Luke Chmilenko
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Starbreaker: Volume 2 - Chapter 39
🕑 Added 2025-02-03 17:00:03 +0000 UTC“Necromantic constructs differ from mana constructs in many ways, but their physicality is not one of them. All manner of golems and servitors are constructed in an identical fashion to those made of the dead. It is only the way that death affinity mana interacts with the existing systems of the body to instantly conduct itself that differs.”
—The Case For Death: An Affinity Maligned, Gren Stalt
Bael clapped his hands together as if there hadn’t just been a massacre before them. “The inner and outer rings are out of alignment, that is why our attempts at mapping have been skewed. You can reach two floors at once from the docking ring.”
“Soulstone network.” Sylvas was feeling a little numb after the fighting, as he always did when the adrenaline began to fade.
“We shall have to proceed further in to investigate, but at least we know that we have cleared out any of the local defenders.”
“Which means reinforcements are inbound.” He turned, “Gharia, in and out, feet don’t touch the ground.”
She nodded. Any doubts that she might have had about their relationship forgotten in the more pressing importance of the battlefield. She cast her flight spell and was off before Sylvas even had his map illusion up for them to try and make their next plan.
“Bael, block scrying.”
The elf pouted. “You know I have an absolute infinity of talents at my disposal, and you constantly use me for…”
Sylvas interrupted him. “Please.”
Bael rolled his eyes. “Well since you asked so nicely.”
“Cheers stanzbuhr.” Kaya almost interrupted his casting by slapping him on the back. “If I knew how to do it, I would. But I can’t. So you’ve gotta.”
“Could I get everyone else sweeping the room and keeping an eye on the doors. We’ve got four ways in, which means four ways trouble might come charging in to bite us.”
There were nods of acknowledgement, and Havran shimmered back out of sight as he set off to do one job or the other. Hopefully that wasn’t too mana intensive, otherwise he was wasting a very limited resource on a party trick.
The map sprung up, still hazy thanks to the weakness of Sylvas gravity sense. He should really have used the gravity spikes he’d cast as an opportunity to get a better picture, but in the heat of battle, it wasn’t exactly a top priority. He tapped at their secondary target where it hung limp in the air. “If the entrances to the inner rings are only at the compass points, then this is our best way in.”
“Counterpoint; everything ahead of us is in the outer ring is clear.” Ironeyes surprised them with his insight. “We could swing around fast, double back at the next entry, avoid whatever the necro has put in our way.”
“In addition, I would wager that the nearest soulstone nexus is somewhere around this area, if they were attempting to minimize the risk of invaders gaining access. That would make it on our way.”
“And there’s a good chance we’ll avoid whatever ambush Malachai has set up for us here.” Sylvas agreed. “Outer circle, it is.”
With the promise of a stretch of corridors without ambushing skeletons or ponderously slow doors, the squad seemed to be revitalized. They slipped into the usual formation, with Kaya, Gharia and Havran taking point, and then they headed out.
Everything was much the same as it had been with their progress so far, minus the tedious delays and brief bouts of terror. There were scattered remains from a few of the same ambushing mantis skeletons as they began making their way around towards the next pylon, but those soon gave away to a plethora of other bones. It seemed that Veltrian’s group had encountered the same sort of welcome as they had, but while Sylvas and his team had held their ground in the shuttle and cleared as much as they could, the fiend had taken a different approach. The chaos played out in reverse upon the floors and the walls. The tide of skeletal constructs pushed back and parted by a spearhead motion of mages. It had been effective, but costly. Sylvas counted three of her team laid about the place, and in one case splattered up the wall.
As they reached the end of easy street, facing the first locked door that they’d encountered since starting off around the outer ring this way, Sylvas couldn’t help but spare a glance into the docking bay. There was a burnt path from the bay doors to the entryway, spell-scarred steel was still clicking and cooling underfoot and the bay doors themselves had been knocked out of place by some invisible force. Probably the siren screech that Veltrain could unleash when she had no need to hold back. The shuttle was still there, still intact, it seemed that the special treatment of being blasted back out into the cold expanse of space had been reserved especially for them. What they did not find was another of Malachai’s mages. That was annoying. If he’d split his force up to intercept everyone on arrival, then there were good odds that their numbers would have been decently depleted. As it stood, there were still six of Malachai’s team unaccounted for. In the burnt mess of bodies they’d left behind at the last pylon it had been impossible to tell who was with which group, since the grunts shared the same uniforms. Not to mention that they’d been so badly burned by the lightning storm passing through that it had been difficult to even decipher what species a few of them were.
They slipped back into the same routine as before, with Luna operating the doors while everyone else stood in wait. Sylvas took a moment to prepare himself as best he could, his passive mana restoration was slower than it was planetside, and the sluggishness of his mana meant that the distances he was having to draw it over were even more of an impediment than they would have been for people with other affinities in the same situation. Still, he was pleased to see that he had nearly three quarters of his supply still available, even after two serious encounters and some skirmishing. If they’d been down on the planet, he probably would have been feeling pretty good about his current position, but everything up here was too different for him to manage any sort of confidence.
With a dull groan that made his teeth rattle, the door into the next section of the docking ring began to draw open, and immediately trouble came pouring through.
The skeletons couldn’t fit through the gap. They were ramming themselves against the slowly opening doors, cracking their skulls on the metalwork trying to get through with the same mindless aggression that they’d displayed up until now. Sylvas didn’t even have to think about it. “Gharia.”
With a lash of her tail that it was hard not to read as pleasure, Gharia stepped up to the door and began to cast. Sylvas hadn’t really watched her before, usually too busy with other things, but as she cast it wasn’t just a matter of hands and words the way that it was with the rest of them. There was a rhythmic quality to her words, and her body seemed to rock ever so slightly with each one. The bubbles began to pour forth, directionless and destructive. Where they met bone, explosions rang out. These were not the great catastrophic bubble spells that the najash had unleashed on the Eidolons that they’d faced together, but a steady stream of small ones, each bursting apart with enough force to shatter bone and rend flesh, but nowhere near sufficient to damage the metalwork of the door or perforate an Eidolon’s hide. It worked wonders. Even as the first rank of skeletons dissolved under the steady stream of her spells, more shoved their way in, trying to take their place, trying to press through the ever-widening gap. Met immediately with a rainbow of spell-bubbles and the kind of destruction that Sylvas wouldn’t have wished on his worst enemies.
But there was no forgetting that the door was opening, and the stream of annihilation that the najash girl unleashed would eventually be too narrow. Sylvas had to yell to be heard over the concussive rattle of spells and the clanking mechanisms of the door. “Just like on the shuttle!”
The doorway gave birth to a skeletal tide. They scrambled over one another, through one another, tangling their bones together in their desperation to kill. Kaya stepped in to start hacking away at them, but paused, there was time for someone to land a decent blow on this cluster before she started breaking it up and letting the amassed skeletons loose.
Sylvas levelled his staff at the door and cast Gravity Spike.
Once more, the narrowed focus of the spell helped it to punch through, warping the space and bones of every construct it passed through before sucking them all back into the next segment of corridor.
Kaya took her chance, dipping in through the open door and into the clearing amidst her foes. Alone it would have been suicidal. With everyone else backing her up, it was almost comical how swiftly the pack was thinned. She stood inside the door, Sylvas stood right beneath the center of its arch and between them, they fought back every skeleton that tried to get past while the rest of the squad unleashed hell on them from the rear rank.
It was so like their first fight on the station that Sylvas was surprised to find his mind wandering a little. He had to be quick and constant, he had to shift weight around his body to make each blow he struck a lethal, bone shattering blow, but there was no casting really required throughout much of the fight. He was just there to hold back the tide until everyone else did their thing. He let his senses stretch out, felt the presence of the skeletons, soft and honeycombed with pockets of air, even where they should have been solid. Then from his gravity sense, he moved on to second sight, to the simple enchantment at the heart of each skeleton, glowing a dull black-green and nestled in the empty ribcages of each one.
Given time and study of the Aion words of death, he was sure a counterspell could be made to such a thing, but it wouldn’t be by him. His mind had to remain on their task. Bael was the better equipped of the two of them to do the calculations required, so the plan remained the same. Keep him at a distance from the fighting so that he could observe and make those calculations.
Just as fast as the mad rush of skeletons had begun, it was over. They had held their ground, used the bottleneck of the door, and won out again.
Sylvas drew a steadying breath, then nodded to the others. “Press on.”
