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403. Drop
🕑 Added 2025-05-25 14:00:09 +0000 UTCIke and Brightbriar fell. As they fell, they exchanged blows. Ike swung the Hungry Sword, and Brightbriar countered with his own, the two of them clashing at high speed. Sparks flew, and the clattering of metal filled the air. The tower streaked by. Puppet arms jabbed through the wall as they dropped, trying to attack Ike or rescue Brightbriar, but Ike dodged, hammered at Brightbriar, and slashed arms away.
Down below, Wisp and Mag appeared, flapping out from a hole in the wall. Wisp stared. “Ike! Coming to meet us?”
“A little help?” Ike asked, still fighting Brightbriar.
“I can’t take any more weight!” Mag complained.
“Sure you can.” Wisp fired a strand of spider thread at Ike.
Brightbriar saw it coming and slashed, sending a wave of sword energy through the air. It struck Wisp’s thread and cut through it. The white thread severed and danced in the air, falling down emptily.
“Or maybe not,” Wisp said, looking at her escaping thread. She pointed at the tower instead and zipped to it, leaving Mag to fly alone. “Go get ‘im, bird boy!”
“Shut up! You don’t tell me what to do!” Mag escaped from under Wisp and zoomed toward Ike.
Wisp scampered up the wall, dodging the puppet arms that punched through stone to reach for her. Between a natural-born wall-climber and puppets blindly punching through stone, Wisp had the obvious advantage. She ran circles around them, sometimes literally, dancing left and right as she chased up toward Ike.
At the same time, Mag winged upward. The two exchanged a glance and hurtled upward even faster, racing against one another to be the first to reach Ike.
Ike rolled his eyes, but he smiled at the same time. He struck Brightbriar even harder than before, putting some distance between the two of them. He reached out, one hand to Mag and one hand to Wisp.
Wisp leaped off the wall and caught his hand. Mag swooped in, catching his hadn from the other side. They both clasped on at almost the same moment, and both Ike and Wisp’s weight fell onto Mag and his wings. Mag drooped in the air, all but falling out of the sky. He beat his wings harder than ever before. Brightbriar still fell faster, but it was a close thing. “So heavy!”
“Oh, quit whining.” Wisp whirled her wrist, calling forth a spider’s thread, and stuck it onto the Tower. The three of them swung toward it, and Mag let go, letting Wisp and Ike swing toward the wall alone. Ike grabbed Wisp and spun, turning so that he’d hit the wall. He activated Storm Clad, Lightning Dash, and his steel feet technique, and struck legs-first, bouncing off the wall.
“Come on. I’m not like that weak bird. I can take our weight,” Wisp complained. She reversed the grapple and gripped Ike in one arm, using the other three limbs to stick to the wall on the bounce.
“I was worried about you taking the hit,” Ike said. He sat up in her hold, climbing up a little so he could swing his sword over her shoulder without hitting her head.
“I’m not weak, like you think human women are.”
“Nah, I was worried your carapace would bust open. You’ve got a hard exoskeleton, right? If it goes, all the bug juice leaks out. Can’t have that.”
Wisp looked at him, then laughed. “You’re ridiculous.”
Ike grinned back. Really, he’d just been confident he could take the hit with no damage, since he had several body reinforcement arts, and Wisp, while he was pretty sure wouldn’t take damage, would only be relying on the natural toughness of her body. Comparing the two, it was obvious that he was the one who should soak the blow.
Hands punched through the stone, reaching for them. Wisp scampered along, carrying Ike with no visible effort, the same as Ike could carry her without effort. Below, Brightbriar, no longer fighting Ike, reached into his storage ring and drew out a set of crossed boards that Ike, after a moment, recognized as a puppet’s control sticks. Power emanated from the boards, and he flew up toward them.
“Get ready. He’s coming,” Ike warned Wisp.
“I’m so ready,” Wisp replied.
Brightbriar whirled his sword. He lashed out, and the projection of a giant, featureless wooden puppet appeared, reaching up toward them. It almost appeared like an artist’s figure, with blank wooden segments and barely-carved nubs for hands, with flat slabs of wood for feet.
Ike still had the King’s scepter; the thing was an energy projection, not an object, and when he needed to use his hand, it automatically reappeared on his back, ready to be drawn. He called it forth now and drew in mana powerfully, sucking it out of their surroundings. Lifting his other hand, he launched a tornado toward the puppet projection. The two clashed, and the puppet battered the tornado down, but not before taking serious damage. Scratches appeared on its arm, and its structure trembled.
Ike snorted. He drew in more power, pouring it into tornado after tornado. His body automatically converted mana into aether as he called it through him—something he realized now was likely possible, even easy, because of his past as a fragment of the Pillar of the World, through whom all energy had once flowed—and as a result, the tornadoes, formed of aether, were more powerful and wild than they would be from using mana. They repeatedly slammed into the giant puppet, beating the projection from all sides until it wavered and fell apart.
Brightbriar burst through the disintegrating puppet projection and gripped Ike by the neck. Wisp whipped around and bit him on the wrist, then fell back, grimacing in pain as her fangs bounced off his puppet body.
“You aren’t him. I need to start over,” Brightbriar said, almost in a trance. He tightened his grip on Ike’s neck, his eyes wide and empty, seeing nothing, knowing nothing.
