Rot and Gold 5 – Beacon of Hope [Rave POV]

Rave walked to the easternmost point of the star fort.

Nahoa, Nia and Ehtra had already scattered to the winds. Unlike them, the First Lady of Fusion was neither connected to John’s brain nor was she blessed with tactical intuition. If anything, past participation in battles had shown that she was prone to overextending. Thus, she walked and took in all that she could.

Copernicus manifested by her side. The solar panther walked with grace and caution, scanning the wide view with her, sharing his senses with hers so they could get a broader view of it all before their fusion folded his mind into hers.

Simmering rage and disappointment filled her at the sight of it all. The Hudson Barrier had been in the process of rotting away when she had left. Now it was just a mass of black and grey, almost entirely hidden in a thinning mist of spores that gradually emptied itself into the Guild Hall. Even when the last Lorylim was dealt with, there was no point in reclaiming it. All of the infrastructure she had helped put together was undone. It would be easier to restart by copying New York into a new Protected Space.

The destruction went further. The very water was tainted with the pieces ripped out of Tiamat. The Hudson on the real space side of things was a dirty thing, but their river here had been clean, made so by utilizing giant clams and such. That same river was now grey and rippled unnaturally, thick like oil and filled with another life.

The Guild Hall itself was still recognizable. For all of its craters and towers of fungal corruption, this was still her home. The Palace was damaged, forests burned, Buildings had been turned into fortresses or hives of abominations, and craters marked the landscape with growing frequency, yet it was still her home.

Rave stopped at the tip of the point.

That anger was still there. It was a strange, sinking feeling, so removed from most things she had expected herself to feel. The smile on her face was gone. In this moment, alone with only her contracted half, she was serene in her emotions.

‘It’s like when I saw mother’s wedding ring on the Abyss Auction.’ She finally managed to put a finger on it. This mix of disappointment, anger and understanding. She loathed the Lorylim for what they did, but she could not say she was in any way surprised by this. Really, she should be smarter than to get emotional at this, right?

Wrong.

Rave was not in control of herself like that. She admired those that were. She also preferred her way. To live honestly, to clench her teeth in anger at her enemies, to ignite her claws in disgust.

‘That’s our way,’ Copernicus supported her, before turning into a band of light. The essence of the solar feline seeped into her, locking into her own soul and making a bigger whole than its parts.

Rave’s understanding of the world widened. Intuitions sharpened, senses expanded, until she truly understood how far she had come. Her mind lingered on that ring, on that day, when she and John had struggled to defeat a singular boss monster. That day on which they had confessed their love to each other.

All of that had led here. She refused to let this be more than a valley in their wonderful life.

‘We deserve to laugh and to live,’ she thought and placed a hand in her inventory. She hesitated for a moment, then pulled out the plain, militaristic earpiece everyone in Fusion was wearing. This was not the time for headphones and upbeat music.

She leapt into the fray.

The feline Lightbearer was a streak of prismatic rays, her body dissolved into magic. The moat around the Palace was an easily jumped hurdle. She landed, light as a feather, on the other side. Her aura ignited, engulfing her in golden light. The earth quaked from the distant battle of titans. Tiamat had secured a grab on Nathalia. The new form of the beloved goddess of volcanoes fit into one of the avatar’s enormous claws.

“A solemn reign for the few that rise up high,” Rave began to chant, while closing the distance. Leap for leap, she made it across hundreds of metres.

Even at her speed, the kilometres across were too much to run in seconds. She could do it in minutes, but she did not have minutes. Nathalia was dragged over the side of a mountain range, while cackling Tiamat galloped away from Stirwin. Her tail swiped through the hurricane Tilgun sent to bind her.

“And we all fight.”

Rave focused her all into her claws. She was well-rested. It had been hours since she had fought in New Orleans, hours spent staring out of a car window while people suffered. She focused all of that into her claws. The hard-light constructs expanded in length as power flowed into them, until they were like curved blades of red, blue and green.

“Let our worlds collide!”

Midair, she swiped her claws. Five sickles of iridescent light sliced through the air. They moved slower than usual, their speed curtailed by the will of the feline Lightbearer, to allow her allies swarming the sky to get out of the way. Many of the airborne Lorylim managed the same, but the great streams of spores lacked that awareness and speed. What was infectious black turned to white ash.

The denseness of the magic allowed them to cross the distance. The sheer length of travel took even the light projectiles dozens of seconds. Her target was larger than a skyscraper. Even if Tiamat moved at ludicrous speeds for her size, Rave knew how to aim.

The chaos goddess screamed when five scorching sickles of light sliced and burned her side. The entirety of her right flank was carved open. Chunks of Lorylim matter the size of an apartment complex slouched off a skeleton of concrete and rebar.

The gap in her stride allowed Stirwin to catch up. His claws curled into Tiamat’s back, grasping her spine and yanking it partly out of her as he ripped her to the side. The abominable heart of the hivemind slammed into the waters and came face to face with the Celestial Devourer. Both inhaled, both let loose the elemental fury in their bellies. Solar fire clashed with black entropy. The energies swirled where they met, cascading outwards in a black-gold disk. It was beautiful and it was destructive, melting mountain peaks where it touched them. Molten rock was turned into Nathalia’s weapon, the now freed goddess of volcanoes forging it with magic and will into a stake that rammed into Tiamat’s chest.

At that moment, the Celestial Devourer’s time ran out. All the magic used to feed him dispersed in a final moment of solar radiance.

Rave suppressed her urge to run over there and aid Nathalia. She and her brother would have to fight on against the heavily damaged avatar on their own. For her part, Rave had been ordered to assure the eastern parts were fine.

She landed, harshly this time. She caught herself on one hand before her knees could smack on the ground. Her lungs worked to get fresh oxygen into her body. Her aura had faded. The standard breathing technique she had been using since her first days as a fighter still aided her much in the recovery of mana and stamina. This warped usage of her light claws had taxed her more than regular.

“The First Lady!”

Rave was aware enough of her environment. She had landed in the middle of a civilian camp. Bodies around reflected a recent struggle against Lorylim, one that the people and the soldiers had won.

A victory that had been hard fought, judging by the environment. A segment of the people were isolated as per protocol, the scratch marks left on them by the various weapons and mishaps of war potential vectors for infection. There was fear in the air and desperation.

‘I am their queen now.’

The thought surfaced spontaneously, as most of her thoughts tended to. She blinked at it. For a brief moment, she was confused. What had really changed between the titles? A couple less letters, really?

What was different wasn’t her title, it was the situation. Rave had been happy to be working at the sides of John’s realm. She tinkered away at public works and social events, keeping a pulse on her John’s project while putting her own spin on things. That had been wild, in its own way, and fun. It was the careful indulgence of a woman building something with her man.

Rave was not the same as John in her consideration for the equality of man. The entire term was nonsense to her. She had been Abyssal by blood, she had been raised in mundane schools by her father’s desires, and she knew she was more powerful than most. Being with John had put that into overdrive, but she had always had the talent to become someone. She would have stood head and shoulders above these people. The mark her tiger had left on her put her on a pedestal.

Now, surrounded by these people, the scent of fear thick in the air, she understood what John had been struggling with all this time.

Unlike him, she wasn’t an overthinker.

“Good work, everyone.” Rave straightened up and put a smile on her face. She knew she was pretty. Confident as a cat, she strut forwards, shoulders back and eyes sharp. Many hours keeping a harem together and people from all stratas of society on her projects had sharpened already keen social instincts. “I’ve just returned from Orleans. We’ve defended that port.”

As she spoke, her eyes fixed on individual members of the crowd. She did not want to speak to some kind of amorphous blob, she wanted to speak to the individuals that she was now responsible for. This was the lot she had chosen. At any point, she could have stopped John. She knew he would have listened to her above anything. Yet, here she was.

“It’s hard and I ain’t gonna lie to ya, it’s gonna be hard for a while longer.” She put her hand on the head of a kid that stood nearby. War did not ignore the young. As an Abyssal herself, she knew that. “We’re dealing with it though.”

The child looked up at her with big eyes. They changed to something hard. “We’ll tough it out!”

Rave laughed. A gentle, encouraging little laugh. “Don’t get too brave,” she warned him and gave him a little punch to the shoulder. “If you get attacked again, I’ll come running!” she promised the people. “I’ll burn bright for us all!”

With those words, she turned again into an elemental ray, streaking across the landscape. Her cat ears twitched, picking up the nearest source of gunshots. Back as a material woman, the quarter elemental charged into the fray. Bullets flew around her, visible projectiles that she wove around as she tore through a crowd of abominations. She used Observe for one of them, registering it as level 27.

The creatures perceived her as she was coming, but couldn’t do more than twitch in response to her motions. By the time she had punched the skull of the fifth and last one clean off, the first one hit the ground.

Rave had no need to stop, but she did it anyway. She nodded towards the nearest soldier. “Keep going,” she told her and offered her fist. The soldier was confused for a moment, then executed a hesitant bump. Smirking, the feline Lightbearer charged away. There was a thousand small battlefields, scattered out in pockets.

Rave understood what was happening, even if she did not understand the details of how it was working. John made the tough decisions that were needed. No doubt that was hurting him. He was a goodie-two-shoes at heart.

She couldn’t take that burden from him. She just did not have those gifts. The queen of Fusion was neither connected to John’s brain nor was she blessed with tactical intuition. What she could do was give people a light in this dark hour. A smile on the battlefield, a claw that carved through the enemies and looked good doing so.

‘Level 201.’ Rave slotted into a creature in the distance, a fat, mound-like creature consisting of rolls upon rolls of rancid fat, marbling black, oozing flesh.

It was the first thing to actually see her coming. Three dozen needle-tipped tendrils emerged between the folds, moving through the distance between them. Rave jumped left to right, dodging all of them except one. It still failed to reach her, incinerated by a pointed finger and the laser that came from it.

A large, vertical mouth opened up. Spores were spewed out like smoke from an industrial chimney. Rave pointed her clawed hand at the monster. A burst of sunlight from her palm overpowered the monster’s attack in an instant. The next, she was upon it. The reinforced knuckles of her right hand slammed into the creature.

The Impact Punch was a Basic Martial Art, supposed to do little more than add a bit of extra oomph to the attack. Done by Rave, it might as well have been a tank shell. The insides of the monster exploded out of the side opposite of the feline Lightbearer, splattering trees and houses in black ooze. A second scattershot of sunlight burned that corruption away.

Immediately, she was back in motion. That creature was the first one she had encountered that had required her to exert herself somewhat. The crowd of Lorylim she found thereafter did not have that strength. It was another cluster of horrors, fighting regular soldiers. She finished off nine, before ripping a tenth one off a man that had been about to get infected.

Another encouraging smile and a little wink, then she continued on. Every engagement she weighed in on went like this. Be it a smile, a wink, a nod, a hand, a fist bump, or a single word, she always offered the people that she helped something more. She offered them a little moment of hope. That was something that, among the geniuses of battle she was surrounded by, she could do best.

The people deserved a brighter tomorrow.