Ch. 2.37 | Glorified Exterminator
PoV: Sanya
Sanya watched as the third eldritch entity in Hope collapsed. Its many-limbed, writhing and teleporting form collapses into a heap of otherworldly flesh.
A quarter of the city was in ruins, stones had been thrown everywhere, and thatched roofs had become thatched floors. Sanya could not tell where the streets or building foundations once were.
Esmat had not been able to do much with their low life force. In fact, they might have done more harm than good, their attacks pushing the entities against more buildings and crushing them. Anything short of a killing blow seemed rather futile against these outworld behemoths.
In contrast to Esmat struggling, all Sanya really had to do was cast [Your Demise is My Command] and watch as the entities thrashed around and died.
Unfortunately, that spell probably wasn't very efficient on life force. If she had to keep this up, she would run out quickly. She was down to about fourteen-thousand in life force units.
These things had just been the scouts, bottom, weak things on the eldritch hierarchy. They were around Sanya and Esmat's level, if just above.
So, the world really was doomed to eldritch consumption.
Sanya watched as the survivors tried their best to clean up and gather what they had lost. They mourned for the dead and moved them into carts, others sifted through the rubble. They looked for survivors and found none. They looked for their loved ones and their family, and they found them. Dead.
It was almost enough for Snaya to cry. Instead, she frowned.
Sanya and Esmat did not have the time to help. There were other scouts out there.
Sanya also did not want to help. That looked like tedious work, more difficult and sad than fighting the eldritch entities themselves.
Sanya turned towards Esmat. They stood on another flat rooftop. Sanya floated just above it.
“Let's split up,” Sanya suggested. “I'll go back to Calderae—there's two there. You can check on Glorestra.”
“I don't have enough life force,” Esmat informed.
They went through this already. There was so much life around, Esmat could find something to subsume. “Go drain a forest or someone’s animal pen.”
“Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Okay,” Esmat nodded.
Sanya waved. “I'll see you around.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
Sanya cast [Globetrot Anchor - Calderae] and emerged to the west of the city.
There was smoke rising up from the southeast and the northwest. More fireballs and other magic attacks seemed to be casting in the east, and the west was closer and nearer more vital parts of the city.
Sanya cast [Organic Displacement] over to the northwest and then tossed herself into the air.
☆ ☆ ☆
An eldritch entity collapsed in Calderae. Sanya floated in the air above its corpse. Somewhere around this kill, Sanya's arm had regenerated. The sleeve of her cardigan merely had a cut by her shoulder, hardly the end of the world for her outer top.
She really was getting easy at this whole killing-eldritch-entities thing. She did it with only one arm, too.
Of course, they were just the scouts. Their duty was to map out the world further and to bring that information back to the outworld. They helped soften up the world and detailed the proper bodily adjustments.
Infiltrator-heralds snuck into closed worlds to break open their barriers. Like . . . some sort of tiny gnat making a tiny crack to get into an egg, to break it open from the inside. The scouts would map out the yolk and get a feel for it.
Then the rest would arrive and devour until there was nothing left.
What was with the egg analogy? Maybe Sanya was hungry.
The whole eating-human-food thing while being an eldritch entity was still weird to Sanya. She would have thought her diet would have moved over to life force.
Huh. Casting magic with the same thing that sustained her life. Imagine if humans could cast spells by using their body fat or—oh, Fleshweavers did that.
Interesting.
Anyway!
One scout down. There was still one more to go in the southeast.
☆ ☆ ☆
Aaaand that's a wrap! Sanya felled the second scout in a field of rubble and corpses.
Five entities slain already. Please let me have a break before the others decide to breach.
They probably had some time before the outworlders realized their scouts wouldn't be coming back. There would be time to rest, then, assuming that was all the scouts they would send, or all that they had available.
Then things would go downhill, probably very quickly. They'd be utterly ravaged once the entities found out their weaker kin had been exterminated by pathetic mortal resistance . . . or so they would think. How long until they found out two of their infiltrator-heralds had turned against them?
Turning her attention to the wreckage before her, these had just been a couple scouts, and yet they had wrought a concerning amount of damage. The cities might all collapse once the stronger entities would arrive.
Sanya wondered, since this was the world's problem now, if strong mages from around the world would come and help them. Surely some out there knew of their plight and could teleport over to aid them? The area beneath the tempest had Oracles and Spatial mages, so perhaps the rest of the planet had those too?
Or it was up to Sanya to destroy the eldritch entities and save the world . . . Can't a girl just live a nice, peaceful life with her kind-of-girlfriend? They could read magic grimoires and cuddle and eat bread every day or something.
Huh.
What did Sanya want to do when this was all over? She liked the mage thing, maybe she could do something with that. Not teaching, though, anything but teaching.
As for why the entities were only here, something about the barrier being weakest here, in the area once under the tempest. All the portal stuff and localized magic made it even weaker still.
It made Sanya think about just how strong the barrier was around their world, that eldritch entities couldn't just break through anywhere.
Were these entities weak, on a larger scale beyond worlds? Maybe breaking through barriers from the outworld was just a difficult task and a half.
“Sanya,” Fazl nodded, floating over to her. Just two mages, floating in the sky. One, a prodigal Elemental mage attuned to Aeolian magic manipulating air currents and something or other Sanya had no clue. It was magic! A second, a human-turned-eldritch-entity floating through the sheer power of her will, casting a proverbial middle finger to the forces that be.
Admittedly . . . she probably shouldn't be floating this much, draining her life force like this.
“Fazl,” Sanya returned the greeting. “Let's head down. I shouldn't be staying aloft like this. [Organic Displacement].”
Sanya found herself at the end of a street, the cut-off where a clean street turned into a holding place for debris and rubble.
Fazl caught up to her in a few seconds.
“How is it?” Sanya asked.
Fazl winced.
Bad, then.
“We've lost far too many. Dozens of mages, a couple hundred soldiers, and far more citizens. In this section alone, we're probably looking at a thousand dead. It's looking bleak,” Fazl said. “Although I suppose the city is still standing, as are tens of thousands. Maybe we should be smiling and throwing a revelry that we've lasted this long.”
“Is everyone . . . close . . . still alive?”
“Yes. Aisha took a bit of a beating. She'll be up and scowling again soon. Fajr too, I believe Mai is giving them their healthy amount of flesh at the guild hall.
“We are getting people to come help and clean this all up. Mostly putting the soldiers to some use. What are they if not strong labor, eh?
“But . . . We have to hope this was it, because I don't think we have long before becoming eldritch kibble.”
Sanya wanted to see Mai. They had been apart for, like, a whole hour. “To the hall?”
Sanya should maybe go over to Glorestra to help Esmat . . . but . . . she trusted them. She also wanted a break from executing eldritch scouts.
Fazl paused, as if he wanted to linger around the devastation and make himself useful. “We can go.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Sanya walked into the guild hall with Fazl flying alongside her.
Aisha had, unfortunately, not cleared it out.
A bunch of adventurers had made themselves at home, eating lunch or talking plans in their small groups. A couple had bandages and other things wrapped around them. Aisha, Mai, and a surgeon had turned part of the hall into a temporary infirmary.
Couldn't they use an actual infirmary? . . . The guild hall was just too convenient.
Mai waved at Sanya upon seeing her, with a big grin. Mai was off to the back-right, with the rest of the inner circle, sans Esmat.
Adventurers turned their heads and gawked at Sanya, whispering as she passed.
Sanya slid into the seat next to Mai.
“Sanya,” Aisha said. “I want to apologize for any . . . extra scowling I directed your way. I was worried you would be against our best interests. I understand now that you're definitely still with us, and our biggest hope. So, um, yeah.”
Sanya only nodded. She did not really know what to say to Aisha. Yes, Aisha had been extremely . . . intolerable. But, like, so what? What was Sanya to do? Aisha was her employer and the leader of the city. She was basically her adoptive mother as well.
Sanya would tell Aisha just to do her part as well. Yet, she knew that anyone short of herself or Esmat would be useless.
Aisha really did not have any good reason to be as cold and demanding towards Sanya as she had been. It seemed she finally realized that.
What happened if her greatest asset just got up and walked away? Sanya was invaluable to her—to everyone else. Gray-ghost-like complexion and all.
She instead looked towards Mai, who was eating lunch again. Fleshweaving used her body fat and made her hungry. She was not far from looking malnourished. In the months since the academy, she had been building up some weight too. There must have been a lot of injured people to tend towards.
“Maybe I should take you all out to dinner tonight or something,” Aisha said, sighing. “I'll go check in on all the response teams at our attack sites. I really don't know where we'll even be a week from now, but I think I'm going to put plans on a festival . . .”
Aisha got up and left the guild hall.
Sanya found herself shaking. She was . . . she was quite literally the world's only hope. Every single person now depended on her for survival. No one knew how many days they had left.
Sanya liked that she was useful, that she was needed. This, though? This was an absurd amount of pressure. She wanted nothing more than to vanish and for this problem to sort itself out.
She was glad no one close had died today. Yet, she had murdered twenty thousand. A couple thousand had probably died to the eldritch scouts.
Things would only get worse from here.
How much longer until Sanya was stretched too thin and one of the ones nearest her died? She couldn't guarantee their safety.
Send them away? Could she send all her people and then everyone else in the cities away from the old tempest zone? That was . . . not feasible. An exodus of hundreds of thousands of people. And it was selfish of her to ask or force her friends to leave.
She knew they would want to stay here.
They were going to die and there was nothing she could do about it.
She could . . . she could teleport them somewhere far against their will. She was an eldritch entity now, if just the lowest on their hierarchy.
No . . . ugh, that was a major breach of autonomy.
Would she do it to save her friends? To save Mai?
Okay . . . she needed to . . . she needed fresh air or a distraction or something.
“Hey,” Sanya poked Mai in the shoulder. “I'm going to go rest at my house and maybe study some more magic, not that it'll do much at this point. You're free to hang out whenever. If I'm asleep, wake me up only in the advent of another entity attacking.”
Sanya probably did not need sleep anymore. No, wait, she probably still did, maybe? Brains needed sleep.
Oh, huh, did eldritch entities sleep? That would be weird. For such strange and otherworldly entities to perform such a mundane task . . .
“I'll come with you!” Mai said with too much enthusiasm. Girl, the end of the world is on us and you are as cheery as ever.
“Are there people who need your Fleshweaving?” Sanya asked.
“Yeah . . . They'll probably keep coming in for a bit. They can get all the Fleshweavers in training, it's fine. Surgeons will be enough unless there's limbs lost, anyway.
“And, hey, I'll leave the Fleshspawn here,” Mai said. She opened up her Repository and retrieved her Fleshspawn. “You'll help in place of me if I'm needed, okay? Listen to that man there,” she told the Fleshspawn, pointing towards the surgeon.
It nodded.
Such a strange magic construction. And, good riddance to that thing. It could stay there with the surgeon and then pop to make itself useful.
Hopefully Mai wouldn't spawn one again.