From the bottom of my heart, thank you to my p4tr0ns: Morpheaus, and RTB <3 <3 <3 Become a p4tr0n too and read up to FOUR chapters ahead!:
h t t p s: / / w w w . p a t r e o n . c o m / t r a s h w i t h g l a s s e s
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With my superior strength I gripped onto the rock of the cliff side with one hand, and with the other, I conjured a shield to block the falling boiling water from above; I couldn't manipulate the Manitou in the cliff, or throw any crazy spells, for the structure wasn't stable enough, and I would be risking bringing everyone down in that thirty meters fall down to the ground.
Why, of all the places they could have chosen to flee, the Moon Mirror Order members had started to climb up a cliff?
If I only knew how to fly…
"Why don't you give up already?!", a man with a piercing in his eyebrows shouted while looking down at me, and the rest of the fraternity members.
"Why don't you surrender already, darling?!" Mari shouted back.
"As if! The Broken would beat the shit out us!", the man with pierced eyebrows got back to scaling the cliff, and one of his underlings pointed his boot at us, and poured another bunch of boiling water again.
My shield blocked and diverged the water safely, but we were getting nowhere.
Our last prisoners, being at the lowest possible position withing the order, could give us the name of the order, "Moon Mirror", and the position of a couple of bigger fish, but nothing much more useful. Our current targets, however, could finally give us the name of one of the distributors of those magical items being so widely available for that bunch, and we could finally discover where they were getting them from; after all, not all of them could have been stolen.
"Tch, we aren't making any progress!", Mari complained, clicking her tongue. "If we throw spells at them, they are just going to fall and die… We need to climb to them faster, and secure their capture!"
"We can't climb up faster, leader!", Aspen hurried to stop the green haired girl with her ideas. "We're in an even more dangerous position than those Order members. If you don't want anyone getting hurt, we may have to give up on capturing them, unfortunately."
Mari gritted her teeth and punched the cliff wall with the side of her hand.
"Shit! There's no way I'm going to get my team killed again…!"
Seeing the green haired girl looking so distressed, I was about to just throw those Order members down, and simply hope they'd survive the fall. It would be better than giving up on the pursue. Splash, however, seemed to have a better idea: "this is all my fault! It's because I can't use my bow and arrow while climbing up…!"
"Seriously, stop taking responsibility for everything!", Aspen sighed, his hand shaking as he visibly wanted to facepalm.
"If you could use your bow, could you take those guys down?", I asked the human with long hair and a goatee.
"Of course! You could leave everything to me!"
"Do your thing, then", I said, and conjured a long rope around the human with long hair and a goatee, and my left hand. Letting go of the cliff's face, Splash got on his feet, on the vertical, conjured his bow and arrow, and pulled the string back. "I'm going unmake the shield for a moment, but I can't catch all of them if they fall down. The rock I'm holding onto would break", I warned, and he nodded.
"I know, just leave it to me!"
And so I did, unmaking the blue shield, and letting Splash shot his arrow: the first projectile flew upward, and dug itself straight into the foot of the man who was conjuring the boiling water, and into the rock under it, locking him up as the man screamed in pain, but held onto to wall for his dear life.
I quickly created the shield again for an avalanche of boulders fell from another one of the Order members, this time the user of a series of magical rings.
"Next!", I said, and as soon as my shield vanished, Splash shot again, nailing the hand of the man into the cliff's side. "Next!", a woman with bracelet that conjured burning oil got her forearm pinned by the arrow. "Next!", Splash finally aimed for the leader of that band and our main target of the day, but this time his tactic was frustrated when the man with piercing in his eyebrows covered himself with a hard stone armor. And then, to my surprise, he jumped off the cliff, and straight over me.
"Raaaagh!", the man covered by a stone armor fell over my shield covered in sweat and with crazed expression. "If you're taking us down, I'm going to take you with me!", he fell right over my shield, and started to punch it with both hands.
"Splash, hold onto the cliff again", I said, and unmade the rope that I kept attached onto him. Then I did the same with the shield.
"Dieeee!", the leader of that section of the Moon Mirror Order punched me right on the cheek with a stone gloved fist, forcing my gaze to the left.
Unscratched, however, and while we both were falling to the ground bellow, I turned my face back to him, unbothered.
"What?!"
"BOOM!", with a shield behind my back, and explosions propelling this, I grabbed the man by his shoulders, and pressed him against the cliff's face, pinning the man in stone armor into the escarpment.
"Aaargh!", he screamed, as slowly his armor was removed from him, and then his skin, leaving a red trail onto the surface of the precipice. Before he could be completely grated against the cliff, however, or die from the fall, by being pressed against the side of the fall, he had greatly slowed down, and when he touched the ground, it was at a reasonable sped, only breaking both his legs, and falling down with a flayed back. He quickly lost consciousness.
I, of course, didn't feel anything from the fall at all. When I looked up, the rest of the fraternity were all safely coming down with the other wounded order members captured.
"I'm very sorry for all this trouble, leader", Splash begged forgive, closing his eyes and fists tightly. "It's all my responsibility…! I promised to make the Bear Mountain a safer place for my four younger siblings, but even then I failing in doing enough!"
"Good that you know; if you and Coyote could have done everything by yourselves, I didn't need to come here in the first place, I could have stayed at the Bear Mountain eating and sleeping", Dust sighed, scratching her hair. "Ouch!" she shrunk down as Aspen punched her in the leg. "I mean, yeah! I love my job or something! My siblings surely can't call me spoiled now!"
"Hahaha! It's alright, darling, it's alright! We won, you see? There's nothing for you to take responsibility for!", Mari patted the archer in the back, laughing.
"Then I take responsibility for the victory too! It's all mine! Auch!", Splash stepped away, brushing the arm Aspen had just punched. "I mean… Yeah, this is teamwork… everyone's responsibility!"
"What about you Coyote?", Mari asked me.
"I'm fine."
"After falling from that high…?", I shrugged. "Well, one day you're going to tell me about your secrets. For now, we have another prisoner to interrogate. And we are another step closer to the head of this order."