Stormblade 4 C33: One's Company (1)
33 - One's Company (1)
Dark brick walls. Torchlight. Traps.
The Solo Portal was a Dark Citadel world.
But it was like no Dark Citadel I’d seen or heard of, and I doubted that even Ellen, with all her practical understanding of portal worlds, would have been ready for this.
I stood at the base of the massive wall surrounding the shadow city. Its dark bulk was all but invisible in the near-supernatural night, with only the sinister-looking torchlight of the city itself throwing flickering shadow and light across it. The portal itself seemed embedded in the wall behind me. And the sky…the sky was lit up with lightning—the green-black lightning I’d most commonly seen when my Path and Ellen’s magic intersected. Bolts slammed into metal towers extending from the roofs of almost every building in the citadel, and the buzz of static filled the air.
Most of that lightning, though, surged toward a single, massive tower at the center of the storm. It looked brick-built, but a cage of portal metal was draped around it, and electricity arced across the grid. The tower wasn’t lit. There were no torches or windows throwing firelight across its walls. But it glowed nonetheless, shining a sickly green color that lit up the citadel around it.
The streets were empty. Not a single portal monster roamed them—not the suits of mobile armor, not a Scriptsmith, nothing.
“Well, that’s probably my objective,” I muttered to myself as I summoned Cheddar. Based on the portal type, this was exactly what I’d need for Ellen’s core reforging. I just had to get it cleared. “Let’s get moving.”
A few seconds later, I was armored up, Nimbus Edge hung ready in my hand, and Cheddar was airborne about twenty feet above me. I’d sent the winged serpent specific instructions to avoid the metal towers and stay low. I moved fast, but cautiously.
But there wasn’t an ambush. There were no traps in the streets. And, after a moment, I stood at the closed gate to the tower. A wide courtyard of brick, completely empty and octagonal, sat behind me, surrounded by lightning rod-topped buildings. This close, the tower only looked more impressive, but the gate wasn’t far behind it.
It had to be a good thirty feet tall and almost as wide, built of solid portal metal. I couldn’t see inside of it, but the electricity and swirling darkness rippling across it could only mean one thing: it was magically sealed, too. Metal relief sculptures stuck out from it—gargoyles, helmeted knights, and masked Scriptsmiths with books. I felt the same as I had when I’d stood in front of Yalerox’s gate. This was the history of the portal world. Of the Dark Citadel.
But there wasn’t a good way forward that wasn’t through the gate, and I needed this portal for myself and to keep a promise. So, after a moment, I knocked.
The door opened.
Tanat: A-Rank
Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this. Instead of a knight, a slender, muscular-looking woman in a breastplate and black leather armor stood behind it. Her face was covered by a portal metal plate that left only her chin and bright red lips exposed, and the blade in her hand crackled with electricity.
She dropped into a duelist’s stance, free hand tucked against her waist and sword-arm facing me, and I brought my blade up in the one-handed Thunderbolt stance. I nodded, and so did she.
We both moved as one. Her sword sprang forward deceptively quickly. I dropped into a lunge and pulled my body to the side at the same time. Nimbus Edge sliced into the Tanat’s arm, leaving a bloody line across it but not staying in contact long enough to cauterize. At the same time, pain blossomed across my leading leg. I looked down in time to watch her blade pull free of my thigh, right above my knee.
“Alright, you know your stuff,” I said.
Her lips hardly moved, but it was enough. The slightest hint of a smile. Her stance shifted slightly as I poured Stamina into my muscle and let the healing process start.
She was the aggressor.
I dropped the blade into a lower stance and shifted my body behind it as I retreated a single step. Mistwalk Forms. Cheddar screeched overhead. I shook my head. “Not right now, Cheddar. Not right now.” I had too much to learn.
Tanat closed the gap. Her sword flashed out. This time, there was nothing deceptive about her speed; if she’d been a delver, she’d have been a striker. One second, the blade hung in the air. The next, Nimbus Edge had barely caught it. I used Storm Dance after just three blocks to buy myself some space, and immediately dropped into a fully-committed lunge when she spun into a charge and the space vanished.
The sword punched into her breastplate, right above her lung. When I pulled it back, the smell of burnt blood and ozone filled the air. Tanat’s free hand pressed against her armor, and her lip curled in pain, but when she spoke, her words sounded calm and collected.
Steel flashed. Nimbus Edge parried. Whatever damage I’d done, it wasn’t enough to slow the A-Ranked monster down. My wound was healing, and so was hers. We traded thrusts and slashes, feet dancing back and forth across the lightning-lit courtyard. I switched to Thunderbolt long enough to use Rain-Slicked Blade, but the woman was fast enough to dodge it. Thunderblade helped with the speed. But her blows rained in just as quickly as mine did.
But even so, I could have won at any time. After almost a minute of trading blows, clashing steel, and near-perfect footwork, I hadn’t seen Tanat cast a single spell. We were both bleeding from cuts to the face, arms, and legs, but the fight wasn’t anywhere near over.
Then Tanat disengaged.
She went from trading blows to twenty feet away faster than I could blink. Her sword hung mid-air where she’d left it for a moment before it flew through the air and clacked into its scabbard. Before I could press the attack, she bowed and disappeared in a blur of shadow, vanishing into the tower.
I stood there, sword up in Mistwalk stance, for a moment, then let it drop. “What was that?”
Cheddar didn’t say anything, and I didn’t get any mental images from him as he flapped through the sky overhead. I stared into the darkness inside the lightning tower for a moment, then nodded and stepped inside.
But I couldn’t shake a single thought—Tanat was like no other Dark Citadel monster I’d ever seen.
◄▼►
There hadn’t been a single trap in the citadel. Not a single monster—not counting Tanat. With the exception of the lightning that surged down the hundreds of metal frames sticking up from the city like hair toward a balloon, there’d been no threats.
Once I was inside the tower, that changed quickly.
Whole sections of the floor were—apparently—connected to the lightning cage around the tower. Anywhere a portal metal grid extended was potentially lethal with next to no warning. Sometimes, that was only a small strip of floor. Sometimes, it was nothing at all. And sometimes, it was an entire room, with only a few safe spots in the corners.
And there were enemies, too. Hooded, masked, and robed Scriptsmiths who filled every safe space with summoned flame traps. Squads of B-Ranked armor that fought until they were completely destroyed, their maces ripping chunks of maelstrom from my armor. Archers who hid in the upper reaches of the tower’s first floor and took shots at me when I fought their allies, only to vanish when I tried to counterattack.
A half-hour in, one thing was becoming clear: this wasn’t going to be a quick, hour or two-long adventure.
I parried a knight’s mace. The impact shook my arm all the way to my shoulders, even with Nimbus Edge redirecting most of the force. Before the walking armor could recover, I fired a Stormfire Lance right into its chest, then followed it up with a pair of thrusts that punched through the weakened armor.
It collapsed. Armor chunks fell free from the main body, and I took a deep breath.
The good news was that I was moving. The massive tower had to be the size of the Arrowhead Mall, and that was just this floor. Still, I was making good progress. I had to be close to the end.
The bad news was that fighting swarms of B-Ranked knights supported by A-Rank Scriptsmiths—with archers taking potshots at me every time I stopped moving—was wearing me down. I was well below fifty percent on Stamina and Mana, and judging by the tower’s size, I wasn’t even really started with the whole thing.
Clearly, this was going to be a longer-term project than the God of Thunder had made it seem.
I took a moment in a nook that seemed relatively safe to cross my legs, sit down, and go over my options.
I could keep pushing. That was the most appealing choice to me. Get as far in as I could, see what the Solo Portal was all about, and pull back when I couldn’t keep going. I could head back to the lightning-wreathed gate in the wall any time—and I didn’t think I had to worry about portal breaks. After all, if I could open the portal by pouring Mana into it, it stood to reason that I could close it the same way.
On the other hand, if I could close the portal, then I didn’t have to clear the Solo Portal in one night. Presumably, the enemies I killed would stay dead if I left, and if the portal was closed, it couldn’t break. I could come back another time and keep pushing.
But there were three problems with both of those plans. First, Ellen was counting on me, and the sooner I got this cleared, the sooner she’d be back in the game. Second, I only had so long before the Governing Council’s big counterattack started, and once we were in the Carlsbad Portal, it’d be far too late to keep pushing through the Solo one. And third, Tanat.
The duelist was good. And I hadn’t encountered another monster like her the whole time. Even more concerning, she’d disengaged from our fight. The only monsters who’d had the discipline to disengage had been Tathrix, Yalerox’s champion, and a few Paragons—and those under a Paragon’s orders. A thought was working its way through my mind about what, exactly, she was. I didn’t quite have it figured out, but I knew that I’d need to keep the pace up to manage her.
I needed to get through the first floor, at the bare minimum, tonight.
So, after a moment to recover, I went back to fighting, and back to killing.
◄▼►
When I finally reached the end of the first floor—or what I assumed was the end, judging by the blocked stairwell leading upward—I was almost spent.
I’d been fighting, on and off, for two hours, pretty much by myself. Cheddar had been burning the candle at both ends, helping where he could and acting as a Mana battery when he couldn’t help in combat. That bond was the only thing keeping me going.
Stamina: 102/500 (+10), Mana 85/620 (+10)
But there was still one challenge left.
I stood outside a room whose floor had been shattered in dozens of places, leaving dark brick fragments piled and strewn across the ground. Pillars held up a massive dome overhead, leaving plenty of room for a flying monster—not that I expected one from the Dark Citadel. The room smelled like fire and blood, but I couldn’t see a single monster in it.
As I’d fought, I’d found more and more signs that, Solo Portal or not, I wasn’t alone in here. Dead Scriptsmiths and shattered armor—all pierced by a thin blade and all scorched by lightning. That pretty much confirmed my theory. Tanat wasn’t a monster, or at least, not a standard one. She was either a Paragon…or a delver.
I didn’t have the time to think about her. If she wanted to clear the Solo Portal, she’d have to start with whatever was beyond this room, because this boss was mine.
Nimbus Edge crackled to life in my hand, and I stepped into the room, then carefully walked to its center.
The moment I did, the floor all around the room’s edge lit up with lightning. So did the ceiling and walls. I groaned; it had been a trap.
Kou Veri, Shock Smith: A-Rank
The boss’s whirling robes and purple aura both pushed out as she fell from above. Pages whirled around her—Scripts and Bindings. I ducked left, and the boss slammed down into the space I’d just occupied. Bindings went active all around her, and a half-dozen Scripts burned out as they transferred their power from the page to Kou Veri.
Then she pulled a mace from her belt. It glowed with the same green-black electricity I’d seen on the tower and that coated this room’s floor. She threw herself at me, Script-enhanced speed more than matching mine. Her mace slammed into my shoulder before I could dodge. My entire arm went numb for a moment. The Stormsteel armor locked up, and I stumbled.
By the time I recovered, another blow was coming in. Storm Dance bounced me away from the mace, and it impacted the floor hard enough to leave another crater surrounded by broken bricks. I glanced over my shoulder as I backed up.
The door was open. I could Storm Dance to it and leave. There was no way Tanat could beat this boss; I could come back later, when I was stronger, and win.
Instead, I switched to Cyclone Forms. Lightning wrapped around my off-hand, and Brendan’s Stormfire Lance formed in it. As Kou Veri closed the gap, Nimbus Edge parried the blow, and the Stormfire Lance crackled against her robes and armor.
The blow burned purple and black cloth. For a moment, she was ablaze. Then a Script activated, and a blue shield pulsed out from her heart for a moment. When it disappeared, the fire was gone.
“Well played,” I said. I fired a Lightning Chain into the floor and pulled myself away from the next mace blow, then sent a single, un-comboed Thunder Crash into the boss. This one carried Windfall, and as the lightning rippled across her armor, it also bound her feet to the floor. She was snared for a moment.
Unfortunately, the spellcasting barrage had burned through all my Mana.
I breathed. Then I shifted stances again—this time to Thunderbolt. I threw myself into the offensive, Nimbus Edge flashing. Kou Veri had to die—people were counting on it, and so was I.