Chapter 56: Power Failures

Chapter 56: Power Failures

The greatest threat seemed dealt with for now, busy with his aerial duel with Esmorana, but by the same token she was busy dealing with him. Her tornado had dissipated, leaving eight other enemies on the ground now free to move. Two more had fallen from the sky when the winds ceased supporting them, but their bone-breaking collision with the ground shook loose their already-tenuous hold on life. In the center of the newly created clearing, four armored figures quickly lowered the closed metal box they held to the ground and released it. Four others, scattered amid splintered tree stumps and other debris, cautiously raised their heads to look around.

Two of the enemies rising to their feet suddenly jerked and collapsed, sporting daggers in the eye slits of their helmets. The daggers flew back to their wielder, and Carlos belatedly noticed the presence of Haftel just outside the clearing, and Noralt beside him. He'd been perhaps a bit excessively focused on watching out for enemies and dangers, not allies. He couldn't spot Sconter even with mana sense, though. Then again, Sconter seemed to have stealth abilities, and stealth would have to hide from mana sense to really be good in this world.

While Carlos was considering that, a piercing whistle sounded, and the two remaining enemies who'd been lying flat quickly stood up and raced to join the group of four in front of the metal box. At the same time, Noralt stepped forward into the debris-littered clearing. Her stout frame was completely encased in hard steel, she held a shield on her left arm taller than she was, and she wielded an even larger hammer in her right hand. She left deep footprints as she charged forward, shield in front and her enormous hammer extended to the side.

Thunder crashed from overhead again as the two enemies on the fringe of their formation moved forward to meet Noralt's charge, and Carlos glanced upward. Three spinning discs of Esmorana's mana flew in erratic loops, their edges razor thin and pulling tightly compressed air in a fast circle to form a deadly cutting edge. The discs came from widely separate angles and shot towards the crackling web of electricity that surrounded her opponent, while two more discs of air were forming on either side of Esmorana herself.

Carlos looked down again just in time to see Noralt's hammer swinging forward. Her target gave an impression of immovable solidity and strength to Carlos's mana sense, and the man clearly had great confidence in the shield he braced in the path of the swinging hammerhead. Noralt's mana was projected just slightly ahead of the hammer, and an instant before hammer and shield collided, her mana snapped forward and connected with the shield, fastening onto it. The hammer passed cleanly through the shield, leaving a hammer-shaped hole in it as though traced and cut out of the shield's steel, and slammed into the man's chest.

The man stumbled, and stared in shock at the gaping hole Noralt's hammer left in his chest piece as she pulled it back. To his credit, he hadn't been moved by the mighty blow, but several broken ribs jutted out from torn skin, and blood flowed freely. He was clearly dead, his chest caved in, his body just hadn't quite realized it yet.

Noralt withdrew her hammer from her first target, two new layers of metal taken from shield and armor coming with it as though shrink-wrapped onto it, and deftly swung it again as quickly and easily as if it were a child's toy instead of a 6-foot long monstrosity of a weapon. Her second target barely had time to begin reacting, trying too late and too clumsily to dodge instead of block, before her hammer acquired two more new layers and caved in his chest just like his comrade's.

She kept charging forward, passing between them, hammer raised and swinging once more. The foe at the head of the formation of four in front of her braced for impact, and this time Noralt's hammer bounced. Her third target had infused their own mana into their armor and shield, and her mana couldn't get a grip on it. Carlos wasn't sure whether this surprised her or not, but either way she swiftly adjusted to the new development, smoothly interposing her shield to block a counterstrike from the large sword in her opponent's other hand.

Amber mumbled right next to Carlos, and some of her mana flicked out into the sky, but failed to take hold on the man who was throwing yet another lightning bolt at Esmorana. Right, that was probably their most dangerous enemy here, and pulling him out of the sky would be a lot more useful than just watching. Carlos activated one of his own prepared levitation spells, making sure to focus on adjusting the force to pull downwards strongly, but the spell just fizzled out completely before it could even try to apply any force at all. His target was somewhere around 20 levels higher than him, and that difference in power was too great for his spell to even connect without the target intentionally allowing it.

Carlos checked the ground battle's progress again, wondering if there might be an easier target. Maybe if he could help speed up beating the rest of these people, freeing up the other three adventurers to help Esmorana might be his best option. Noralt was exchanging blows with resounding clashes of metal on metal. Her opponent was strong, but she was stronger. Both of their weapons were moving so fast it seemed like it shouldn't be humanly possible, but in occasional moments of stillness Carlos could see that the enemy's sword had begun to bend slightly, and their shield looked increasingly battered and covered with dents.

As for the other three enemies, one was fending off an onslaught of daggers, one was running towards Haftel, and one was helping with the daggers but mainly focusing on watching out for attacks from behind them. The one running towards Haftel suddenly fell, his feet yanked out from under him by Sconter, who appeared out of nowhere without warning. Sconter produced an axe from somewhere, yanked on his target's helm to expose a slight gap on the neck, and chopped off the head with a precision strike, all in the blink of an eye. An instant later a dagger flew just over the newest corpse to join four others in seeking and stabbing at weak points in the armor of the remaining three ground-bound enemies, replacing a dagger that had just been snatched out of the air and stuffed into a container.

Lorvan sighed and stepped forward. "It seems I am needed. Ordens, be ready to flee and report if my armor is disabled."

Carlos held out his right hand, gesturing Lorvan to stay back. "Not yet. I'm not finished yet." He almost snarled as he focused on amplifying the negative levitation even further. It wasn't as simple and easy as just choosing a more negative number, unfortunately. He had to conceptualize that number's connection to an amount of force, visualizing the strength of gravitic pull that should result from that number, and it was already strong enough that he was having some difficulty maintaining that visualization.

He'd been in a centrifuge before, at up to 3 or 4 gravities, and his visualization was already several times beyond that. The man should have been blacking out unconscious by now, if not for his mana resisting the spell. He needed to go farther than that. Maybe even to "human pancake" levels of force, either counting on the man's resistance to reduce it to something survivable, or just accepting that this might end in death.

Carlos tried to imagine a downward pull so strong that it would not only hold someone to the ground, unable to even crawl, but start crushing them to death like a hydraulic press. The image that came to mind was uncomfortably grisly, filled with blood, bones, and gore, but he embraced it and tried to imagine even the gore being smashed flat by its own weight. It felt so very wrong, in more ways than just the incantation system complaining at him, but he determinedly pushed through.

He sensed the man beginning to actually struggle to stay airborne, and amped up his visualization even more. For a moment something seemed to flicker around him, but Carlos dismissed the distraction and focused his concentration.

"Uh, what?" Ordens shook her head uncertainly. "Gear's not reporting anything, but even I'm feeling something wrong here."

Carlos had closed his eyes to better focus on imagining even higher gravities. Suddenly the feeling of wrongness seemed to recede into the distance; still just as strong, or even stronger, but not so close at hand. He shook his head. He'd figure that out later. He sensed the man's soul drop to ground level, finally, and Noralt leaped on top of him. Carlos opened his eyes to see Noralt wrapping her arms and legs around the grounded man, electricity glancing uselessly off of her metal armor, and released the spell with a gasp. The man jerked upward with the sudden release of force, but quickly stopped and settled back to the ground with Noralt inescapably grappling him.

Ordens stared at Carlos. "That was not the sabotage. What did you do?"

Carlos turned to look at her, and belatedly realized the force bubble protecting him was gone. The spell maintaining it had just sort of fallen apart. He frowned. "Just a moment." He experimentally tried activating another levitation spell. He felt the pieces of it trying to come together, but something was missing, and it failed to form. He considered how the feeling of wrongness seemed to be coming from a distance now, and shivered. He was pretty sure he knew the source of that "free" mana now, and it was in truth not free at all.

He shook his head as he realized the extent to which his guards' equipment wasn't functioning right now. All of the enchantments on it relied on the same incantations system that his own spells did, and that system itself wasn't working in the nearby area. "Something dangerous." He sighed. "I did something that I should never repeat if I have any other option, and should never teach, lest someone else uses it unwisely. I didn't know how bad the side effects would be. Your equipment should work again once we leave this place, I think, but I honestly don't know whether the effects here will fade." The incantation system still existed, or the feeling of wrongness would have disappeared entirely instead of becoming distant, but he had drained its power from the local area, and he didn't know if the system could repair itself from that.

Carlos took a deep breath and stood up. "For now, I think it's time to take some prisoners."