Vol.4 Ch.73 – Mountain Breaker

Chapter 73: Mountain Breaker

Elaine still didn't know whether the giant spider in the sky was truly there or just some kind of fear illusion or something and, right then, she didn't really care.

Because the mountain-sized spider leg descending towards them sure felt real enough.

They had Aurora back. They just needed to get out of there. But that would take time. More time than this thing was going to give them.

“Distract that thing!” Elaine called out and thought through her options as she watched that leg descend.

Blocking it wasn't going to happen. Even if she somehow managed to muster the strength necessary to resist being squashed, the thing would just ram her and the others into the ground.

Killing the giant spider deity sounded great on paper but even more impossible in practice. But maybe she wouldn't have to kill it. Maybe all she had to do was to make it hurt enough to flinch.

And so she sent her swords at it, giving them enough speed to almost break the sound barrier. The impact they made wasn't even visible.

Well that was useless, a voice inside her head said.

Witty remarks, now?, she asked her Soul Shard, Typhon. Aren't you even a little bit scared?

Scared?, Typhon asked. I live for this shit. What better tyrant to fend off than one the size of a planet?

Cool, Elaine thought. So, about that whole 'giant made of crystal' thing.

Yeah, fresh out of that unless you somehow manage to activate your True form.

Any chance of that happening?

Not until you make nice with Tiamat, he replied, and that isn't happening under these circumstances.

So we're fucked, then?

You said you wanted to try making it flinch, he said.

Yeah, and my swords couldn't even pierce the exoskeleton, Elaine thought. So what am I supposed to do?

Yeah, shame, huh?, Typhon said. If only you had a girlfriend whose magical armor-piercing spear you could borrow for such occasions...

Elaine almost smacked her forehead, then summoned forth Alexis' spear Areadbhar. Lugh's magical armor-piercing spear of fire. If anything had a chance of piercing this thing's armor, it would be this. Well, except Evelyn's Vasavi Shakti, but Elaine hadn't brought her.

Alright, if this had any chance of working, she had to do it right. She clutched the spear, took a deep breath, and released her Higher form.

**

Esther knew intellectually that celestials had a Higher form they could access to boost their powers by an order of magnitude.

It was why her threat to Omega had been half bluster. She could kill him in his Sealed state, she was pretty sure, but the moment he unleashed his Higher form she would be in a fight for her life. Maybe a Higher form Cherubim wasn't quite as durable as a Zodiac Knight but they would be at least as deadly.

But Esther had never known that humans were capable of doing the same.

Granted, Elaine clearly wasn't a normal human. There had been power bubbling up from her beyond anything Esther had ever felt from a mortal but even so she hadn't expected Elaine to just whip out a Higher form like that.

Power positively thrummed off of Elaine and her body glowed, then changed.

Elaine's hair grew longer and bleached out to strawberry blond. Gauntlets and greaves and sabatons of crystal materialized along her arms and legs. And most importantly the crystal swords that had been hovering behind her back multiplied and elongated, turning to match the shape of the spear she had summoned. When the transformation was over Elaine had a dozen crystal spears floating behind her back, held in the vague shape of a pair of wings.

Elaine turned back to look at Esther and the moment their eyes met Esther's breath caught. This was no longer the pretty, muscled brunette from before. This was a goddess of war, no less terrifying than the stories her parents used to tell of Athena.

But she couldn't simply stand and gawk. The Void Stalker was still a threat she needed to deal with. And so she charged right past Elaine and at the Void Stalker. Only this time she stopped playing by its rules. She summoned forth reed-thin wires of light magic. Not the instantaneous blasts of light energy she'd been firing but a static beam of cutting light, like trip wires that couldn't snap.

And she didn't use them to attack the creature, either. Instead she constructed a web right behind the creature, just out of reach, not triggering whatever danger sense the thing was using to avoid attacks it couldn't see. And then she charged the fucking thing like a bull.

It was smart enough not to dodge directly backwards but she'd accounted for that, arranging the beams in a curve rather than a straight line. And when the creature used its freakish speed to bend out of the way one of the light beams seared its fucking arm off.

The thing let out an ungodly shriek, nothing like the sophisticated manipulator it had been before, but what gave Esther pause was that the shriek seemed to be coming not just from the Void Stalker but also from the enormous spider god above.

In here we are legion, the thing had said. Maybe that had been literal. Was that spider god the gestalt consciousness of all the Void Stalkers or something?

If so then whatever blow Elaine was about to deal that thing might hurt a lot more than just their Void Stalker. She just hoped Elaine would do it soon because the thing was now so close Esther could count the hairs on the spider leg. And those hairs looked to be the size of trees.

**

The spider wasn't actually a black void that sucked in the light. It had appeared that way at first but it wasn't. The thing was a dark obsidian color, just shy of pure black. It was not the hairy kind of spider, quite smooth in fact, but even the ones with smooth shells had little hairs on them. Except this one was so big that each little hair stood like a monolith dedicated to a nameless god.

Elaine knew she couldn't focus on that though, knew she had to bundle all her strength. Alexis could multiply the power of her blows by charging them up and a little bit of the runoff of that ability had made it to Elaine. But even then, these spears would be less than a pinprick to a creature like this. But... even a pinprick could deliver a drop of Tabasco, right?

And so she filled those spears with all the fire, all the lightning, all the plasma and all the swirling acid she could, cramming enough magic into them that she could feel her body swaying, close to unconsciousness despite the Higher form magnifying her magic. When she felt like she was going to pass out on her feet she launched the spears, all twelve of them, at the spider leg.

The spears were going at near sonic speeds but they still seemed slow compared to the speed the leg was approaching them at, hinting at the kind of impact the thing would cause if she didn't stop it.

And then they hit.

At first nothing happened, giving Elaine just enough time to worry that all her effort had been for naught. And then the most horrid cracking sound Elaine had ever heard shook the space they were in and a tear ran up the leg through the chitin, whatever bug guts this thing had exploding violently and messily out of the crack. If she hadn't totally miscalculated, just the tip of that spider leg had been the size of a mountain. And Elaine had just cracked it down the middle.

The thing did flinch, jerking its leg back in a panic, but not before a glob of burning black bug guts came splattering towards them.

Elaine had clearly watched too many movies about xenomorphs because she immediately worried that that sludge might be caustic, completely ignoring that a glob of that size wouldn't need to be caustic to bury them all underneath it.

And so she summoned forth whatever power she had left and whatever magic was in this space, drawing all the carbon out of this cave that wasn't a cave, and used it to create crystal chips, all hexagonal, and assembled a shield above them. She half expected the mass to crash through regardless but when it struck her shield held. The strain of keeping the barrier up gave her a splitting headache but she managed it, tons of black bug guts weighing down her shield but not getting through.

And then she chanced a look up and almost lost her lunch.

The bug guts weren't bug guts. Oh, they were glossy black, sure, but they weren't an inert sludge. They were Void Stalkers. Thousands upon thousands of Void Stalkers, some of them half melted because of what Elaine's magic had done to the spider but all of them recognizably the same kind of creature they had chased into this plane of existence. And they began clawing at Elaine's barricade.

**

The Void Stalker wasn't doing so good.

Between having its arm cut off and its progenitor harmed it seemed to be barely holding on. But it was still coming.

Mare was doing her best keeping herself and Aurora safe, only barely managing that while Esther did her best doing damage to it.

They had to get out of here, had to find a way out before an army of beings just as fast and just as smart broke through Elaine's shield and tore them limb from limb. But how could they leave? The gateway they'd broken through had collapsed. And while Mare had snatched up the memory of how Elaine had wrested that gate open, she didn't know where to open it, even if she could steal the M-skill and make it happen.

But Mare was noticing something else. Magic was getting hard in this space. Really, really hard. It felt like they had sucked most of the magic out of the air. Which wasn't possible. Law of conservation of energy and all that. Maybe they truly were closer to the Outside than to Creation. Maybe magic didn't exist Outside and that was why they had to use their weird Outsider witchcraft. Maybe they ate Winds. All Mare did know was that Elaine seemed to be having... well, not no issues drawing magic, but definitely less of an issue than them. There was a constant draw of Winds Elaine needed to keep the barrier up, to keep that horde from attacking them.

But she wasn't drawing those Winds from just anywhere. There was a stream of Winds coming from one very specific spot. That had to be it. She had to be drawing Winds from the real world.

“Esther,” Mare snapped. “Keep it busy!”

“Understood,” Esther replied, clearly sensing the urgency in her voice.

“What are you doing?” Aurora asked, rushing after Mare.

“Getting us out of here, hopefully,” Mare said, then drew on whatever Winds hadn't been used up yet and used them to pull out Elaine's M-skill. The ability was jarring enough with tangible M-skills but with this one it felt like she'd grabbed onto something with her brain and yanked. It felt horrible. But possible.

She used the Aspect of Liminality and focused it on the spot Elaine was drawing the Winds. Nothing happened. She put more power into it. Still nothing. What was she missing?

'Monkey see, monkey do' worked really well with simple tasks but with stuff this complicated it could lead to mistakes. What was she missing? Wait, Elaine had futzed around with shadow magic when doing this, hadn't she?

And so Mare used the absolute last of the magic available to her and cast the spot in shadow, then tried again, forcing all her frustration into the power.

Just a little more, she thought, pushing as hard as she could.

And then Aurora's hands laid over hers, helping her. And together they wrenched open the gateway.