Prytaneum
Explosion
The truth was, I was running on fumes. The High Magic Potion and rain had helped, but everything they had given back was quickly draining away because of the geysers and storms. I wanted to stop them both, but…I honestly wasn't sure I could, at this point. Or that, if I did, I'd be able to do anything else. Stopping the geysers alone took a strength I honestly wasn't sure I could spare right now, not when I wasn't sure what I was going to be able to accomplish to begin with.
Frankly, the smart thing to do would probably be to just stay behind Welf. Zanis wouldn't take the shot while the only person who could make magic swords was in front of him—probably. I mean, he had the first time, but even he'd apparently been shocked by the power of the magic sword and given that his new insane plan relied on Welf, he'd probably know better than to swing that thing at him.
The thing is…he was right. He probably could knock Welf aside with one hand—or, at least, force him to do something drastic. If he captured Welf, drugged him, and somehow made his crazy plan work, there was no telling how many other people might get hurt, but maybe even worse than that…I was pretty sure Welf would literally kill himself to keep that from happening. Either way, I couldn't just stand back and watch, even if I wasn't sure if I'd be able to do any better than Welf.
But I didn't have any other choice; I had to stop Zanis some and I didn't have any choice but to do it here and now—because if I didn't, there was no telling what he might do. I didn't believe for a moment that he'd get away with any of this, of course; if there was anything good about this colossal mess, it was that everybody and their mother was going to notice sooner or later.
But that was part of the problem. If he still had the magic sword when he was cornered, it might cost someone their life. It might cost a lot of someone their lives. Any number of people could probably take Zanis down if he didn't have it, but if he swung that magic sword again anywhere near the city wall…
If he didn't use it on me, all it meant was that he might use it on someone else—even if he was willing to give up, as long as he had that magic sword, letting him walk away wouldn't guarantee anyone else's safety.
As is, I couldn't let him hurt anyone else, but I couldn't let him take Welf, either. I couldn't let him escape with the magic sword, I couldn't gamble the life of the next person to catch up to him or those of anyone around him, and I couldn't let him hurt any more innocent people.
Which, all told, left me pretty damn short on options. And the only person in town I was comfortable to put at this kind of risk was myself. It probably made sense, too. How many people in Orario had the type of heat resistance I did? And of those who could survive a swing from Crozzo's magic sword, who else could potentially minimize the damage it caused? Those seemed like pretty good reasons, frankly, but the fact of the matter was that I started it and I couldn't let anyone else die trying to finish it. I needed to stop him before that happened.
What I needed aside, though, when I reached down deep for everything I had left, I came up pretty dry. Maybe I could have splashed him pretty hard with what I had left, but stop him? That, I was a bit less sure of.
But it didn't matter. I said I'd stop Zanis and I would, even if it killed me. So as Zanis reared his hand back for a swing, I closed my eyes and did everything I could, mustering the last of my strength. I sent up a prayer to my father and the other gods, just a simple 'please,' and hoped someone happened to be looking my way. I thought about my Developmental Abilities and Skills—of Hero and Hope—and thought that if there was ever a time for them to lend me a helping hand, it was now. I thought of Lili. Of Welf. Of everyone who had and would be hurt if I didn't stop Zanis here and now. Of the people I'd cared about, the people I'd lost, the people I'd maybe never see again and maybe see really soon.
Then, with the courage that brought me, I went for broke. Maybe I felt like I was running on empty. Maybe I was running out of 'magic' or whatever. So what? That just meant I had to draw from somewhere else. Because I wasn't just an adventurer, a mortal given strength with a god's blessing. I was a demigod.
And this power was in my blood.
This wasn't my limit. This wasn't all I had. Because I was still alive, I was still standing, and I was still willing to fight. My father's blood was in my veins, his ichor, something that was more divine than biological—and as long as I still had that, as long as I drew breath, I must have had at least a little bit of magic left.
So I thought of holding up the weight of the sky. I thought of burning within a volcano, flying faster than I could imagine, and then falling back to earth like a comet. I thought of burning alive within the waters of the River Styx, of nearly being unmade. I thought of dying, like I had before and was willing to do again.
And it was like there was a glass orb in my stomach, something solid and fragile, cracking and breaking as I pushed. I felt flashes of pain like broken edges, but I didn't stop—and all at once, it shattered into a million pieces.
It was like a dam had broken. Something flowed through me—or more like, flowed out of me. The streets behind and around me cracked and exploded, water gushing up from the fissures as if we'd been standing above an underground lake. It seemed to gather out of the very air, gathering into droplets even as more of it flowed in rivers big and small all around us, from what seemed like every possible place. As Zanis finished his swing, I summoned water and it came in a flood.
Fire blossomed and my vision filled with flames again, but I faced it head on. I wasn't trying to shelf myself again, to outlast the attack—I was trying to smother it, to drown the flames in the sea. And as I reached out, a torrential wave of waver gathered and clashing with the raging inferno like a tsunami against a volcano. I spread it out as wide as I could, making it into a wall that nothing could get passed, standing firm as columns of steam rose like clouds.
And when that still wasn't enough, when Crozzo's magic sword seemed like it might still burn pathways through…I called for more. It didn't matter how much it took—others would be on their way by now. As long as the magic sword was gone, there were any number of people who could beat Zanis; I just had to weather this. The water seemed almost like it was trying to struggle or rampage, fighting my control in a way I'd never felt before, but I clamped down on it brought it close through sheer force of will, surrounding myself with it and putting it between Zanis and the city, buying time to bring everything I could to bear.
The sea shells I'd scattered around simply burst, shattering in an instant with sounds like gunshots, but each seemed to open a door and an even greater flood came roaring through. Two dozen waterspouts as thick across as my shoulders curved through the air, merging and feeding into my wall as I stood fast. The rain strengthened, abruptly turning from a shower into a full on storm, coming down hard enough that it was hard to see. And then…I drew from myself, too. The sea was in my blood, in the ichor my father had passed down to me, and it flooded from my hands in a surge, even as I felt like something was being squeezed out of me.
For a moment, maybe even two, it seemed like enough. Water turned to steam, but yet more water came to replace it, again and again and again. I spread it out, just enough to completely cover the arc of the blast, holding it at bay.
But even then, it began to break through. Perhaps it was because I was spreading out my power too much while trying to protect the city had its consequences, perhaps I was weakening, or perhaps the sword really was just that powerful. Whatever the case, something had to give—or else I had to choose what I would leave unprotected. I could feel the blast focused around several points and I cut a few corners, drawing water back in where it didn't seem to be evaporating as much, focusing instead on those places that seemed the hottest, trying to keep anything from breaking through. But while that helped a bit, there wasn't that much I could spare, even cutting every corner I could. Not if I didn't want to make a new opening somewhere else.
In the end, the simple fact of the matter was that there was a difference between weathering a small, man-size section of a blast and holding back the entire thing. The way this was going, it was going to break through; at best, I could choose where and how. If I couldn't resist the blast completely, I had to guide it as best I could to a place where it couldn't hurt anyone else, without knowing where anyone else was.
To be honest, it was a pretty easy choice, given that. I was the focus of the attack and the strongest parts of it, the parts taking the most energy to withstand, were all around me. I was the reason for it, too, the reason why other people were at risk to begin with. And since the brunt of the attack was all focused on me anyway…
As long as I took it, there was that much less of a chance for others to get hurt—and I had protection, a decent chance of surviving it.
They didn't.
I shifted my hands, turning them from casting a torrent into the heart of the blast to reinforcing the rest of the wall. Keeping them focused front and center may have given me the best protection from the worst of the blast, but it had meant that much less water to support the wave and I couldn't afford that. Instead, I opened a way, let water flow from my skin as an extra layer of protection, and braced myself for the heat. Where my hands had been uncovered, though, this time I angled the blast for the most protected part of my body, hoping my armor would endure as it had the last time Zanis broke a magic sword on me.
When the blast first hit me, it felt more like being hit by a giant cushion than anything and I felt nothing but a slight warmth that I could barely feel through my Undine Silk shirt. Even so, I saw as my defenses began to burn as the flames sought to take the path of least resistance, especially as I pushed my wave forward as if to squeeze it through.
First came my Salamander Wool jacket—a hundred thousand valis worth of fire-based protection that held for a solid second before simply igniting, bursting into flames with an odd flash of red. Then came my new armor, designed with a slight fire-resistance that proved nowhere near enough. The markings that showed where the Minotaur Horns had been forged into the armor glowed brightly as they drew in most of the heat, but they quickly began to melt along with the rest of my armor. It glowed brightly as it liquefied, flowing down my chest and arms, but even still it was only a slight, if growing warmth, thanks to the rest of my defenses. My Undine shirt helped my take the heat, though it quickly began to burn once exposed to the flames themselves; perhaps my skill with Mystery just wasn't up to this kind of task.
And then it was just me.
I burnt. I screamed, too, of course, but the sound was swallowed by the flames—or maybe my eardrums just burst in the heat. I wasn't sure, but either way, things went quiet really fast and then they went dark as eyes began to burn as well. It hurt more than when monsters had tried torturing me with lava, hurt more than anything but a small handful of agonies I didn't want to remember, but I endured it. I pulled more water from my skin, from the air, and from the ground, reinforcing myself and remaining steady. Things faded quickly, like sight and sound, but I could still feel the pain so I knew I was alive and that kept me going, kept me healing, and kept me fighting. I could do this. I would do this.
I endured for what felt like forever, unable to even spare the focus to count the seconds as I felt myself burning and healing in a shifting cycle of pain that was the only thing I could really feel. Even when the fires abruptly ended, I felt it more in a lack of evaporation than anything else. The wave I'd been pushing forward abruptly had nothing left in its way and crashed forward. I felt something that I thought was probably Zanis getting caught in it, too, and it came as a surge of victory and relief.
I'd won, I thought, wanting to smile as my heart began to pick up speed.
And then, all at once, the geysers cut off, startling bursts of sudden nothingness. The water I'd been controlling abruptly lost shape and spread out randomly, guided by gravity and the landscape rather than by me.
But more than that, more than anything else, something stood out to me as odd—a strange silence, going beyond the one I'd already been plunged into. Not as though everything had somehow fallen even more silent, but as if something specific was gone, something that had always been there before. Though I could hardly feel my limbs, they felt odd, like I was losing all my strength. I wanted to shout something, but I couldn't even open my mouth to draw a breath. More alarmingly, I went truly 'blind', my ability to sense water vanishing into simple darkness.
What was happening? What was going on? Was I that badly hurt? No, I had felt myself healing, felt the water giving me strength. My injuries were no doubt horrific, but they alone weren't the cause of this. Then was this 'Mind Down'? A consequence of overusing my powers? Or—
Oh.
Oh no.
I realized the truth as I faltered and began to fall. My injuries were what was wrong nor was this Mind Down. The cause, I thought, might have been the same, but I wasn't losing consciousness. I'd reached down for everything I had, drawing water from a dry well to protect people, and this was the result.
Where it had picked up speed in my excitement, there was abruptly nothing but silence.
My heart had just stopped beating. I was…I was—