210 – You’re in the Way
A/N: Hello! It's been a while. Where did I go? A few places. Italy for a family vacation, Denver for LitRPG Con, and then out to In 'n' Out a few times...
Yeah, sorry about disappearing. I don't really have any excuses. I tend to forget about NovelFire, and then when I remember, I have multiple chapters to upload, which is mildly tedious and annoying, so I go "alright, I'll do it later" and then forget about it again.
Anyway, I will be disappearing again next week, since I will be moving. Hopefully I'll be back. Regardless, I will be updating properly until then, because I need to stub book 4 on the 8th, which means I need to have the chapters out here, at least for a little while. I'll also have the .epub up for free on my Patreon as soon as the final B4 chapter goes live on the 4th of August.
Despite Emmett’s words, Elise did not leave immediately. Instead, she stayed rooted in place in stunned silence as armored knights poured into the room with Emmett at the rear. For a split second, she wondered if it was already over, as no ordinary person could have survived what happened to Firona. But, of course, Firona was far from ordinary, and she was no person.
Emmett and the armored men with him were already preparing spells and other attacks when the door disappeared from Elise’s vision. One second, it was there, and the next second, there was an explosion to her left, and one of the armored men had disappeared through a hole in the wall, while another was left without a left arm.
Firona was standing where the door had been with her clothes tattered and a drop of black blood welling from a small cut in her forehead, but she was otherwise unharmed. She also looked quite angry.
At once, half a dozen powerful beams of mana struck her, and four of the surviving men rushed toward her, weapons drawn. She ducked under two of the beams, and erected a mana barrier to block the other four. It shattered after a moment, but not before weakening the beams enough that they broke harmlessly on her skin.
Meanwhile, as if the beams weren’t even there, she engaged the melee fighters. There were two in front wielding shields and maces, and two behind holding longer spears. Firona empowered a fist with enough mana to overwhelm Elise’s entire mana pool a dozen times over and slammed it into one of the shields, seeming shocked when the shieldbearer handled the blow without issue.
For the two maces, she created small shields, similar to the one she used for the beams, stopping their momentum just enough to turn them ineffective, and for the spears, she used a new defensive Skill. It happened too quickly for Elise to fully register, but it seemed like she empowered her skin, because when the spears struck her abdomen, they failed to punch through, instead sliding to the side, leaving faint lines that healed almost instantly.
Having learned her lesson with her first attack, she did not try to punch through the shield this time, instead wrenching it downward as her eyes began to glow. The ground below her turned to mud, pulling her downward, but her grip remained tight, pulling the shield with her, and when white-hot beams of mana emitted from her eyes, Elise heard a sickening pop as the shield bearer stumbled backward, holding a hand over what had once been his eyes.
Despite the injury, however, the mud trap was still effective, and the man was not completely crippled. A moment later attacks were pouring in on the demoness from all sides, and while she was powerful, she was not invincible. Wounds began to appear on her skin, and for the second time in as many seconds, Elise wondered if perhaps they had things under control.
Then, Firona shouted, and the air around her detonated, sending everyone else in the ground stumbling backward. Elise herself nearly fell to the ground as her chair fell backward, and she barely managed to keep her feet. When she righted herself, the first thing she saw was Firona glaring at her, and at that moment Elise realized she had made a mistake.
At that moment, a rough hand grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the door as the battle resumed around Firona. She looked up to see a woman in black armor shielding her while escorting her out.
“Wait!” said Elise, wrenching her arm free. “I can help.”
“My orders are to get you out,” said the woman, grabbing Elise’s arm again.
“Hold on!”
Elise pulled free again, much to the surprise of the woman, who seemed confused why her grip was so weak. Elise ignored her, though, instead turning back to the battle. Firona was holding the severed arm of the blinded shieldbearer in one hand, and prepared to swing it at the other. Her clothes were almost fully destroyed, and her body was covered in small wounds, but none were critical, and all were healing quickly.
Elise and Firona locked eyes for the briefest moment as Firona made her next attack. Elise tried to interrupt the attack, connecting with {Whisper} so she could use {Power Word Kill}, but the Skill failed. Firona had some kind of mental defense up that blocked even innocuous Skills. The shield still strapped to the severed arm slammed into the other shieldbearer, forcing him to take a step back.
The woman tried to grab Elise’s arm again, but Elise just shook her off, still focusing on Firona. She tried another mental attack, this one more of a brute force attempt with {Forced Feeling}. After a brief mental struggle, she managed to push past Firona’s defenses, filling her mind with pain. It didn’t do much, but it did make the demoness flinch, and that brief flinch was just enough that she failed to get her defenses up in time to block the spear aimed at her side.
The spear did not pierce all the way through, but it penetrated at least a couple inches, making it the first serious wound they had dealt her. The success seemed to boost the morale of the humans, and despite their injured comrades, they redoubled their efforts, forcing Firona back on the defensive.
Elise assisted where she could, battering down Firona’s mental defenses at inopportune times, making her hesitate and miss openings, and as the seconds passed, her wounds grew more numerous and more serious.
It’s working! thought Elise.
As if the demoness could hear her, the next moment, she repeated the maneuver from earlier, sending everyone in the room flying backward with a wave of mana. The spearman between Firona and Elise flew backward, slamming into Elise and sending them both backward into the wall. The spearman was back on his feet in an instant, but Elise was slow to rise, having hit her head on the wall.
“What are you still doing here!”
Elise flinched at the voice shouting in her ear and looked to the side to see Emmett.
“You’re in the way!” he said. “Get out! Now!”
“But–!”
“I have things handled!”
“I can help!”
“No! You’re just getting in the way!”
“No I wasn’t!”
“Yes! You were!”
Emmett suddenly moved his arm forward, and Elise flinched, thinking he was about to slap her. Instead, he clamped his hand down on her temple, and all at once a flood of information entered her head. It was disjointed, and she didn’t understand it all fully, but she understood enough to be horrified.
Amongst all the information Emmett had sent, three pieces stood out. First was that he did indeed have a plan, and it was a plan that required her to be gone. Her mental attacks had been somewhat useful, but she had no way to properly defend herself from an enemy of Firona’s caliber.
The second was that this was not Firona’s true form. Any damage they did to it until she fully revealed herself was wasted, so while her mental attacks had been somewhat useful, they were ultimately meaningless.
The third, and most worrying, was what would come next. With Firona’s true form revealed, Emmett would activate a few contingencies, and when those went off, Firona would reach the point of desperation that would force her to activate her Domain. And if she managed to do that while Elise was still inside, Elise would die.
“I– I’m sorry!” she said.
“Just go!”
Emmett pulled her aside and shoved her toward the door. Elise was still woozy from hitting her head, and nearly tripped over her own feet, but she made it out, and soon activated her wings to fly down the hallway.
She thought about summoning her scroll to escape, but now that she was out and not in immediate danger, she was hesitant. She had not said goodbye to anyone. She wanted to see the Grays. She wanted to check on Ostra. She wanted to contact Oberon. If she just got out, she might be able to go see someone, if only for a few seconds before she had to go. There was no way to tell where the scroll would bring her, and she didn’t want to use it just yet.
The sounds of battle faded behind her as she moved through the facility. She wasn’t entirely sure where she was, but the path to the exit was clearly marked, and there seemed to be no one else present, so it did not take long before she turned a corner to see a doorway with a window that perfectly framed the moon outside.
Right at that moment, the entire facility shook, and she heard a distant boom from the direction she had come from. Not wanting to find out what that had been, Elise increased her speed further, using {Mana Burst} to blast the door open as she flew out into the open air. However, a few seconds later, she slowed to a halt, and let out a small laugh.
She was not in Jelor City. She didn’t know why she ever assumed they were. Emmett had clearly been planning to fight Firona here. There was no way he would do it in the city.
The location he had chosen was instead somewhere in a mountain range. The door she had flown out of was at the end of a winding mountain path leading off far into the distance. It did not look like the mountains near Everspring, and Elise didn’t know enough about geography to make any kind of guess as to where she actually was. She had teleported in. This could have been anywhere.
Another explosion shook her from her dark amusement. She couldn’t stay here, and she no longer had any reason not to use the scroll. But as she took it out of Astrid’s Star, she hesitated once more.
She was filled with regret. She had done nothing. She was weak. She was in the way. Emmett and the other knights were fighting for their lives against a 9th Tier demon, and she was useless. Even the one thing she was good at wasn’t enough.
And the worst part was, she knew that Firona wasn’t even that strong. Not relative to the strongest the world had to offer, at least. Elise had seen true power. She had seen the sealed heroes, and the serpent that endangered even them, and then Irylax who had effortlessly slain the serpent. Firona was the bottom rung of a very tall ladder, but Elise couldn’t even get close to reaching that.
I need to get stronger.
She looked down at the scroll as another explosion shook the mountainside. As reluctant as she was to use it, the scroll was exactly what she needed. An unexpected new place, and a way to grow stronger. She had plenty to do. She knew what had to happen. She just needed a change of locale.
Resolutely, she unfurled the scroll, taking one final moment to look back at the facility, then tore the parchment and vanished.
When the blinding light of the teleportation faded, Elise found herself in near total darkness. Her human eyes could not see well in it, so she switched to her changeling form, and her surroundings came to life. She was in an underground city, and while it reminded her of Dokkalfheimr, it was quite clearly different.
For one, it was much grander in scale. The cave she was in was at least three times the size of the dwarven cave, with the ceiling so far away she couldn’t see it at all. The architecture was very different as well, with sloped roofs that reminded her vaguely of east asian buildings, and there were even structures hanging from the ceiling, emerging from the darkness like enormous stalactites.
The city was also quite clearly abandoned. Many of the buildings were damaged, with some even fully collapsed, and there was dust hanging in the air all around.
Also, it was full of monsters.
She could not make any of them out clearly, but there were figures slinking around the ruins, and as she took in her surroundings, one entered the range of her aether sense. She turned to face it, activating {Don’t Look at Me, Peasants!} so she could get a better look at it. It soon emerged from an alleyway, and its appearance sent a shiver down her spine.
It was similar to a wolf, but it had six legs instead of four, a tail like a whip with a long blade at the end, and it was completely furless. Its skin was as black as tar, and beneath it, its muscles rippled with every step it took. The most horrifying part about it was its face. The upper half of its head was similar to an ordinary wolf’s, except it had too many eyes. And the eyes were not placed properly either. It was like someone had tried to shove as many eyes as they could into a pair of oversized eye sockets.
The lower half of its head was not like a wolf’s maw at all. Instead, it was a mass of tentacles that writhed and twitched as it sniffed the ground. After a few seconds of sniffing, it raised its head upward, sniffing the air, and Elise got a glimpse of the rows and rows of teeth hidden at the center of the tentacles.
The beast was strong. Its aether and mana put it among the upper echelons of monsters that Elise had seen, and its species name, [Abyssal Hound], was enough for Elise to know this was no ordinary monster. But it was nothing she couldn’t handle. And if the entire abandoned city was filled with these…
I think I can make this work.