Chương 32: Action (Part 2)

Shrike watches the back window as she speaks, the Jeep going where Shrike directs. Shrike is silent for a long moment, watery eyes rapidly flicking between the road and Martin.

"He's here. He's been here. The chindi. My chindi." Martin's face stays relaxed.

"Chindis are the dead's negative energy, and you're obviously still alive." Shrike shakes her head, telling him what she remembered. She was born to a fairly normal family. She was the only surviving child of her parents. She learned the hunt. Their main prey, the mastodons. She was no help with throwing spears, but she had a knack for fashioning reliable spearheads. Such was her job, creating the great spears that would pierce the mastodons, well into adulthood. She would occasionally come on hunts. To observe.

To learn. She learned the specifics on how the spears were used. Her knowledge was ever-growing, and she returned to the spearheads, ever so slightly adjusting the length or sharpness. There was a magic to the Clovis points, so much energy and time was invested into their perfection that they began to take on the soul of their creator. One of the earliest humans to use magic, as far as she knew. There was fire. How it started was unknown, but likely an unfortunate accident.

The sun beat down on her, those around her burning to death. Such was life. Everyone dies. Still, if she could prevent it, she would try, in whatever way she could. She took up a spear, and as if she had trained her whole life, cast the projectile into the heart of the fire. She willed the fire to stop. For the sun to relent. For the suffering around her to end. Time froze. No words were spoken, but there was something there. Life, from all around.

Two choices were put before her: die as a human, or live until the presence called her to act, a last resort to humanity's invasion of the land. It was an obvious choice, at the time. She halted the flame. She stopped the light of the sun. She was stripped of what made her human, and reborn anew as a cursed creature by a spirit of nature. She saw him then. The exact opposite of her every feature. Dark grey eyes instead of bright gold. Male, instead of female. Jovial and friendly, instead of reserved and austere.

More spirit, instead of more physical. An inverted copy. The negative energy that was stripped from her, made tangible. They both knew what would happen if they were reunited. Their opposite being in physical contact, dark and light converging into one, like matter and antimatter. It would bring destruction. It would bring ruin. It would bring renewal, a last-ditch effort to ward off the pending invasion of her former kind. She was to sleep, until awakened by the nature spirit, at specific points in time.

Points of upheaval, or milestones, to be judged by her impartial hand. The spirit made a mistake when it stripped her of her humanity. Humans were a new breed, unlike anything that came before, and as such had a unique and intrinsic characteristic. They were more than just their nature. The magical property inside all humanity. That animating force that caused magical beasts to form around the template.

Humanity's ability to evolve within themselves, ever-changing at an individual level, growing and learning and being. She would be awake for periods, listless and without memory or purpose, having changed too much for the nature spirit to rely on. She was abandoned, but she knew humans. She found community, friends, hate, war, love. That was enough for her, until she slept again. Her soul regrew as she became a new person, each iteration of life a different approach caused by previous action and reaction.

She had grown to love humanity again, with all its quirks and shortcomings. She didn't want it to end. She would go back to where it happened. Return her gift. Defuse the bomb.

"Shrike... what do you mean by returning your gift?" She grips her knees tightly, having calmed herself enough to speak clearly as Martin drives down the endless roads.

"Should I perish, then there will be no further threat to the land. I am unsure of the scale at which the devastation would be unleashed should I and my opposite meet, but it would be significant." Martin rubs at his beard, swearing.

"What if the other one was killed? Your evil opposite?"

"The same result. I cannot control that outcome, however. I will accept death to save the people who would otherwise be slain." He takes a long, slow breath.

"Shrike. I'm not going to let you kill yourself."

"It is not your decision to make."

"The hell it isn't! We're partners. Where one goes, we both go, remember? Besides, how many monsters have we killed together? A billion?" He takes one hand off the wheel, holding it out for Shrike to take. He sees Shrike in the rearview mirror, staring longingly at his hand, her own raised slightly but not quite in reach.

"I have lost count," she says.

"I... do not believe it is wise to attempt this. Should we fail, there is much we can lose..."

"Just give us a chance, okay? You can watch a ways away, and when you see that we kicked its ass, you can come back."

"... yes. That is suitable." Shrike tightly holds Martin's hand.

"Who is the 'we' you refer to, Martin?" Ferret grabs Moth's arm, pulling her away from a classic sasquatch sighting. He starts making calls of his own, as Moth starts driving. Possum says a reassuring "Okay" over the phone, and looks at Opie with pleading eyes.

"Sorry, buddy, but we gotta take a detour. Do you mind?" Opie doesn't turn his head away from the supposedly abandoned house he's stationed outside, looking expectantly inside for his next meal.

"It's Shrike." Opie takes a final glance at his potential meal, before going to Possum's side. Folk music that borders on country plays over the speakers of a red used sedan. A new-to-him car Elk is blitzing north up the highway in, the not-broken AC blasting him and Caribou. Woodlouse's voice comes through the car's speakers, dimming the music.

"You should be intercepting her in fifteen minutes. You'll be second to arrive, after some other hunter named Possum and her hoar hound. After that should be Dragonfly and Damselfly, followed by another pair of hunters called Ferret and Moth. Half an hour or so before everyone's together at the rendezvous point." Caribou listens to his voice with growing impatience.

"What of Isopod? Is he coming?" The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Yeah, but he's bringing a package, courtesy of Krastev. He'll be taking a little longer. Consider it the trump card." Martin watches two more cars arrive at the same time, along an empty side road from an abandoned ranch. No better place to stage this than somewhere expendable. Ferret and Moth step out of one, and in the other is Marissa. That's everyone.

"A moment, that I may ask what we are all thinking." Caribou states, "Why is Counter-Magic proper attending our little function?" Martin expected this, and has an answer ready.

"She's good. Shrike and I both can vouch for her. She hates Norwood as much as any of us."

"Very well." Caribou directs his attention to Shrike next.

"I have spoken to this shadow before, in the spirit world, as you know. We are far from friends, but I know his ambition. There is none. Simply feeding and existing, barely even seeking you out. This was a tragic coincidence, or guided by whatever force made you."

"I... I understand," Shrike affirms, nervously looking over to Martin.

"So..." Ferret says, "I take it we have a plan?"

"That's what we're here to do." Martin takes a stick, and starts drawing lines in the dirt. This is going to take time, but he already has everyone waiting for his direction.

"Let's start with what we know..." - Shrike's shadow follows the highway in a hazy, gaseous form, intuiting where his other half would have gone. The strange vehicle carrying her moves faster than he does, but she'll have to stop eventually. Now that he has found the bearer of light, he can finally merge with her, and sate his ceaseless hunger with as many humans as they both could want. There's no way it can hide while still awake. He is rejected by the air in front of him, as if hitting a wall.

He shakes it off, remembering how much he hates the physical world. His form coalesces into a nearly human fog. It's too hot out, he thinks. His eyes drift to the one who stopped him. A man with a spellbook, coming out from behind some unused farm equipment. He must have been maintaining an anti-magic ward, known this was the direction the light was headed, and that he would follow. Clever, and efficient. He wonders what muse inspired the human to come up with the idea. Oh well. A snack before the feast can't hurt.

Something seems off, though...

"I got it's signature," Dragonfly confirms, as the barrier falls.

"I'll need around fifteen minutes to put this spell together."

"Gotcha," Martin confirms into his earpiece, viewing the situation from the rafters of a derelict farmhouse off to the side of the road, the scope of his rifle insulated from glare. This farmhouse is the only other point of cover in the area. At least, it was.

"Elk?"

"Yep," comes the reply, the sound of a car speeding along the highway faintly echoed in the speaker.

"Shrike's currently in the back, we're getting out of range, moving in the direction of the hospital. We'll be waiting in an emergency."

"Marisa, keep it occupied. Moth, you in position?" A brief huff of exertion precedes Moth's voice.

"Yep. I'm there."

"Perfect. Let's hope this goes as planned." They ambushed him in broad daylight, but there's only, what, three of them? One by the equipment, one hiding beneath the sand that thinks it's unseen, and a third running for him at superhuman speed. How little magic seems to have progressed amongst the humans, still using the same old tricks. With hardly any effort, he starts leeching the energy from the air around her, cooling the gasses to just above the freezing point.

In other words, extremely cold, and actively sapping her body heat. Marisa feels the instantaneous chill, but Martin had predicted some kind of freezing effect. She's insulated by an invisible bubble around her body that traps heat inside, without diffusing it to the air around her. She'll overheat if she keeps this up for too long, but it'll be fine for the moment, as she aims a magically infused kick at the blurry shape. As expected, her foot passes through it, as if she were kicking a ghost.

That's good enough info for now. She shoots a calculated glance to Damselfly, who hovers over Dragonfly, as always. Whatever these humans are doing is too convoluted to be worth engaging. Better to just leave. He attempts to simply ignore them, but is met with another spell by the one that tried to kick him. It keeps him from leaving more than a few dozen yards away from the caster. That's new for the humans. Fine, I have time, it thinks.

It creates a perfect void, black and hungry, directly over whoever was hiding in the ground.

"Contain," Moth says as the void starts to reach her. The black orb in her hand seems to be at odds with Shrike's double, repelling it back instead of pulling in its spirit. Not ideal, but it's something. She gets up, and starts inscribing a sigil onto the iron plate attached to her rifle. Disruption rounds, to start. She fires a stream of rounds, of which several connect, the gaseous creature starting to more fully solidify. Perfect. These humans had a plan. Strange.

Must be a new increase in intelligence since he last fought them. Still, they're easy enough to deal with, if he expends a little energy. The ground around his feet begins to sink, another void appearing beneath him, reaching out with hungry cracks in the earth that lead to a vast nothingness.

"Shit..." Martin grabs a thermal scope, and as expected, there's an extreme temperature difference that extends upwards.

"It goes up about ten or fifteen feet, don't try to jump it. Just keep making space. Moth, that orb is going to run out of juice in the next minute or so. Take advantage of it, see if you can fully separate a chunk of that black stuff."

"Confirmed." She charges ahead, spraying the ground near the target's feet and cleanly breaking away one of the creeping tendrils. The blur staggers in place, the pulsating emptiness on the ground retreating back like a startled turtle.

"Ow," the blur exclaims in surprise. He admits they actually did learn more magic lately. More importantly, though, there's whatever that other guy with the haltija floating around him is doing. With a little effort, he drops the temperature of all the air around him to near absolute zero, the air around him turning to a liquid and dropping to the ground like a popped balloon, and quickly angles a void to encircle the spellbook human. It's messy, but it should work.

A blast of sand squirts out of the darkness like an archerfish, half-burying Marissa and knocking the spellbook from her hands. Still, he's rapidly taking physical form, so he performs the same move on the rifle one. She tumbles out of the way, and repels a spear of negative energy that erupts from the ground with her weapon. Damn. She's quick. They're portals, Martin realizes. Where Shrike stores and releases light, the Anti-Shrike must simply consume into the infinite dark.

"Okay, he has three known abilities. Freezing the air, creating portals on the ground that extend upwards a dozen feet, and whatever those spike things are. Those spikes are not portals. Go get 'em, Possum." Possum comes sprinting out of the farmhouse, Opie racing ahead far faster than his partner can run.

"Opie, they're portals, see if you can do anything to them!" The hoar hound doesn't respond, but leaps headfirst into the shadowy ground.

"WHAT THE FUCK?" the blur yells, instantly severing all contact to the void it created.

"What the fuck was that?" There's no reply from them, as expected. Whatever the hell just jumped into his portal, it damaged it somehow. Badly. Screw it, if they have another one of those things, he could be done. He decides instead to interrupt whatever that hatija is busy protecting, and leave. He runs over, huffing from exertion as he shields himself from the approaching bullets via a wall of negative energy.

Unlike Shrike's neat hexagonal barriers, this is a shadowy circle, fraying and wavering at the edges like a flame. It won't last long. He creates a simple spear out of the same substance, and stabs at the magician who is carefully drawing a circle of some kind in a book. The spear is stopped by the haltija's whose own bubble of protection stops any damage he tries to inflict. New plan. Last ditch effort.

The sky above him turns dark and starry, a pocket of the night tearing open the light refraction in the atmosphere in a large radius around him, from which dozens of negative energy tendrils pour out, curving downward erratically like tree roots. A damn shame, he'll have to go and wait another hundred years to recover what he's using here now. He won't underestimate them next time, at least. He coordinates most of the teeming masses to intertwine into a single point, drilling into the haltija's barrier.

With this much force, there isn't much the little spirit can do.

"It's breaking!" the haltija squeaks, flying away quickly. Finally, the barrier collapses, and his entwined spears gore the spellcaster before he can complete whatever he was doing. A churning laugh comes from the human he stabbed, as it reverts to its usual form.

"Is that any way to treat a friend?" Caribou asks, coughing up blood.

"Seriously? You're outright helping them? You know what, I don't care." The blur withdraws the hardened tendrils from the incapacitated Caribou, splitting it apart again into individual roots, extending them scattershot in all directions in an attempt to take out the humans with pure overwhelming force. Good, the one with the weapon's orb isn't working anymore. Martin takes a slow, deep breath, aiming his rifle. He fires a shot, kicking up dust near the blur.

"Dial point five left," Ferret says. This is a very far shot, which he gets one chance of pulling off. Having a spotter and firing a mundane round first made the most sense.

"Dragonfly?" He hands Martin a single round, inscribed with an extremely complex spell etched directly into the bullet. Martin chambers it, holding his breath, as the blur turns his attention to where the new bullet came from.

"No wind. Send it." Martin squeezes the trigger. - Shrike's phone rings out, which she answers immediately.

"Martin?"

"Nope. Moth," she says.

"You're at the hospital, right? Get ready. I'm pretty sure someone is going to need you."