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Arcane Apocalypse ~ 51
🕑 Added 2024-10-21 16:00:19 +0000 UTC***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mS0pOV2dbqTkHvWurnsdmmdexLnusB9I0LWnEL_IcEg/edit?usp=sharing
*****
[{Newcomer} Introductory (12)]
Objective:
Enter a Rift / Dungeon and kill a number of monsters inside! ( 0 / 50)
Reward: A System generated defensive artifact (Amulet of Lesser Warding).
***
Mia glanced away from the System window, dismissing it with a flicker of thought as she instead focused on the present. She could think about how to fulfill that quest once she was done here.
Her grip tightened on her wand, her thumb playing with the ivory grip a bit as she flicked it to the side. She had aimed upwards, and as the spell circle for the homing barrage variant of her Arcane Bolt flashed into being, she grinned.
Mana flowed out of the pretty pink gem at the base of the wand — a rose quartz by the looks of it, but it might have been some other magical gem that just looked similar — and then the spell activated fully. A dozen pebble sized globules of arcane power burst out as if from the barrel of a shotgun, then they all arced, homing in on a rat nearby.
With targets aplenty, each little bolt found a monster of its own to mutilate. Most didn’t kill outright, but as most hit the torso of the monsters — since that was where their mana was the thickest, inside their cores — they gained broken ribs, spines, crushed lungs and when Mia got lucky, mangled hearts.
Wands were, as it turned out, pretty useful. Mia’s didn’t enhance her spells, nor did it make casting them any easier, quite the opposite. The ivory body of the wand and whatever its core was made out of was much harder to move and control mana through than her own channels, though nowhere near as hard as through air.
What it did instead was that it let her store about two Blasts’ worth of mana in the gem embedded into its grip and allowed her to cast a few cheaper spells with that ‘pre-loaded’ mana.
That meant if Mia had a spell circle ready in her runic-model, all she had to do was to activate the spell. No need to channel mana and such.
The wand would also take the fall for any mess up. If she lost control of mana, it would rampage through the wand and not her channels and if she utterly fucked up a spell, the backlash would strike the wand and not her.
It wouldn’t last long if she continuously messed up spells, but it could save her life one or two times. Mia wasn’t too keen on testing that though, as it would leave her with a broken, useless wand at best and half of it lodged into her palm after it exploded in her grasp at worst.
Carmilla looked at her gory display with a hint of fascination, her eyes flickering back to the simple white wand.
“Get one of your own, this is mine,” Mia said teasingly, rolling the focus between her fingers like she’d learned to do with pens back in highschool. “You shouldn’t have let me take the kill for that Ratling if you wanted to complete your own quest this much.”
“I have it completed,” Carmilla said, sounding unbothered by Mia’s jest. The girl was only curious. “But I got this instead of the wand so I was kinda curious.”
Mia glanced at the hand Carmilla held out, at the glove worn on it to be exact. It was a simple thin black leather glove with a nail-sized ruby woven into it on the back of the hand.
“I didn’t see that on you before?” Mia tilted her head, unashamedly grabbing Carmilla’s wrist. She turned the vampire’s hand this way and that to observe the glove from all sides. It was tasteful, elegant, with an edge of promised death in its colouring. “It fits you perfectly by the way, it’s pretty … fits you like a glove.”
Carmilla blessedly snorted at the godawful joke, her mouth curving in amusement as Mia let her hand go with a curious glint still lingering in her eyes. Were gloves another type of focus? She’d only heard about wands, rods, staves and staffs before and she’d been busy devouring as many of her System-given books as she could.
“I never really asked, but-” Mia started, halting for a moment to think what she was going to ask through. For some inexplicable reason, Mia felt asking other people what their System stuff were — like stats, quests and such, — was rude. She did it with Mark of course, as with her mother too, but they were family. She didn’t ask any of the others yet about anything relating to their Classes, Affinities or Attributes. Stop being silly. “What Quest are you on?”
“The same as you,” Carmilla said nonchalantly, tilting her head curiously at Mia’s startled look. “What?”
“I just-” Mia stuttered, biting her tongue midway through. “I thought that sort of thing was private. Or something, so-”
“Mia, I shared much more private pieces of information with you than quests.” Carmilla said, looking at Mia like she had one too many screws loose.
“Like?” Mia couldn’t help but ask.
“Bloodline memories for one,” Carmilla said. “And just about everything else about my life. You know, I don’t just go up to random people and start telling them my life story.”
“Oh.” Mia averted her gaze, scratching her slightly flushed cheeks. “Okay! So! Rifts, how are we getting into one?”
“ … we have to find one first,” Carmilla said after a few moments of staring, conveying her opinion of the grace with which Mia changed the topic.
“Right,” Mia said, then flicked out with her wand again as a thicker group of rats rushed at them, some of which managed to get past her dutiful Familiar. She had had to re-summon it, since the previous one sadly expired moments after the Ratling — which is apparently what the System calls the humanoid rat monster — did.
The new one was doing an admirable job of slaughtering any rats dumb enough to approach the two girls strolling down the street. They were patrolling, by the way, with the group having split up to clear out as many of the remaining monsters as they could in the neighborhood.
Thankfully, Mia hadn’t felt another Ratling so far, so their job was easy. Mainly, shooting the few rats that got by the Familiar.
“Didn’t you mention it before that you can feel the monster’s … energies in the air near Rifts?” Carmilla asked, having gained an uncertain look around the middle part.
Mia understood it, she still wasn’t quite sure what to call the wrongness monsters exuded. Was it the broken mana they had? Their decaying souls? Or some kind of miasma unique to monsters?
“Yeah,” Mia said, gaining a thoughtful look. “Yeah. That could work, I sort of forgot about that. Though it’ll take a while to actually track down where a Rift is … and then even longer to get there, with the main part of the army battling monsters around there. Would they even let us in?”
“We don’t really need to ask,” Carmilla said. “We could just sneak in, or walk in. The soldiers standing guard would hardly be a challenge to disp-, disable.”
“We should talk this through with the others,” Mia said, squinting at the vampire who suddenly found a rat corpse extremely fascinating.
There would be no soldier murdering done anywhere Mia could see, that’s for sure. And if a certain vampire acted out, she would have to live off of rat blood for a while after. Not that Mia thought Carmilla would actually kill anyone without there being a really, really good reason for it.
The redhead could be callous at times, but not cruel. Maybe a bit too apathetic to anyone not, well, Mia, but that was understandable too with the childhood she had. Mia just hoped the girl would grow to care for more people.
Mia halted in her steps, tilting her head like a hound trying to get a better grasp of where a sound was coming from. It was barely a whisper on the wind, almost overshadowed just by the line of trees’ leaves rustling under the soft caress of a breeze.
Mentally locating herself in the district, Mia realised the two of them were close to the edge leading back towards Graz proper. There was … a heated argument in the distance, if her ears weren’t playing tricks on her and those barely audible shouts were real.
“You hear that?” Mia asked, glancing at Carmilla who’d turned to stare at her curiously, the vampire having grown used to Mia zoning out whenever she heard an interesting sound or felt something peculiar through her Spirit Sense.
“Hear wha-” Carmilla blinked, facing the same direction Mia was and gave a slow nod. “Yeah. Arguing. What of it?”
So she just ignored it, or subconsciously put it into the ‘I don’t care’ folder of her mind.
“Let’s check out what’s going on.” Mia decided, setting off at a brisk pace. Carmilla followed without hesitation, though she wore a somewhat uncertain look on her face and kept glancing at Mia. “What is it?”
“I mean, so, you remember how there was this Eisen-something guy, right? The one Brent talked about?” Carmilla asked, and at Mia’s nod continued. “Well, I know Zeigler has been trying pretty hard to keep him from knowing about any ‘mutant’ civilians with above average power.”
So that’s what she learned snooping around at night? Mia mused inside, though she still wasn’t getting what Carmilla was getting at. “Yes, and? We aren’t going anywhere close to him just yet.”
“But we are,” Carmilla said, glancing forward where beyond a bend a high barricade with soldiers standing guard on either sides of it rose from the ground. It was made out of just about anything from wrecked cars to furniture, but what caught Mia’s eyes was the soldiers on the other side of it pointing rifles at a sizable group of haggard looking people. “Those are his men, not Zeigler’s. If we kick up a fuss here, the General will hear of it and I don’t know whether Zeigler will be able to, or even willing to try deflecting the man’s wrath.”
Mia bit her lips, stopping at the corner and slipping back behind it only to poke her head out. She took in the two groups, the few soldiers on this side of the barricade armed with aged-looking rifles and the rest of the soldiers with much more modern stuff standing atop the barricade and on the other side of it.
The ragtag group though, were the very embodiment of the word ‘refugee’. Mothers holding children, smaller kids dressed in dirty clothes and a whole lot of young women of around Mia’s age and younger. Mia spied animal bits, pointed ears and other oddities on most of them, strangely enough.
A lot of them just stared up at the barricade with forlorn looks with only a few glaring hatefully at the guards. Which was also what likely got that many guns pointed at them.
This little strip of land where the barricade ran was where a road ran from the river Mur up to the foot of the now overgrown hill with the plant-monsters in them. There were only at most four intersections on the road, one each at the foot of the hill and the bank of the river with the other two at around equal distances.
All along, down the middle of that road was the barricade, and now that Mia paid more attention, she caught even a tank or two parked just at the one intersection she could see from her spot.
“Why would they build a wall here?” Mia wondered aloud, her look of confusion quickly morphing into a scowl as one soldier used the butt of his rifle to knock away one of the hysterical refugees. “There are people still on the other side, aren’t they here to protect them? Why would they lock them out?”
“Andritz is their backwards base,” Carmilla said, and it took an embarrassing few seconds for Mia to realise ‘Andritz’ was the name of the district her mother’s house was located in. “This is where they store most of their provisions, and this is the way they’d go through if they had to retreat and abandon the city. They need to keep it clean and safe, empty of monsters.”
“And the citizens just got locked in together with the monsters and the army?” Mia asked, raising a dubious eyebrow. That made little sense, what would pain those damned soldiers so about just letting some refugees through then? All they wanted to keep back with the barricade were monsters after all, right? “What’s the use in not letting them through? I don’t get it.”
“Me neither,” Carmilla said, her voice inching closer and closer to her ‘vampire’ voice the longer she listened in on the argument Mia still couldn’t make out. “Sometimes, people are just cruel for the sake of being cruel. Or they just don’t care, or even find it funny to be mean to someone in need.”
“What are they talking about?” Mia asked, she was still hundreds of metres away from the barricade itself. It was hardly surprising she had a hard time hearing them, even with her magically pointy ears.
“The panel building the refugees lived in has been overran with goblins,” Carmilla said, apparently easily able to listen in. “The army had every survivor moved out of the building, then they demolished the whole thing with hundreds of goblins still inside. These people now have nowhere to go as a result.”
“And why aren’t they let through?” Mia reiterated her question for what felt like the thousandth time, irritation bubbling over into the beginnings of anger in her heart.
“General’s orders,” Carmilla said, her voice quickly turning glacial. Maybe she wasn’t quite as apathetic towards the fate of strangers as Mia’d thought after all. “‘Not a soul is to be let through the barricade who isn’t military personnel.’ he says.”
Mia took a few moments to understand what Carmilla had said, for it to really sink in. They weren’t being let through because some nepotistic half-wit moron who bought his General title — if Brent’s tipsy murmurings are to be believed — said so?
With a great measure of difficulty, Mia calmed herself and attempted to put herself into the General’s shoes. She asked herself the question ‘Why?’, why would she, if she was the general, order such a thing? What was the point?
No overconfident civvies high on their new magical power trip wandering in and ending up gutted by goblins for one. Mia thought, but that wasn’t quite right. If that was the reason, a one-way ban would have been enough and the soldiers should have been more than happy to let refugees out of the combat zone. So he’s probably not just worried about their safety.
What else is there? Infiltration? Are there shapeshifting monsters? Mia thought, likely because one of the last novels she’d read had a plot based on evil aliens masquerading as humans. The werewolf? No. The barricade should be around the hill if the general is worried about his ‘pack’.
Ever so briefly, Mia even considered the possibility of a zombie virus. A total quarantine of parts of the city would make sense then. It was honestly the most likely answer in her mind, though she knew how stupid it sounded.
When she shared it with Carmilla though, the girl had a pretty convincing counterargument.
“Or he’s just an asshole,” Carmilla said, looking at Mia’s rapidly reddening cheeks incredulously. “A dumb or sadistic asshole. Possibly both at once. Why is he locking people in? Because he doesn’t care and he has the power to do so.”
“I like my idea better,” Mia mumbled, pouting slightly as she twirled a lock of pink hair around a finger. She really did too, it would mean the leader of the armed forces in Graz wasn’t an evil cunt, and was just doing his best to save as many citizens as possible from a virus.
“Isn’t that … “ Carmilla mumbled, a confused frown coming over her features. She sniffed the air, once softly and then loudly. They were upwind from the barricade though, so it was of little use. “Isn’t that girl familiar?”
“Which girl?” Mia asked, turning to follow where Carmilla’s finger was pointing. With them being hundreds of metres away, it was of little use, but as Mia squinted at the haggard group, she caught sight of a familiar burgundy jacket and a mane of dirty blonde hair. “Avery?”
Mia squinted harder, but they were too far away so she remained uncertain about her conclusion. Three hundred thousand people once lived in Graz, surely there were at least a few girls with the same hair-colour and jacket, right?
“Let’s get closer,” Mia said, but didn’t actually get moving until she received a small nod from the vampiress. The small apartment block they’d been sheltering behind came to an end only a dozen metres down the street and to the right, rows upon rows of suburban allotment gardens stretched from the road they stood on down to the banks of the Mur two hundred meters away.
Cute little apple trees and what not stood here and there, with larger fig trees, and towering walnut trees lending shadow to small plots of land separated only by coloured ropes stretching between trees.
Mia slipped under one such rope, shamelessly entering one little allotment that only had five small rows of tomatoes in it. The foliage wasn’t what anyone would call thick, but it was more than enough to hide the movement of the two girls as they stealthily crept closer to the barricade.
Thankfully, there was barely anyone out gardening, so they stayed unnoticed. If there was one thing that would catch even a prowling vampire, it was some granny bored out of her mind, looking around from her perch atop a gardening chair. Mia and Gabe had been busted more than once by a granny from somewhere thinking ‘these brats shouldn’t be out at this hour’ before dialing up their mother.
The closer they came to the barricade, the clearer the voices became. So far, all Mia’d heard was the growing panic and borderline hysteria in the shouting refugees and the apathetic, almost disdainful voices of the soldiers in response.
Now though, she could make out the words they spoke too and what she heard made her blood boil.
“Please, we don’t have anywhere else to go and the monsters are closing in!”
“That is not our concern,” the apathetic soldier answered, sounding more bored than anything. “We have our orders. I’ll say this one last time: Disperse, or we will be forced to make you. This is a military installation. Your presence here is not permitted. Leave.”
Mia hid behind a shed standing in the last allotment before the intersection. From this close, her Spirit Sense could reach the people on the other side of the barricade. She hadn’t managed to identify anyone only based on how they felt in her perception, the best she could tell was a vague subconscious familiarity she felt in the mana of people she knew.
In that group, she felt a presence like that, one she was vaguely familiar with. A moment later, when she felt that smouldering fire mana spike and overflow from the mage, she was certain. It was Avery, and she didn’t seem like she was planning on taking ‘No’ for an answer.
Comments
Fi
TFTC ❤️
Stephanie Washburn
Well that's an explosive situation
