The Chimera Summoner – Ch 43 (Part 2/2) – Nightwish
Nightwish part 2-
I attempted to get my bearings.
Lorna’s icy lake was raining in ghostly drops from the ceiling, each drop landed and evaporated in a puff of icy vapor.
I was still suspended in Carmine’s web, pierced in dozens of places by the sickening threads.
But the pain was overwhelmed by the magic still surging through me.
I watched everything happening like time was being stretched, each moment lingering for my personal perusal.
Lorna was back in her vessel, her true self banished back to safety in the astral. She was blighting the guards around Hera and the Netherim with frost and fear.
Not much time had passed then. A few heartbeats at most. Lorna must have sprung straight into action, bless her. It was just like her. Her practical side wouldn’t let her squander an instant, once I had switched us and thereby committed us to my own plan.
Hera was rolling around with a bloody, frost-blighted guard, wrestling a spear from him.
Carmine was staring at me with confusion and rage, a nest of pale threads already spinning between her fingers to do, no doubt, the worst thing she could think of.
My mind was clear.
My soul hummed with a mountain of foreign power, gifted from the mystery woman in my vision.
It had a odd…taste? Like it had been carefully sealed away to age and was happy to at last be free, finer and more potent for its time in stasis.
It had an elden, unfamiliar, but benevolent feel to it.
My sword was light in my fingers.
Cool new sword, bad guys abounding, good guys in peril, traitorous nemesis hurtling towards me, and here was me – absolutely surging with power like nothing I had ever imagined.
Questions later.
Daring heroics NOW!
[Familiar Bond]
Three summoning circles of green, pink, and gold roared to life below me.
[Tempest Strike]
I went to cast the Skill as normal, but Melody’s Nightwish seemed to seize the magic within me, and do something to it.
Focused it!
Dark air shot in a dozen cutting arcs around me, shredding the entrapping web to nothingness. Carmine was ripped away in the sharp whirlwind, her threads shredding in her hands.
Black, smoky wind.
That is NOT how [Tempest strike] usually feels.
Still brimming with power. Class feels fine inside me. Everything seems fine…?
…Sweet!
Even as I began to fall, I activated [Spectral waltz]. This time, I pushed the Skill straight through the sword, as instinctively as every other part of my Class had always been. Instead of merely becoming insubstantial for a moment, I transformed into moonlight and dashed towards my target.
Atalanta Carmine.
I had never been moonlight before, but I didn't have time to marvel at the alien sensation.
We both gasped in shock at the speed, even as I slammed Nightwish through her growing net of string.
It was an artless approximation of a slash. The angle was wrong, I twisted the blade slightly as it cut.
But I was moving so fast, and the blade was so damnably sharp that, even deflected, it cut right through her rapidly forming defensive cocoon of threads, and slammed into her.
She rocketed away from me, into a huge metal pipe which cracked, sending a shrill blast of steam, and a screaming Carmine hurtling across the room at an odd angle.
Still THRUMMING with power! Holy moly… I could get used to this!
My energy dropped just fractionally, and I felt a single nauseating drop of fatigue.
Ok. I am on the clock!
My bonds were singing.
I felt Lucy’s exhilaration, as she zipped around the room at incredible speeds, gathering up Netherim and herding them to relative safety. Gods, I loved the woman. Looking out for people in danger. Looking good while she did it.
Her foot slammed a pair of guards across the room with a gust and a boom.
And she beats up bad guys at the same time.
Literal. Dream girl.
Familiars also powered up. Got it. Power split five ways, probably not going to last for long.
Time still felt slow.
…but not as slow as before…!
Priorities.
I dashed.
[Spectral Waltz]
[Spectral Waltz]
I rocketed between foes like a shooting star taking out the robed assholes who had tormented my Lorna in that fucked up ritual.
I took particular satisfaction killing them with the very weapon they had tortured her to steal.
They ignited various defences or attacks, or both as I closed on each of them in turn. But I was moving faster than I ever had in my life, and Melody's Nightwish parted every defence and every body in rapid succession, without so much as losing momentum. Cutting them was only distinguishable from cutting through air by visual and auditory cues, such as parting magics, and parting limbs.
Level up!
Level up!
As I thought, my team acted.
Violette started sending an arrow into each cultist, including the ones in the pews around the perimeter who were now surging to their feet.
Serenity's shields were everywhere, flowing in and out of the crowds blocking magic and metal en route. She soared into the rafters, providing overwatch and a broad awareness of the overall situation that flowed through our collective consciousness as we acted in harmony.
Lorna and I orbited one another in a deadly dance. She would hex and curse, calling targets of opportunity or ex-prisoners in imminent danger. I sliced and dashed, making up for lack of expertise with overflowing power, and a vicious hunger for vengeance.
The dark, bladed projectiles of [Tempest strike] whipped from my sword and cut apart the exhausted robed cultists who had conducted the ritual.
I was merciless.
I was cold.
I was as detached as the moon pulling deadly waves.
These were the same assholes who took Wally from me. Who burned my home. Who turned people I had known all my life into a monster. They’d attacked my school. Scared my friends. Hurt my Familiars.
I caught sight of a group of cultists grabbing Netherim. Blades and magics raised.
Whether to make hostages or corpses of them, I didn't wait to see.
[Spectral waltz] carried me there.
[Tempest strike] carved them to ribbons.
They fell in spatters.
I felt flourishing, expanding of magic straining the fabrics of my soul as the over-leveled enemies fell.
Level up!
Level up!
My soul was surging painfully. My Class was roiling inside me. It wasn't meant to grow this fast.
Taking down such enemies shouldn't be possible for me in the first place. But with my borrowed power, it was terrifyingly easy.
Cut after savage, brutal cut. Half the time, I slammed the flat of the blade into an enemy by accident. But I was so charged up that it didn't matter.
[Spectral waltz] carried me between enemies in a flash, and [Tempest strike] cut them to ribbons. Anything that survived met Melody's Nightwish.
The guards that had herded the Netherim into the throne room died.
I made to cut my way through a thick line of Carmine’s web, but found it far tougher to saw my way through than any other magical defense I had encountered.
I sensed the moment that Violette finished planting a Emberblossom on each living cultist in the room with her uninterrupted barrage.
I could feel my gifted power starting to wane. Then it started falling off a cliff. I rushed to use [Emberblossom Harvest].
I felt the sword reweaving, focusing, and magnifying the Skill even as I cast it.
I sent the behemoth network of magic into every corner of the room.
The high, vaulted ceiling turned black. The last of Lorna’s lake was evaporating, and I replaced it with a night sky.
An haunting image of a red moon emerged from illusory clouds.
Each Emberblossom erupted, multiplying, growing and spreading, in a glorious flourishing symphony of petals.
Cultists burned.
Screams and cries echoed around the acoustic chamber.
Level up!
Level up!
Level up!
As power flooded into my soul from each Level, it rebelled. Cracked.
I ignored it.
Together, my Familiars and I fell into a violent trance.
No hesitation, no language. Only need and action.
We whirled around the great throne room like a natural catastrophe that only touched Eternity’s faithful.
[Spectral Waltz], cast alternately through Melody's Nightwish and in my normal way, carried me in a bloody carousel of extreme speed and invulnerable slowness.
Counter attacks sailed through me, and in the next heartbeat, I would be before the offending enemy bringing Nightwish down on them like a lunar guillotine.
By the time new attacks could be launched at my new position, I would use the mana-expensive [Sleight of Place] to switch positions with Lorna or Serenity.
Together, we took up far too much space in the brawl for anyone to touch Violette, who had taken high position in the stands, and was keeping her bow humming, sending arrows zipping into our sturdiest foes.
Any time a cultist realized that she was our true damage source and tried to stop her, Lucy would identify the threat and create a more urgent problem for them.
The bunny girl foot-to-the-face kind of problem.
The regular booms of her [Tempest strikes] sent cultists flying.
Violette’s Emberblossoms were beginning to fill the room with a blue glow as fire ate away inescapably at the panicking enemies.
We had well and truly turned the fight.
But I could feel exhaustion starting to knaw at my bones. And I knew my girls felt it too.
Violette's work was done, and I used [Emberblossom Harvest], in its traditional form.
The execute Skill pulled mana from each of the thick carpet of fiery flowers, dealing massive damage to those most afflicted.
Mana poured into us like a tidal wave, but instead of the usual invigorating refreshment of our energy reserves, the mana washed off us like dust in our thirsty mouths.
The gifted power had overcharged us to such a point that our souls simply couldn't intake anymore, and everything that should have replenished us, instead drowned.
Exhaustion.
It hit us all like a tsunami, utterly shocking in its scale and weight.
I was a beetle crushed under an ocean. No hope of knowing which way was up, much less of swimming.
We were paying the price.
In the storm of spirit fire from Violette’s fading flowers, a sickly pale needle darted like a hummingbird.
It laced through every dead and dying cultist, piercing them with unnatural thread. They hung suspended, as Carmine yanked the thread taught in her hands.
Then their bodies fell. One by one, like discarded rags. Behind, the writhing, ephemeral outlines of them remained, impaled and trapped.
From a steaming, red hot corner of the throne room, Carmine, smoking and lacerated, hauled on the lines with grim determination.