Stormblade 4 C48: Deadpool (2)
48 - Deadpool (2)
The moment I stepped into the next flooded room, I targeted Cheddar, Nathan, and Sarah with Stormbreak’s exclusion and used the Unique skill.
It didn’t lack targets. Half a dozen or so flowers of lightning bloomed around the A and S-Rank monsters filling the water, and a moment later, they all started pulsing as our Mana disappeared into the skill. Tentacles and fins sizzled as electric hatred arced from monster to monster to me. It was a massive opening hit—almost as powerful as Bernard and Terrel hitting their targets together—and it threw the monsters off-balance.
The gigantic, flaming phoenix and sunbeam-spewing serpent took care of them while I recovered, with Sarah’s help. The healer’s Mana soothed scorched veins and throbbing nerves, and the pain of using Stormbreak faded. Her brow wrinkled, concern across her face.
I pushed myself to my feet. “I’m fine. Stormbreak doesn’t kill me anymore. I can push through it now.”
“You’re not fine. You need more time to recover before—“
Sarah’s voice stopped suddenly, and she glanced at Nathan Anders as he changed from his Phoenix Reborn form to his human one. “How are we doing here?” he asked.
“We’re fine,” Sarah said. She tossed a look my way.
I didn’t need to be a genius to understand what that look meant. Shut up, agree, and take it easy for a little while. Let Nathan take the weight. Recover.
And I wanted to. Oh, I wanted to. Sarah was right; I couldn’t keep using Stormbreak forever. The spell might not be knocking me out of the fight—or at least, might not be driving me unconscious anymore—as I got more of a hold on it, but it was doing damage. I couldn’t afford that damage to my nerves, not against this kind of enemy. If even one more S-Ranker were here, I wouldn’t have even considered ignoring her advice. But it was just the Phoenix Reborn, Sarah, and me. And we had a mission to complete, with people relying on us to do it.
And that made the choice a no-brainer.
Still…still, when we pushed into the next room and saw only one S-Rank monster, I held off. Instead, I drew Nimbus Edge and threw myself at the oversized, myriad-limbed squid. It vomited heat from a dozen ports across its body as a bone-colored pair of eyes stared at my sword, then faded into the water and re-formed on the far side of the flooded assembly line.
Liquid Stalker: S-Rank Monster
I growled in frustration and shifted stances even as burning-hot liquid flooded into the room from both the monster and the open door behind it. Cyclone Forms. There wasn’t really enough Mana in my core to get a good combo going, but I gritted my teeth and tried anyway. Rolling Thunder copied Polarity Shift, burning through half of my Mana. I used Lightning Chain to cut the distance between the squid and me, Polarity Shifting again, then fired off Thunder Crash as the monstrous, bone-grey monster faded into the water.
The storm—with two Polarity Shifts—slammed into the floodwater right where the monster had been. A scream echoed through the room, feral and equal parts pain and fury. I braced myself and shifted stances to Mistwalk, hand drifting behind my back and up on the balls of my feet. Fire filled the air around me; Nathan was engaging.
The Stalker formed behind me, red-hot tentacles lashing out at my head and legs. I couldn’t dodge both—and I didn’t even try. Storm Dance consumed my last Lightning Charge and threw me behind the Stalker.
Two could play at that—
A tentacle slammed into my chest. The Stormsteel armor took the worst of the blow, but my skin still blistered beneath the metal and maelstrom. I lost my footing, and a second tentacle dragged me under the water. Before I could swing Nimbus Edge and cut myself loose, a third slammed down through the water, wrapping around me.
I’d screwed up. This wasn’t a B-Rank monster I could play with. One second’s let-down to even think something cocky, and I was paying for it. The tentacles squeezed tighter and tighter. Air erupted from my lungs, and a rib popped painfully. I tasted blood on my tongue, in my mouth. It floated in the water around me.
The tentacles tightened enough to crack a second rib. Then a third. I screamed, the last air surged out of my lungs, and the monster’s grip loosened. I pushed myself to the surface, gasping in agony as my lungs reinflated from nothing and briny water spewed out of my throat.
The Liquid Stalker was nothing but a molten pile of charred gore and goo. Nathan Anders stood on its far side, hands on his knees, breathing hard as I sucked in shallow gulps of air. For a long moment, no one talked.
Then Sarah waded across the ever-filling lake and started healing—but not me. “Nathan, you cannot keep fighting like this,” she said.
◄▼►
I stared at Sarah. At Nathan. For a long moment, rage filled me. I’d pushed myself to my limits just stepping into this portal, and I’d only made one mistake. Why was Sarah prioritizing Nathan’s wounds?
Then he turned, and I saw his back. The Phoenix Reborn didn’t wear armor, and his shirt was completely shredded by dozens of perfectly round, bleeding circles. The deepest dug almost an inch into his skin; I could see vertebrae poking through. “I know,” he said.
“Then why did you jump in? Kade had that. He still had tools to use,” Sarah asked.
“Because he takes longer to recover his tools.”
I coughed. Blood splattered into the water, but I ignored it as best I could and waded toward the door. Before I could get there, Sarah’s hand closed over my shoulder. “You can’t keep pushing like this, either. You’re both killing yourselves, and—“
“We don’t have a choice,” Nathan said.
I nodded slowly. “Agreed. We need to kill the portal boss. That’s the only way we’re getting out of here, right?”
“Right.” Sarah held up a hand as Nathan started up. “You’re right. But right now, we’ve got other problems. If we die trying to push, there’s no way the boss dies. We probably need…oh, four of the team to take an S-Rank boss out with any hope of winning. Right now, we’ve got three. The weakest three. God, I wish we had Bernard…”
Frustration filled me. My build just wasn’t there yet, and my resource regeneration was too low to push this hard. Sarah was right—but I hated that fact. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hit as hard as Nathan. It was that I had to all but kill myself out of the fight.
“Let’s get you two healed up and keep moving,” Sarah said after a minute. “We’ll regroup and see what we can do.”
The water rose around our thighs, slowly creeping up toward my shirt, as Sarah used all the Mana she’d been building up to set my ribs, scab over the dozens of wounds on Nathan’s back, and disinfect the myriad blisters covering our skin. We were making headway, but nowhere near enough—and all three of us were spending more resources than we could afford to make it. And it wasn’t as if Sarah had healed herself fully, either.
Stamina: 53/500, Mana: 61/630
“We need a change of plan,” I muttered.
Sarah snorted. “I’m open to ideas.”
I closed my eyes. Then I pointed at the room’s architecture. “We go up into the catwalks. There’ve got to be ways through the rooms along them, just like down below. We keep climbing, look for a place we can hole up for a while, and then we start looking for the others. If we can regroup…”
For a moment, no one said anything. Then Sarah shook her head. “How do we look for them?”
I pointed at the winged serpent. “Cheddar. He can fly places we can’t walk, and he can give me an idea of where to go the second he finds Terrel and the others. He also knows who the Portal Tyrant is from our first trip to Carlsbad, so he’ll know who to look for.”
“And if he gets seen—or killed?” Nathan asked.
My eyes squeezed closed. If Cheddar died…
Well, first of all, Jessie would kill me. She’d loved the scaly monster since the moment I summoned him. More practically, in the moment, it’d be the death knell for my resource regeneration. With him, I could just barely keep up with the fighting. Without him, I’d have no chance. And, though he wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as my allies or me, he was a useful ally in here. And he was a friend, of sorts.
He was already hurt, too. Deborah’s cut hadn’t fully healed. It was a long shot, but…
“It’s a risk. I think we have to take it, though. It’s really our only option.”
Sarah nodded. “Fine. Let’s get moving. Send Cheddar out now, though—before the place fills up with even more water.”
One mental image—of the Portal Tyrant and his hammer—later, Cheddar flapped through the flooding doorway behind us, tail dragging through the salty water. His glow faded, and the last I saw of him was the cloud-shaped outline of his replacement wing.
He’d be fine. And if he wasn’t, I couldn’t worry about it too much. All I could do was take care of myself.
We climbed a brass ladder, the bars warping under our weight, and pulled ourselves up onto a narrow catwalk high above the flooding room. I made sure to memorize our route as we moved, sprinting down the catwalk, and let Nathan melt a vent’s grill until it popped open. Then we clambered inside the wide brass tubing and kept moving.
Up.
Always up. Away from the water.
It took a long time—long enough for my resources to slowly get back to a reasonable level—before we finally found a ‘room’ with nothing in it and no water. It wasn’t much. A massive brass turbine spun on its far side, and it was really only a wide spot in the tubing. But it was flat, and it was safe. Sarah collapsed onto the floor, sucking in air. “Holy shit, I’m out of Stamina.”
“That’s fine. I’ll take the first watch,” I said.
“Screw that. We’re not sleeping here. We’re waiting for that familiar of yours to report back in, and while we’re doing that, we’re trying to put together a plan,” Sarah said. She sucked in a breath and forced herself to sit up. “I have plenty of Mana. Who’s getting healed up first?”
Nathan looked at me. Then he raised his hand. “I could use some more.”
“Great. Get your ass over here.”
As Sarah pumped healing Mana into Nathan’s still-tattered back, I leaned against the tubing’s side and breathed. Cheddar was still sending back mental images of flooding water and monsters, so he was still alive. That was the best we could hope for…for now.
My mind drifted to Ellen.
She’d be at the Desert Wind’s headquarters. We’d talked about how to handle a broken core—both when mine truly broke, then again after she cracked hers. Lots of exercise, no pushing. Let it heal. If I could have, that’s what I would have done. Hopefully, she was in the guild’s gym, lifting or running. Maybe Jeff and Yasmin would be spotting her, or working out too. Either way, I could trust her to do what was right for her. It had hurt her not to be able to be here, but at this exact moment, Ellen was in the best possible place—for me, if not for her. I was already gambling with enough just by being here myself. Having her here, with a cracked core, would be too close to a twisted reversal of Queen Mother Yalerax’s portal world.
I couldn’t do that. Not to her, and not to me.
And, equally importantly, she could keep an eye on Jessie for me. My stupid, genius little sister was almost certainly getting in trouble—probably with forces much more powerful than herself. I snorted. We really weren’t that different, Jessie and I. We both needed someone to keep us in line. For her, it was supposed to be me; I’d promised to take care of her, after all. But for me? Sarah, maybe? Or Ellen? I wasn’t sure anyone could keep me in line if I didn’t want them to. When I hit S-Rank, they definitely wouldn’t be able to.
And that was coming sooner rather than later. What Eugene had told me…creating my own Truth and forging another Law along the Stormsteel Path…that was something I’d been pondering as we fought. I had no idea what Law it would be, but—
A mental image flashed across my vision. It wasn’t much—just a bent, battered tower shield with a pair of helmeted eyes behind it.
But it was enough.
“Cheddar found them!” I half-shouted. “I’m getting directions now.”
◄▼►
Every time Cheddar sent me a mental image, I regretted not using him as a scout sooner. Even injured, he was saving us time and avoiding more fights than not.
We were still drenched, still hurting, and still exhausted, but there was no helping that. The entire dungeon was filling with water, and there was no avoiding some skirmishes. Tentacle-covered monsters, brass-and-silk constructs, and swarms of B-Ranked fish that died fast but still all but overwhelmed us through sheer strength of numbers.
But without Cheddar, we wouldn’t have even gotten close.
In the end, we didn’t get close enough.
It happened in a long, narrow room. We were halfway across, the water only occasionally even ankle deep, and moving at a full sprint, when a golden portal opened in front of us. I skidded to a halt, splashing water up. The Placid King couldn’t know what we were up to…could he? Was it just a random flood—the SS-Plus-Ranked Paragon trying to speed up the process?
No. This was deliberate. Instead of a wave of water, a single monster stepped out.
Quellat, Still-Lung Blade: S-Rank Paragon
He was thin. A long, shimmering rapier in one tentacle-fingered hand, blue-green tendrils wrapped around the hiltless handle and trailed up the blade. Half a dozen eyes, all locked on me. Armor covered in shells and coral, and more sucker-covered tendrils hanging from his head like a beard. The man was obviously a duelist. He was obviously a powerful, powerful enemy—I could tell that without the system’s help.
And even more importantly, he was obviously here for me.