Elwick's channels felt as if they were on fire, his Mana gone. Strain marred him, his core, and the captain knew he had little left to give. But he was so angry, and it was as if he were being gifted more strength from that rage.
Now on his knees, the captain focused upon the heat he felt building in his chest. He knew the wrath he felt was unreasonable, that it was mad, that his Elder had never told him to take things so far. That small part of him could see the web of their Oath, once shining, now corroded. Burnt. And along that web came a delirious certainty that he had been lied to...that the man before him was a greater threat...that he shouldn't be killed, but...delivered...
Something burned away inside of him. Something vital. That small voice vanished, popped like a soap bubble. But the rage remained, bottomless and hungry. Despite the wounds that riddled him, Elwick felt good for the first time in a long while. He felt right.
Power surged through him, flushing his limbs with strength. Elwick screamed at Harn as he attacked, lunging from his knees. A sword of ice materialized in his hand, blurring in a savage thrust. The bastard still met each blow with his axes, deflecting the attacks easily, contemptuously.
"How are you even here!?" Elwick snarled, blood drooling from his mouth. It tasted sour on his tongue. "The Domain should be closed to you!"
"So they did alter the shell," Harn grunted, somewhat wryly. "Knew it felt weird comin' in."
"How?" Elwick flared Verglas Edge, diverting his attention to summoning not many blades, but a single one. Mana vapor coalesced above the warrior, a guillotine of power, just at the cusp of solidifying. Harn was only a few steps away. "It...should have stopped you..
"Can't be tellin' you all my secrets," Harn said as their blades locked together and Elwick pulled him close. The man tilted his helmeted head in confusion. "Your eyes..."
"Die!"
The blade, nearly the size of a wagon, dropped with all the subtlety of a cannon. Held fast by Elwick's sudden surge of strength, Harn could do nothing but accept the inevitable. It hit hard, hard enough to shatter the flagstones for several feet in all directions, immediately coating them in frost. Elwick was thrown back, skipped off the ground like a rock on a lake, before fetching hard against the steel wall.
Yet before blackness claimed him, there was a surge of terrible, primeval crimson and the stench of blood.
Then nothing.
Felix would like to have said he hesitated when presented the choice. An explosion of purple-white and silvery Mana to their left, while to their right a furious exchange between the Iron Ranks and Yvette. The explosion had been a powerful thing, nearly throwing him and Atar off their feet, and he worried that Harn had not survived such an assault. But Pit was to the right.
So on he went, dragging a gaping Atar with him.
It was easy enough to bridge the distance with Unfettered Volition, the wild alterations to the ground barely hampering his speed. Felix readied a Skill, and he felt Atar muster his concentration and re-summon his fiery crown. But by the time they'd reached them, it was over. Yvette was down on the ground, a rapier and spear to her throat.
"You're all..." Felix smiled. "You're okay."
Pit ran up to him and jumped, putting his big paws on the Nym's shoulders in his excitement. The hidden tenku was streaked with blood and caking dirt, but his Health hadn't dipped too badly. Felix fished a monster core from his pack and surreptitiously fed it to the chimera. Pit snatched it up, eating it in seconds and hummed contentedly as threads of System power began to unspool within him.
+1 INT
+1 STR
"Well enough," Vess agreed, pausing to smile back at him. She was bleeding a bit from her left cheek and her cloak had some new holes in it, but her Health was well above 80%. "Never had to fight a defensive specialist before. Harder than I expected."
"Highest flame, Alister, you're bleeding!" Atar rushed to the nobleman's side, but he was waved off.
"It's fine, Atar. Just got winged, is all," he said, but Felix felt a light trilling from his Spirit. It felt...pleased?
"Pretty boy over here took a wall spike for me," Evie said with a grin and a nudge at Alister's back. The young man blanched at the movement and had to put up his rapier. "My hero."
"I don't appreciate being in another's debt, Aren," he sheathed his rapier. "Now we're square. Ah! Lilian! Dabney!"
As the nobleman rushed over to a mound of rocks, Felix looked over to the other side of the enclosure. It had devolved into a cloud of stone dust and Mana vapor. He could feel someone moving about, but he wasn't entirely sure it was Harn. Silently, Felix stepped forward, putting himself between the cloud and his friends.
Then a body was sent sailing through the air, one in armored blue robes and run through by a large shard of ice. He landed hard in front of them without rolling, but Felix's Eye could tell the man was barely alive. Again. Blood poured from his many wounds, looking darker than it should have as it pooled beneath him. Emerging behind him was Harn, still fully armored, though his pauldrons and breastplate sported a savage looking rent. Frost trailed from the man as he walked up to Elwick and put his boot down on his chest.
"EAAUUGH!"
The Guilder twitched several times but couldn't quite make his arms work well enough to push Harn's boot away. He resorted to writhing beneath it, instead.
"You alright, Harn?" Evie asked. "Your armor's busted. I've never seen it busted before."
Harn tried to shrug and winced instead. He nodded to Atar, Alister and the others. "Your captain packs a mean punch. Lucky fer me, it wasn't mean enough."
A discordant twang, like a steel string snapping, rippled through the air. Felix's ears perked up, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end as that ambient heat he'd been feeling all this time turned into a bonfire. He shouted and pushed the others back, away from Elwick as the man's skin began to dry and blister beneath the invisible heat. Felix's nerves screamed out in pain, but he pushed it aside, muscled it into the back of his throat as he watched what happened next.
Elwick had started to convulse, and his body at first seemed to dehydrate and shrink beneath the unnatural heat. But what Felix had mistaken for blistering resolved into small thumbnail-sized callouses that surfaced on his exposed skin, overlapping and growing as the strangeness continued. That discord he sensed grew ever stronger, and within him the whispering Maw snarled wordlessly.
This was the corruption. But it wasn't the Maw's own.
This is something new...
Felix felt it, like a figure standing at the edges of his vision, and as Elwick writhed and convulsed it grew all the stronger. The man's body was looped and knotted with shimmering threads, enough to weigh down any person. Hundreds of them at least, each of them spreading far and wide in a web Felix couldn't hope to perceive in its entirety. A few of them radiated outward, binding Atar, Alister, Lilian, Dabney. But on Elwick and Yvette, the threads weren't silver, not anymore. They crawled with a dark crimson stain, corroded by it yet paradoxically strengthened.
The threads extended into the distance, toward the supposedly secret entrance they had used. Felix, unable to help himself, pushed. He followed the threads back, back until he sensed something holding onto these threads, a powerful figure that shone like the sun at dawn. Blinding, golden.
Master Tier.
Elder Teine, they'd called him.
Someone screamed.
Felix yanked himself back to reality and saw, to his horror, that Elwick had clambered back onto his feet. Only, it was not Elwick, not anymore. His bones had shifted and deformed, his once-handsome face splitting down the middle as the man's teeth fell out. The scaling of his face and arms was more complete now, darkening toward a rust-red color save for where slick veins pulsed obtrusively along the inner parts of his limbs.
"Kill...kill you...eat you..."
Elwick's face split open with a meaty hiss and teeth the size of daggers leaped from hideous, newly formed gums.
"Kill you! Eat...you!"
Kill it, Felix! Destroy it!
Reign of Vellus!
Felix didn't need the Maw's increasingly vibrant advice to make a move. He gripped the newly born Revenant with his Will as lightning played along its battered armor. The robes burnt away under the barrage of azure electricity, but the hide beneath was tougher than it looked. A barrage of other Skills hit it moments later, fire and ice, stone and silver spear. But the thing did not buckle. The creature that was once Elwick took a single step forward, pushing at Felix with an overwhelming Strength. He had Reign of Vellus flared as hard as he could, but it barely inconvenienced it.
"Punish! Eat! Fee---!"
With a powerful swing, a silver axe bisected the monstrosity's neck. Elwick's deformed head hit the flagstones with a heavy, wet thud.
Then Yvette began to scream.