December II

Author's Note: Refer to Chapter 40 for the first appearance of Sirian Lie.

Please tell me we’re almost finished here. I’m going to need to see the Springfield shrink after this, Helaya thought, head spinning as she touched another of Crossfire’s bloodstains. His former cell was littered with them, and each time she was sent into his past. Though she didn’t have to feel his pain, as Strength rained blows on their body the trauma left its mark either way. How are you doing, Crossfire?

Goes double for me. Okay, if Wallace was interrupted by Nairis in that one, then I think this one will be my escape, Crossfire explained, pointing at another patch of dried blood on the rocky wall. I’ll stay over you while you’re in there, Hel. Anyone else find anything?

The empath vampire braced herself as she touched a bloodstain on the far wall of Crossfire’s former cell, instantly taken back to the last time he had been struck by Strength.

One of the mass cells held people in their own sick, probably as a means to get them to give in, Sorvel reported, turning up her nose at the otherwise bare cell to her left. On her right, Shelle sat with her legs crossed. Her eyes that were rolled into her head slowly returned as she stood.

Only two lost souls here, so she wasn’t killing many people. At least, not without using their soul somehow. And they’re too faded to be of much help. One started crying when it saw its reflection in my eyes, the other claimed it’d rather die than associate itself with criminals. Shelle patted her cheeks with both hands then shook her head, whispering an incantation to warm herself up as the chills of communicating with the dead left her. Anything at the entrance, Lucien?

Nothing has entered the barrier after us, Lucien confirmed, sounding somehow equally bored and alert.

Wait, do you hear that? Sorvel asked, crouching low as she turned toward a nearby doorway. The hallway she and Shelle currently stood in was hardly wide enough for them to be shoulder to shoulder, the walls lined by deep cells with thick iron bars and bare stone floors. The aforementioned sick cell to their left still offended her with its scent despite being practically scorched clean. However, under her companion’s whispered spell, she heard a distant shiver.

At the end of the brick and bar walls, there were three doorways. One was full of collapsed rubble, the hallway beyond suffering the same fate with starlight peeking through where the mountain had collapsed into the structure of the barrier following Crossfire’s explosion. To the right was a restroom that seemed entirely too long for the proportional space it occupied, lined with large stalls. Forward, a cavernous room with the remains of chairs lining the far side. The scorched right wall was visible from the door, but the room stretched out of sight to the left. The mage and the dragon stepped forward, the high-pitched shivers of a young woman distinctly audible to the latter as they crossed the threshold into what might have once been a meeting room.

On the far side of the room, a would-be hidden panel in the wall was pushed out, and beyond it, in the fetal position, lay a girl in rags with pure white hair. Shelle and Sorvel gasped in union before the former quickly floated over to the freezing woman and reached into one of her pocket spaces, quickly scanning the young woman with a host of identifying and scrying spells to see past any illusions or false magical creations, but the girl didn’t have a trace of magic on her. A biologic spell revealed that she was a human woman nineteen years of age, but her auric vision saw no soul in the woman. She finished pulling a thick wool blanket from a pocket inside her cloak and draped it over the young woman as she dismissed her own cloaking spell. *An escaped soulless prisoner here!

Sorvel crossed the room in a single leap, destroying the rest of the false wall with a flying kick and revealing a much higher tech interior beyond. The steel walls were embedded with wires which fed into the ground, and a lifeless automatic door stood at the end, jammed open a sliver.

The helpless young woman yelped as Shelle appeared, crawling back on her arms in recoil, though after a few moments, she leaned into the warmth of the blanket despite her panic. “No! You shouldn’t have come here.”

“It’s okay, we’ll get you to safety,” Shelle said, trying to give the woman a reassuring smile, though as she looked down on the girl’s frightened visage, her own expression felt hollow. Crossfire, can you feel Lucien? He’s dropped from the network.

The red mage reached out into the heat of the barrier, though his own heart went cold as he felt first an enormous mass of heat moving toward him impossibly quickly, and then Lucien’s thankfully warm body on the ground. A moment later, the monster he had escaped from appeared at the door to his cell once again. Hel, we need to go, now!

Take my body out, I’ll snap back on my own. I need a little more time in here, the bloodseer responded, her body limp on the ground.

Wallace is here again! Get out while you can! Strength stepped forward with a satisfied grin on his face, his massive hands a black void as he slammed his palms together. The resulting shockwave nearly blew Crossfire off his feet. The sound shattered the telepathic connection and the stealth enchantments Shelle had laid on him and his ward, though his tower shield blocked Helaya from view.

The behemoth bent the bars on the walls and door until they were trapping him in the tiny room again as Crossfire stood there mouth agape, eyeing the giant and hoping he didn’t realize Hel was there. “You know, if you wanted to be captured again, you could have come to our new lair; I think you’d like it much more. Don’t worry, I’ll bring you there later.”

“Well, last time was nice but I wanted a real spa day this time.” Crossfire, despite the confident front, breathed a sigh of relief as the giant disappeared.

“You’ll be safe and warm in my pocket space while we escape; there’s a very evil person here,” Shelle explained to the shaking young woman. With some effort, she ripped through the reinforcement open a hole to her most familiar pocket reality with two hands, though she immediately felt the mana drain. A spike of panic ran through her as she felt the aberration that was Strength approaching, and she glanced at Sorvel. Are you-

I’m ready the dragoness replied. Her crimson red scales previously wrapped around her ankle spread out in a pulsing hexagonal wave across her body, growing up her legs and eventually covering her whole body, bulging out the white tank top and sweatpants she wore. The straight black twin horns on her head grew, reaching down as far as her shoulder length red hair. The scales finally reached her face, a scarlet mask around glowing yellow eyes as the ends of her fingers contorted into sooty talons.

“It won’t matter,” the woman moaned, though she dove into the pocket space when Strength appeared in the doorframe. The space snapped shut behind her as a stream of black fire erupted from a palm Shelle stretched toward the monster.

“Goddaughter,” Strength lectured in a faux-hurt tone, splitting through the fire stream with his hands joined together, “you’d attack one so close to you so readily?”

“You lost that title when you betrayed everything you once stood for,” Shelle hissed back. The white tiled floor of the once-meeting-room they stood in bulged out before innumerable earthen spikes erupted from the floor and walls. Strength twisted around the first few that made it to him, shattering one outright with a punch and weaving through a dozen more toward Shelle through a clear path in the spikes.

Sorvel dodged in place around the spikes coming toward her, waiting in the most viable path toward Shelle the spikes allowed. The giant lunged through a ring of spikes rocketing toward him and set to converge on his throat. One stone found its mark in the impossibly large but tiny target ripping through his knee. He found his footing as he landed. A bilious yellow aura surrounded him as he twisted on one foot and threw a haymaker toward Shelle. The imprint of his fist sailed directly toward her, a black aberration the size of her head that would rip through her chest and destroy her heart.

Instead, it collapsed into Sorvel’s scaled stomach. The dragoness shrugged off the pain of his attack as a fraction of the blackened energy seeped through her scales, stepping forward and reaching up to uppercut her fist into his neck and chin, a sharp crack issuing out as she launched Strength into the stone behind him. He climbed out of the wall to see an empty room. Rushing toward the exit Sorvel blocked his path, and beyond her Shelle faced him with glowing iridescent eyes, floating backwards down the cell-lined hallway. “Of course. The lizard.”

“Crossfire Heat,” the knight whispered under his breath as he dismissed the shield and grabbed the bars with his gauntlets. An arcane heat washed over his entire body before concentrating into his palms, though the metal remained solid and black despite the molten heat. He swore under his breath as he gripped the bars harder, willing everything his armor had into the spell, but the bars didn’t even soften. Explains why it hurt so bad when Strength knocked me through them.

A shadow cast over him, interrupting his spellwork as the metal bars were bent at the top and bottom by the recovered paladin. “Crossfire, you need to escape. I’ll ensure your safe passage.”

“What about you? The big guy took you out like it was nothing. No offense, but… you really think you can stand up to him?” Crossfire asked, draping Helaya’s **** body over his shoulder despite his objections.

“He took me by surprise. I won’t let it happen again. I am going to join Sorvel and attempt to extract Shelle as well,” Lucien explained, taking off his dented helmet and throwing it into a corner of the room.

“Did we get what we came for at least?” Crossfire asked as he stepped through the gap in the cell bars carrying the vampire.

“Perhaps, but that’s not important. Staying here any longer means certain **** or worse. You must go,” Lucien said, and though Crossfire often felt the opposite responsibility when doing his duties, he acquiesced to the paladin’s demand. Before Lucien could leave, Crossfire laid a hand on the back of his head. A smooth red helmet capped with twin spikes formed on Lucien’s head to replace the old; his white adamantium armor became streaked with red. His sword morphed, growing slightly thinner and wider as a circle of flame appeared in the base of the blade, replacing some of the metal.

“My skills, my power, my legacy, it’s all in you now. You can give it back to me when I see you back at base. Good luck,” Crossfire saluted the stalwart knight as he left in a rush of wind. He felt his power leave him as he gave up his enchanted armor to Lucien, left with only the strength of his soulless body. He shifted Helaya’s weight, internally praising himself for upping his workout routine as he nonetheless easily sprinted toward the exit carrying her.

A neon green aura surrounded Strength as he shifted his gaze from Sorvel to Shelle. The dragoness spit three bursts of flame at him as he sprinted forward, shifting around each fireball and landing a jab into her scaled stomach, knocking the wind out of her and sending her backwards through the doorway of the hall and to the research section behind. Shelle became translucent, floating upwards through the metal and rock of the ceiling.

Strength crouched down as she left his sight, launching upwards with a powerful leap. Getting faster as he moved, he crushed the metal and stone with his fists until her ankle was visible and grabbed it; the black aura around his hand negated her intangibility spell. He threw her into the ground with a loud crack. Shelle left a red streak behind on impact and gasped in pain as she slid backwards, whispering a healing spell as Strength lunged toward her with another leap.

The shockwave which resounded when his fist met Lucien’s shield brought her to her feet, and she took the opportunity to scorch his face with black flame. The giant pushed the paladin back with one hand as the other knocked her stream of flame away. Sorvel, recovered from his attack, flew from between Lucien’s knees, landing a flying drop kick directly into Strength’s hip. His recoil allowed Lucien to drive his greatsword into the giant’s stomach, though Strength easily retreated from the attacks. With two teammates back in sight, Shelle re-established their mental link.

“Lucien, you disappoint me so. You could have been something great, you know. Be a pity for you to die here,” Strength called, ripping an adamantine bar from the cells on either side of them and spinning them in his hands.

“Ironic.” Lucien stared his former master in the eye, assessing his intent as Strength’s gaze swept through the trio. A brief analysis indicates his true target is Shelle. You are the most **** of us, you have to leave. I predict I can hold him off for five minutes. We may even be able to escape, if Sorvel and I can overpower him.

We can beat him together! You could hold your own against him before, couldn’t you? Shelle fired a blast of iridescent mana at the behemoth, and he batted it back with one of his poles, enveloped in the same dark non-energy as his fist. She tried to dispel it as it sailed toward her, but contact with him had corrupted it somehow, and she flew back and to the side in a burst of speed to dodge as Sorvel and Lucien engaged Strength once more.

I think not. He’s stronger than before. Faster. It should be impossible… Lucien blocked a few of Strength’s strikes, though he couldn’t stop the monster from slamming one into Sorvel’s head, sending the brawler into one of the cells beside them with dizzying ****.

“This should be impossible! I’m twice as strong as you now!” Andros roared, welts all over his body where John’s subdual bullets had hit him. John finally revealed himself, smirking though the man couldn’t see his face behind the mask, fooled by its identity hiding enchantment. “Unless it’s not you at all! This was all a trap, is that it?”

“It’s me alright,” John said, taking off the mask just to gloat. “You’re twice as strong as I was like five months ago. That’s nothing to me now.”

“You must have made a deal with an entity of your own,” Andros said, throwing two knives at John. Even without Reflex Mode John easily dodged out of the way by Jumping up onto a fire escape in the barrier. From there, he activated Mind Over Matter and leapt from the rail toward his opponent.

Andros smirked as he shot another paralytic dart from a mechanism under his wrist, but John formed a board out of Mana Construct to stand on and Jumped out of the air, behind his opponent. He landed a few quick blows onto Andros’ back before the assassin turned around.

Andros thrust a longsword hidden under his cloak toward John, though the man’s lower Agility let Intercepting Strike handle the blade easily, ripping it from the man’s hands and stowing it away in John’s inventory. Andros retreated and drew two daggers while John cracked his knuckles, lunging toward his opponent and performing two more Intercepting Strikes in quick succession as Andros attempted to strike him with each dagger, stowing away these weapons too.

Andros drew and flung eight knives in an instant, and John Jumped into the air to leave an Afterimage behind, the visage of him in pain as if struck. Using Move he pushed himself behind Andros and gave himself a shove downwards, landing a side kick into the back of the assassin’s head.

“How…?” Andros stammered out, turning to John once again as the Gamer held his hands up toward his opponent down his centerline.

“Time to bring you in, see what you know.” John Jumped a dozen times per second, each time leaving an Afterimage behind and every other appearance landing a blow on Andros until the empowered assassin could take no more and collapsed. To ensure the job was finished, John took out Ivory and shot him in the head twice with the Shard of Mercy restrained gun.