Chapter 40

“Emotion has no place on the battlefield, but a mage is no soldier, and it is their passions that ignite the magic within them. To separate the feeling part of the mage from the thinking part is to cripple both. Intuition is born of emotion. Decisions are made at the meeting point of the rational and irrational mind, and to discount either’s influence is to cripple oneself.”

—The Psychology of the Wizard, Remo Aurea

Amongst them they had not suffered a single injury, barring Ironeyes stubbing his toe on a doorframe. They had made it around almost half the station with barely a scratch, and their mana supplies remained high. Once again, Sylvas reminded himself that in any other circumstances he’d be full of joy at this state of affairs.

“I don’t trust it.” He admitted out loud.

Kaya nodded. “It’s too quiet. Too easy.”

“I am fairly certain that people wading their way through a veritable flood of reanimated corpses are not meant to comment upon how easily they are doing so.” Bael commented in passing as he moved into the next stretch. “Most likely all is as Sylvas predicted, and the inner circles of the station where the tactical objectives have been stowed away are where the defenses have been focused.”

Despite that reassurance, Sylvas called out to the squad before moving forward. “Everyone keep your eyes up, it feels like there’s another ambush coming.”

There was some groaning and complaining, but for the most part, everyone just kept on moving about their duties, sweeping the roof and alcoves for ambushers. There were none yet. That made a degree of sense, Sylvas supposed. If their own shuttle had been Malachai’s priority, placing more ambushers around it made the most sense. Though, how Malachai could have known which shuttle was his, he didn’t know.

The next door was already wheeling open by the time that Sylvas arrived at it. Luna and Orson standing in wait. After the relatively straightforward fights, it seemed like the big man was starting to calm a little, fall back into his usual routines. That was good.

The rest of the group were still sweeping the chamber, but given how slowly the mechanisms worked, it wasn’t exactly a problem. Besides, Sylvas was toying with his gravity sense as he went. Now that he knew the feel of bone, it was so much easier to detect, which meant that the alcoves no longer needed peered into and the roof didn’t need a light cast over it in case there was something lurking there. He knew that they were safe. Or at least, he thought they were, until he swept his senses forward and caught wind of what was beyond the next airlock.

“Get back!” He yelled, trying to be heard over the machinery and cast a spell to haul them out of the way. “Get back!”

He was too slow.

The sickle blades of the mantis armed skeletons so far had been just a little over arm’s length. The bones combined and refined into one single edged extension, joined to the construct’s elbow in place of a forearm. The ones that burst through the opening in the door were an order of magnitude bigger. Four of them slid through the gap before twisting out to the sides as the door was hauled open, metal and mechanisms all screaming in protest. Those mantis blades, they were as long as the doors themselves, and when they snapped back against the walls so that the thing coming through could gain enough traction to squeeze through the gap it had made, they sliced cleanly through everything. The control podium by the side of the door, and both Orson and Luna.

They were bisected at the waist, both tumbling and encased in the Crest’s protective bubble before anyone even knew what was happening. The screaming and bellows of everyone else did little to help Sylvas focus, but his Paradigm did what it was meant to. He silenced all thoughts for the fallen and turned his attention to the problem at hand.

The skeletal construct had a half dozen skulls all melded together into one head, hollow sockets staring out blankly in every direction, mouths twisted into entwined screams without sound. The massive bladed arms took up the majority of its mass, with only a normal human sized rib cage dangling behind, and tendrils trailing from that that made the whole thing look like it too had been bisected. The tendrils, Sylvas realized, were spinal columns. And what they lacked in stability, they made up for in speed of motion.  Every one of them might have struggled to shift the weight of the creature they’d been fused to, but they worked so fast that the incremental progress they produced was sufficient to have the thing barreling forward out of the gap it had made far faster than anything that size should have moved.

Kaya leapt for it. Her metal blades coming down, her angle of attack perfect, but it moved too swiftly, positioning its own claw to block her blade-armed swipe and deflecting her. A quick switch to second sight confirmed Sylvas’ suspicions that this was a far more complex piece of necromancy than they’d faced before. There were multiple nexus points were death mana coiled around the constructed body, no easy kill here.

Flinging itself forward out of the gap, the construct found its progress halted abruptly by the sudden barrage of magic from the rest of the squad. Those vast and ponderous bubbles of destruction that Gharia prized were flitting their way over. Ironeyes’ lightning bolts dashed off the solid plates of bone it wore as armor. Even Bael, typically withdrawn from the fighting, was casting something from behind Sylvas. As for him, he knew his job. He had to pin this monster down, keep everyone else out of reach. Extend the fight long enough that the ambush became a battle, and the battle became a victory.

Gravity spike was the obvious choice, not cast through the staff but just on the creature itself, dragging the mass of bones down to the floor and pinning it there. The only trouble was, even with all the abbreviations that he’d made it still took seconds to cast, seconds that they clearly did not have. Even as he was casting, he fragmented off another part of his mind not to retain a spell, but to do the stupid thing that he didn’t have enough time to think about doing. His body moved without him being consciously aware of any choice to move, the staff coming up and around his body to block the next lashing blow of the scythe claw. 

In anyone else’s hands, it would have been a pointless exercise in futility. The strength of the construct could have knocked any parry aside, but Sylvas staff was a part of his body, and his body could weigh however much he chose to make it weigh. When the fine razor of bone struck against the steel staff, it cracked.

Holding onto his staff where it was pinned to the ground with enough weight to make the deck buckle, Sylvas finished his casting.

The claws that had been raised up to strike another lethal blow hammered down. Clattering against the iron mesh beneath them. It tried to raise them again, only to have the weight of its own bones drag it back down once more. It looked like nothing more than a giant skeletal baby throwing a tantrum, battering its blades on the ground in a fit of rage.

The rest of the team needed no instruction. They rained death and destruction down on the construct as Sylvas kept it pinned in place. Though it bucked and it wriggled, it never mustered up enough strength to break free of his gravity spike, and once Sylvas was certain of that, he closed his eyes.

With this blinding point of gravity at the center of his gravity sense, it was impossible to see anything nearby, but the echoes coming back from every other part of the station were ideal. He overlayed them with his mental map of the Mournhold as the others fought on. 

It was less of a fight, and more of a slaughter now. The initial surprise had won this skeletal mess a victory, but with it pinned and powerless, all that really remained was the question of how much mana it would cost to take apart.

Not much, in the end. Kaya waded into the dense gravity and started severing key pieces by Bael’s direction, and the coils of green-black death mana soon found themselves uncoiling as the enchantments bound to the distorted corpse fell apart. He released his hold on the gravity when he was sure it was done, and his hold on his emotions.

There was time now that the fighting was over to feel his horror at seeing Luna and Orson carved in half. There was time to feel the bitter disappointment at knowing that a full third of their team was now gone. There was even time for some treacherous voice inside of Sylvas to remind him that the reason he’d assigned them the task of opening the doors was because they were essentially useless in any sort of high-level magical combat, so it was better to risk them in these situations. He didn’t feel particularly good about that last realization, but it did help him to temper his anger. It had been a well played out ambush, and he didn’t feel like they had been bested unfairly, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t angry as all hell that he’d lost two of his people.

Bael was checking on the fallen with a dispassionate gaze. “They’ll live.”

“I just wish they were alive now.” Sylvas grumbled, stepping his way carefully through the fallen skeleton to make his way into the next corridor.

“Perhaps it is for the best.” Bael opined. “After all, neither one of them was holding up too well under the pressure of…”

“Bael.” Sylvas drew a heavy breath. “I say this with all due respect.”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

The elf stared at him blankly, as if he genuinely thought that he was misunderstanding. “I beg your pardon?”

“Now isn’t the time to be giving performance reviews. We just lost two friends and have an uphill battle to fight. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize for now, yeah?” Sylvas didn’t want to do this right now, but he couldn’t have morale suffering any more than it was already going to.

“I was merely observing that of all the possible troops to lose, the least valuable would have been…” He drew up short when he saw Sylvas’ expression. “It was a tragedy that could not have been avoided, and we shall avenge them henceforth.”

Sylvas gave him a grateful nod, then pressed on. There were no ambushes or traps in the next stretch. It seemed that everything had been invested into one big trick. Sylvas tried to keep his mind clear of the anger that was bubbling there. He’d wanted to hit Bael when the elf started talking about their lost troops, and it would have made everything so much worse. He took a steadying breath as they reached the next door then moved to operate it himself. Kaya frowned. “Oi, stanzbuhr. Want to let me do that? I’ve got armor.”

He shook his head. “I’ve got it.”

The truth was, that without some reaction time, Kaya’s liquid metal armor was unlikely to stop another guillotining blade any more than his own one-armed uniform. Besides, he wanted to be as close to the door as possible.

Reaching out with his gravity sense, he could detect no great mass of bone beyond the airlock. He palmed the controls, brushing his fingers over the runic language of the Strife natives with a  weird familiarity after living amongst their ruins. Yet even as he was doing that, he kept his gravitational sense sharp, and it was soon rewarded with movement.

There was more waiting for them beyond the door.