12 Miles Below

The chain end slammed into another divider, ripping it into parts. An occult blast came from it a moment later, exploding the metal cabinet it ended up into. Shrapnel flung everywhere, colliding against my armor with a cacophony of sound. Journey didn’t need to trigger a shield for small things like that, it was saving it for the harder issues.

Avalis was going all out, ripping apart anything I could stand on, trying to keep me off balance long enough to nail me with the whip. I fell down further, slamming against blessed solid concrete I could stand on. A bathroom wall of some kind, from the quick glance I saw looking down the open doorway behind my feet.

The Feather landed right after, whip launching out for my chest. My armshield lit up, taking the blow, sliding the chain up over me before it could wrap around. Occult ghosts flashed out at the same moment, trying to reach him.

Avalis leaped forward, spinning on himself, whip following behind in a whirlwind that crashed through each of my occult ghosts.

“Keith! His hand!” Father called out, voice tense.

I caught sight of what he meant. Avalis’s other hand - it came into view with a black familiar cylinder. The chain had been a distraction.

It scythed out, low to the ground, forcing me to jump over it. Which was exactly where Avalis had wanted me - helpless in midair. He followed the sweep with a pitcher’s throw.

Father’s Death sight bled into existence, four large arms surrounding me, hugging tightly around.

But I’d gotten the warning just in time. The jump I made was low to the ground, twisting myself upside down midway, watching the chain scythe right under my helmet. My hand snaked out and grabbed the lip edge of the bathroom doorway, then I pulled myself down, letting both gravity and Journey’s relic power fling me straight through.

The knightbreaker sailed right over me, zipping across the skyscraper ruins and blasting straight out into the void, where it faded away from my occult sight.

On the other hand, I had seriously put one massive push downwards. The far end of the bathroom wall rapidly reached sight and Wrath and I collided against the tiles, causing a full crater. Surprised the wall was still standing even.

“Kick off! Right side!” Father yelled out. I didn’t question that, trying to roll only to find myself stuck - Wrath’s sack didn’t make for good rolling. My head booted up a moment after, and I kicked against the side of the wall, launching me skidding across the bathroom directly into a stall, my head smashing against a perpendicular toilet. Mites didn’t get that one done right, it looked more like a throne than any kind of toilet. It also didn’t win the fight against a relic armor helmet, and was left in cracked pieces now.

A chain end zipped straight forward, the mace slamming into the center of my crater, digging into the ruined wall. The occult explosion followed a moment behind, doing its thing embedded halfway inside the wall.

It had survived relic armor with a sack slamming into it, but the occult chain was asking too much for the poor wall. It ripped apart, crumbling down, revealing more flooring from this level, and far off at the end, broken window panels and the longest drop I’d seen so far.

This fight wasn’t going according to any kind of plan. The terrain didn’t let me get solid footing, and if I kept going down, I’d eventually hit the dead end where I’d need to pick between falling to my death, or getting diced up by an angry Feather.

“Anyone got ideas!?” I asked. Cathida. Father. Wrath. They were all here with me.

He cannot see through walls. Wrath said. I know you humans have a secondary sight using the occult. It may prove to be the deciding factor.

The girl is right. Father said. You need to use the environment against a foe like this.

That’s easy for you both to say! A lot harder to do when I’m stuck in a literal toilet.

Didn’t have time to complain more, Avalis was already jumping down. And I was trapped like a rat here, up against a wall.

But he had made a nice hole for me. So I made one desperate dive straight through. My hands ripped off a smoke bomb and a grenade from my belt, tossing the explosive right at the start.

It wouldn’t do anything to damage either of us, but it would make an absolute mess of the area. And boy did it do that job well in an enclosed decaying space like this. The shockwave yanked me off course and ripped everything around it.

If the shrapnel flying around the cabinets, dividers and ruined computers wasn’t enough to disorient, the smoke grenade that exploded right after did.

I skidded another dozen feet down before my hand caught onto something, and I swung to get my boots against the roof, then blindly kicked straight down. Goal wasn’t to get a good position. Avalis would chew me up ten times over if I tried to square up. I wanted to hide. And the random kicks combined with desperate turns got me lodged into the side of a cubical.

No idea even where I was in relation to the ruins, I’d been moving and sliding across the floor and walls so fast I’d let pure instinct and reflex guide me, stopping only when I felt the smoke and destruction was fading off.

For a moment, everything went still as rocks and debris finally slid all the way down and rattled out the bottom. Smoke still lingered, the grenade hissing away, caught against a cubical wall somewhere far off to my right.

I heard noise further away. The crunch of metal bending as something heavy hit it.

“Are you truly trying to hide?” Avalis asked. “Did you think buying time for the other three humans to climb their way up here would change anything? You can’t hide from me. You and whoever is advising you, I'll find them. My forces are scouring the surroundings for him. Once they’ve got him, they’ll swarm into the area and break your neck if I don’t first.”

It took a small mental reboot to piece together who the advisor was. Then it clicked. His overdeveloped sense of hearing would have let him hear Father as a comms voice in my head, calling out excellent advice. So his forces were searching around in vain.

“The moment things settle, I’ll be able to hear your breathing, even your heartbeat.”

I knew he was baiting me out, trying to get me to talk. Feathers had stupid good hearing, but even they had to have limits.

Is he bluffing? I asked Wrath. He’s got to be bluffing, you lot can’t possibly be this ridiculous.

Feathers are not able to hear heartbeats or breathing. Or at least, my shell was incapable of that feat. She confirmed.

He’s not bluffing that your sister and the Winterscar knights are too far away to save you, boy. Father added, keeping off the comms and staying in our little soul-tendril group up. That part, I’d believe. We’re on our own.

Plan hadn’t gone completely his way, considering the armors showed green signs right now. Kidra and her two knights were still alive. But their tower hadn’t been in the temple’s gravity well, and it had fallen at full speed.

That’s fine, I wasn’t trying to wait him out. From here, I think there was a chance to outright kill the bastard. He couldn’t see me. But I could see him.

The occult sight could see through walls if I focused just on the sight around me. And his attempt to bait out my voice had exposed his own general direction. Sending my ghosts through walls was trivial, silently surrounding him from all directions.

Feathers didn’t seem to have as highly attuned occult senses like humans did, and my educated guess turned out right when four of my occult ghosts leaped straight for him from different sides.

He reacted instantly to the ambush, but I hadn’t gambled on killing him with a sneak attack.

I didn’t need to move from my hiding hole, letting me fully focus on the occult. Now I was playing to my element. I was going to wear him down.

His chain flew around, but the ghosts constantly refreshed themselves, leaping at him, slashing with those armguards that had far too many occult edges to be safe to touch.

The bastard was fast. Feathers could overcome human limits easily, but physics still had some laws they had to obey. Inertia and gravity put an upper limit to how fast Feathers could actually move. My ghosts didn’t have those limits.

I moved them like a master puppeteer, trying to go faster and faster. Matching his speed, exceeding it slightly. But there was one advantage Feathers had that I didn’t.

A growing haze of heated air followed behind his head anywhere he moved, dodged, or sprinted through. My ghosts could barely move faster than he could, because I was limited by speed of thought. Avalis could see everything move in slow motion, letting him calculate exactly how to maximize his speed and minimize my threat.

I’d been planning on exactly this. Let him build up a backlog. And then up the heat all at once. A fractal lit bright on my own hand, and in doing so, each of the ghosts equally had the same pattern light up in their palms.

The look of horror that flashed through his features was priceless. He recognized it a moment before it was too late, as each ghost completed their last swipes, spinning around gracefully to point four hands from each direction at him.

Fire roared to life, burning through everything.

Unfortunately, he tapped his own powers and turned immaterial, letting the flames pass him. He fell through a divider as a consequence, then ripped it apart with a far more material chain, scything through the ghosts before him.

Press the attack. At this rate he will need to retreat or else the heat sinks will be damaged. Wrath said, when I sent her a mental picture of my current plan.

Father watched on with his own sight, carefully studying the enemy. Avalis was learning some of my patterns, but he was still being harassed by four unkillable ghosts that constantly zipped through the walls, chasing after him anytime he tried to do the same. And we were in an enclosed space filled with flammable things with a pyromaniac hiding in the walls.

The air was heating up rapidly, as everything was being set on fire.

The godsdamn ability of his is ridiculous. I seethed, as the metal weasel somehow survived against the odds. It’s the bottleneck stopping me from actually killing that bastard. Anytime a ghost armguard sailed for his shell and he couldn’t block it, he’d go intangible. At this rate, he’s going to outlast me before I get him.

The brain fog of overusing occult images was starting to stagger in. I held firm against it, focusing.

Focus your mind. Father said. The occult is nothing but willpower made manifest.

Trying. I sent back. The dividers and general layout of the zone here were slowly getting completely ripped apart in the fight. Smoke was filling the floor, but both Journey and his eyes could see through that easily enough once adjusted. And Avalis wasn’t just dodging my ghosts, he was always methodically eliminating everywhere I could hide.

Then I made a mistake. He got close to me by chance. My ghosts struck at him heavily from one side, not all at once, but enough for him to notice somehow. I thought I’d been subtle in my attempt to push him away from my hiding spot.

His eyes narrowed, then glanced directly my way. “Found you, rat.”

He leaped straight up, turning immaterial to soar through the obstructions between us. I scrambled out of the way, jumping out of my nice hideaway right as the Feather tore into it. It wasn’t a direct hit, more an estimated guess on his part. A good one. But a guess all the same, and that gave me enough wiggle room to escape his assault.

I opened fire with my own fractal of heat, pointed directly at him, a torrent covering his approach. He soared through me, immaterial, fading back into reality with a savage swing of his offhand.

It sailed through air as I’d already kicked off the ground, sliding against the nearly vertical floor.

The chase was on. I jumped from divider to divider, falling down a few, sprinting across others, kicking an old coffee machine backwards, launching bouts of flame to hold him back, insulted his mother, anything I could to distract him. Avalis wasn’t having it. He hadn’t cared for being harassed from a distance, and he wasn’t going to let me give him the slip again.

I had to end my assault with the wraiths, the difficulty of casting those occult mirrors and moving at the same time had grown too much for me. I’d seriously tapped myself dry.

Father called out a warning, but I was growing too muddled to hear it. A chain end raced for my chest, at just the wrong angle.

I elbowed the side of the floor, letting me spin my armguard around just in time to take the chain. Not enough time for me to parry it. The chain was held off by my armshield, but free to wrap around to my back.

It swung into Journey’s shield, forcing the armor to trigger early. Blue flared out, crackling against the blow.

Only saving grace was gravity and my current speed, pulling me down the floor this entire time. I slipped through the chain like soap in his clenched hand, just as my shield was near seventeen percent. A heartbeat from breaking.

That wasn’t the only dangerous part of that weapon.

The occult explosion hit a moment after, spinning me like a dreidel across the floor. My hand blindly snapped out and caught another cubical divider. The cheap rotting thing broke apart, unable to hold my weight. It did stop my spinning and let me angle my slide down the floor until I hit a bolted set of cabinets.

I’d reached the bottom of the skyscraper ruin. It was just lopsided cabinets and the broken window grid before me.

And right past those cabinets, were the broken shards of window walls and a mile long drop right past. More than a mile even. I think this zone had multiple stratas combined.

It gave me a stupid idea. With effort, occult pulsed one more time from my core, two wraiths splitting off from me. I didn’t have them go for Avalis, I’d need them for later.

Then I swan dived straight to the abyss.

“What are you doing?!” Cathida screamed out as my hand reached out to grab one of the window grids, skeletal remains of the skyscraper’s old surface. The metal bent slightly, but held. Gravity was still weak here, being under the temple.

“Improvising.” I grunted out and swung my way forward with a kick, hand out as my feet dangled over the massive drop down. The grid that once held those windows was sturdy enough with the temple’s aura, holding my weight as I swung from makeshift bar to bar.

“Improvise harder!” She screamed out, Journey’s HUD highlighting a red outline rapidly approaching.

Avalis landed right where I’d been a moment ago, cabinet crumpling down under his feet, the chain already spinning in his hand. Violet eyes darted around wildly, looking for where my wraiths had gone off too. Then they centered back on me, narrowing down. He chased behind with a leap, running with precise jumps across each grid as I swung my way under, features dead-set and focused. He was gaining, speed growing with each leap.

Exactly what I’d been hoping for. Half formed wraiths ambushed him from both sides, forcing him to leap down at my level in order to keep his speed, hand grabbing a grid bar like I’d been doing.

“A useless attempt, Winterscar.” Avalis seethed, swinging behind me. “You can’t damage me in any way that matters.”

“Yeah.” I admitted. “But gravity sure can.”

My hidden wraiths sprang out, slashing both ends of the bar he'd been about to grab. Cutting the section completely free as his eyes widened in realization. Didn't matter anymore how fast he could think or any of his occult scrapshit.

He fell straight down, screaming in incoherent fury.

Next chapter - The True Forge

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