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404. Not This Time
🕑 Added 2025-05-27 00:50:58 +0000 UTCIke sent the Hungry Sword into his storage ring and grabbed Brightbriar’s hand with both of his. Using all his strength, his aether, his Storm Clad and metal hands, he pried Brightbriar’s hands open. When he had enough room to breathe, he glared at Brightbriar.
“I’m not the greater being, but I’ll never be. It’s not possible, and not only that, you’re blind to him. You will never be satisfied.”
Brightbriar roared. His hands grew stronger, clenching shut again, but Ike ducked, letting them snap shut over his head. He struck out instead, headbutting Brightbriar in the solar plexus. Brightbriar barely moved, but that didn’t matter. Ike called forth the Hungry Sword again and smashed Brightbriar, while Wisp turned around and spat acid at his body, and Mag hammered him with ranged magic from a distance. His puppet body shuddered under the onslaught, unable to handle it. His blank eyes went fully blank, and he shattered to pieces.
“Is that it? Did we do it?” Wisp asked.
Ike shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was just a puppet, after all.”
“Do you think there’s a ‘real’ Brightbriar anymore?”
Ike grimaced. It was a legitimate question. Did Brightbriar exist as a human anywhere? Had he, since the betrayal? Or was he simply a puppet, now and forever, for as long as the System had existed? Was being reduced to a puppet part of his punishment, or had it always been his path, his route as a mage to greater power, that then obsessing over recreating the greater being had pushed him even further into this depravity? After all, the greater being would need a body, and Brightbriar’s children, too, the fragments of the greater being, needed physical forms after they lost their lives. Puppet creation was so deeply tied to his goals from all directions that Ike couldn’t tell, anymore, whether puppets were Brightbriar’s hammer, and all these problems became his nails, or if he’d searched far and wide to find a solution to his problems, and come up with puppets. It could be either way. He was sure there were solutions to this problem that weren’t puppets, but puppets were such a good solution that he couldn’t be sure that Brightbriar hadn’t started from this problemset and come up with puppets.
At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. Whether he had started from puppets or ended up at puppets, it all ended the same way. “We’ll kill him ‘til he stops coming back, and that’ll be that,” he said, crossing his arms.
“Yeah! Kill him ‘til he’s dead!” Wisp cheered.
Underneath them, the tower’s wall trembled, the stones flaking off, rubble falling onto the houses below. The arms reaching out all retracted, the holes empty in the darkness. Ike and Wisp exchanged a look.
“I don’t like that,” Ike muttered.
“Hey, Mag!” Wisp shouted. She leaped off the wall and reached out toward him, shooting a web toward his bird legs. He clawed down, catching the thread out of the air.
As Ike and Wisp swung away from the wall, the tower exploded outward. Chunks of stone flew past them. A huge block of rock hurtled toward Ike and Wisp, expelled by the force of the tower falling. Ike drew and swung the Hungry Sword. The sword activated and chomped down on the stone, biting it to dust.
Wisp clambered up the thread, carrying Ike, and clung to Mag’s claws, turning her head to slurp up the excess thread. She turned, staring at the ruined tower. “Holy shit.”
“Huh?” Ike lifted his head, then stared. “Uh oh.”
A mass of puppets swarmed out of the shattered tower, all of them clambering over one another like a kingdom of ants escaping heavy rain. The nebulous mass formed into a human form, creating arms, legs, a lumpy head. The vague features of Brightbriar’s face materialized on the figure’s face.
“I think we found him,” Ike commented.
“It does look like it,” Wisp agreed, nodding.
Mag huffed, beating his wings hard. “So… heavy…”
“Hang in there, Mag,” Ike deadpanned. He and Wisp were both fighters, melee battlers who used their strength every day, so their weight was nothing to one another, but Mag was a ranged spellcaster. He could fire off huge spells at a long distance, but his strength suffered as a result, due to him not focusing on increasing them. At the end of the day, it meant that Ike and Wisp could carry one another with no real physical effort, while Mag had a hard time carrying either of them, let alone both of them.
The puppet-formed Brightbriar let out a horrible roar, formed of a thousand puppet voices calling out all at once. He swung a huge puppet arm upward, swiping at them with fingers formed of puppets.
“Ooh, I like this,” Wisp said, her eyes shining. She released Mag and dropped toward the giant puppet-person, transforming into a giant spider as she dropped.
Ike grabbed Mag’s claws before he fell, without Wisp holding on anymore, and watched the giant spider scurry over the giant puppet body below. The spider bit and tore, pulling puppets of the body and tossing them free, where they shattered far below on the streets. Just like a real person reaching for a real spider, the puppet reached over its shoulders to slap it, distracted.
Ike chuckled. He transferred his hold on Mag’s claws to one hand and whirled the scepter, calling the storms in the sky and the aether all around to him. He activated the Prince’s skill and Storm Clad at the same time, but held onto them, pouring mana into them without releasing the spells. The sky darkened, crackling with lightning as a wild wind sprang up, whooshing around the puppet monster. Within him, the Prince and the King worked in concert, sharing their understandings of their skills to strengthen the spell Ike cast. Rosamund and Accais watched silently, which shocked Ike, while the infants dogpiled Llewyn, preventing him from fighting back or sabotaging Ike’s focus.
Then again, Accais was abandoned by Brightbriar, and Rosamund had her faith in him shattered. It wasn’t too surprising that they wouldn’t want to fight hard for Brightbriar, when they had first been thrown aside by him. He wasn’t ready to let down his guard toward the two of them, but it seemed he didn’t have to treat them as automatic enemies, either.
The puppet-monster looked up, at last realizing that the storm was forming around it. It abandoned the spider, leaving Wisp to tear puppets off its back freely, and reached toward Ike and Mag instead. Puppet fingers slapped toward them, the puppets themselves reaching out as far as they could to grab the two of them out of the sky.
“Mag!” Ike shouted.
“You’re so heavy,” Mag whined. Nonetheless, he beat his wings harder, soaring away from the onrushing hand. The massive hand hurtled toward them, growing closer with every passing moment.
