Ideworld Chronicles: The Art Mage

Kito’s body vanished beneath a thickened layer of chitin as he surged to the front lines. The beetle-like wing-shields erupting from his arms unfolded with a metallic screech, locking together into a living barricade against the hail of bullets tearing across the beach from the hills ahead.

Everywhere around us soldiers dropped into the coarse sand now stained rust-red with blood. Their screams tangled with the thunder of gunfire into a single unbearable symphony of agony, and my enhanced hearing caught every detail far too clearly. But the smell was worse. Oh Reality, the smell. Burnt powder, ruptured flesh, blood, bile, and the foul release of bodies violently emptied by death. It coated the inside of my throat so thickly I could almost taste it.

So I turned my nose off.

I stripped the Authority from it entirely.

Night shrouded the battlefield, unlike the morning of the true D-Day landing. Thick clouds drowned the sky, leaving the world illuminated only by muzzle flashes, tracer fire, the glowing crimson numbers hanging unnaturally across the heavens, and the distant Eiffel Tower blazing like a lighthouse at the edge of the world.

“Lia, I made the flies—!” Kito shouted over the chaos as I released my paper birds into the storm, sending them slicing toward the gun emplacements in the distance. “—evolve to have bellies full of acid!”

The entire team moved in a staggered line behind his shields while Liana pressed herself against her brother’s back. Green and gold shadowlight flowed from her in radiant streams, sinking into the insects Kito had altered. All around us thousands of tiny lights lifted from corpses and wreckage alike, swarming upward in a glittering cloud before streaking toward the bunkers ahead.

We advanced at a snail’s pace. The heavy guns hammered Kito’s defenses relentlessly, forcing him to stop whenever cracks splintered through the chitin. Each time that happened Milo stepped forward, slamming his bat into the earth and conjuring what he called a “base”—a temporary dome of force that absorbed the incoming barrage while Kito regenerated the shattered armor over his body.

The first explosions came minutes later.

My birds struck the concrete bunkers atop the hills, erupting into bursts of force that sent avalanches of rubble cascading down onto the beach. Chunks of shattered stone rained through the darkness like meteor fragments. Then Lia’s insects reached their targets and the swarm burst apart on impact.

Acid poured over the Nazi fortifications in luminous torrents, melting concrete, steel, and flesh alike within seconds. Shadows dissolved screaming into bubbling sludge.

“Good God,” Patricia whispered with horrified awe in her voice. “Some of them were still standing while their upper bodies melted into puddles.”

“I dobrze, kurwa,” Piotr muttered in Polish, sounding impressed by the carnage his teammates unleashed. I really needed to learn that language around him.

With the nearest gun towers destroyed—or at least crippled—we finally had an opening.

Milo took it instantly.

For a brief moment his body blazed brighter, crimson shadowlight erupting around him in violent waves. He glanced back at me once, winked as his, jaw tightened, and then he vanished. A shockwave of sand exploded outward where he’d stood, followed by a delayed gust of wind that slammed into us seconds later. He moved so absurdly fast he carved twin trenches through the beach: one left by his feet, the other by the bat dragged behind him.

He looked like a crimson comet ascending the hill, leaving a gust of sand launched into the air.

The distance disappeared beneath him almost instantly. When he stopped, a blinding flash erupted near the bunker ahead, followed by a concussive wave that tore through the remaining walls. The thunder reached us a heartbeat later. Then came the second strike. His bat collided with something inside the fortification and the entire bunker imploded outward. Concrete, steel, bodies—everything erupted into the air in a violent bloom of debris, leaving behind a crater glowing faintly red around the edges.

“You said he was powerful,” I whispered to Bastien, unable to tear my eyes away from the destruction. “But holy fuck.”

“That’s a Czarny in action,” Patricia said. “He is our weapon. We are all there to let him reach whatever he needs to get to.”

“I can see that now,” I answered, focusing on the small silhouette up on the hill making another swing with his bat as a squad of Nazi soldiers from a neighboring bunker rushed him, leveling their weapons with desperate determination. They never even got to fire. One instant they were charging him through the smoke. The next they exploded apart into fragments of bone, blood, and shredded meat hurled across the ruins by the sheer force of his strike.

We all ran toward the opening he was making for us when Bastien suddenly stopped, kneeled, and took a quick selfie with all of us in the frame, before promptly standing up and continuing the charge.

I saw him reach for the console embedded into the contraption on his arm and suddenly a strange feeling hit me. A foreign Authority over space reached into me with the will to move me elsewhere. All of my teammates around me must have accepted it, because they disappeared without a trace, reappearing near Milo on top of the hill.

Only then did I do the same. When the Authority was let to do its thing, I immediately appeared in the middle of them mid-run and had to forcibly stop myself from continuing the motion. “What?” I played dumb.

“I apologise,” Bastien whispered, adjusting something on his display again. He was changing the size of the bunkers and the real buildings followed in flashes of shadowlight. “Should have told you the teleportation was coming.”

We were all inside the base created by Milo, who heaved for breath, his shortness of it caused by the godly display of athleticism from moments ago. He kneeled by his bat planted into the ground, while Kito’s arms transformed into mantis-like blades as he danced around the approaching Nazi soldiers, cutting whomever got close into parts.

Patricia stayed close behind him, weaving in and out of the shield Piotr provided, punching those that came close and hiding from the gunfire of those farther away. And while all of this happened, grubs the size of snakes slithered out of the air itself to grab our opponents by the legs and trip them, just for angry wasps to land on them, piercing their bodies with stingers the size of stilettos.

Before I even decided to deploy more of my paper creations, the team dealt with the whole opposition in a swift and efficient manner.

“That was rather quick, no?” Piotr asked, looking at the timer displayed on the sky. It showed that thirty-three minutes had passed since we entered this place.

I looked around the beach where the bodies of fallen soldiers piled up. Some of them still moved, embers of life clinging stubbornly to broken flesh, making it all resemble a carpet of body parts, blood, and cloth undulating on the dirtied sand as the waves crashed onto them from behind. Some brave soldiers who survived the initial storm of bullets were now assaulting the bunkers far to our sides, away from the opening we created.

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“I fear most of our time will be spent walking,” Lia answered, her gaze fixed on the Eiffel Tower far beyond the horizon, yet unmistakably much bigger than the one we entered from. “And there are no cars around.”

“Not like we can safely use them,” her brother answered, walking toward the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach. “This event was pure madness, and yet people did it without any powers.”

“Some of them were mages,” Milo answered, standing up. “My family was among them. My grandfather stormed those bastards.”

“Some,” Kito mused. “Others relied on pure iron will and the willingness to topple great evil from its throne.”

“Can’t you just teleport us straight to that tower?” I asked Laurent, watching him edit the photos of the bunkers and soldiers to weaken their potency while reality itself responded to his alterations. “Just edit the picture so we’re already there?”

“No. The distance makes it impossible to place us into the image properly. We’d end up as little more than pixels.”

“You should carry a telescope with you,” I said offhandedly. All of them looked at me as though I’d suddenly started speaking an alien language. “…Would that not work either?” I asked.

“No, it…” Laurent paused. “It probably would. Actually, it certainly would. I have magnifying lenses, but nothing remotely as powerful as a telescope.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I may have to add one to my repertoire.”

“We better get going if we want to beat those northmen,” Piotr said and spat on the corpse of the Nazi soldier closest to him. He threw his bat into the air. It whirled like a windmill before he caught it back in his hand and rested it against his shoulder. “Shall we?”

“We can, but there is definitely a soulmark somewhere in the underground bunker here. Could be an artifact or two as well.” Patricia knelt on the ground and pressed her hands to the earth. She shone briefly with silver shadowlight, while her eyes became two swirling pools of silver and grey.

“Who cares!? We have a record to beat.”

“How far away?” I asked, despite his protest.

“Oh come on, Elle. We don’t have time for it.”

“So you’d rather risk chasing a record that has stood undefeated for fifteen years to gain potential, unknown rewards, than go for the ones already at hand? Weren’t you guys self-proclaimed treasure hunters?” I countered, drawing the attention of Lia, Patricia and Bastien.

“Fuck, yeah?” Piotr answered with a question that clearly meant yes and nothing else.

“The entrance should be about a kilometer that way,” Patricia replied, pointing toward one of the distant bunkers. “It’s underground though.”

“I’d like to go there. I’ll catch up with you. You lose nothing and I might gain something useful for all of us.”

“We are not letting you go alone,” Laurent replied. “It’s too dangerous.”

“We are definitely not splitting up,” Kito said, crossing his arms over his chest. He looked human again, though the fact he was almost naked and covered in blood contrasted sharply with the rest of us, who were merely dusty and dirty but still clothed—Lia’s scant suit excluded. His gaze shifted from Laurent to me. “This is unfortunately exactly what I feared when you wanted to join, lack of unity.”

“I actually agree with Elle, so she is not the problem. I was going to suggest the same,” Lia said, stepping to my side while facing her brother. “We came here intending to train for what we’ll be doing in the catacombs—hunting treasures and soulmarks. And you two,” she lifted her chin first toward Kito and then Milo, “decided we should instead chase the record.”

“I—” Kito started.

“That’s just more efficient. Two pissy birds with one fucking stone. Look, we’re already wasting time standing here and doing nothing,” Piotr replied. “Let’s just go.”

“I vote for going further,” Bastien started, trying to amend the situation with their method of finding a proper solution. It was surprising though that he sided with Piotr on this.

“Same, obviously,” Milo said, clearly annoyed that we had to vote at all.

“I want to go for the soulmark,” Patricia said.

“Me too.”

“And me,” I added right after Liana.

“Three to two,” Bastien counted. “Elle’s addition screws up our uneven voting dynamic.”

“You don’t say,” Milo muttered. “Come on, big boy. Say your piece.”

“They’re right. Testosterone got into our heads. Rushing toward the finish line is not what we trained for. Let’s go for the marks, just the way we practiced. Only then, doing things our way, can we say we beat those other guys fair and square.” Kito’s voice was measured and calm.

It was interesting to see how quickly he changed his mind, and I wondered whether it truly came from reason or from something else entirely.

“Just don’t whine when we lose because of the time we spend here,” Milo said, standing up and starting toward the bunker. We followed after him, matching his pace when he shifted into a brisk jog and then a full run. Interestingly, Patricia despite being rather overweight had no problem keeping up—maybe because of the armor, her stamina, or some form of Seer’s power I didn’t know about.

We quickly reached what remained of the fortification Milo had destroyed and passed it, heading for the next one embedded deeper into the rocky hillside. The jagged stone provided natural cover, while the thick concrete reinforced it further. The guns mounted inside still bombarded the incoming Allied forces with bullets, but they had already made considerable progress toward the station and in just a few minutes some lucky survivors would probably manage to storm upward. Grenades were already flying and the ground shook with explosions while soil and rock fragments rained from above.

The air smelled of blood, stench and piss, while my brain—maybe with Anansi’s help, maybe on its own—started phasing out the endless gunfire, the shouting and the cries.

“How are you fighting with Milo’s power while you’re in an enclosed space?” I asked Patricia, who was closest to me.

“He dials down the force of his attacks so he doesn’t bury us alive and fights with more finesse,” she replied simply.

We were very close to the bunker in question now. A hundred meters maybe. The soldiers inside noticed our approach and opened fire on our position. I reacted quickly, grabbing Ella and unfolding her into a shield form to protect both myself and Patricia, but Kito was even faster. He threw one arm to the side and it rapidly transformed into long beetle-like wing shields, broad enough to protect the entire team, while his other arm shifted into a smaller version guarding his own body.

He slowed down and we slowed with him as bullets kept hammering against the chitin.

I removed the Authority from Ella and clasped her back onto my belt when something strange appeared in the night sky and stole my attention. Illuminated for a split second by a streak of lightning, it looked like some enormous man o’ war swimming high above us. Its black silhouette suggested countless tendrils trailing beneath it, long enough to scour the sands below as it drifted closer.

“What was that!?” Laurent shouted.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kito answered. “We’re close enough. We’re going into the bunker. Can-opener tactics, guys.”

I remembered this one from their tactics sessions, but it was amazing to watch it unfold in real time.

Bastien played the first violin. He took a photo of the entrance and quickly edited it to be much wider than it actually was. As it stretched over a longer distance, it also became less durable structurally, turning the bunker’s reinforced entrance into something far easier to breach.

That was where the Chuma siblings came in.

Liana allowed the bees she stored beneath her skin to swarm out into the open, while Kito, through his evolution soulmark, reached into them to glimpse the possible evolutionary branches they could take if given the chance. From those possibilities he selected the one best suited for the situation and flooded the insects with his golden shadowlight-covered Authority.

This time it made them larger—almost fist-sized. Their abdomens swelled to grotesque proportions and their wings expanded to meet the challenge of carrying the added mass.

Liana acted next. Through her command soulmark she ordered the insects toward the machine-gun slits we were being fired from. The bees that avoided the bullets disappeared inside.

“They’re highly venomous,” Kito said. “Should make quick work of the operators.”

The gunfire abruptly stopped, before he even finished his sentence.

Piotr moved to the front. With one swing of his steel bat he unleashed a compressed wave of force that slammed into the weakened doors, bending them inward and hurling them deeper into the bunker. The opening allowed another wave of insects to pour through. Grubs burrowed out of the earth right at the entrance and skittered en masse into the corridors beyond, pinching, stinging and biting whatever survived the initial breach.

At the same time both Kito and Milo charged inside, while Bastien photographed whatever still needed dealing with.

He outright erased some obstacles—the twisted gate, the weapons of soldiers trying to shoot down the insects or us—while the boys, aided by Patricia in her magical armor, beat down everything else that remained.

Once again it was over swiftly. A minute at most.

And just as the rest of us were about to descend into the can of worms we’d opened, I saw movement above us—something fast skittering across the concrete roof.

They were massive, four-armed things wrapped in torn Nazi uniforms stained dark with old filth and something wetter beneath. Swastikas and silver skulls gleamed across their twitching bodies. Their flesh bulged and shifted under the fabric.

At the end of each appendage was a human face. The mouths stretched unnaturally wide, packed with wet, crooked teeth. Tongues writhed inside them. Long fingers surrounded each face, peeling open slowly to expose the mouths further, as if the creatures were blooming.

They were the size of horses and moved in horrifying inhumane way, folding and rolling across the bunker roof in sharp, jerking motions that barely looked real.

Then they came straight at us.