Chapter 44

“No matter how good you are. No matter how hard you train. Eventually you will hit the wall. This isn’t through any fault of yours. Circumstances and ability very rarely align, and even less so in combat.”

—Squad Tactics, Fal’Vaelith

“Plan? What do you mean plan? There are two steps left.” Gharia countered before counting off the steps on her clawed hand. “One: Find necromancer. Two: Kick ass.”

“There’s more than just that. We need to get these historical documents out of harm’s way. We need to get our secondary objective returned to the shuttle.” Sylvas didn’t add that they needed them returned so that even if they all died in their attempt on the primary objective, they would still be able to salvage some degree of victory. “And I think you should be the one to carry them.”

“Excuse you?” The najash levelled her glare at him. “I’m here to fight.”

“With your flight spell, you can get back to the shuttle faster than any of us and deliver the package.”

“Our shuttle got launched into space, remember?”

“There’s another Ardent shuttle in the bay we passed.”

“Why are you doing this? Is this because of the eggs?”

“It isn’t because of the eggs. That was funny.” Sylvas chuckled as he leaned in closer, then delivered the bad news, he knew she wouldn’t want to hear. “It’s because you’re out of mana.”

She jerked back like she’d been burned. “I am not—”

“Gharia, I know.” He cut her off.

With a growl, she grabbed him by the front of his jacket. “You didn’t scry me, how could you know that—”

“I can keep track.” Sylvas cut her off again with a sigh. “Perfect memory, remember?”

She glanced furtively around the others, as if looking for support, but they weren’t going to give it to her. A mage without mana was like a fish without water. That was why her voice trembled when she whispered, “I’ve still got enough.”

“For a flight spell back to the shuttle, securing us both a victory, and a valuable archaeological find.” Sylvas tried to ease her into the idea, but she was resistant.

“I can fight.” If she had been a mammal species, Sylvas felt like there would have been tears in her eyes. As it was, both sets of her eyelids kept flickering. “I’m not useless.”

“Nobody is saying you can’t. Nobody is saying you are.” He took a chance and pulled her into a hug. “But the thing that you can do right now that would help us the most.”

She rested her chin on his shoulder and grumbled. “I really hate it when you’re right and you know you’re right, you know that? Your face, it gets all… I hate it.”

“We all hate his stupid face.” Kaya piped up.

“Thank you, Kaya.” Sylvas’ dry response made Gharia chuckle away whatever was left of her sorrows.

“Alright, back the way we came, fast as I can move.” She held out a hand, and somewhat reluctantly Bael passed over his book-bag.

She looked around them for a moment, like she was memorizing their faces, then she took off.

“Good.” Sylvas took a long moment to be sure that she was out of earshot, then turned to everyone else. “I have an idea, but I wanted to put it to the least reckless of us.”

“Perhaps you should have dispatched Kaya.” Bael replied at the same moment Kaya pointedly looked at Sylvas and said, “but you’re still here?”

He shook his head at the pair and closed his eyes, feeling his senses spread out through the station, the map that they’d constructed, overlayed with what he’d managed to see on the soulstone nexus, and what information his gravity sense had gathered in the last spike. “I have a route that will let us avoid whatever defenses have been raised and get a clean shot at the core.”

The dwarves looked delighted at the prospect, but Bael remained more skeptical.  “That sounds far too good to be true.”

“Well, it will involve moving through a section of the citadel that isn’t strictly… right.”

“In what manner is it not right?” Bael’s eyebrow arched.

“It doesn’t show on any of the maps.”

Bael fixed him with a dull stare. “Is it perhaps on the outside of the station? The very first thing that we were advised to…”

“It’s still inside, but I think it is maybe a utility vent or… I don’t know. But I can feel it. We can access it through the chamber down there, and it runs the full length of the station, right to the core, as far as I can tell.

“And the catch?” Kaya asked.

“I don’t think its strictly meant for people.”

Bael pinched the bridge of his nose. “So it is unlikely to have lights, life support or any of the creature comforts to which we are accustomed?”

“Fine by me.” Ironeyes was quick to volunteer himself. “Nice tunnel sounds just like home.”

Kaya conceded the point with a nod to Ironeyes.

That was two votes, but Sylvas didn’t want to push the issue of Bael objected strongly enough. The elf wilted a little. “I’m going to get very dirty down there, won’t I?”

“Almost definitely.” Sylvas grinned.

It was short work for Kaya to remove one of the bookshelves where it covered the access panel, and from there, it took barely a few minutes for them all to slip down into the dark passageway. Whether it was the natural state of affairs or a result of Abbas’ casting above, the tunnel was filled almost to Kaya’s waist with run-off water, swirling where light shone through the grated roof above them with oil slicked across the top in a rainbow. It was stagnant, and down here without the air processers running the smell swiftly became unpleasant, but despite it all, it seemed that Bael could not be shut up. “Those books are an incredible find. I only had a chance to scan through some of the diaries as I was organizing them by date, but they seemed to depict the final days of civilization upon strife. The choices made in a last ditch effort to hold back the Eidolons. Very moving stuff.”

“Sounds it.” Sylvas was paying more attention to extending his senses out ahead of them in the dark. It was all very well being able to move around blind back on Strife, but up here the water hid detritus that the shifting weights and volumes seemed to deliberately mask, so he was constantly stubbing his toes on invisible impediments.

“The Mournhold for instance, seems to have been the demesne of a certain archmage who determined that necromancy was a viable solution to the eidolon problem.” Bael’s chatter was wearing on the dwarves, Sylvas could tell from their hunched shoulders, but there wasn’t really a polite way to ask him to shut up. “Better the fiend you know, or some such. This entire station was built to his specifications, built to operate using death affinity mana and powered by it.”

That was actually quite interesting, and Sylvas had a follow up question, but he never got the opportunity to voice it, because a skeletal hand locked shut around his ankle and dragged him under. Stagnant water streamed up his nose, flooded his mouth. He couldn’t cast because he couldn’t speak and he couldn’t fight because he had no traction. The skeleton latched onto his leg dragged him along the bottom of the tunnel, battering him against the jagged, rusted metal as he went, only stopping when he managed to catch hold of one eroded panel and let it dig into his flesh until it met bone. Before he could block the impulse, he cried out in pain, swallowing a lungful of the vile water. That made him cough, that made him take on more water. The skeleton was clawing its way slowly up his leg. The staff in his hand was little more than a hinderance in this total darkness with no up or down. Reaching out, he seized control of his orbitals and hammered them home into the skeleton, shattering skull and bones, splattering him with the pieces of mummified flesh still clinging to the remains. He surged up then, back to the surface just inches away, lungs on fire.

Bursting out of the water, he caught the briefest glimpse of everyone else. The ambushing skeletons had less luck dragging Kaya and Ironeyes under, and now that she’d armored herself she was moving sluggishly but relentlessly through the dead. Ironeyes couldn’t bring his magic to bear without electrocuting all of them, but he’d drawn a hammer from somewhere, and was laying into the skeletons with a passion.

Bael was nowhere to be seen. Sylvas had brought him down here, into the filth and the darkness, without so much as an apology, and now the man was gone. He reached out with his gravity sense. He had to find him. Had to save him before he drowned. Sylvas himself was still choking up mouthfuls of water, even as he searched.

Beneath the surface of the water, further back along the corridor, there was a concussion. A great blooping bubble rose up, and Sylvas took off running towards it, hoping that it was his friend and not some antique machinery throwing a fit. 

The elf rose from amidst the bubble, hair perfectly lacquered back by the stagnant water and uniform somehow looking even more fashionable. There was a skull with hair still clinging to its top in his hand, which he tossed aside almost absent mindedly.

“It seems that the undead defenders of the citadel are not entirely new.” He informed Sylvas as he approached. “These ones appear to be remnants from the previous owners. I do wonder how many of those bodies being manipulated up above were also natives of Strife, left here to putrefy or… mummify as the case may be.”

“We can write a very interesting paper about it when we get home.” He caught hold of Bael and started dragging him along. “Can we go save the dwarves now?”

“If we must.” Bael answered with his usual dryness despite being literally drenched with water.

Sylvas cast no spells in such close proximity to his friends. It would have been too dangerous. That was why it had mattered so much that when it came to fighting hand to hand, he was capable. His staff swung with such an impossible weight that reality warped and curved around it and tore through the skeletons with such force that they shattered to dust. His orbitals zipped through the air, deflecting clawed hands reaching for his friends, cracking off skulls and wrists and spines and keeping the enemy on the back heel. Without the element of surprise or any of the modifications that Malachai had made to the bodies in the upper levels, they actually made quick work of the skeletons. It was brutal close quarters hand to hand fighting, but it also wasn’t nearly as dangerous as it had first seemed. Between the four of them, they made short work of the remaining skeletons.

Sylvas waded forward from then on, sweeping his staff back and forth and taking the time to crush anything that felt too skeletal. The few that he missed, Kaya was more than happy to lay into with her own bladed arms.

In barely any time compared to moving across the higher levels, carefully divided up for maximum defensibility, they arrived near where Sylvas had judged the core to be. There could be no doubt in his or anyone else’s mind that the worldsoul shard hung above them, not when it was radiating death aspect mana so potently that they could almost hear their own death echoing in every heartbeat.

The four of them gathered around. “This is the primary objective, it is going to be the most heavily defended part of the station. There is no grand strategy here, we have no idea what we’re going to be facing. If we need to split up and tackle separate targets, we will. If we need to fight together as one, we will.”

“Whatever comes, we’ll be ready.” Ironeyes assured him.

They took a step apart, then inhaled one last lungful of the putrid air. “Kaya, take us up.”