Chapter 64: 64. Frantic Energy With Nothing to Do
The Devourer’s throat exploded. The surrounding darkness pulsed with energy as the creature let out a deafening roar.
In that moment of chaos, the ground trembled, and a blinding light emerged from the remnants of its throat, signaling the end of its reign of terror.
Octavia came out of it, riding the water that flowed out as her barrier melted in the heat. She landed fifty feet away on a spread of tentacles that held her weight.
With a fierce determination in her eyes, she steadied herself and focused on the creature’s remnants, where the light began to take shape. She felt the kind of pain that one experiences after being inside a Mythic creature.
She was breathing hard, her armor was cracked, and she had a real smile on her face that was clearly the result of someone who had expected to live through this but wasn’t sure. The air around her sparkled as she called on the last of her strength to push through the tiredness that felt like a thick fog.
With every painful breath, she felt a new sense of purpose rising in her, ready to face whatever came her way. "Ara... I didn’t think that I could survive that..."
Lucian rushed toward her as the Devourer disintegrated behind him, bursting apart in a cascade of purple energy and debris.
The soldiers were cheering, and Seraphina was saying something both sharp and kind to him. However, none of that mattered as much as reaching Octavia.
"Are you okay?" He knelt down in front of her.
"That," she said with emphasis, "was the most exciting thing I’ve done in three hundred years."
She laughed weakly. "And I could feel you the whole time..."
"You kept the channel open and kept me grounded." She reached up and touched his face with one hand while a tentacle wrapped around his wrist with the other. "Thanks, my love."
Marshal came up behind Lucian and stopped next to Octavia. "Oh, good, looks like you’re fine."
"I’m a tank; of course, this felt like light work for me."
She looked at the wounds and quickly decided how serious they were, as someone who had done this kind of thing on the move for her whole career would have done. Then she reached down and offered her hand.
"Good job, water tank," she said. "You are tougher than I thought."
"From you," Octavia said as she took the hand and let Marshal pull her to her feet, "that might be the most important thing anyone has said to me all week..."
"Yeah, yeah, but I do admit that was pretty cool." Marshal almost grinned. "Better not tell Ice Girl about what I just said to you."
Octavia chuckled, shaking her head as she brushed off the dirt from her armor. "No worries, your secret is safe with me..."
...
When Lucian’s party got to the southern approach where the Corruptor was, the situation had changed exactly as Brother Aldric had said it would, but it had happened much more quickly.
The Corruptor had stopped spreading its plague in a wide area and had started actively pulling energy back in. The Corruptor was consuming the converted soldiers it had previously created and growing larger from the energy produced by that conversion.
It was changing, and Lucian could see it from the ridge that looked over the approach. The bodies of the thing were shifting and adding mass, and what had once been a big threat was now taking on the shape of a disaster.
Aldric’s team was holding on, but just barely. Yuki’s ice containment was the main thing keeping the growth from speeding up.
The A-rank healers were cycling through purification on the converted defenders who had been taken down non-lethally, working through them one by one before the Corruptor could get them back.
"We need to let out everything," Lucian said as he looked at what they were looking at.
"Good thinking! And we meant everything we have," Marshal agreed.
It was the kind of fight that didn’t let the Harvester or the Devourer do their clean, individual set pieces, where the problem could be separated and the solution could be applied in a systematic way.
The Corruptor fought by turning everything around it into part of itself, which made the defensive advantage a liability. The coordinated attack that broke it needed overlapping fire, which caused as many problems as it solved.
The steam from Octavia’s water and Seraphina’s fire blinded half of the fighters in the north for thirty seconds. Aldric’s purification floods hit Glacielle’s ice and made a slick that killed six of their own soldiers before anyone thought to go around it.
Lucian made changes as quickly as he could read the situation, which was faster than it had been even three days ago. His training and combat experience had given him a kind of fluency that he had been developing so slowly that he hadn’t noticed it until he was using it at full speed.
When the Corruptor’s evolution reached its peak and the three cores were visible through the shifting mass of its final form, the choice was clear.
He felt the synchronization opening before he even thought about opening it. Glacielle first, then Marshal, and finally Octavia.
Three separate channels were running at the same time, and the pain was immediate and intense. He pushed through it without stopping because the window was only seconds, not minutes.
The three strikes happened at the same time.
All three cores broke.
The Corruptor broke apart from its centers, and the plague aura that had been hanging over the southern approach just stopped, like a sound cutting off. The air changed so quickly that a few people near Lucian instinctively took a deep breath as if they had been holding it without knowing.
Lucian’s legs stopped working.
He didn’t fall; he simply sat down, though the distinction was mostly technical, as he had no control over the act of sitting.
The triple-sync feedback hit him right after the battle ended, which was how it always went. The body kept working because it had to, and then it sent him the bill, which was bigger than any other bill he had ever received.
He heard Glacielle’s voice before anything else. Then it was Marshal’s. Then Octavia’s tentacles were around him before he knew what was going on.
Her tentacles wrapped around him with a protective reflex that was uniquely characteristic of her. Aldric stood there, his hands glowing with healing light, as he assessed the extent of the damage.
Aldric declared, "He’s alive," which apparently marked the first necessary statement. "But just barely..."
"The triple sync he used probably gives him that effect... he needs to rest right away."
"Right away," Glacielle said, in the same tone she used when she didn’t want to show how scared she was.
Lucian said, "I’m fine."
"Your nose and ears are bleeding," Marshal said.
"But aware... which is, you know, good."
"Still, we need to get you checked out," Glacielle insisted, her voice steadying as she focused on Lucian. "Let’s move quickly before things get worse."
"Stop talking," Octavia said, and her tentacles got a little tighter. "We’ll carry you."
He let them take him.
They were given a narrow, quiet medical room with one barracks bed and three people who wouldn’t leave. One person kept trying to tell them they didn’t all need to be there, but they were being ignored.
Lucian lay in bed and watched his three warriors move around him with the frantic energy of people who needed to do something but had nothing to do.
Glacielle was holding his hand with both of hers, and her eyes were dry in the way of someone who had made a choice to be calm and was sticking to it.
Marshal was standing by the window and moving every few minutes, like someone who had decided something was her fault and was trying to figure out what to do about it.
Octavia was sitting on the edge of the bed with her tentacles hanging down to the floor. The ends of the tentacles were moving in slow, restless patterns.
"I should have stopped you," Marshal said.
She wasn’t talking to the room; she was saying something she’d been working on for the last twenty minutes. "I’m your strategist..."
"I could figure out how likely it was that all three of you would sync up at the same time. I did the math and let you do it anyway."
"You let me make a decision," Lucian said.
"I should have changed it."
"You would have gotten to override it about zero times, and we both know that." He looked at her. "Marshal... three Mythics are dead."
"The people who were kidnapped in Corvus’s operation lost their main summon resources."
"The capital is holding."
"Those are things that didn’t happen by chance."
"You almost died."
"Nearly" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
"Lucian." She said his name in a flat voice that made it clear she was serious and wouldn’t be swayed. "If Aldric had come thirty seconds later, the damage to your synchronization channels could have been permanent."
"You might not have been able to bond at all."
