Chapter 32

“While one might consider a creature without magic to be ill-equipped to face a world in which magic exists, one would be grossly underestimating the limitations of the physical. Magic allows us to go beyond our own limitations, but that is in no small part because our limitations are set so far short of the actual possibilities. How strong can a living creature become if it spent all its days on a planet with the heaviest gravity? How fast can it become, when it relies on instinct and nerve bundles instead of rational thought? Imagine those limitations, and then wonder why it is that we cannot approach them without altering the rules of existence, while the shikari hit the natural maximum for every category from the moment that they are birthed. In a universe without magic, they would have annihilated all life already. It is only through cheating reality itself that we are allowed to persist.”

—Shikari Dream in Red, Olivan Veilbohr

Hector had been right about their speed. Sylvas hadn’t even seen them rounding the corner before they struck. Now that they were through the shield, all bets were off. Kaya moved with all her usual speed to intercept the first bounding beast, only for it to slip right by before she could bring her arm-blade down on it. Sylvas had to hit it with a direct blast of mana to knock it away from him, or the massive, hooked teeth lining the thing’s jaws would have been in him.

He took flight as he cast his next spell to avoid the thing’s follow-up pounce, launching himself into the air and deploying his orbitals from cold storage. The shikari moved from its failed pounce to the wall in a single bound, then launched itself right after him. Only one of the orbitals intercepting it knocked it off course and kept him out of reach of its claws. 

Claws and teeth were the predominant traits on display. There was leathery, studded skin-like armor in some places, fur in others, but the claws and teeth seemed to be mostly reptilian with blood grooves and ragged edges. Each of the shikari they faced was bigger than a grown man—one that was trying to get around Kaya was twice the size of that. There didn’t seem to be any logic to how big they were, or how they were composed, like they were a randomized nightmare of different animals and parts meshed together.

The pouncing shikari that he hit curled around the impact, latching a paw around the hovering orbital, and used it as an anchor point to throw itself after him again. There was no part of this monster that wasn’t predatory. Every movement it made, every thought in its head, brought it closer to the kill.

Sylvas reached for Strife, trying to summon it back up, the claws, the blood, the power that it could grant him, but he’d gone to such efforts to calm it earlier that now it was just beyond his reach. He increased his density to the point that space began to curve in around him and did his best to block the incoming blow.

Yet even so, he was still slapped to the ground by the shikari’s massive paw, the claws tearing through armor and cloth but not quite managing to penetrate through skin as dense as he could make it. The impact of the blow knocked all the air out of his lungs, and the inevitable follow-up impact of the ground sent pain ringing through him. It had been a long time since he’d been hit hard enough to hurt.

The shikari that had hit him carried on its course, rebounding off the other wall of the corridor just above head height, twisting and coiling around itself, and then launching right back at him again.

Another push of raw mana stopped it in mid-air despite the force it had launched itself with. So long as Sylvas fought it on his terms instead of its, he could win. Or at least, he could have, if there was only one of them to fight.

Kaya was being knocked around like a ragdoll by the shikari she’d tried to take on head-on, and the big one had come bounding right around her to head for Sylvas, where he lay prone. There was only time for one spell before both of his hunters launched themselves at their prey once more, but he knew just the one to cast.

Inversion turned the gravity in the tunnel sideways. The wall that Sylvas’ original foe had been launched towards now became down, and the other, larger shikari had no time to account for everything suddenly shifting sideways in its own charge, so it slid across to collide with its friend. 

Once more, Sylvas reached for Strife and was rebuffed. It was coiled up tightly in the dark heart of him, snarling at the attention, denying him anything. It was an eidolon of war, and antagonism, and it showed that in its attitude.

Kaya slammed her heel down, ramming a spike of metal into what had now become the wall of the tunnel, and the monster she was fighting fell away from her, too. She launched one of her bladed arms after it, skewering it through the meeting point between fur and scales and drawing literal first blood in this clash. It oozed thick and green out of the wound, sizzling and clotting around the blade still lodged inside it. 

She took a breath, manifested more metal, a fresh blade to match the one that had already been lodged inside her foe, and then she retracted her heel, letting gravity drop her down into the writhing, snarling mass of shikari.

Sylvas did not fall because gravity had no hold on him except when he wanted it to, but he did cast. With Kaya in the melee, he couldn’t afford to launch another one of his Gravity Shear blades into the mass of them, but he could still fight. A single focused gravity spike was delivered into the head of the largest of the shikari, crushing whatever was inside, mangling whatever passed for brains in its elongated skull. It jerked spasmodically, perhaps from the destruction of its brain, or perhaps from Kaya’s blades slicing into its flank, but it did not fall. It did not die. The claws still flexed, and it still twisted to follow Kaya’s movement, jaws scratching and shrieking over her armor as it tried to find purchase. The head was caved in above those jaws, but still, it fought.

Hector had not been idle through all this fighting. More of the startling green that he’d formed his shield out of sprang from his hands. Barbed darts of life mana turned to venom and acid launched one after the other, as fast as he could think them into being, a constant stream of them hitting into the thick hides of the shikari and embedding. Their blood and his venom looked indistinguishable to Sylvas’ eyes, but they did seem to be slowing as these spikes struck them. Even if it was only a little, only just enough that Sylvas could actually follow their motion with his eyes.

The inversion lapsed at the same moment Sylvas moved on to casting his next spell, but with their claws hooked into the concrete, and her blades thrust into them, neither the shikari nor Kaya fell. They were still stuck up there, suspended against the wall in the midst of their brawl.

Sylvas launched himself into the fray. Flying straight for the shikari that he should already have killed by all rights, locking his fingers into its fur, and then increasing his own weight far beyond the limits of anything that should have existed on the exoplanet. The fur tore, ripped from the shikari’s hide, but he dug his fingers in, catching on the thick ridges beneath the surface of the skin, hooking them to get a grip as he had on Hector’s ribs. He pulled the beast off the wall, away from Kaya and down to the ground. When he hit, he was so heavy it shattered the concrete in a web pattern beneath his feet, but he was glad of the stability that weight brought him. The shikari in his hands bucked and writhed to get free of the tick clinging to its back.

A tick that was now standing beneath it, holding its full weight overhead.

The shikari snapped at him, twisting and turning to get at its captor, but through it all, Sylvas held firm, casting as he stood, channeling mana through his channels to form the spellform that he needed inside of the shikari. He cast a focused gravity shear, a blade of raw gravity inside the thing. Then he let it drop, and it fell in two neat halves to either side of him around that blade.

The front half of the shikari, with its crushed brain, finally came to a stop, but the rear section still pawed blindly at the concrete, raking it with its claws. Sylvas was so shocked at its ongoing survival that he almost missed the blur of motion as one of the other monsters launched itself away from Kaya towards him.

Pouring more mana into the shear blade, Sylvas raised it to meet the monster’s leap. It paid his tiny weapon no heed, expecting it to rebound off its hide or deal superficial cuts like Kaya’s blades had done. It did not know what hit it as the blade bisected it down its center line. Vertebrae showered down around Sylvas as he bored through the length of it and was doused in its toxic blood.

With a flick of his sword and a pulse of gravity, he wiped himself clean, then moved in once more to face the last of the trio that had intercepted them. Kaya was slowing herself, exhausted after being battered and pummeled from all sides, her blades just a little slower than they needed to be to parry each testing swipe. She saw Sylvas approaching and called out, “No! This one is mine.”

Sylvas slowed his approach, watching as she was caught a stray blow with the shikari’s clubbed tail as it spun around to rebound off the wall and pounce at her again. She staggered, and Sylvas had to ask, “Really?”

“No, not really!” There was a hysterical edge to Kaya’s laughter. “Kill it in the culgh!”

Launching the shear from where it hovered beside his palm took just a moment of clever spellwork to incorporate the arcane arrow, and then it sliced cleanly through the shikari, behind its first set of legs. The rear half tumbled sideways, but the front carried on to be impaled on Kaya’s upheld blades, the forelimbs going limp as its brain stopped functioning. With a heave, she cast it aside and then let out a whoop of victory.

“Too soon to celebrate,” Hector declared as he stepped up beside them. “There are more coming. Lots more.”

Sylvas flung himself forward to get a clear line of sight along the corridor, and he saw the swarm approaching with the inevitability of a falling star. There was not enough room along the floor for the sheer number of shikari, so they had mounted the roof and the walls, digging claws into solid concrete for traction and bounding towards them at such a speed that they had only a moment before they arrived. Sylvas threw up his hands and cast a full Gravity Shear. Stretching it from one side of the corridor to the other, even though it immediately began tearing through the concrete.

The shikari hit it with an unstoppable force, every one of them launching at it from their own angle of attack, and if it had been any of the others raising a shield to hold the horde back, it would have been shattered, but the Gravity Shear did not try to confront the forces arrayed against it, it displaced them. The shikari hit the surface expecting a foe to vanquish and instead found themselves carried off in a current. They slid along the curvature of the shear, colliding with one another as they all scrabbled to find purchase on a surface that wasn’t there at all. Every one of them was sliding towards the walls where they began to heap, a circle of monsters, surrounding the now-clear view down the corridor.

As Hector had said, they were smarter than they had any right to be. The concrete around the walls was already crumbling from contact with the shear, and the shikari set to digging into that broken surface with gusto, tearing at the walls, the roof, and the floor. Every angle that they’d been forced to, they were now trying to attack from, working their way slowly but inevitably through the solid concrete walls to get around the shield.

Sylvas held it steady because there was nothing else that he could do other than let them loose to tear through him and his friends, but he knew it was only a matter of time until they found a way around and came pouring through.

Acid sluiced past him, a torrent of it cast from Hector’s hands, flung with enough force to get to the far side of the shear before the gravity caught it. It washed over the domed surface, splashing up against the distant shores of the shikari and starting to eat through them with an acrid smell that made Sylvas’ stomach turn.

They slowly dug their way through the concrete, Hector slowly dissolved his way through them, and in the slowest-paced race to victory that Sylvas could conceive of, it was hard to guess who would be the victor. As they’d been warned, the shikari healed almost as fast as they were hurt. When one managed to pull part of itself out of the suspended acid bath, it would begin restoring its natural shape almost immediately, but by then some other part of it was being seared off, and it would have to shift again or risk losing some other vital part.

I’m still running the calculations, but I don’t think this works.

Sylvas could see the shikari edging closer to death, pinned against the walls, being washed over by the steady flow of acid. He could see them slowly being eaten away as it built up around the periphery of the shear. “It’s working.”

We haven’t accounted for the other factor.

Sylvas tried to guess what she meant at the same time as the acid-weakened concrete gave way entirely everywhere that the shikari had been digging. He had to launch himself up off the floor to avoid the wave of acid now coming their way and dive back, too, as his broken concentration let the shear fall and the burnt and mangled shikari come tumbling through.

With a simple casting, Hector neutralized all of his own acid and began a fresh barrage of barbed shots into the charging monsters, but it wasn’t going to be enough to slow them, let alone stop them. Sylvas pushed with raw mana, as widely and as hard as he could muster, but it only stalled their approach for a moment before they began pressing forward again. Kaya stepped up in between the two men, readying her blades, banging them together, and shouting out a challenge to the beasts that needed no invitation to attack.

And then Malachai arrived. “Drive them back!”

He did not come alone. All of the dead guards that had been left heaped up behind them came with him. Those that were in close to one piece shambled forward with false life implanted in them by his necromancy. Those that had been in too many pieces to count recombined into hulking constructs of flesh and bone, big enough to match the smaller shikari on even ground.

The dead lumbered past, meeting the shikari charge. If they had been flesh and blood alone, it would have been a catastrophic slaughter, but Malachai’s magic infused them with far more strength than they’d had in life, and while he may not have had the boundless mana of Hector, he did have all the death that had just occurred on this world to draw upon.

Two armies collided in front of Sylvas’ eyes, and inside him, he finally felt the wolf began to stir.