53 – Hard Knock Life
I’d taken plenty of hard knocks over the years, usually from the stronger wizards who were sent to route me and my forces. But this... this was something else entirely. Even if the fire of the attack didn’t hurt me, the pressure and weight of it was utterly titanic in nature.
As if that bastard had hoisted the mountain from its moorings and dropped it on my head.
I forced myself to my hands and knees as the worst of it subsided, sifting a veritable mountain of ash off of my body. “Yomi,” I croaked. “You here?”
“Mm.”
She rose from a sifting pile of ash, her expression bitter. A shimmering miasma of translucent darkness rose around her and then slowly dissolved away. Some kind of magic armour.
It had spared her from the worst of it, and she was still in one piece, but her face was marked with scuffs and thin scars.
“What the fuck was that?” she hissed, slurring her words like some kind of drunk.
“Feels like the sun just punched me.”
I rose to my feet with some effort, feeling my bones snapping back into place while the scars in my flesh sealed themselves back up.
We’d landed atop a tiled floor caked in ash and rubble, the sky above thick with smoke visible from the yawning wound that had been blown into the top of the mountain. All around me I could see display cased, weapon racks, and containers housing... things I couldn’t even begin to grasp.
At at the heart of it all, radiating blue light through the smog, was a strange sphere on a pedestal. The surface beneath it was crusted in a layer of frost, somehow untouched by the immense heat.
Sha stood before it, huffing for breath with the exertion behind that blast of his. “I don’t like being forced to do... radical things. To take outside help to win. But I’ve lived long enough to know that, occasionally, you have to do things you don’t like for the greater good.”
I tried to stand, but my knees were shaking and it was suddenly impossible for me to gain my balance. I’d be back to fighting form quick enough but that blast had actually knocked the wind out of me, and the flame in my breast spluttered for a brief instant.
When was the last time anything had hit me that hard?
Must’ve been when Cole Varang hit me with that last that temporarily buried me in the sunken city of Tchull.
A blinding white flash lit up the area around us as Sha’s blazing fingers touched the strange orb, some kind of magic barrier trying and failing to push his fingers away. Sparks sprayed up, growing larger and more numerous as his fingers dug into it. And all the while a miniature whirlwind kicked up around us, growing stronger by the second.
“Shit,” Yomi hissed, raising an arm to shield her face from the steel-shredding wind. “That’s some kind of yokai soul!”
The barrier broke apart with a sound like a hundred windows shattering in unison, large white hot shards of energy flying up from the glowing blue sphere.
Sha screamed as if he’d just been handed over to Tender, pale white flame snaking up his arm. Mount Gruai shuddered anew, greater tremors rocking the ground beneath me. The pale orb vanished in another blinding flash, the intensity of it making me wince and grimace.
The flash gradually faded.
Sha stood erect, slowly huffing for breath. The right half of his body was still wreathed in flame, but the left of him was now covered in a thick crust of ice and frost which perpetually steamed in the glow of his body.
Sha inspected his hands, clenching and unclenching them. In his right hand he generated a blinding halo of flame, while the right grew larger as he folded it in spiked layers of ice.
“Incredible,” he muttered.
He was between us instantly, so fast that the shock wave of his arrival nearly knocked me over. Yomi raised her arms to block, only barely fast enough to intercept the kick that lashed into her like a frosted lightning bolt. She was swept away, crashing through several massive blocks of debris. Sha swung at me with his frozen hand, and I raised my claymore to block.
The impact jolted up to my shoulders and the metal of my sword... dented. I was sent skidding back, my jaw clenched tight, and I had to draw more magicka into my blade to repair its distorted frame.
His blows came far faster, far harder than before, and a flurry of them both shattered my blade and sent me skidding away. His punches were harsh, brual, and his ice encrusted fists struck me with enough force to make my head spin.
Yomi raised her hands, and from her shadow emerged a spray of jet black arrows. They cleaved through the air at speed, but Sha spun around to intercept them. A wall of ice appeared in an instant, twice as wide as his body, and the sharp projectiles cracked and broke several chunks from the frosty surface.
“I have no idea who this old boy was, but... having another element at my fingertips...”
She leaped away, barely avoiding Sha as he rushed her. Her blade was wreathed in pulsing shadow, and she raised it to parry and deflect several of his strikes. But I could see, even from afar, that she was on the backfoot and Sha was only gaining in speed.
I forced myself upright, the shaft of my broken blade hissing with swirls of flame. In an instant the broken handle morphed into a flaming broadsword, and on my left arm sprouted an angular shield of that same black steel.
A more defensive stance, that was what I needed.
What you need is me.
I grimaced, feeling a stab of heat in my breast.
No, I didn’t. I didn’t need the full power of the Wight for this.
Yomi gave a sharp, pained shout as she was knocked aside with a hard punch that sent her body scraping across a broad swathe of the floor. Sha flicked a had toward her, and from his fingertips flew a great wall of fire.
I was in front of her before it could make contact. The flame washed over me like a warm breeze, hissing along the surface of my shield. “You alright?” I asked over my shoulder.
Yomi winced, touching a bloody gash on her cheek. “Been better.”
“Reckon you could do that shadow paralysing thing again?”
“Goddess no. I could barely hold him before, and he’s a lot stronger with all the qi of that frozen soul in his body.”
“Mm. Shame.”
The blaze parted and Sha lunged at me through the opening, his left hand wreathed in a frosted blade of sculpted ice. Even with my power further strengthening the shield, the frosted blade still sliced deep into the metal. The force of the blow rattled my arm.
Again and again he struck the shield, kicking up large sprays of sparks with each swing, but fortunately it could regenerate as quickly as the damage was done.
Sha slammed both of his fists together, kicking up a flash of fire and ice that sent both of us skidding away from him, and a few of those frozen shards slipped past my guard to slice up my arms. “Fuck,” I hissed through clenched teeth.
He seized the opening and collided with me like a cannon ball, the two of us sweeping sharply through the air. We flew clean through the crater he had blasted into the mountain, flying me in a beeline toward a smaller peak. We smashed into it, and the whole mountain seemed to shudder as vast quantities of rock and ice shattered beneath me.
“How’s that?!” Sha snarled, raining harsh punches down on my face before I could get up again. Blood sprayed from my mouth, my ears rang, and blackness seeped into the edges of my vision. “Who should surrender now? Who can’t defeat who now?!”
I knew how to take a beating but... damn, this was far more intense than anything I’d felt in some time.
The punches rained down, harder and faster, and filled the air with a sound like distant thunder.
And with one particularly hard punch, blackness flooded my vision entirely.