Broken Lands

There was a five hour respite after the end of the fourth Fall before the fifth, which made the time for the fifth Fall more or less a day after the first. It was a time to rest and recover. It was also a time for teams that felt they were missing something to try to find someone who could fill their weaknesses. Fortunately, that wasn’t something Notii needed to worry about. He caught a few hours’ sleep and felt immensely better.

Notii was incredibly happy that the fourth Fall was aht’ko and aht’keet when he figured out what the fifth Fall was. It seemed innocuous at first, a blue-white trail behind the meteors instead of the fire of previous Falls. The same color appeared on the aht’ko meteors, so Notii didn’t think much of it.

He also wasn’t worried when the meteors started flying towards the Pillars. Some monsters could and would throw rocks and while these were extremely large for that, most monsters had whatever they needed as weapons and the monsters didn’t always emerge from the meteors in some Falls. Maybe these monsters had some sort of Ability that let them teleport to rocks. It wouldn’t be the first time.

He started to shout for Bimet to help Tellix deflect the incoming stones when the first one fell to the ground.

“Attack the stones! They are the monsters!” Sophia shouted over the Lifeweb. “Some sort of spirit that can possess inanimate objects. I stunned the first one, I’m going to swap to pushing that out, so anything you hit will be shocked and maybe stunned.”

“I should have known,” Dav muttered beside Notii. “Of course there are ghosts. This is a moonscape.”

Notii frowned at the nonsense statement but had bigger concerns. They were lucky this was the fifth Fall; since the fourth included commanders, the fifth wouldn’t, which meant they only had to deal with the standard monster. “Tsukumogami! Bimet, you’ve got our only exorcism Ability, you’ll have to take care of the final blow once we break up the meteors enough for you to get at the-”

“We all can,” Dav interrupted Notii. “We should be able to hurt them by hurting their bodies, the things they possess, and we can all kill them as well, that’s one of the buffs from Sophia. Anything that isn’t properly living is easier to kill and you can always affect it.”

Notii blinked at the insanity of that statement. “Sophia can help everyone else bypass defenses? How many people can she boost?”

“Yeah?” Dav sounded like he had no idea why Notii cared. “I’m not sure. All twelve of us, probably more; we’ve never tried to push her limits.”

That was the sort of Ability that would get someone scouted to fight Branch Lords; why, she could probably even get paid a significant fraction of the final award! Notii didn’t know of any Branch Lords on the third branch that specifically needed that for the Lord itself, but there were three whose minions either included or consisted of tsukumogami or other mostly-intangible spirits, many of which inhabited items or other monsters. If Shades and Moonlit Whispers counted, that was two more Branch Lords, and if it applied to artificial spirits, the Constructed Watcher and its Eyebots might count.

Notii had heard something about an assault on the Fortress of Shattered Peace, and that meant dealing with the Constructed Watcher. He definitely needed to talk to the group about that and see if he could talk them into joining with his teams; that Ability would earn them a place easily, once they proved it worked. If it worked on more than twelve people … he could be swimming in aurichalc in a season or two.

It probably, no, definitely wasn’t going to work out that way, but he could hope. The fact that it was definitely going to turn out to be more limited than he thought was just the way it worked; no one had an enhancement Ability as impressive as that sounded unless it was the only thing they did.Even then, it probably got weaker as Sophia spread it out to more people.

For now, though, they needed to fight the monsters that were in front of them, even if the monsters were rocks that threw themselves at the Pillar in an attempt to batter it down.

Notii adjusted his plans to treat the tsukumogami as if the monsters were ordinary monsters instead of spirit-monsters that inhabited rocks. He had to see this. “Ci’an, Mareth, Tellix, take care of the stones as they come in. Let’s see how-”

A blast of wind met the next flying meteor. It cracked in half as it fell to the ground. “Maybe a bit less, Tellix?”

“I barely tapped it! That was like cracking an egg!” Tellix crowed. He leapt into the air and circled the Pillar.

Notii chuckled at his friend. He was almost the opposite of Notii, which was probably why they got along so well. Well, that and the fact that they’d been friends since they were little; Notii couldn’t remember any of his life without Tellix’s exuberance. “As long as you’re not exhausting yourself.”

“Nope!” Tellix exclaimed, but he also landed near the Pillar before he started to look around for the next tsukumogami.

Notii checked with the nearby Pillars and found they were also having an easy time of it; the tsukumogami were weirdly weak for all of them. That was excellent news, so he took the time to talk to Sophia’s team about joining him in an assault on the Fortress of Shattered Peace.

They weren’t interested. Sophia offered to help out if they were still in the World Tree when the assault happened, but she wasn’t willing to guarantee anything and that meant the others didn’t either. No matter how much he talked up the rewards, it was clear they didn’t really care. Sophia and Dav were focused on reaching a Wayfinder so that they could leave Arcatiz, and that meant they needed to climb one more branch after this one. If the assault happened before a valid Event that could get them up that last step, or if they had to hang around the World Tree afterwards while the Gateway they wanted was set up, they’d be happy to join.

After about an hour, Notii admitted to himself that he wasn’t going to get a better answer than that. He also admitted that he really, really wasn’t needed to deal with the tsukumogami and he was quite tired after the inadequate sleep during the downtime. He left instructions for Bimet to wake him if he was needed and went to bed.

He wasn’t.

Twenty minutes after the Fall ended, the last tsukumogami was killed, with no more Pillars falling. Notii wasn’t certain he’d ever seen that in a Meteor Pillars Event, but he’d only been through half a dozen. He knew what to expect partly from personal experience, but a lot of it was from the experience of others; everyone knew more or less what they could expect and which Events weren’t worth bothering with. This one was a fairly significant exception to the norm so far, but in a good way.

The next Fall was announced with yet another boulder hurtling at the Pillar. This time, it wasn’t aimed at the Pillar itself; it was aimed at Tellix instead. It also didn’t burst apart the first time anyone hit it. Instead, it had to be battered to the ground. The boulder vanished after about a minute, which made them all even more paranoid about the fact that there hadn’t been a following attack yet.

The second boulder didn’t come from the side; it came from above. This time, Notii was able to see the source: a giant albatross with a wingspan that had to be forty feet wide. That was enough to know what they were facing, and it wasn’t good. “Jump Tossers! We have an albatross in the air and … where is it? Does anyone see a humanoid? It will be huge!”

The one good thing about Jump Tossers was that their only method of attacking was throwing the rocks that they could jump to and pull back to themselves. It meant they never ran out of rocks to throw, but it also meant that they were slow and all they had to hit with was the mass of the rock.

They were usually hard to catch, since they could move between smaller rocks that they usually scattered around the area, and they were tough; they always took time to kill. There wouldn’t be many of them, but even a few could lock down a Pillar quite a while. Worse, even if you could kill them, you couldn’t leave your Pillar to help others without risk, because once you had enough Tossers, they’d start attacking the Pillar as well as the people, and once that happened the Pillar was usually not going to survive.

They were one of the nightmare Falls, especially this late in the Event. Notii was glad they weren’t the eighth Fall, but this was more than bad enough.

“It’s over there!” Ci’an shouted. An arrow sped away from her, slicing narrowly past an incoming rock before it hit the ground where a fifteen foot tall white-skinned humanoid stood a moment earlier.

Notii swore. His team didn’t have a good way to deal with Jump Tossers; it was going to come down to the strikers and - if Lith’e got lucky - Lith’e’s vines. It was going to be a pain in the ass.

“That’s enough of that,” Dav declared. Before Notii could ask what he meant, he stepped forward and leaned against the rock he’d just deflected.

“Jump Tossers can grab their rocks from anywhere,” Notii warned Dav. “It’s going to disappear-”

Dav disappeared instead of the rock.

Notii blinked. What just happened?

“Get him!” Xin’ri shouted. “Lock him down! If you can block his teleport, I can blast him!”

Notii glanced at the staff-mage, then followed her gaze into the distance where the absolute most ridiculous fight he’d ever seen played out. Both Dav and the Jump Tosser were teleporting all over the place as the Jump Tosser tried to hit Dav with stones that he pulled towards himself and Dav tried to kill the humanoid Jump Tosser. About half the time, what teleported into the Jump Tosser’s hand was Dav instead of the stone it was trying to grab. Sometimes it was Dav that Jumped immediately after the Jump Tosser threw a smaller stone instead of the Jump Tosser. It didn’t look very effective, but nothing was really effective against Jump Tossers. “What the hell?”

“Dav’s stealing its spell. Well, Ability, but it’s a mana-based Ability so it might as well be a spell,” Sophia sounded amused when she appeared next to Notii. “He says it’s less controllable than his normal movement Ability but cheaper because it’s using the giant’s mana, mostly. He says he can - NOW!”

Fire erupted from one of the feathers that floated at the far end of Sophia’s enormous Domain while an arrow streaked away from Ci’an’s bow and lightning arced from Xin’ri’s staff. All of them converged on the Jump Tosser at the same moment.

Dav teleported instead of the Jump Tosser and all three Abilities hit it at once and left a hole in its back. Blood poured from the exposed muscle and its left arm went limp.

“One more strike like that and it’ll be out,” Notii told Sophia. “And then if we can deal with the albatross, we’ll have a few minutes before the next one arrives. Probably, anyway; Jump Tossers are a pain to kill but you never see all that many of them.”

They saw more Jump Tossers than they should have, as if the World Tree was directing extras in their direction because they were so efficient at taking them down. Notii had heard of that, and knew that it meant they were taking pressure off the nearby Pillars by taking some of it on themselves, but that didn’t make it less annoying when he realized he needed all four of that team to sit out the seventh Fall if he wanted them rested for the eighth.