Chapter 31
“But throwing all of that aside for a moment and assuming that there is more than mere correlation at work, if the shikari were the product of aion experimentation, wouldn’t that explain so much about them? Not just the fact that they occupy ruins and vaults, that they possess a biology so finely tuned as to be incomparable to all natural life elsewhere in the universe or that they have been noted to respond to the activation of aion technology nearby, but in the way that they behave.
Their patterns of behavior, if they had been consistent throughout all of history, would have resulted in the extinction of every other species, yet at some point prior to the beginning of written history, they were restrained in some manner from killing our various species in the cradle. They have not spread across all of known space, slaughtering everything in their path, and I posit that this is because we are not dealing with wild animals. We are dealing with domesticated animals that have gone feral in the absence of their creators.”
—Connections: The Shikari and The Aions, Part Two, Rania Clarendon
For a moment, it seemed that there would be no reaction.
Then, as if the strings on the puppets were cut, every single shikari shot off in a different direction. Some seemed to erupt, spindly spider legs bursting out from where they’d been hidden. In others, the same thing happened on the tops of their bodies, with tattered and atrophied wings protruding instead. They burst away from the rainbow parade that they’d been marching in, and Sylvas let out the breath that he’d been holding for far too long.
He kept his eye on the shikari as they scattered, but whatever concerns he had about them going after the Empyrean armies were gone within moments. There were just so many eidolons on this planet that the shikari were spoiled for choice. They could hunt and hunt for days without finishing off the population. Sylvas wasn’t sure if they’d really turn the tide of the battle in the Empyrean’s favor, but by the point in his planning when he was sending out pleading messages for help to the remains of the criminal syndicate he’d wiped out for trying to abduct and assassinate him, he was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
He turned around to find Rania shaking. “Hey, it’s okay. They aren’t going to hurt you.”
“Because you told them not to.” She didn’t quite meet his eyes. “I’m just thinking about what that means.”
“It means the plan worked, and I don’t have to fight about sixty giant monsters.”
She tried to force a smile, but it faded all too quickly, “You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know.” Sylvas sighed. For a moment, they just stood there, and then he held out his hand.
If she hadn’t taken it, he wasn’t sure what he would have done, but she did.
He pulled her in closer and took flight, heading back to the gathered Ardent, to his friends, to everyone he knew, all gathered here in one place, to fight one final time. As he flew, one hand held Rania close to shield her from the worst of the wind, and the other was in motion, throwing out one gravity shear after another, fragmenting his mind to maintain the chain of them running alongside the sprinting troops as they tried to clear the vast killing zone that they had now found themselves in.
He touched down at the head of the charge. Rania was doing her even best not to make eye contact with Vaelith after their less-than-stellar introduction last time around. Rania dropped to her own two feet and started running with the rest of them as soon as she was in reach of the ground. Sylvas rose back up above the train of bodies to start picking off the covenant mages attacking them.
The trouble with the Dominion’s mages wasn’t that they lacked power or training, but that they lacked flexibility. They had been handed their covenants without ever having to forge a relationship with the eidolon or change how they did their magic. They were exceptionally good at what they had been taught to do, but beyond that, they struggled.
A steady stream of aggression from each of them should have been able to annihilate Sylvas’ entire army, but instead, they found their spells deflected, redirected, or rebuffed in ways that had nothing to do with brute force, and they simply didn’t have an answer for it. Meanwhile, Sylvas could brute force his way through their defenses without hesitation because of his infinite mana supplies.
When the Empyrean first realized how many covenant mages they were now up against, there had been terror. Seeing how they fared in battle with the covenant mages of the Empyrean just proved how much experience mattered.
As they closed in on the main force, where it was under fire, the defensive emplacements all immediately diverted their attention in the direction of Sylvas’ army. That wasn’t a surprise—whatever cloak the Seekers had slapped over him had died with Bael, and even if it hadn’t, Sylvas wasn’t sure if it was actually effective or if it was another coordinated ruse. He also wasn’t making much effort to hide at this point. With the Ardent here and the shikari deployed, the pressure was as light as it could be, which meant that he could finally start taking action.
Of course, that change to the tempo of the battle meant that Blackstar was taking action, too. He still hadn’t shown himself, so there was a constant sense of anticipation, just waiting for him to burst out of the ground or any one of the fortifications and start laying waste to the place, but Sylvas had a suspicion that they wouldn’t actually encounter him until they reached the vault itself.
The man had worked too hard and too long to miss his opportunity to get into the thing if Sylvas somehow managed to sneak by. Which meant that he was a later problem, and the titanic eidolons that he was diverting from the battle with the main force were the concerns for now.
Sylvas launched himself ahead of the pack and got ready to deal with the now problems.
The closest eidolon looked like some deep-sea monstrosity protruding from a craggy mountain that the massed tentacles beneath supported. Shots from both the Ardent force and the Empyrean army had been punching holes through its rubbery tentacles to no noticeable effect the whole time that he was making his approach, so he decided to focus farther up. There was a vast crystalline pane on one side of the craggy stone, like a polished purple geode, and that was where he set his sights, launching a focused gravity spike straight for the center.
It should have had some effect. The glassy smoothness should have cracked, or the eidolon should have been at least tugged in his direction, but it faded into the geode’s face like it was slipping beneath the surface of a pond. Snarling, he did it again, and then again, the constant, steady percussion of gravity spikes that had killed Bael and a dozen others since him pattering like raindrops off the thing’s face.
Sylvas manifested a blade of gravity shear and destruction, noting numbly that it was now wreathed in flame thanks to his latest eidolon additions, and zipped in closer to take a swing, shifting his own personal gravity throughout his body so that the blow fell with meteoric force. It hit, he could feel the blow ringing up his arms, but there was still no scratch on the smooth expanse that he now found himself hovering in front of.
Down in the depths of that polished stone, a light began to build. Energy thrumming inside, building to some new catastrophe that Sylvas had no intention of allowing to come to pass. He unleashed an arcane arrow at the surface, just to see what happened, and he was rewarded with a tiny smudge that was opaque. Which meant the thing wasn’t invulnerable to everything.
Tentacles as thick as tree trunks trailed up to slap at him, like he was a gnat annoying the beast, but with the disparity in their size, it was easy enough for him to avoid being splattered across its stony surface. Still, the light continued to build, and Sylvas darted back to get a better angle to handle it. He had its attention, at least. So he didn’t need to worry about the eidolon blasting his whole army apart.
When the beam was unleashed from the big, smooth crystal, a quick tear in reality redirected it. Two tears really—one fixed in front of him, to catch the whole blast, the other a more complex piece of magic, a portal to Cold Storage with a fixed aperture on one side and a moveable one here in real-space. He pivoted that one wildly as the crackling purple beam burst through, tracing it across all the other eidolons throwing themselves at the shields of the main army.
Everywhere it hit was crystallized. Every eidolon, no matter how powerful or fearsome in its own aspect, was overwhelmed by the power of this one. Even here, there were few eidolons as outright powerful as the one he’d chosen to go toe to toe with, so they all succumbed, becoming jagged statuary.
By the time that it stopped blasting and the portals closed, the near side of the Empyrean army was blocked off from the Ardent reinforcements by a crystalline wall, and there were only a half-dozen major eidolons of note left. Of the lesser eidolons that had managed to escape the eye-beam’s crystallizing effects by running for their lives, the shikari hunting hounds that Sylvas had unleashed were making short work.
With one quick sonic scream, the crystal wall was shattered into pieces, giving the Ardent a clear route to rendezvous with the rest of the army. Then Sylvas turned his attention back to the towering monster that had made it all possible.
The scream hadn’t been directed its way, but that vast crystal eye was frosted over with a spiderweb pattern of tiny cracks all the same. It was almost too easy. This time, when he flung himself in through the rising forest of lashing tentacles, manifesting a blade, he didn’t make it of gravity, destruction, or even of flame. He roared out sonic mana, shaping his shout into a spike as he went, then plunging it deep into the crystal darkness of the geode eye.
It might have shrugged off the mightiest of blows before, but this time, the eidolon crumpled inwards around the wound. All its shattered parts began to slide in towards the breaking point. All its tentacles flailed wildly as the spike twisted into whatever it had that passed for a nervous system.
The solid mountain of stone that formed its body began to shift, collapsing slowly inwards towards the shattered eye. As it went, more and more tentacles seemed to come bursting forth from the ever-widening hole on the bottom, but they were only a threat by accident. There was no intention behind any movement they made. It was all just pain.
For the sake of the safety of everyone down below, Sylvas inverted the gravity beneath the dying monster, sending it floating upwards into the air, plucking it free of the planet and sending it skyward. Its death throes went on, tentacles spreading and flailing across the sky, but it was high enough within moments that there was nothing in reach for it to hurt. Sylvas turned his attention back to the battle around him, diving back in at the next of the Tier-7 eidolons still lingering on the far side of his now-united army.
The vault was in sight now. The vast obelisk of stone dominated the horizon. The ground between there and here was essentially clear. Along the sides of the path, there were bristling weapon emplacements and fortifications, mages packed into trenches, launching a relentless barrage at the Empyrean army, but down the center line, it was an open road.
Sylvas headed for the frontline, plunging through a hailstorm of spells and weapons fire to seek out their leaders. He made it almost halfway before he was slapped out of the sky.
He would have hit the ground hard, if he hadn’t been waiting all along for the enemy gravity mage to show themselves again. Instead, he stripped himself of all weight and came to a halt before the gravity spike could haul him all the way down. Beneath him, the troops of the Empyrean were flattened to the ground in a circle by the sudden increase in gravity, but Sylvas hung in the air, sifting through all the floes of mana until he found the place where gravity mana alone was being drawn.
The covenant gravity mage was there, in one of the nearest fortifications, a tower as big as a town that loomed over their approach. Darting out of the gravity spike’s reach, he let himself gain mass once more, then reached up with all of his personal gravity, killing his inversion spell, and then dragging at the massive object overhead, redirecting the angle of its fall.
The mountainous eidolon had almost reached the atmosphere’s edge before it died. Its corpse was rimed with frost that melted away in its meteoric descent. It whistled as it fell, like something out of a children’s tale. Whimsical.
What it did to the tower was not whimsical. The solid stone of the eidolon’s main body was heavy enough that as it fell, it fell first, while the tentacles trailed behind like the tail of a comet, at least until it made impact. Then they came splattering down across the whole enemy line, knocking down weapons emplacements, blocking trenches, and crushing everyone and everything that they came crashing down upon.
As for the tower itself, it was shattered. Had it been built instead of grown by magic, it probably would have been reduced to its component bricks, but instead, it became a cloud of dust and jagged fragments. The enemy gravity mage could not have teleported away with the interdiction in effect.
Sylvas didn’t even bother to search for them again.
