Chapter Thirteen #2
Before the undead assassin—who Vester assumed was the titanbat’s rider—could move, Kora slammed her tower shield into it.
The thing bounced backward, only to take Dent’s hammer to the shoulder.
The blow came down like an avalanche and crushed the skeleton into the deck beneath their feet.
The crunch echoed up through Vester’s feet, though he was preoccupied with swallowing a healing potion, and his illusion wavering as he drowned in his own blood.
Krysta’s staff swung up and she hooked Vester’s ankle with the crook. The connection allowed her to pour healing energy into his body, and he found himself coughing out a few clumps of something he didn’t want to think about too hard.
But once they were gone, he was able to take a real breath.
Despite the blow that had flattened it, the skeletal figure wasn’t done. It flipped back to its feet and went after Krysta with both blades. Kora kept shifting between them, and a swirling wall of air allowed Krysta to move fast enough to dodge the weapons.
Then Li Ra began blasting the undead with bolts from her pistols.
The brilliant blue flashes came like metronome ticks, one after another, regulated to avoid overheating the weapons.
Each cyan blast charred the skeleton’s armor and rocked its body, so the thing twisted to face her, lashing out with both blades and sending dark crescents flying through the air in her direction.
Ripper lunged to take the attack on its flank, and Vester was shocked to see how deep the energy carved into the golem’s bronze sides.
Ripper’s return attack, four serrated tentacles lashing down to loop around the being’s forearms, almost severed its hands, though black energy swelled and flowed through the bones to mend them immediately after.
The necrotic healing did nothing to mend the skeleton’s armor, though, so Vester took solace in the fact they were damaging it.
The airship suddenly rolled over until the deck was nearly vertical. Everyone began sliding toward the starboard side, which now faced the ground, though the skeleton slammed its knives into the deck to hold its position.
Vester had no choice but to leap from Dent’s shoulder, because the iron golem fell like an anvil and it was only by burying its ax in the deck that the puppet avoided falling free of the ship entirely.
Vester came down, rolled, and then caught one of the banister supports with his free hand.
He stretched out his cane and poked the skeleton in the forehead, casting Deprivation Cage in the hopes of cutting it off from the outside world.
To his shock, the skeleton responded by grasping Trickster’s Cane, ripping it free of Vester’s grip, and hurling it off the ship.
Immediately, the mana drain from Freeform Illusion skyrocketed. Vester lost the eighty-percent reduction from the cane and grunted at the sudden sensation of his mana flowing out. He cut off the blaring music, needing to conserve his power.
The skeleton’s eyes seemed to flare, the flames in their sockets growing brighter, then it shot Vester in the face with twin beams from its skull.
An involuntary scream tore from Vester’s mouth as his face ignited, and the shock cost him his grip on the railing.
With the airship still tilting, Vester began falling toward the ground below.
He wasn’t the only one.
Elflings screamed in the sudden silence, and the bass groan of the undead titanbat continuing to grind against the hull filled the air. Vester and a dozen others finished sliding across the desk joining those who’d been on the starboard side in falling toward the ground below.
Vester couldn’t see much—his eyes had been badly damaged—but he felt a serrated tentacle try to wrap around his leg only to slice through the meat of his calf, then it was gone.
Thanks for trying, Ripper, he thought just before he bounced off something that felt like a tree branch attached to a silk balloon—one of the airship’s lifting legs.
Then Vester felt emptiness all around him.
He heard the crackle of the flames around his head, and far-away screaming, but that fire was his priority.
Freeform Illusion and Fantastic Reality combined allowed him to momentarily snuff the blaze, but he had to do it three times in a row before he was able to truly put it out.
Fucking skeleton and its god damned heat vision!
He was tumbling through the air, and when he finally got rid of the flames and cleared the water from his vision, Vester could barely see from the burns to his eyes. He was passing between several tall pillars and knew he didn’t have much time to figure out how to slow his descent.
He tried forming something under him to slow his fall—this time a parachute, which he should have tried the last time—but the mana drain was so severe he had to let it go almost immediately.
The sudden jerk did momentarily slow him though, which gave him the seconds he needed to figure out how to avoid going splat.
Vester cast Decoy Swap and teleported onto the side of one of the pillars.
He was fortunate the swap didn’t carry his momentum through the teleport, or he’d have splattered against the rock like a bug on a windshield.
Instead, he slid along the stone and felt his gloves tear while he found nooks and crannies to bury his fingers into.
It hurt, but he’d take cracked fingers and a few torn fingernails over obliterating his body any day.
He hung on the side of the stone column and looked up just time to see the blurry wreck of the airship completely upside down and falling toward him.