Chapter 33

“Eidolon incursions are the most common cause of a planet’s death. Second is necromancy. Third, shikari outbreaks. From there, we have a massive drop-off in percentages until we reach natural disasters, magical accidents, prolonged internal warfare, and other fringe cases. The numbers are weighted so heavily in favor of the top three that if all others were ignored, statistically, there would be little difference.”

—Annihilation Strategies, The Veilbohr Institute

Kaya waded in alongside the undead, slashing and hacking at every shikari that came into reach, trying to force them back, to reverse their charge and buy the other casters the space they needed to do what they did best. 

In the grand melee, Sylvas’ powers could not be brought fully to bear. He could not unleash gravity without it affecting everyone and everything inside it, but that didn’t mean he was helpless. Calling his orbitals to his side, he began casting focused Inversions, firing them out with all the force that gravity could infuse into them. They shot from between his hooked fingers and burst through the armored skin of the shikari as if it were paper, deflecting off their bones, and tearing around inside of them before finally lodging in place. One after the other, he fired off each orbital, and not one of them did enough damage to the shikari it had struck to even slow it down, but that hadn’t been the purpose of the exercise. The orbitals were a part of him. He could make them move in exactly the same way that he made himself, or the ship, move. By will alone. With one raised hand, he picked up the shikari.

Torn from the ground, they hung helplessly in the air above the battle, flailing and reaching for one another, trying to find any purchase to get them into motion again. They were purely physical, without any magic, and thus, they were incapable of changing the laws of physics. Without traction, they could not move. Sylvas had all the time in the world to cast the Shear Arrow that would destroy them all, and in the final moment as he cast it, he slammed all of the orbitals together in the center, bringing all the shikari together to be destroyed as one, then exploding out in every direction as they were caught in the periphery of the shear. 

One rebounded off a wall before slamming into another shikari, and the rest found flesh without Sylvas even needing to guide them, embedding in the next crop of victims and hauling them up off the ground so he could repeat the process again. 

There were dozens of shikari in this horde—it must have represented the mass of all the ones brought to this world and released—but their claws could find no purchase on Kaya’s armor, and for every one of Malachai’s undead servitors that they slew, all the rest were empowered. He scavenged parts from their broken remains, tearing bones from the dead shikari just as readily as his own troops to form the next rank of his relentless army.

It was deafening. The screaming of the shikari. The ripping and rending of flesh. The crackling of magic reforming the dead into Malachai’s minions. The sound pounded at Sylvas. Thunderous. Like the blood in his ears.

When he cast his next shear arrow, it was not just the deep darkness of gravity magic running through it but blood. It dripped from it as it flew, and when it struck home, it wasn’t just with the cataclysmic slicing that he’d become accustomed to but an eruption of gore. The orbitals exploded out just as they had before, but so too did all of the blood that had been inside the shikari, ripped out of them with such vicious force that the veins came trailing after like ribbons. It swirled in the air above the battlefield, and as the orbitals sought out their next targets, the blood lashed out, too. 

The same way that he could move the orbitals, he could control the blood, and just as he could invest the orbitals or his body with all the weight and mass that he wanted, so too was he able to invest the blood with all the weight of the world and bring it raining down, piercing through the shikari. Not just the few that his orbitals could reach, but all of them. Each of them was a spike, piercing through them, and each one of them curved into a great hook that plunged back up into the underside of the shikari. He pulled, lifting them clean off the ground, all of them, every single one, whether they were hooked with blood or an orbital.

The lurching army of the dead came to an abrupt halt, and Kaya sliced through the empty air. All eyes turned upwards to the shikari, trapped in mid-air, bereft of any way to break free of Sylvas’ hold. He could have cast again, he could have torn them apart with another arrow and put an end to all of this, but Strife wasn’t finished with them yet.

Through the orbitals and the blood, he was connected to the blood of the shikari. That blood, it was his now. He tore the blood free, splattering it across the walls, across the floors, the dead, across all of them. The empty, desiccated remains of the shikari still twitched spasmodically for a moment, then they too fell. 

Kaya’s whoops of delight almost drowned out the disgusted noises that Malachai and Hector were making to be entirely bathed in the noxious green blood of the shikari. If Sylvas still had any control over it, he would have wiped them clean, but in that final explosion of death and destruction, his connection to his eidolon had been broken.

“Sorry.”

Kaya’s cackling broke only for long enough to say, “Sorry?! We were dead meat.”

Malachai spat the green blood away from his lips, then sighed. “Her assessment is correct. We could not have broken the stalemate in our favor.”

Hector wiped his face, laughing despite the situation. “So those were shikari.”

“Let’s never fight them again.” Kaya’s armor rippled away from her face, clearing her own head of the slime that the aliens had left behind. “Let’s never be on the same planet as them again.”

“Was that all of them?” Sylvas looked down upon the tangled mass of corpses that he’d made.

Hector closed his eyes and sniffed. “Far as I can tell, that’s them all. If there are more hiding out or locked away, they’re shrouded well enough I can’t get through it.”

Sylvas took a steadying breath. “If they’re out there, we’ll find them and put them down.”

Hector’s laughter began trailing off. “You see why I said they’re a threat?”

Malachai had found a handkerchief somewhere about his person and was wiping the worst of the blood off his face. “They were formidable, though I suspect that now we have a better idea of their capabilities, we will be able to handle them.”

“I can pin them, and you can scythe them.” Sylvas nodded his agreement.

“And I’ll twiddle my thumbs,” Kaya complained loudly.

Hector held up his hands. “If we have a better way to tackle them, we should take it. I can heal from just about anything, and I don’t ever want to fight them again.”

With a nod, Malachai took up his position beside Sylvas, and they headed past the charnel house that they’d made. The necromancer took a moment to drag the bones from the fallen monsters to rebuild those of his bone-constructs that had fallen and to build some fresh ones that looked terrifying even by his usual standards. A giant amalgamation of human bones was threatening and unsettling, but the things that got pulled together from the remains of the shikari were haunting just to look at, like some sculpture made by a fevered mind. The bones bore no resemblance to those of a human, and the way that they had to be put together to form functional bodies mashed jawbones and teeth hard against eerily elongated limb bones and other forms that Sylvas couldn’t even begin to identify.

They moved forward in lockstep, both extending their unique senses ahead of them as far as they could, Sylvas pulsing gravity every few steps to develop as wide a map of the facility as he could and detect anything resembling enemy movements as early as possible.

It took them nearly three hours to clear the entire complex. It was vast, dug three layers deep into the planet’s surface, and everywhere that they went, they found the trail of destruction left behind by the shikari. Dead people, and not even a sign that one of the monsters had been injured. Eventually, they uncovered the menagerie where those wild things had been kept stowed away, and it made the defenses of the rest of the base look like a joke. Walls lined with enchanted metalwork rent with scratches and cuts from the shikari’s testing attempts to break loose. Doors as thick as the Folly, with three separate enchantments requiring activation simultaneously to open them. A complex gating system so that individual shikari could be placed into the storage or removed without the risk of all of them breaking loose. Layers upon layers of spells to keep them docile, immobile, and weak. The moment that they’d cracked open that main door, it had all been for nothing. Here was where the blood trail started. The Consortium’s sacrificial lamb, too slow to get away after opening the door. The other two looked to have teleported away, so there was still hope of finding some hidden bunker with living people, but as they continued their search, that hope grew dimmer. There was a shelter, but the door had been twisted off its hinges by the combined strength of the shikari, and inside what had been people looked more like soup.

“Don’t think they’ll be answering any questions.” Kaya stepped daintily over a piece of ribcage.

Malachai squatted down to retrieve a skull from the mess. It fell in half as he lifted it, and its contents tumbled out. “I would not enjoy attempting to commune with anyone who died so violent a death.”

“Then let’s hope we’ve got a better option somewhere in this place.” Hector had waded into the panic room and was searching with his boot for something on the ground. “These were the ones the Consortium wanted to survive if this place was attacked, which means they were the ones in charge…”

His foot hit something solid, and he bent over to pluck a slate out of the slush. “…Excellent.” 

It took a few wipes before he could see the slate clearly, and then only a few seconds for him to groan. “They wiped it.”

He tossed it aside and began searching through the pile of the dead once more, but Sylvas picked his way over to where the wiped slate had landed, shook off the blood and hair clinging to it, and started casting. It took just a few seconds of adjustments before a sizable chunk of the information the slate had once contained flooded back across its surface, flying by far too fast for any normal person to read it but at exactly the pace he needed for it to be absorbed by his perfect memory and fed through to Mira for analysis.

Distantly, Sylvas heard another groan from Hector. “Wiped again.”

Mira flooded Sylvas’ consciousness with all the relevant information. “The shikari were found on Cantobus 3—another pastoral world. The vault on the planet was unusually well-preserved and showed signs of Aion defenses that might have interfered with an attempt to scoop it, so they deployed a freelance archaeologist to scope it out and crack the system.” 

Oh, you should take a look at her picture when you’re done pretending you learned all the things I’m telling you. She’s pretty. Probably dead, obviously, but very pretty.

“Once she’d opened the vault chamber, the shikari inside attacked. The Consortium withdrew with these first samples captured, and then… nothing. They planned to go back, locate the queen, and extract her so they’d have an infinite supply of shikari, but the next ship they sent out went out of contact. That was about a week back, and they haven’t deployed anyone else yet.”

“The slate was blank!” Hector exclaimed, wading back over and snatching it out of Sylvas’ hand. “They wiped it. How did you…”

He stared down at the information scrolling over the slate in dismay. “How does a war covenant or a gravity affinity let you do that?”

“Oh, undoing a wipe? I taught myself how to restore fragments the second time I was in the Ardent brig, and I needed something to read. They should have destroyed the things instead.”

Hector gawked at him for a moment, a moment of vulnerability that let Kaya jump up and snatch the slate out of his hands. 

“Got enough of everything on here! Shipping manifests. Black markets. Regular clients. If we can restore a few of the other slates…correlate them between one another…we’ll have the whole Consortium by the short hairs here. They’ll done!” She crowed excitedly.

“So I will not need to commune with…” Malachai trailed off.

“Not unless you want to?” Sylvas had a hard time getting a read on the man’s mood.

“I very much did not wish to relive their final moments, no.”

There was a momentary pause, and then Sylvas mustered a smile. “Next stop, Cantobus 3?”