PoV Forren
We were hiding behind a corner. Next to us was an empty fast-food restaurant. The mysterious creature was using the escalators to reach our floor. Its body was covered in a black ooze. It had five long tails, which it used to hunt down people. Its face could shape-shift to take the form of a creature he recently killed, whether it was a human or a pet.
'Why now of all time?'
Everything happened so fast that it almost felt unreal. The wolves had gone exploring the stage area to get some more information, while Diego had gone scouting in search of tools or weapons for us to use. I accompanied the girls to a shopping center to relax while we could.
Then suddenly, a weird creature came down, breaking the ceiling and hunting down whoever was close enough to it.
The creature stopped for a moment and locked its eyes on me. His face had recently taken the form of an old man's face, almost bald with some white hair, his face full of wrinkles. We stared at each other for what felt like an eternity until he reached the floor. Then he started smiling—a wicked smile that literally went from ear to ear. His eyes were brimming with delight at what he was about to do.
His long tails (black and about 20 meters long, or around 65 feet) then started bouncing everywhere, smashing, grabbing, and launching whatever furniture would come across their paths. He was deliberating, trying to scare whatever civilian was still stuck on the second floor.
He had already broken every stair, and immediately after reaching the floor, he broke the escalators. There were some emergency stairs outside, but I was sure they had been taken care of before entering the shopping center.
"Valis, carry Folarin out of here with your magic. You can use the hole created by him. I'll try to gain some time for you."
"Wait, you can't-" It was already too late; I had already gone.
As I charged at the creature, I grabbed one of the metal seats lying close by, concentrating most of my aura in my legs to the point they caught on fire. And with a single jump, I managed to close the distance between me and the creature.
Before I could manage to hit him, one of his tails hit me on the sides, launching me directly into a clothing shop, breaking the class windows and smashing through many shelves full of clothes.
'This fucking-'
For a split second, I noticed a child crying beside me, hiding behind a clothes hanger with what could have been his mother.
I had barely enough time to get up before he tried to strike again with his tail. It was a piercing attack that managed to go through my stomach and get stuck in the wall behind me.
'This- he is probably a class 1 calamity, okay. Facing one of them without a weapon is clearly suicide. Maybe I can do something with-'
He used his tail to launch himself towards me. From the black ooze emerged what could probably be the creature's legs. They had sharp talons. He used them to lock both my arms. He probably squeezed with enough strength to break them.
He pushed me against the wall with enough force to break it. He then secured his grip on me by coiling one of his tails around my chest, and he proceeded to use my body to ram and break the wall on the floor above it.
'A bit aggressive, aren't we?' I wanted to say something but had too much blood in my mouth to actually speak.
Once we landed, he pinned me down, raised his head, and started to roar. His roar was very high but did not resemble that of a human voice, despite the appearance of his face.
I concentrated part of my aura to create a small blade on my chest to free myself from him. I managed to cut off just a little bit of one of his five tails. He immediately backed off and started hissing at me.
"How dare a lowly creature like you…" He spoke for the first time.
I had trouble getting up. As usual, whenever I used the aura, I couldn't feel any pain, yet the damage was still visible in my body. While my back had healed faster than I thought, my ribs were probably still a mess.
"I was born from a grade 0 calamity; small fries like you don't frighten me!"I said to taunt him.
I could barely keep myself standing, so I used a nearby table as a support.
It was then that I realized we had landed at a bar. A quick glance showed me that there were still plenty of people inside, and most of them were now running away.
'Shit, there are too many people here. I need to push him away from here.'
I noticed that almost half of the aura I used to create the blade was lost, or, to say it better, I lost control of it.
It remained attached to the tail and was rapidly changing colors in succession.
'Shit, I should've put more focus on the solidification method.'
I then started accelerating the flux of aura in my body. That was the best but worst method to improve my body; any other person could only last a couple of minutes before being completely burned alive, but I was no normal person. I also started burning Folarin's mana stored inside me to gain more aura.
'She may not like it now, but it's a necessary action.'
The creature was not paying attention to me. It was trying to set off the fire in his tail. He gave up on it shortly after and cut off his tail with something sharp he was keeping under the mass of dark ooze coming out of his body.
I grabbed a couple of tables and threw them at him, took a small knife and threw it towards his face, and immediately charged at him.
He blocked everything by creating some sort of protective wall using his tail, then he started using his tails as whips, making them bounce everywhere without a clear aim. One of them even managed to hit my legs, but thanks to the massive amount of aura flowing within my body, the damage was minimal.
At that point, I think I started burning alive. I felt the power slowly leaking out.
I managed to reach the creature, and then I tackled it. I then began dragging it around the mall, smashing its body against everything I could find while also setting it on fire.
The creature allowed me to drag myself across the shopping center and remained silent even while I launched myself into a free fall from the third floor with it.
Afterwards, it simply extended his tails and used them to stop our fall.
'No, you don't.'
I channeled all the remaining aura in my fist and tried to rip off his head by grabbing his long neck and burning it while pulling it with all my strength left.
The creature started screaming in pain as its neck caught on fire, yet his flesh didn't have the normal reaction when catching fire. His skin started turning white, and many small bubbles started appearing on it. Then I learned that the black substance he was always coating his body with was highly flammable.
The creature tried to shake me off his body, but I wouldn't let go of his neck. Then it started smashing his body and mine on various walls, on the escalators, and on broken pieces of glass on the ground, trying to push me away with its tails.
I felt something piercing me from the back. It was one of his tails. The tail then proceeded to coil around my neck and start crushing it.
'I won't go down unless you're going down with me!'
I then tried to create a blade to slice his neck off cleanly, but the aura exploded, and that's where I lost my senses.
'Of course there would've been multiple of those; otherwise, it would've been impossible to make sure nobody could've escaped a shopping center!'
At that moment, I cursed my naivety.
PoV Valis
With the help of Folarin, we managed to kill three of those tailed creatures. Unfortunately, Folarin had finished her mana, and her reserve was used by Forren. I, on the other hand, could do nothing but fly away, carrying Folarin. I lacked control and the ability to create such precise techniques as hers. All I knew how to do was overwhelm my opponent using the elements around me, and if I used that here, I risked making half of the place crumble.
"Where's the magic pen!" Shouted Folarin in panic.
"It should be in the left pocket of the blue backpack." I shouted.
"There's no blue backpack!"
'Shit, I probably left it on the second floor.'
"Brace yourself; we're going back to the second floor."
"Are you crazy? We wasted so much mana on nothing now!"
"It's either that or you find a way to pull mana out of thin air!"
As we got out through the hole created by Forren, I saw something shocking outside. There were many empty capsules that were planted on the ground. They had pierced the concrete and made many cracks, so they were most likely launched here. Lots and lots of soldiers had surrounded the perimeter of the mall.
As soon as one of them saw us, he pointed at us, and soon after, they all started shooting at us. Thankfully, we managed to retreat to the second floor in time before the barrage started.
"Shit! Why do they always have to use firearms? That's so unfair!" I screamed before slipping and falling off the small flying platform I created to fly off.
Folarin, instead, managed to gracefully get off the platform before it went crashing towards a nearby wall.
'Of course she can do it better than me, of course! Ah shit, we need to run!'
The two creatures left, instead of chasing us, decided to try to kill the army surrounding the mall, but only managed to get shot to death.
'As if the situation couldn't get any worse. First of all, how are we supposed to even escape them? Secondly, how do they know we're here?'
"Fuck, Fola, quickly go search for the pen while I try to slow them down."
"I'm not Fola. Second, what if there are other monsters lurking around the mall."
'She does have a point, dammit, if only Satsui and Tsuitame could deal with those fuckers like they did last time in the snowy mountains. We still have Forren, thankfully!'
We immediately started searching for our blue backpack. As I peaked at the center of the shopping center's ground floor, I saw Forren blacked out. Beside him, there was the body of one of those creatures without a head.
"Dammit, Forren!"
"What happened?" asked Folarin, startled.
I simply pointed at Forren's location, and she got pretty nervous.
I noticed that most civilians were all amassed in the corners of the mall, mostly crying and praying. Some others were blindly wandering around in search of their relatives or friends who they had lost while escaping.
Searching for our blue bag was not easy since a lot of people were wandering around and some of them were stealing stuff on the ground, especially if it was lying around a bunch of corpses.
A couple of minutes later, we managed to find a guy carrying a bunch of bags. He had filled them with all sorts of stolen items.
"Valis, give me three paisons, quickly!"
I panicked and made four of them, which she used to kill the thief without even trying to engage him in a proper conversation. He was decapitated in a flash, so fast I couldn't even see what really killed him.
"Why-"
"No time to explain; go check what the army is doing."
'Are you crazy? I don't want to get shot at!'
Of course I couldn't say such a thing out loud; I was too much of a coward to do that. Her serious gaze always left me at a loss for words. Is it her beauty or her glare?
As I tried to peek over a small window, I saw most of them working around big vehicles that had what looked like a massive cannon at the top, with various agents operating machine guns that were placed around it.
One of them noticed me really quickly and shot a couple of times in my general direction. Thankfully, he missed, but I immediately backed off as a precaution.
'Shit what is going to happen now? They really are meticulously planning a sure way to kill us. How did they know that today was the perfect moment to strike? We never told them we were splitting. Were they monitoring us from the beginning? Then Satsui and Tsu-tsui'
As I was thinking about it, I heard a loud bang, followed by the sounds of many glass windows shattering. A helicopter could also be heard in the distance, getting closer and closer.
Whatever they launched at us was now releasing some sort of fog. I was pushing away from me using my mana. I immediately returned to Folarin, who was in the process of drawing the "thunder rain".
I wanted to stop her, but I had to prioritize her safety first, so I tried to create a wall of crystalized mana to protect us from the gas.
"Are you crazy? That will get us killed!" I shouted at her.
"This is our trump card. I'm sure it'll work in our favor... somehow." She yelled back at me.
'Out of every spell in the book, you thought that one to be the best suited for this situation? That's bulls-'
I started feeling the mana present in the air being drained, even the mana present in my cage that separated us from the gas.
I had to continuously channel Mana on the wall while everyone else was collapsing on the floor. Some of the people trapped inside had started to make masks out of their clothing.
It wasn't very effective, as most of them ended up losing consciousness anyway. At the same time, many black, heavily armored soldiers started descending from many holes in the ceiling.
All of them were wearing black bulletproof armor and a helmet that completely covered their faces. They also had heavy armored pants. All of the soldiers were at least two meters tall and were equipped with many gadgets I had never seen before.
They immediately started shooting at whoever was moving. In the meantime, the helicopters were hovering right above the mall, and the troops stationed outside started marching inside.
I decided to maximize the output of mana and create as many layers of barriers as I could to make the wall as durable as possible. I managed to create around 150, maybe a little bit more.
Forren gave no sign of ever waking up. The circle in the sky had almost finished charging up. Just as I thought things couldn't get worse, a lot of the last remaining citizens had surrounded our barrier and were all trying to break it in order to get inside.
They probably managed to break one of the many protective layers before lightning began raining down on the surrounding area.