Vol.4 Ch.63 – Welcoming Committee
Chapter 63: Welcoming Committee
Elaine and this temporary squad she'd been given command over filed out of their Gospel, right next to the hospital. The ones she was most worried for were the resistance mages but heading into a facility run by Caulder's goons was sure to be dangerous for everybody.
“Have you been to this place before?” she asked Esther as she watched the other people in her squad walking ahead of her. Seven lives she was responsible for, plus Esther's and her own.
“I helped save people who were about to be dragged in there,” Esther said, “but I have never set foot inside.”
“Alright, we'll play it by ear then,” Elaine muttered, then spoke loudly enough for Evelyn to hear: “Evie, turn the Akashic Knowledge on the hospital. Maybe you can warn us if anything's about to jump us.”
“Got it,” Evelyn said, already fiddling with her AR displays.
“Should we just walk in?” Aurora asked.
“I say we smash the doors in,” Vitali said.
“You always say that,” James said.
“No, he actually has the right of it this time,” Sylvia said. “If we need an escape route, opening and closing a door could cost us.”
“Fair,” James said. “Who wants to do the honors?”
“You do it,” Julia whispered. “I'll see if the drones work.”
“Are they that useful?” Elaine asked.
“They're great for scouting ahead,” James said. “And the pistol ammo is armor-piercing so they're not totally useless against the cyborgs.”
“Those pistols are looted from Caulder's troops, right?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Elaine exchanged a look with Esther. “You think he...”
“Created these pistols specifically to pierce Atlantean robotics?” Esther finished. “Oui.”
“You think our enemies are divided?”
“It's possible,” Esther said, “but I rather think Caulder is the kind of person to plan for contingencies.”
Elaine's lips pressed together into a thin line. “So, what's his contingency plan for someone attacking this place?”
Esther's breath caught, but then she shook her head. “The Knight. With a Zodiac Knight here, any rescue attempt is doomed to fail.”
“So why didn't that Knight stop us last time?” James asked.
“I assume he isn't interested in hunting us down,” Sylvia said.
“Or he wasn't there last time,” Vitali said.
“Alright, fair enough,” James admitted. “Either way, let me make us an entrance.”
And so he stepped forward. Elaine or any of her squad could have done it as well but, to be honest, Elaine was kind of curious to see what they could do. Her and her team had gotten so strong that she'd kind of lost sight of what a baseline human mage could accomplish.
And James didn't disappoint. He drew Winds to himself for a long moment, way longer than it would have taken any of Elaine's squad, and then reached out a hand, closed his fist on empty air and yanked upward. Along with the motion of his hand rocks shot up out of the ground all around the entrance. When he was done the glass doors lay shattered and the overhanging roof was held up by pieces of magically conjured granite rather than the stone pillars that had been holding it up before. That seemed a little risky to Elaine though. It wasn't that she didn't trust the rocks to hold but still.
But then the genius of James' spell became obvious. The moment the glass broke a dozen Wendigo came rushing out of the hospital and that's when James dropped his hand. Alongside his hand the stone pillars receded back into the ground and the roof, no longer held up by anything, collapsed right onto the monsters.
Or at least that's what should have happened. For a human his reflexes had been phenomenal and even with the ridiculous speed of the Wendigo he caught most of them under the falling debris. But not all of them. Three managed to rush out from under the collapsing roof and Elaine and Esther were just a fraction of a moment too slow to react. But they needn't have bothered because right as the first Wendigo was about to close in on Vitali the big man caught the beast in a bear hug and, before it could figure out how to bring its claws to bear, he immolated the thing in his grasp.
The second stormed straight toward Sylvia, who didn't even attempt to avoid its claws. Elaine was about to shout a warning but at the moment of impact the Wendigo simply... vanished. Sylvia had a single red line blooming on the back of her hand and that was it. Wait, Sylvia was a teleporter, right? Elaine chanced a look up and saw the Wendigo as a speck in the sky, windmilling its arms supernaturally fast but unable to affect its trajectory or the terminal velocity with which it was falling. Elaine concluded that teleporters were fucking terrifying, in a way she'd never considered before. The third Wendigo, a bit slower than the other two, beelined for James and arrived there just in time to run face first into a magically conjured boulder. This one he hadn't pulled out from the ground, he'd simply willed it into existence. Normally Wendigo were fast enough to avoid such obstacles but not even they were faster than the speed of thought and so the monster careened into it. And as it turned out, Wendigo were so ludicrously fast and could build up so much momentum that, when they hit a wall at full sprint their heads exploded like watermelons.
No single spell Elaine had seen here had been outside the grasp of a normal human mage but the amount of ingenuity and coordination on display was awe-inspiring. These were mages who'd been fighting as a team for the better part of a year and it showed.
And before either Evelyn or her could point out the collapsed roof blocking off the entrance James summoned the Winds forth once more and swept the debris away, clearing a path forward.
**
“Marcus Wright, was it?” Kaja asked as her team reached the Awakener who had originally been sent to the library.
“At your service,” the young man said with a salute. Kaja felt like his tone might have been flirty in any other situation but clearly he was too rattled for that.
“When did the thunderstorm set in?” Abigail asked.
“Couple minutes after you last called us,” he said. “The antenna glowed and a moment later the sky changed from sunny to this, like someone had ripped a band-aid off of reality.”
“Not good,” Kaja muttered and from the stares she was getting she knew it hadn't been quiet enough. “We need to head inside.”
“Do we get to come with or will we be a liability?” Marcus asked and he almost kept the bitterness out of his voice.
“We will need you,” Kaja said, clearly surprising him. “I can't promise that we will take your team with us to confront the Necromancer directly but you will still be of great help getting there.”
Marcus nodded, seeming mollified, and Kaja took the opportunity to assess the situation.
They'd brought six people and Marcus's team consisted of another eight, Marcus and one other man as well as six women. One of the women was a lamia, with a long snake tail where her legs should be, and the male Shard Bearer was some kind of therianthrope, presumably a werewolf.
Kaja had no doubt that this team was highly competent but they were also clearly not as strong as Elaine's squad, of whom Kaja and Omega had poached some of the best members. In fact, from that little scan earlier Kaja was fairly certain that Ophelia might be the strongest member of Project Divinity aside from Elaine. In fact, in terms of sheer utility this girl might even have Elaine beat.
Either way, that was what she had to work with. Meanwhile the library had three floors and a roof and there was not a doubt in her mind that the Necromancer was holding his ritual on the third floor. If he'd been on the roof he'd already have noticed their arrival.
“Let's head inside,” Kaja finally said, then looked at Cassie and Ophelia. “Darklight shields up, please.”
The two gave her a nod and a moment later Ophelia's left hand was wreathed in shadow while cold gathered around Cassie's.
As they advanced Kaja noticed two of Marcus' Shard Bearers staying back. “I don't think it will be any safer outside,” she said gently.
“Sam is artillery support,” Marcus said. “She can attack any place she can see and she can see through walls. She's most dangerous when she can survey the entire battlefield.”
Dangerous enough to leave a bodyguard behind for her?, Kaja thought but didn't voice as she saw one of the other Shard Bearers sitting down cross-legged on the ground as a white feather cloak shimmered into existence around her. A moment later there was a howl and a pack of wolves rounded a corner and huddled around the sitting woman. She muttered a few words and the wolves all blinked at the same time. When they did their eye color shifted from the normal yellow to a gently glowing turquoise.
“Lana has a Soul Shard of Perchta,” Marcus explained. “So long as she's not actively under threat she can conjure up as many wolves, bears and stags as she needs to.”
Kaja was about to mention that even an infinite amount of wolves wouldn't do much good against the things they were likely to encounter but then Marcus added:
“They inherit a portion of her stats and she can cast spells through them.”
Well, now that sounded a lot more intriguing. So not only were they supernaturally strong, she would be as strong if not stronger so long as she didn't enter the fight personally. Suddenly Kaja's assessment of Marcus' team's strength didn't seem so clear anymore.
“Alright,” she finally said. “I trust your knowledge of your own team. Now, how do we open the gate?”
“Allow me,” Abigail said as she stepped forward.
Kaja thought she would get to see another demonstration of Abigail's Higher form but clearly the Lacrima had decided to work smarter, not harder.
Abigail began humming and as she did she summoned the Winds to swirl around her, feeding them into her voice, amplifying it and focusing it down until she was hitting the glass doors with a wave of sound magic so dense it blew apart the doors completely.
Kaja had expected a welcoming committee to rush out the moment the doors broke. That's why she'd told Ophelia and Cassie to keep their Darklight protection ready. That did not happen. In many ways it would have been preferable to be swarmed by monsters. Instead what wafted out was a wave of Outsider energy so dense it made everyone present retch. It hadn't even been an attack. This was just the accumulated ambient power of whatever ritual that Necromancer was working.
“Omega,” she said quietly, not even sure what she wanted from him. And he understood. He rushed to her side and supported her, letting her lean against him.
Once again he was her rock. Rocks were hard and unyielding and jagged but sometimes they were exactly what you needed to keep yourself upright.