Chapter 258: A War of Stolen Moments (1/2)
Sophie was dashing through the camp like a spectre, swift, ghostly and untouchable. She ended up running along the inside of the wall and onto the top, sprinting along it to reach her maximum speed. With a double-enhanced Hero’s Moment empowered every speed ability she had, even she felt like her breakneck speed was wild and precarious. She did not relent on the pace, whatever she felt, as speed was the only objective.
Ability: [Avatar of Speed] (Swift)
Special ability.Cost: None.Cooldown: None.Current rank: Bronze 3 (86%).Effect (iron): Your movement abilities have increased effect and reduced stamina and mana cost.Effect (bronze): Periodically gain instances of [Momentum] while moving at speed. The greater the speed, the faster instances are accrued.
With every moment, more and more stacks of Momentum were gathered. She kept moving, determined to drain every drop out of the Hero’s Moment spell.
“How are you holding up?” she asked through voice chat.
“Quite well, thank… argh!” Jason’s voice came through.
“Good to know, but I think she meant us,” Clive said. “We’re doing the flasher move you came up with.”
“The what?” Jason asked.
“The guy with the red tights,” Clive said.
“The Flash, not the flasher,” Jason said. “Also, they’re not tights.”
“They sounded like tights, the way you described them,” Neil chimed in.
“I think we’re all a little busy for this conversation!” Belinda yelled.
Jason had given up taunting with Shade. The Builder had thinned out the monsters and even his own forces as he scoured the camp for Jason. It was becoming increasingly hard to both stay ahead of the Builder and clear of the team, with more than a couple of near misses as the Builder came close to snatching him up.
He had been injured several times and had been using the monsters as a source of life drain, randomly laying out afflictions as he went. That was becoming harder and harder as the Builder continued to thin out the herd.
The close calls were getting closer with every passing moment. Frustrated that the greatest contribution he could make was running away, he desperately willed the team to success.
The tyranny of rank was an inescapable reality. For all that Humphrey’s morale was renewed and reinvigorated, his body was not. He had reached the point that little more than will alone kept him moving. His body was ravaged by Zato’s attacks and his own ability in equal parts. The team’s bag of tricks was running low and Humphrey’s stamina had reached its limit. His attacks had finally started doing real damage, but while his spirit was willing, his body was spent. He stumbled, faltering, breaking the chain of attacks he had almost miraculously maintained through nothing but muscle memory and willpower.
Zato had taken some real hits and a magic tattoo appeared on his body, shining brightly before dimming. Belinda recognised it as the upgraded version of her own magic tattoo that reset the cooldown of an ability. Hers had disappeared with her ascension to bronze rank and she was chilled as she saw it appear on Zato. She knew what power he wanted to use again.
Every member of the team had a gold spirit coin to use in absolutely clutch moments. Steeling herself, Belinda slipped it into her mouth to ensure the special attack that followed would work.
Ability: [Power Thief] (Magic)
Special attack (boon, affliction, magic)Cost: Very high mana.Cooldown: 5 minutes.Current rank: Bronze 3 (32%).Effect (iron): Make a magical ranged attack. You become able to use a random active-use ability of the target, who cannot use that ability until you have done so. It can be an essence ability or the inherent ability of a magic creature, but functions at your rank, not the rank of the target. You may not use the ability more than once. This ability cannot be used again until the copied ability is used. If not used within 24 hours, the copied ability is lost, restoring the target’s ability to use it.Effect (bronze): You can choose a specific ability of the target. If the target does not have that ability, a random ability is stolen instead.
Zato roared with fury as a light flashed from Belinda’s hand, striking Zato and zipping back to her in an instant. He had just used one of his biggest trump cards, making the explode-and-heal power that damaged Sophie so badly available once more, only to feel it snatched away.
Zato lunged at Belinda, still under the effects of her Counterfeit Combatant power, clad in armour and holding a long-handled war hammer. In his fury, Zato didn’t notice the gold-rank aura emitting from Belinda, who met his charge with the hammer, with gold-rank strength behind it.
The blow staved in Zato’s head, yet even that wasn’t enough to do more than stagger the metal man. Belinda, by contrast, felt the coin’s power drain away and collapsed under the weight of her own armour.
Humphrey was too exhausted to move and with Belinda sharing his fate through the use of her spirit coin, Clive and Neil were suddenly left vulnerable. Zato looked grotesque with the huge dent deforming his head, but he was only staggered for a short time. In spite of his hideous disfiguration, he fought on.
While Zato recovered, Onslow and Stash moved from the edge of the fight where they had been on monster shepherding duties, placing themselves between Zato and the last members of their team both present and standing.
Zato began to move on the valiant familiars but he didn’t get to make his attack as Sophie returned to the battlefield in a blur of motion. The Hero’s Moment spell was on the verge of ending, and she stuffed a gold spirit coin in her mouth as she arrived in front of Zato.
Between Neil’s double-enhanced spell and the gold coin, only her temporarily gold-rank power attribute was enough to hold her body together with the absurd power coursing through it. She ignored the pain, slapping her palm into Zato’s chest. All the Momentum she had built up over the duration of Neil’s spell was triggered, the power multiplied again and again and again by the empowering effects layered onto her. The resulting attack had so much power that simply unleashing it made the air crash like thunder.
[Momentum] (boon, magic, stacking): When making an attack, all instances are consumed to inflict resonating-force damage. Multiple instances can be accumulated and instances are lost quickly while not moving.
The seemingly indestructible Zato exploded into a rain of liquefied metal.
You have defeated [Zato].
Jason grinned, but he knew that his true contribution started now. His team had done their part and all they needed was time. It was up to Jason to buy them that time.
He gave up hiding and appeared before the Builder, who was staring at the tower with a rare display of emotion on the vessel’s face. It wasn’t rage but affront. The great astral being was less confused by the success of the lowly mortals than it was by their temerity in stand in its path. Jason did so literally, planting his feet on the ground between the Builder and the tower.
“What did I tell you?” Jason said. “The power of friendship.”
“Your friends will be the ones to kill you, still.”
“You get your shot first, mate,” Jason said. “Your opponent is right here.”
“You cannot harm me.”
“Should be an easy one for you, then.”
“Pleasure is a mortal concept,” the Builder mused. “Even in these vessels I have only felt it for no more than a few fleeting moments across a span of time longer than your species has existed. I think I will take pleasure in watching you suffer.”
“I do aim to please,” Jason said, drawing his sword. “Shall we?”
Shade’s bodies spread out from Jason to surround the Builder, although Jason kept one in reserve. The Builder could easily damage incorporeal creatures and, assuming he got out alive, he would need one of Shade’s bodies to reconstitute the rest.
Jason, the Builder and all the remaining monsters felt the shift in the tower’s magic, starting from the base. With that, the Builder lost interest in Jason and started striding in the direction of the tower.
As they moved into the mid-range of bronze, the team had broken through the limitations that were part of human, or human-adjacent existence. They could run faster than any Olympic sprinter, with stamina that would make a marathon runner shudder.
Sophie and Belinda were slumped on top of Onslow’s shell as the familiar zoomed up the ramp on a cushion of air. Belinda was barely conscious, while Sophie was barely alive. Neil’s magical intervention had been the only thing that had prevented her body from giving out after the power she had sent coursing through it.
Humphrey was in no better a state. His new power had brought with it a surge of strength, but as that passed, the lingering soul damage had left him debilitated. He was slung over the back of Stash in the shape of a heidel, desperately clinging to consciousness as he sought to see the task to completion.
Neil was running, along with the dragon-tooth warriors Humphrey had a managed to summon before collapsing entirely. His own summon was too slow to keep up and had been left at the bottom to block anyone who tried to follow them up.
Clive also sat atop Onslow, carefully maintaining a ritual circle around the crystal cube floating in front of him. It was a device he had cobbled together from materials originally intended to open a path back home, a plan rendered moot by the changes to the astral space’s ambient magic. He had repurposed the materials to create a device that would invert the towers magic. It was a process Jason has insisted on referring to as ‘reversing the polarity.’
The function of the device was straightforward enough. They simply had to take it from the bottom of the tower to the top. If that were all there was to it, Clive could have simply handed it off to Sophie and let her run up the outside of the tower. The trick was that Clive’s cobbled-together device was made from improvised components and worked in accordance with theories he was only just beginning to understand.
In order to keep it operational, Clive needed to keep it encircled in a magical diagram that he needed to alter in real time as they moved the device. It was a ludicrous feat only possible because of Clive’s power that let him draw ritual circles in the air, combined with his incredible skills as a ritualist. Even then, only months of drawing out rituals in combat had honed his reflexes enough to keep up. It took every ounce of his concentration as they made the way up the spiralling ramp inside the tower.