Stormblade 4 C21: Burning (2)
21 - Burning (2)
Ellen was on her last legs.
Her skin was blistered from the unholy combination of radiation and scalding steam—she’d stopped even trying to mitigate the pain with her Stamina. It just hurt too much, no matter what she did, and trying only made her freeze up even more. Even with Pepperoni circling high above, her Mana was bottomed out, and every time it hit enough for another Shadow Shapes, the spell ate every last drop in an attempt to rip swarms of monsters off her shattered piece of wall. Her leg was shattered; she couldn’t stand on it, and she didn’t have the Stamina for that wound, either.
But she was alive. And she didn’t want to die. Not yet. She had too much to live for. It had only been a few weeks since she’d truly become her own, independent person, without Bob’s influence.
A Silkstormer started its way up, along with two Centurions and a handful of the B-Rank monsters she’d been massacring an hour ago—before her resources had bottomed out. She checked her Mana. Not enough. This was the wave that’d kill her—unless…There was a man standing on the wall, several hundred yards away. If she could see his shadow, maybe she could Shadestutter across the gap to safety.
No. The mist was too thick; it made every shadow in the city weak and diffused, and that made them hard to see—or to use. She couldn’t make the jump.
Her Mana ticked up.
It ticked up faster and faster, and Ellen grinned. Her teeth were bloody, and when she spat off the edge of her rock, it came out pink. But she didn’t care. The flood of Mana pouring into her core could only mean one thing.
She cast Shadow Shapes when the monsters were halfway up. Tendrils of darkness grabbed the brass automatons and threw them into the rubble far below—and when they landed, they weren’t alone. A screeching sound echoed from above. A blast of concentrated sunlight ripped across the crushed, battered machines, and a single sunlit wing and one made from clouds whipped past her.
Ellen’s skin burned. Her throat screamed. But she couldn’t stop herself from laughing hoarsely as a pair of figures dashed into the gap. One was an Avatar of Lightning, but one unlike anything she’d seen before. It moved like a master fencer, even in its full armor, and hit harder than a fighter with a greatsword.
The other was even more terrifying—and more welcome. The other was Kade.
◄▼►
The moment I felt Ellen’s aura, I abandoned my push toward Angelo Lawrence’s flashes of nuclear hellfire and Bernard the Wall’s ironclad defense. The former was still ahead of me, ripping explosions across the desert at a horrifying rate. The latter was somewhere to my left, with the other S-Rankers’ auras.
Neither of them mattered.
I pushed ahead, toward the beacon of fear right where I’d expected it to be, in the middle of the breach. Cheddar was out—and he was flying low. I didn’t care about hiding him anymore. I was an A-Ranker, and if the Governing Council had concerns about monster familiars, they were welcome to try taking him after the siege. And the Stormkin Avatar was out, too. Dad lunged, his form practice-pitch perfect, and the lightning sword punched into a Centurion’s torso, then out the other side.
Windwalk activated. I stepped into the air, sprinting through it, and threw a Lightning Chain toward Ellen’s makeshift fortress. Fear filled my gut, but it was only her aura. The Lightning Chain tightened, and I pulled myself onto the platform, landing next to her.
She looked like shit.
Her gums were bleeding, and every bit of exposed skin was blistered or bloody. Her eyes stared through swollen slits, and she couldn’t stop laughing. But she was still fighting. Even as I put a hand on her shoulder, another Shadow Shapes ripped across the battlefield and pulled a handful of B-Rank automatons down.
An explosion rippled across the desert in the distance, then a series of smaller, rippling blasts.
“Ellen, I’ve got you,” I said.
“I know. I felt the link when you got closer.” Her voice was hoarse and cracked.
“Are you good to keep going?”
I didn’t want to ask it. She was tapped out. But I needed her if we were going to win this. It wasn’t just that she was a part of me—she was, and I was a part of her, too. It was that without the power of the core I’d brought her, we wouldn’t be able to end this siege. I needed her, and so did Phoenix.
Her slitted eyes narrowed, and her jaw set. She winced in pain as her hand closed over mind. “I’m with you for the long haul, Kade Noelstra.”
Good enough. I shoved the core into Ellen’s hands. She nodded.
◄▼►
Ellen didn’t hesitate.
The moment Kade’s fingers stopped touching her hand and left the stormy, dark core resting in her palm, she dropped to her knees. A tiny part of her heard him say something about being careful, but she ignored it. Now wasn’t the time to be cautious, and it hurt too much to have a conversation.
Another tiny part of her yelled something about consequences to her. She had a feeling she knew what was about to happen. No proof. No evidence. Just her experiences—and Kade’s. It would happen to her, just like it had to him, but in reverse.
The core was hers. It screamed to her in a way that nothing ever had before. Lightning flashed, and the swirling shadows within reached out to smother it. The patterns were almost seductive. They promised her both unspeakable pain and phenomenal power. All she had to do was—
She didn’t hesitate. The core broke, and Ellen found herself in a familiar place.
Her garden.
The pool was full to the brim, overflowing into its gutters. Fish moved in the artificial stream that ran through the garden, and she stood on a narrow bridge with no railings, looking down at the black, white, and yellow koi. The air felt still. Not calm, but still—there was a static feeling that reminded her of Kade.
Kade wasn’t here, though. He was busy buying her the time she needed to do what had to be done. To push her Unique skill as far as it could go. To push her build to the point of instability in the name of victory and survival. To push herself beyond her limits, and to the edge of his.
This was the cost of being with him for the long haul, and she accepted it.
Shadowy clouds hovered in the air in front of her. She recognized them; they’d been inside the core before she’d broken it. As she touched them, they swirled around her hand, darkening her skin until it was a mottled grey color. She moved her fingers. The shadow danced between them like a coin.
Then she closed them in a fist around the shadow. It wasn’t the core’s anymore. It was hers. Her power. Her strength. Her cost to pay—but that’d happen later.
The shadowy clouds disappeared into her skin, and her core started to ache as a faint crack formed in it. She grinned. It didn’t matter. Kade had powered through it. He’d held his core together through sheer strength of will, and she would, too—at least until this was over. And once it was, she’d put herself back together, or she’d have Kade help her.
Her core cracked even more. It didn’t fracture completely—that would come later, and she knew it—but it cracked. Mana leaked out, and so did shadow. It reeked of fear, but Ellen was beyond fear. She was beyond uncertainty. The cost was high, but what it had bought was more than worth it.
Unique Aura Learned: Tides of Darkness
The shrouded core within you offers its strength, if you can survive the terror it brings. Consume large amounts of Mana to take control of all shadows within range, treating them as a liquid force for the duration of the skill. The shadow inflicts terror on and rips at any enemies caught within.
She opened her eyes. Kade was pumping Mana into her as fast as he could; his Avatar was down, and Cheddar was helping sustain the flow. It felt exactly like her attempt to push to B-Rank while Mana burned. Her numbers ticked up as she stood and looked out at Phoenix. It was shrouded in steam, yes, and that shroud weakened the early morning’s sun-cast shadows to almost nothing.
But it was also on fire, and the inferno threw flickering shadows across the streets of Mesa.
Ellen took a deep breath and unleashed the Tides of Darkness.
◄▼►
The world shifted.
It was subtle at first. Fires lost their contrast all around me as I fought to keep the rubble clear of monsters and give Ellen the time she needed. Her shadow, faint and weak as it was in the steam-diffused sun, vanished. So did mine. It was like standing directly under the noon sun, but with bright lights shining in every direction around me, forcing my shadow into nothing.
I kept fighting. Cutting Storm lashed out, clearing a half-dozen automatons from the right side, and Cheddar fired a beam of sunlight that raked the left flank of our improvised fortress. When that didn’t cast any shadows, either, I knew what was coming.
Ellen stood up. Her hands rose over her head, and from a hundred yards in every direction, black, inky shadows rushed to her. They swirled around her like a thin whirlpool of darkness. Then it expanded into a cyclone that dwarfed even the wall around it.
A single nuclear fireball rose in the distance. The shadows it tossed across the battlefield joined the tornado around Ellen, too.
It crashed down onto the gap in the 303 Wall, and fear filled the air.
I was already moving before it hit the ground. I’d seen what Ellen had done with this power. In my vision, the skill had shredded brass and silk like paper as the shadows rebounded to their original locations in a massive wave of darkness. I wasn’t worried about me, though. I’d be fine. Ellen and I were one.
No. I was more worried about rising to the moment and taking advantage of Ellen’s sacrifice play. There were almost a dozen auras nearby, and I recognized two of them.
The strongest was the Light of Dawn. He was a hundred yards away, on top of the Wall, but I’d seen what happened when he truly pushed himself. He wouldn’t be helpful for the next phase in this battle, and even if he was, he’d be better as artillery support.
So instead, I turned toward the other S-Rankers’ auras. The Spark of Life was there, and I would need her for what was coming.
I dashed past dead and decaying brass automatons as the shadows finished snapping back into place. They were missing chunks of their armor, not like it had been hammered away, but like it had been vaporized. The humid air reeked of oil and smoke.
“Kade!” Sarah Cullman’s eyes locked on mine as I turned a corner and skidded to a stop, face-to-face with Bernard the Wall. “Did you clear the Fallen Delvers portal?”
“I did. What you just saw was one of the weapons I brought back. I need your help, though. That was Ellen Traynor. She consumed a core from the portal and used…something. I’m worried about her core stability. Go help her.” I turned, dismissing the Spark of Life.
She didn’t argue. She didn’t try to pull rank. She just moved—and that was the gift I’d been hoping for.
I rounded on Bernard the Wall and the Portal Tyrant. “As for you two, I need a team. We’re going on the offensive. It’s time to break the siege of Phoenix.”
◄▼►
There was a bunker below the GC headquarters building.
Compared to the Carlsbad Fortress bunker, it wasn’t anything special. Its hallways were narrow enough that two GC reps couldn’t pass without one pressing against the raw concrete walls, and flickering fluorescent lights and computer screens cast long shadows across the otherwise bare rooms, with one long tunnel leading further below Phoenix. The GC rarely went down that tunnel. Everything they needed was directly under the tower. The Governing Council’s disaster response facility wasn’t built for long-term operation. It was built to be a crisis center.
Councilwoman Harriet Myers sat at its center, with a legend beside her. Representative Unger was the best GC rep ever to do the job. Councilwoman Myers was the sharpest. Together, they were managing the fall of Phoenix. It wasn’t going well.
“This is going well,” Rep Unger said. Harriet noted that there wasn’t an ounce of sarcasm in his voice.
“Really?”
“Yes.” He pulled up a map of the city in three colors. Green districts hadn’t been touched by a single monster. There were three—Surprise, the Wickenberg triangle, and a sliver between the airport and downtown. Yellow was contested. Most of the city flickered that color. And then there were red zones.
There were only two red zones. Areas that were considered to have fallen to the siege and were now infested with monsters.
Mesa. The whole thing. And a small circle around downtown.
“Thirty minutes ago, those two spaces were connected,” Unger said. “We don’t have contact with any of the delver teams in Mesa, but something has shifted out there. There’s instability, and we can take advantage of that.”
“How?” Harriet asked. She believed the veteran. He hadn’t botched a portal break in his entire career, and every GC rep knew his name. If he said something was true, it was true, even if he couldn’t explain it.
“Simple. We keep watching, we try to restore comms with the S-Rankers in Mesa, and we figure out what the delvers on the ground are thinking. This isn’t a grand strategy battle. If we win this, it won’t be through our actions. It’ll be through a hundred or a thousand individual fights. And it’ll cost the city. Every resource we have, we need to spend here.” Unger leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer array in front of him. His fingers set back down on his keyboard, and he started working.
Harriet understood. She pulled on a headset and flicked through the S-Rankers’ channels. Nothing. Then she typed in a number on her computer. The headset rang twice before it picked up. “Councilwoman Myers here. I need three teams of B and C-Rankers at the GC building in five minutes. Escort duty. There’s a broken radio tower in Mesa. We’re going to get it up and running again.”