Book 4: Chapter 56 |
If one good thing could be said about sacrificial attacks, its that if you were on the receiving end and survived, you didn’t have to prepare for a follow up. With the scale flying around and generally acting more like living creatures than remote weapons, it was easy for many of the soldiers in the two armies to assume that they were a swarm of some kind and act accordingly. Sadly whatever rules the scales played by, they didn’t follow any logic that anyone on Torotia could follow, and things continued to get even weirder as the battle continued.
Some of the scales were a one and done attack, they hit something, then fell to the ground and didn’t move anymore. Those led to several people falling into a false sense of security and getting killed by the scales that could attack more than once. The physical damage was bad, especially to the people who ignored a deflected or blocked scale and then got bisected by it flying into them less than a second later, but the reality warping effects started cascading against each other and swathes of the battlefield became… strange.
The outside laws of existence battled against the existing ones, and the scales would release bursts of un-reality, causing changes in their local area. Sometimes that meant the eldritch influence would grow and push out normal reality, sometimes the opposite occurred and the soldiers got a pocket of stability to shelter in. Occasionally, and most damaging, there would be a stalemate as the combative realities came to a standstill and in those moments among the buffer zones of existential battle where neither reality held total control a bubble of something new would be born. These moments of new laws of physics and magic didn’t last long, but even a few seconds of a new contestant battling it out for dominion over the universe appearing cause all kinds of problems. The brief moments of change caused more changes to occur as even more new existences appeared, sometimes overlapping with slightly earlier ones and the space beneath Kay became a kaleidoscope of colors, sensations, and feelings that danced across the battlefield like a constant artillery barrage of odd results.
Thankfully for the people Kay cared about, and by extension the ones he didn’t who happened to be nearby, the changes mostly affected time and space directly, so while many people were incredibly uncomfortable and a huge number of people vomited, no one was immediately killed and the vast majority of the warping effects on people ended when the twisted sections of reality changed back to normal. This didn’t save everyone, as large numbers of soldiers died from incoming attacks, space suddenly being different in their body than outside of it, and other mind bending effects that left pieces of bodies behind, or nothing at all, but it was better than one of those changes to existence appearing around them, killing everybody, and then everything was over.
The scales were also affected by what was going on, although it affected them less directly. Mostly their attacks were thrown off as their paths through the air became as discombobulated as those of the original ranged attacks against the massive eldritch leg.
A cacophony of screams, weapons crashing, and other abnormal and unwelcome sounds roiled around Kay’s ears. The ever changing flow of the clash between existences modified wavelengths and increased or decreased the speed of sound, making noises louder or softer and longer or shorter than they should have been. The sound of someone’s shield clashing with an incoming attack lasted a full minute as Kay trudged forward against an unceasing barrage of scales flying at him, while one individual’s scream repeated again and again at high speeds, sounding like a machine gun wailing in pain as it was fired.
As hard as he was concentrating on keeping a wall surrounding him to ward off any attacks it was difficult to safely float himself forward in his armor, so he took step after step through the air, keeping the soles of his boots aloft so it felt like he was walking on solid ground. The wall of blood in front of him had to be expanded into a sphere covering every direction as flocks of the scales flew over and around the wall, circling from behind and below as they tried to slam into him, cutting with their razor edges or warping reality to harm him. Infusing the blood with the anti-eldritch effects of Purify Blood helped combat the reality warping nature of the impacts, and the newly discovered natural vampiric resistance to eldritch corruption that the System had infused into him and other vampires might also have helped but he had no way to know for sure, but the attacks didn’t end and Kay had to constantly replace the blood he was using the shield himself as the modifications to existence made each layer of protection useless after enough impacts. Kay knew he couldn’t just bump into the leg and hope to damage it with the shell wrapped around him, so he started expanding his armor as he approached. Layer by layer he grew it out, until his armor was multiple feet thick and dozens of feet tall.
Without a way to see his way forward, Kay began letting off mist from his shell whenever he sacrificed another section that was compromised. The material around the compromised areas divided into droplets that floated through the air. From the ground Kay’s creation looked like a mono-colored blimp leaking red gas. The mist spread through the air and pushed in the direction Kay thought the leg was and Kay followed behind it, avoiding the areas of space where the mist started moving wildly or just stopped existing. Chasing behind the mist he waited until he was in striking range before lashing out. The defensive shell covering him exploded outward, blasting the nearby scales away and giving him room to maneuver. In one smooth motion, his expanded armor following his motions, he created a massive halberd and swung it out at the leg. The weapon passed through the air, large enough and moving fast enough to make a whoosing sound as it traveled. Right at the moment of impact… nothing happened.
Kay glanced down at the head of the weapon, which should have struck the eldritch limb, and found it missing. Reaching out for his sense, he found it sticking out of mid-air hundreds of feet below him and to the right. Striking again, he tried coming at it from a different direction, then again, and once more. Each time he tried to angle his attack so it never overlapped any of the areas the halberd had passed through before, and each time the front of the weapon vanished into the air and appeared somewhere else, still connected. Silently snarling, Kay released another burst of mist and sent it streaming toward the leg, looking for a path forward. His magical sense were almost instantly overwhelmed by the information as sections of the red mist began traveling all over, the connections through space so warped that Kay couldn’t keep track of any of it. The only thing he learned from the attempt before he was forced to let go of the blood just so he would be able to think was that he couldn’t see a path through.
Only seconds had passed, and the attacking flocks of scales regrouped and began throwing themselves at him again. He was forced to back off as they pushed him back, and he struggled to rebuild his defenses while keeping his expanded armor intact. A portion of the arm was bored through and had to be replaced, while the technically unnecessary head piece got blow off by the sheer force of half a dozen scales barreling into it at once. Lashing out in every direction, Kay managed to beat back enough attacks for him to retreat until the sheer number of scales bombarding him lessened to a manageable amount. Closing himself back into a shell of blood, as much to save him from having to look at the distressing sight of the leg and its scales as it was to protect him directly, and tried to think of what to do.
The first bullet hitting his protective covering, Kay ignored. Even while the armies fought off the onslaught of scales, there were still people trying to hit it with their longer ranged attacks, although Kay hadn’t noticed any having an effect. A large number of them had ended up flying Kay’s direction after they’d passed through spatial anomalies in the air, but all of them had ended up hitting one of the multitudes of scales constantly flying around Kay and trying to kill him. The second bullet he also ignored. The third one hitting the same spot had him turning around to look with a frown. When a fourth and fifth hit in close succession, he started flying back down toward the army.
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Finding the rough position of his people by detecting the armor of his Blood Guard, below, Kay let loose with another explosion by detonating his shell and looked down. Another bullet smacked into his expanded armor right where his head was under and he pivoted to follow the trajectory. Standing inside a circle of soldiers who were frantically fighting off the swarms of scales dive bombing everyone around was Cindy, who was waving frantically up at him. Quickly descending, Kay landed in an open spot next to her, shedding the mecha-like armor and using like a shield.
“What-“
Cindy grabbed his face and pulled him close to her, shouting over the discordant noises ringing out all around them. “There’s a way through!”
“What?”
“There’s a way to get through to it!” As she dragged his ear right next to her mouth and shouted again, Kay noticed Cindy’s eyes looked almost filmed over with white. “I can see a way through!”
“Where?”
“It’s constantly shifting, you won’t be able to just follow directions, you’ll have to take me with you!”
“That’s too dangerous!”
She shot him a completely incredulous look. “What do think’s going to happen if we don’t take risks right now?”
Taking a deep breath, Kay cursed the entire situation a few times before grabbing Cindy in his arms and throwing himself upward, wrapping the armor around both of them as they flew as fast as Kay could take them right at the leg.
They were pressed right up against each other in the tight confines, and Kay could feel her pressing up against him as she shouted directions. “Soft left and up a tiny bit! Now directly backward! Good, and… stop! This one is weird, do a barrel roll while going up and to the left, hard left!”
She squealed in delight as they flew, making rapid maneuvers through the air under her instructions. To Kay it felt like they were flying in completely random directions and making no progress, but right before she added a new set of directions to follow he noticed them blipping about the battlefield, appearing in one section than another at a fast pace.
“Keep going forward for- No! It changed, drop straight down! Quick!”
He let go of his control over the blood surrounding them and let gravity take over. He watched as a dense swarm of the scales raced through right where they had been, vibrating at high speeds and clashing with one another as they appeared out of nowhere and vanished again.
“This is going to get tight!” Cindy yelled, “It looks like the closer we actually get the more the defenses come after us. Stop falling! Now take a single step up a steep staircase!”
The areal dance over the battlefield became a chase as more scales joined in trying to knock them out of the sky. They came from all over, following different paths through the twisted passages through space that let them make high speed attack runs on the two Outworlders that were only narrowly avoided thanks to Cindy’s foresight. One more than one occasion Kay braced himself against an attack form another swarm, only for them to pass right over them as the strange and twisted mess that the two fighting realities created warped yet again. Once the leading edges of a gathered cluster of scales were less than an inch from Kay’s chest, and then they just vanished as they passed though an invisible opening in line with Kay’s body.
The inadvertent maze took them much longer to pass through than just flying directly at the leg, but when they arrived Kay could feel it. The air around them was filled with the uncomfortable taint of an antithetical reality. Like before Kay could the difference between this corruption and what he’d experienced before this, but the sheet overwhelming power of it made any differences trivial. This was a reality that would kill everyone he cared about as inexorably as a tyrant’s army trampling over them, and with less mercy. This wasn’t a malicious force that wanted them dead, this was a reality that didn’t have the rules of existence that could keep them alive, and it didn’t care. Only Kay’s armor reinforced against eldritch taint kept the two of them from instantly dying.
“Why is it all the way over there?” Kay demanded, pointing at where he could see the leg, hundreds of feet distant.
“That’s where it is to our eyes, this is where it is for hitting it!” Cindy shouted back, “It’s an eldritch abomination from a realm beyond with rules attached that we can’t understand! Deal with the weird and hit it!” Still surrounded by Kay’s armor she pointed in a direction ahead of them. “There, swing!”
Kay stabbed forward, and this time he could feel an impact as his weapon struck the otherworldly limb. Faintly in the distance he could see a section of the scales covering the leg crack, and he swung again. He managed to get three more attacks before the fifth swing went through empty air.
“It changed again, three steps to the left the half a step up!”
Continuing to follow Cindy’s instructions, he lashed out again and again, only getting in a few attacks before space warped and he was off again, finding the next section of the sky that would let his weapon reach the enemy. Blows landed again and again and larger numbers of cracks in the scales across a wide portion of the leg began to show as Kay tried to pierce the defenses bit by bit. After hundreds of attacks and dozens of moves to new locations though, Kay started to worry.
“We’re not making a lot of headway here, can you get me to a spot to attack through before it pops up so I have time to make a big attack?”
Cindy’s eyes darted about, the whiteness covering them growing deeper as she looked into the close future. “I- yes! Straight up the diagonally down and to the left, like a water slide!”
Kay began gathering blood as he flew, once again creating a sharp outer covering filled with explosive penetrators. Dodging, blocking, and occasionally taking a multitude of attacks from every direction by an endless flood of the flying scales, Kay darted through the contested airspace at Cindy’s command. After multiple warps through space as they ran into anomalies, they ended up in the sky above the crack in reality, looking down at the leg from another, unacceptable world. Kay fought the urge to vomit as he took in the limb and the space it extruded out of simultaneously.
“Shoot it straight up from here, but just the smallest fraction forward.” She directed him as he aimed his attack, ‘Bit more. Less than a piece of spaghetti’s thickness more… good, there! Ready? Three, two, one, now!”
Kay let loose with the prepared strike, compressed blood shooting out at incredible speed and slicing into the leg, cutting through the protective scales and deep into whatever approximation of flesh was below. Magenta and neon green gas erupted from the wound like a punctured propane tank. The penetrators lashed out behind the initial wave of destruction, unleashing a wave of destructive explosions as the magically compressed blood suddenly lost all containment and blew outward. Scales were launched in every direction, spinning through the air with the light bouncing off them in headache inducing refractions that boggled the mind. The leg shifted for the first time since before they’s attacked, pulling up and taking half a step back before stopping in mid-air.
“Great!” Kay shouted with a fierce grin. “A few more of those and-“
Tendrils made of scales, all connected in a direction Kay couldn’t see with a soft and mushy looking metallic fiber, burst from the wound Kay had made and lashed out in his direction. They wrapped around his armor and pulled him in, yanking him toward the opening in the limb’s flesh. He and Cindy passed through the twisted space Kay had attacked through and were instantly against the eldritch monstrosity. They slammed into the edge of the wound and continued forward as the unbreakable grip of the tendrils pulled them deeper in.
At the last second before they passed through the gash in the creature and inside of it, Kay sealed Cindy in a hardened casing of blood and launched her like a missile away form him through a gap in the tendrils wrapping. He saw her fly outward away from the limb, vanishing through yet another piece of modified space, before the tendrils dragged him inside of the leg.
That was when everything got fucking weird.