Starbreaker: Volume 4 - Chapter 42

“One aspect of mana that remains outside of mortal reach is chaos. We often see eidolons manifest with it as their defining characteristic, but no mortal has ever been able to access it. We are creatures of reason, so magic that is inherently without reason is inevitably going to be anathema to our thought processes. As our thoughts are our magic, so is chaos magic outside of our reach.”

—Dark Mana, Gairfen Hosst

Dawn came, and with it the next wave of shikari. With Sylvas hovering them above the center of the compound, Malachai was able to dispatch them en masse after another successful gravity spike to draw them all together. They remained up there for a while, waiting to see if there were any stragglers or hidden attackers, but if there were, they’d succeeded in outwitting them, and the usual defenders would have to take up the battle. Sylvas didn’t have any other option.

Down on the ground by the outer wall, Sylvas could make out a ruckus with a familiar short figure in the midst of it. He could feel Malachai sighing as they approached. “What could she possibly have incited this time?”

Kaya was there in the heart of it as usual when there was trouble, but Rania was, too, which could only mean that the trouble was headed in Sylvas’ direction. She had also brought along the original archaeology team. Viv, Kegel, and Lass—do you remember anything for yourself?

The helmeted dwarf, Kegel, broke away from the argument to stride over to Sylvas. “We’ll be coming with you to the vault.”

Rania caught his eye, and that sly smile just slightly tugging at the corner of her lip distracted Sylvas just long enough for Malachai to speak first. “Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.”

“It will?” Sylvas cleared his throat at Malachai’s stink eye in response. “It will.”

Transporting all of them the distance on the skiff was out of the question. They would have to cross rough terrain and water to make it to the vault, but Sylvas had come prepared with a flight spell of his own. “Stick together up there, and don’t drop below the altitude I’m flying at unless it is an emergency. I don’t care how interesting something on the ground is; it isn’t worth getting into jumping range of the shikari we have to assume are out there.”

The formation between the ex-Ardent was tight, while the magic carrying the rest of their group left them a little more breathing space. This was, of course, by Sylvas’ design. The moment the wind started whipping by, he turned to Malachai. “Why exactly are we bringing along the archaeologists?”

“Several reasons. They will be of assistance in navigating to the vault. They may have means of bypassing obstacles that we cannot without brute force, and most pressingly, because they wanted to come with us.”

Kaya chortled. “Why does that matter?”

“Because unless I am mistaken, they are the only people on this planet who still possess a functioning spacecraft.”

Their flight stalled out for a fraction of a second as Sylvas took that in. “How do you know that?”

“They arrived prior to the Aion platforms activating and have made no attempt to escape that might have resulted in the destruction of their craft. It is possible that it was damaged by the shikari, but I do not believe it to be so. They spoke almost exclusively in terms of deactivating the planetary defenses with little interest given to slaying the shikari queen. This suggests that they have the means to depart when the battle is won, without fear of shikari reprisal. Ergo, it is in our best interests to be as friendly with them as possible so that we might ‘hitch a ride,’ as Kaya would say.”

“I would say that,” Kaya affirmed. “I’d probably have spent all night shmoozing them if I knew they had a way off this rock.”

“You don’t think we can beat the shikari queen?” Sylvas asked, already dreading the answer.

Malachai answered, “It would be advantageous if we did not have to.”

At the same time, Kaya slapped herself in the chest and declared, “Of course we can!”

The two looked at one another from either side of Sylvas, and he did his best not to sigh.

“A shikari queen is a formidable opponent, and we do not know how densely she has populated the ruins in which she has laired. More pressingly, you will not be able to exert your usual gravitational pull in battle without endangering those same ruins and potentially burying both us and whatever means we might find of deactivating the platforms. Ergo…”

Kaya was weighing his words with all seriousness, even if she might not have liked them. “Ergo, this might be a sneak-in and hit-the-button kind of job.”

“Indeed,” Malachai replied in a clipped tone. He did not like being interrupted.

Sylvas brought them down a little as they were passing over the lake ahead, enjoying the cool breeze rising off it. With the sunrise, the planet had become uncomfortably warm to him, though everyone else seemed to be enjoying it just fine. He supposed he was just accustomed to colder places.

They passed by the remains of the Folly as they flew, and Sylvas couldn’t help but feel a pang of loss at the sight of the beautiful ship reduced to ruins. If he had the opportunity, he would get it back in the sky again someday, but for now, he had to focus on the task at hand.

There was no sign of the task at hand ahead of them. He had expected to see some signs of the shikari gathered around wherever they were headed, some cleared land where they had set themselves up around the vault entrance, but there was no indication of anything on the spot that had been marked on his mental map. It was just another patch of forest surrounded by all the other patches of forest dotted across the vast flat continent, with nothing much to say about it. Sylvas had his suspicions that they were in the wrong place… until the bombardment started.

The shikari had no magic, nor weapons, but their bodies were all that they had ever needed to wage war, and now Sylvas and his formation were their target. At first, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing, thinking that some enemy mage must have taken the place and was casting at them, but as the great globules of venom soared through the air on an intercept course, he came to understand them for what they were.

He was not the first to work it out. The archeologists had more experience with the shikari than any of them, and they had started casting the moment that the strange green spheres rose up out of the forest. Their shields intercepted the venom, splashing it around them, and forcing Sylvas to draw the whole formation in tight to keep them protected.

“They can shoot now?” Kaya shouted over the splash and splatter.

“Always could.” Rania had her jacket drawn up around her face as if it would protect her from the particulates in the air. “You’ve just never fought them from a distance.”

“Who would have thought that they were more pleasant in close proximity.” Malachai’s attempt at humor fell a little flat when the next bombardment struck in the midst of it. The other mages grunted and cried out at the impact, but Sylvas just kept them going straight ahead. So long as the shield held, he had no reason to divert their course and risk getting them caught in the trail behind each glowing green snot-ball.

They began their descent at last, and with it, Sylvas began doing his best to not only avoid the shots coming at them but also avoid where the shots were coming from to begin with, keeping his eyes entirely on the marked location on the map. The shikari might not have had rational thought on their side, but they’d set up a solid defensive perimeter all the same, and it was now collapsing inward.

The canopy reared up to meet them, and the rapidly fracturing shields of the archaeologists were the only thing that let them crash through without injury. There was one brief moment of shade and green, and then they hit the ground running. Or at least Rania did. She immediately knew where she was and where she was going, and Kaya had to take off at a sprint to catch up to her and make sure somebody was around to keep her alive. Malachai and Sylvas turned back-to-back to face out at the forest surrounding them. It was already heaving with motion and life as the shikari closed in around them like a noose. “Everyone down!”

Kaya tackled Rania to the ground, and at the same time, the shell-shocked archaeologists seemed to understand what was being said and fell limp. From Malachai’s scythe, there leapt a vast arc of pure death mana. As it passed through the trees, they did not fall, but they did die. The bark shriveled and withered as it passed through, and the leaves atop the trees turned instantly brown. Sylvas’ own arc, his Gravity Arrow wrought large, was just as deadly but many times more destructive. The arc he unleashed cut through the trees, the shikari, and everything else. Just as he'd cleared a path for Hector back on the world where they’d trained, he sliced down an entire compass direction of forest to well beyond the horizon. The trees toppled after the bloody black blade had passed through, but that satisfied Sylvas considerably less than the shikari that he had bisected with his spell. One half of the woods was dead by his hand, the other half by Malachai’s, and if he was right, it would take the shikari beyond that quite some time to close with them.

Dragging herself free of Kaya, Rania went on running, shoulder-barging into a toppled log that was almost as wide as her and uncovering a piece of graven stonework beneath that was alight with the same sigils that they’d seen on the constructs in space. She slammed her hand down on it, twisting parts of the sigils out of position on moving plates, and realigning them. “Shield down.”

The Aion spellwork had been so good that Sylvas didn’t even know that there was a shield until it was dropped, then suddenly, his perception of the whole area changed. The ground beneath their feet that had seemed so solid just a moment ago was suddenly gone, and all of them dropped down several feet and landed on a steep incline leading down deeper into the dark. Rania had been dropped along with them, and now she scrambled over to the wall, hammering at the engravings there with her fingers as though she could drive flesh and bone through solid stone. Above them, the survivors of Malachai and Sylvas’ massacre were arriving, snarling and roaring as only shikari could, deep and low enough to make Sylvas feel it in his chest.

All around them on the slope was the miscellaneous detritus of the forest, everything that had fallen on top of the shield, obscuring this place from sight all this time. Sylvas would have expected the whole slope to be clotted with rotting vegetation, but it was really just what had come down with them, and whatever had arrived the last time the way had been opened. The shield sprang back to life before the shikari arrived, and even when they struck at it, spat poison at it, and raked it with their claws, it could not be moved.

“Don’t be tempted to stick your head up there now.” Rania chuckled. “You can get out, but you can’t get in when that shield’s up, and I’m not letting anything else in, so your head will be staying up there.”

The incline down into the ruins beneath didn’t look nearly as rundown as Sylvas had anticipated, but now that his gravity sense extended to the whole area instead of being filtered by the shield, he could feel that it was thriving with life. There was no direction they could turn once they began their descent that wouldn’t lead them to shikari. “Kaya, do you want to take point?”

“Oh no, you go ahead, I insist,” she chirped back, a smirk already forming on her face.

Sylvas sighed and strode down the slope. It was so steep that without his mastery of gravity, he suspected he might have slid all the way down. As it was, everyone else was having to balance themselves on the walls and each other. It would have been the perfect time for an ambush, but he could feel no sign of one impending.

“I wish Hector were here.” Sylvas sighed.

Rania chuckled from behind him. “Wish my mom were here.”

The dwarf in the helmet chuckled. “Fight a lot of shikari, your mom?”

“Wouldn’t have surprised me.”