his mortal life?

I turned to face the backside of the Colossal which was still many times larger than the growing meat-tower behind me. Since I was trapped between its two segments, it hadn’t come at me with the same aggression as before, but now that the others were fleeing, that was about to change.

I had no doubt we weren’t its only targets. Since it had put forth the effort to forcibly bust into the Dungeon Level, it would’ve sensed our retreating friends by now. Most of them were now over level 20,000. That was hundreds of millions of MP just waiting to be slurped up.

They weren’t that helpless. Maybe they’d gotten out in time. Perhaps they could even fight off a tendril of the monster if it didn’t commit much of its body to chasing them.

Flying back, I placed myself between both segments. There were maybe two miles between them. That didn’t give me much room to work with.

It had always been a long shot to think I would be able to succeed where the last thousand years of Chancellors from the Illuminated Cathedral had failed. They came to Grandmaster the hard way. They lived hundreds of years and understood light and Light Magic at a level I couldn’t even fathom. Not yet.

It wasn’t complete arrogance that had led me to try what I had. It was possible that my talent gave me an advantage when casting it, but that wasn’t to be. Not if I stuck to trying to create one as other Light Mages did.

There was no guarantee that Scorching Sun would harm me in my Astral Body. The heat of Laser didn’t, and it could reach extreme temperatures. Theoretically those as hot if not hotter than the sun.

So I’d do what only I could do. Artificial Sun bloomed outward, shrouding me inside it. Light Eater went to work, taking advantage of the situation without interfering with what I was doing. Then with a hand on either side of its core, I channeled mana into my fists. I started with just one finger, reaching out and touching the Artificial Sun’s condensed core.

***

The Primordial Cat sauntered over to a seemingly empty outcropping of rock well enough away from the hungry Colossal that he wouldn’t have to dirty himself but also close enough for him to watch. Out of the shrouded portal above stepped the young succubus queen who had first annoyed him as a girl. She wore a black-on-black dress that covered her from wrist to ankle.

Xaphan spun around and sat down on his haunches to watch. “The Colossal is your doing?” he asked through mind-speak.

“No,” she replied. “Though I left it alive.”

“You’ve always been a schemer.”

The woman chuckled. “Would you like to fight me to the death?”

He didn’t even bother looking at her. “When a fight to the death never ends, it’s just as boring as an endless nap. At least when sleeping I can dream about loss and victory.”

The girl landed right next to him and reached up with her hand. Dark Lightning dug into his haunch like claws and raked against him.

He purred as he leaned into the savage energy.

“Do you think he has it in him?” Lilith asked.

“Only you would waste the boy’s talents on a gamble,” he growled.

“Waste or challenge. The line between the two is fragile.”

“I agree it’s a waste,” a voice came from the open portal.

He ignored the cackle of high-level succubi watching from within. “If he dies then the Colossal is mine.” No one raised an objection.

Only the woman next to him had a reply. “What if the boy lives?”

At the thought, Xaphan plopped down and grunted. “I sense new trouble.”

“At least you’re not bored.”

Seeing that she’d stopped petting him until he acknowledged her, he leaned against her.

She laughed wholeheartedly.