Chapter 101: Play Ball

Why did Ann let Kat make the plans again? They were standing in the middle of a street, asphalt warm under her paws as she hopped from one to the other nervously.

“Ah calm yer tits,” Kat chuckled. “We’ll be fine. Probably.”

The past thirty minutes had been a hectic mess. They’d gotten out of the zombie infested skyscraper nest, the ones they’d alerted on the third floor having lost interest when they couldn’t get out of the room.

From there they’d set up Rosalyn and Lucia on the roof of a four story building to the north, clearing out any Warped that were in their way. Thankfully, it was just a couple of the Ringrats. Bren had been assigned to staying with the ranged group, so it was just Ann and Kat down on the road.

“That’s a big probably, Kat,” Ann groaned. “I did not plan on being a wolf shaped pancake today.”

“Well, ye run fast enough, an’ ye won’t be. Ye’re way faster than I am wit’ yer skill, dinnae why ye’re worryin’.”

“Maybe because this is really, really dumb!”

The Guardian, massive meatball that it was, rounded the corner. It didn’t have a singular face, but a mass of them, all watching with bloodshot eyes as it crept along.

“That looks so much bigger up close,” Ann whimpered. “Kat, I don’t wanna do this.”

“It’s fine. Stick tae the plan,” Kat said calmly, despite shifting on her own feet. “We get this right, we kill it quick. We feck it up, we’ve got a long fight.”

“No other ways to do this?” Ann asked, feeling the familiar fear welling up inside her chest.

“Unless ye wanna chip away at it fer hours, not that I can think of.”

“Orenous, you owe me for this fucking thing,” Ann grumbled. She turned, tail towards the massive monster, as it fully entered the street and dropped into a runner’s starting stance. “Ready.”

The Guardian was moving toward them, but slowly. Too slow for the plan to work. It sounded awful as it moved. Hundreds of hands pattered the ground as they pushed its bulk forward, and a squelching as bodies were crushed under the weight before regenerating on the other side. Moans and cries rose from its uncountable throats as it saw them and sped up slightly.

Kat drew her sword, reflecting the setting sun back to where Rosalyn and Lucia were set up. She sheathed the sword, and waited.

A moment later, a bullet hit one of the heads, splattering a black stain on the surrounding bodies while a wind blast took out another.

That got it pissed. It let out a cacophonous scream, each head slightly offset from the other to give it an eery resonance.

Kat laughed in its faces and screamed back. “I’ve seen bigger balls than ye. Come show me what ye’ve got!”

The taunt locked hundreds of eyes on her, and the Guardian charged.

“Oop!” Kat cried as she turned and bolted.

Ann dug her claws in and ran with her. It was a dead sprint straight ahead. The skyscraper loomed ahead of them, ten blocks away. Ten blocks to the twisted structure is all they had to make.

Ann found her pace, legs loping gracefully as she stayed neck and neck with Kat, focusing on her breathing. It was a race, but not with her girlfriend. They had to make it to the building first, but not too far ahead that the Guardian lost interest.

She cast a glance over her shoulder. The Guardian was right there, baleful eyes flashing by as it rolled. It was also picking up speed. Perfect.

“Hurry it up!” Ann called as she put on more speed.

“Aye!”

The first blast of magic missed them, a glowing pool of magma landing to Ann’s right. They thought the thing might be able to use magic. That it could do so while rolling was a problem, though. A second spell, ice this time, shot just over Kat’s head, forcing her to duck.

Kat stumbled slightly from the maneuver, but forced herself to regain her footing and catch up to Ann.

Ann watched the speck that was Lucia take aim and fire over their heads, no doubt interrupting another spell before it was cast. She didn’t have time to fully confirm as a gob of acid landed in her path. Digging her paw in, she leapt over the hissing pool and landed gracefully on the other side, transitioning back to running in a single motion.

Gods, it felt great to run. The wind in her hair, ears flapping, tail streaming out behind her. She was made for speed and it was times like this she got to really show it.

“Oi, too fast!” Kat yelled.

Shit, she’d gotten caught up in the rush and had outstripped the Guardian. It was going fast, but she was easily faster for now. Slowing her pace, she rejoined Kat, ducking and dodging magical death.

“Think it’s fast enough?” Ann panted.

“Not yet. Two more blocks. Shoot it a couple times, will ye love?”

Ann grinned, pulling her pistol and firing blindly behind her. Aim didn’t matter, the Warped was almost as wide as the road, so she emptied the cylinder.

A discording scream deafened her, ears flattening to her skull with pain. That pissed it off. Ann let the adrenaline fuelled grin spread across her face as she ran. Yeah. She was fucking terrified, but the danger was exhilarating at the same time. She and Kat, putting themselves in mortal peril again and again. This second life was fucking crazy.

They hit the last block at a dead sprint.

The Guardian was gaining on them, even at full speed. Hands thundered against the pavement as it careened forward.

Half a block. Almost time.

Ann pushed herself hard, Kat barely keeping up.

A quarter block left.

Feet left.

They were in the cross street.

Ann hooked her gauntleted claws into Kat’s back, activated Burst of Speed and hauled her girlfriend as hard as she could to their left.

Kat knew it was coming and kicked off the ground with all her strength at the same moment.

Momentum still carried them forward, but Ann just barely got them out of the street, out of the way of the Guardian.

Said Guardian didn’t have the foresight to adjust. It slammed into the skyscraper with a thunderous crash. Glass shattered as its form crushed up against the building, its weight acting against it.

Ann tripped, tumbled, still clutching Kat, and they rolled to a stop, looking back.

It was still there. It hadn’t moved. Had it worked?

“Let’s keep it there. Remember the plan,” Kat grunted, standing. “Do what we can tae hurt it while Rosalyn and Lucia whittle it down to their comfort point.”

Ann groaned, stretching, then jogged after Kat. “This is gonna work.”

“Feckin’ better.”

Rosalyn

This plan was crazy, even for Kat. Rosalyn watched in horror as the rolling ball of bodies collided with the tower of glass. It was a terrifying sight, even when they’d expected it to happen.

She bolted over to the edge of the building, peering over, and let out a sigh as she saw Kat and Ann tumbling across the pavement. They looked tired, but safe. It was time for her to get to work.

Lucia was already firing her rifle as she rejoined the small group on the roof. Bren was dealing with any magic he could deflect, shimmering shields appearing for mere moments, just enough to deflect, but no more.

“Keep it up,” he called as Rosalyn channeled the winds.

It was different than when she cast her Thorns. She knew what the earth felt like. The plants and nature. The wind was unruly and took more encouragement to shape into her spell. Eas was formless for a reason, and their winds tried to hold to that nature.

Rosalyn was, however, getting the hang of it. The winds liked to move. To race and speed. She just needed to make sure they did it the way she wanted them to.

Twirling her staff, she fired off another bolt. The taste of the bitter mana potion still on her tongue, she checked her Mind. Over halfway full, and she just capped out her Storm Winds. Time for lightning.

Her wool crackled as she drew the raging energy from within her magic. It was a terrifying thing, lightning. Deadly, wild, and more unruly than the winds. She knew it well, though, and pushed the magic forward in a focused burst. The smell of a storm filled her nose as the ridiculous energy arced from her staff towards the Guardian.

Charred corpses fell from the mass as the bolt passed through it. Rosalyn watched as others twitched, electrical impulses causing whatever made them move spasm. Warped clearly felt pain, and had to have fine motor movement to cast spells like that, so it made sense they had nervous systems. Something like that, though? The complexity of such a system to manipulate hundreds of limbs in coordination along with fingers, eyes, voices, was staggering. Dissection of this one would take a long time, if there was enough left unburnt to study. Maybe just half of it? A body or two? Maybe the core would be the more interesting part. The rest of it just looked like people, which was not all that interesting. Though, the connection point to the core could be intriguing.

Rosalyn fired more wind at the creature, blasting away more and more as their mass shifted to even out over the core. Her mind had wandered. It did this all the time. Start thinking about Warped and it was like it grew legs of its own and the rest became autopilot.

Focus, Rosalyn. More wind. You’re down to a quarter Mind, she thought. Berating herself sometimes helped her focus. Other times it just made her feel bad for being so scatterbrained.

But Warped were fascinating. She could live her life studying things like this Guardian. Look how the torsos moved. When Lucia splattered the brains of one, it shifted inwards, while others took its place. Once that body was done healing, it re-emerged. A giant defensive array made of flesh. The only time they got a body to drop off the creature was if it was too damaged to repair. Not like the Guardian couldn’t afford to be greedy. Warped of this size could regenerate way more than smaller ones. More energy, or magic, or whatever they used.

Rosalyn pondered on that for a moment while sending off another salvo of attacks. What did make the creatures regenerate? What gave them the ability to shift internal organs and musculature to recover from normally fatal wounds? They all had it to some degree. Weaker ones barely had any, but even a Twinwolf could shrug off a massive cut to its shoulder that would have crippled a normal creature. Magic was the obvious answer, but what kind? Life magic? Necrotic? Maybe something entirely different. Possibly divine? That might make sense with how the Gods couldn’t see into Seeds, but that was complete conjecture.

Two more blasts surged from Rosalyn’s staff. More bullets whizzed into the teeming horde of faces. She was getting distracted again. The creature was subsiding slightly, its bulk growing smaller as they whittled away at the bodies. She got to her cap on Storm Winds again and let another lightning bolt cook several bodies.

This thing, along with the dusty Warped didn’t give her the normal thrill of fighting Warped. Something about them being human based put her on edge. She understood Ann about that part. She could fight Warped all day and night, but humans and other sapient races? The thought of fighting them bothered her. At least these were twisted to the point of being monsters.

“This is my last bit of Mind,” Rosalyn called. “It’s enough to get up to Storm Winds cap, then we’re gonna try to have to get the core. You ready Lucia?”

“Low on ammo, too,” Lucia said, checking her pouch. “Ready.”

A few more blasts, then it was time for them to put the plan into action. Ann and Kat would be doing their best to chip away at bodies down below, but with their limited reach, they could only do so much.

Finally, her reserves ran dry. “Alright, it’s time. On my second strike, remember!”

Lucia leapt upon a square object on the roof, getting a better angle on the core. “Ready.”

Rosalyn closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. She pulled on her Storm Winds reserve, channeling more than it took for a normal lightning bolt. This spell was wild and the area of effect it applied came from the instability of the spell. She opened her eyes and focused on the point directly in front of her.

Lighting arced from the clear sky, angling to hit exactly where she’d pointed. A wild scream that made her heart shake with fear came from the Guardian. Dozens of charred and seizing bodies fell from it.

With titanic effort, the Warped tried to move, but was still stuck in the building.

Bren worked double time as dozens of spells were aimed toward Rosalyn in that moment. Acid, magma, ice, fire, even a few boulders, either splashed against the barriers or were deflected by them.

Rosalyn closed her eyes again, pulling that same reservoir of power for the second Lightning Crash. She unleashed the fury of the storm upon the charred crater, where bodies were already shifting to fill the hole. More burned, filling the air with acrid smoke, and the Warped shook. Not just the bodies on it, but the whole thing.

“Lucia!” Rosalyn screamed over the din.

A shot of bright white light erupted from the huntress’ rifle. It streaked straight into the pit Rosalyn’s spells had created. Lucia pulled the bolt and fired again, so quickly Rosalyn had a hard time following the woman’s hands.

The Guardian screamed in pain, wrenching itself free from the skyscraper and rolling toward them. Glass and rubble crashed to the ground in the gap it left. It was slow and lacked the force it had before. No magic was cast as it approached, and Rosalyn could see more and more corpses falling from the main body. By the time it reached them, it was only two stories tall, moving lethargically.

Normally when you killed a Warped, it just died. I mean, if you managed to exhaust its regeneration, it might be able to bleed out, but you might as well just finish it at that point.

“I think this is it,” Bren sighed, finally relaxing. The man was sweating profusely from the effort required to keep her safe. “I am so Godsdamned tired.”

“I want to say I agree, but something’s up. I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet,” Rosalyn said, peering over the edge at the pile of bodies.

“Why?” Lucia asked simply, joining her.

“Too slow a death. That’s not normal,” Rosalyn pointed out. “We’re assuming the core is something that’ll kill it, but we don’t know that. Maybe it just disables it for a bit. Hey! Ann!” Rosalyn yelled.

Ann looked up, ears flopping to the side as she cocked her head. “What’s up?”

“Be careful! I don’t think it’s dead!”

“Then we’ll finish it off!” Ann shouted back, giving her a thumbs up. “No worries!”

“No worries, she says,” Rosalyn grumbled to herself. “Do you remember who you’re talking to? That’s like half of who I am, worries.”

She and Bren watched anxiously as Kat and Ann approached the pile, then started climbing onto it. Some of the bodies reached up and tried to grasp at them, but they were either too weak, or the warriors cut them down with ease.

“How many, you think?” Lucia asked, having taken a relaxed position to watch the two below.

“Easily hundreds,” Bren said. “Something of that mass? Ridiculous amounts of bodies. I am certainly intrigued in the core. If there is one, I mean.”

“We’re about to see,” Rosalyn mumbled, eyes fixed on her girlfriends.

Kat and Ann dug at the centre of the mass of corpses. Each woman set to work, pulling bodies out of the pile and tossing them to the side. After a few minutes, they were both sweating, but seemed to be in a good mood. Ann was cracking a joke about giving Kat a few extra hands. Kat sniped back about her needing more brains, then waggling a corpse’s head at her. Those were her idiots, Rosalyn thought with a smile.

The mountain of bodies suddenly shifted, and Ann and Kat slid in the resulting avalanche of bodies.

Rosalyn tensed. Had they just destabilised the pile? Oh, no. No no no no. That’s bad.

A sickly purple black magic was seeping up between the corpses in the middle of the mass.

“Ann! Kat! Something is coming!” Bren yelled, fear in his voice.

Rosalyn froze, watching. The bodies on top of the magic shifted. A black arm stretched up, larger than those surrounding it, then a white one. Both landed, pushing at the unsteady pile and lifting its body. A head cleared the surface, eyes burning white and, somehow, black in its skull. Skin was pulled taught over bone, but the lower half was blank, no mouth visible. The head itself was a swirling mix of the two colours, and as more of the thing’s body was revealed, the patterns continued down its torso. Another set of shoulders appeared? No, those were hips. Kind of? Wait, that was another body, attached perpendicularly to the main one. It had four legs… feet? Hands? It had four arms instead of legs, Rosalyn decided. A human body, attached to another human body at its waist, supported by four arms functioning like legs. The left of it was black, the right, white, and the center swirled and mixed. The thing staggered, its left forelimb oddly floppy, and staggered as it tried to put weight on the limb. From that position it reached down into the pile, and pulled a long, white sword that appeared to be fashioned from a femur. As it stood again, the limp limb regained its strength. The Guardian levelled its wicked blade at Ann.

It made no sound as it charged.