Spellheart 10: Chapter 30 (Patreon)

It took me a moment to place the name. Louis had mentioned it before. That was the name of his ship, the special item he’d arrived to this world in, just like me.

It was also the reason he wanted The Wanderer. If he could absorb The Wanderer the way The Wanderer had absorbed the QCA, he would unlock some hidden new ability his ship would otherwise never obtain.

“And yes,” said the voice that claimed to be my future self, “before you ask, it works the other way around. If you beat Louis, The Wanderer can absorb The Challenger, granting you complete control over the ship’s true capabilities. You’ll still be limited by the ship’s energy stores, but the training wheels will come off, so to speak.”

“Meaning no more points and quests and whatnot. If The Wanderer can do it, it’ll happen.”

My reaction was twofold. First, there was fear that something as powerful as The Wanderer was coming for me. Something like that was bound to pack a punch. Mac and I had gotten Level Reducing Sentry Towers. But Louis had been around far longer than I had. What tricks did he have up his sleeves?

But just as present as the fear was something else. The same ambition that had driven me to accomplish so much else in such a short span of time. What new secrets could I unlock if I scrapped The Challenger for parts to improve The Wanderer?

I didn’t have to wait long before Louis returned.

A great bulky monstrosity of metal appeared on the horizon. Unlike The Wanderer, whose physical form defaulted to a phone booth, this ship did not try to hide what it was.

It looked like someone had started with a sci-fi battleship, then started heaping magic on it without care for physics. The ship's engines drifted in the air alongside the rest of the ship, completely detached from its main body. If those invisible places had been filled out, it might have looked like an enormous biplane with two wings and engines.

The ship was also big. Very big. Where The Wanderer was tiny, this thing was a giant. From front to back, it might have stretched from one side of the Hearthwood to the other. There was no way to measure it now that most of our trees were barren, magma-splattered wasteland.

“Everyone, take cover!” I yelled as I sensed a massive energy buildup from the front of The Challenger. Those were laser cannons if I’d ever seen them. Likely magically enhanced through some fusion of enchantment and technology, much like Argona and I were trying to do in the Hearthwood.

I joined them behind the walls, which was also a good thing. Those laser cannons lit up brighter than the sun as they struck the energy shield surrounding the Hearthwood. There was some sort of reaction there that caused a deafening explosion.

The energy shield that had protected us until now popped like a soap bubble. Whatever that beam was, it had been engineered to take down shields like ours in explosive fashion.

[Directing... energy... outward!] Mac grunted from the strain. Though he had no physical body, I could tell that whatever he was doing was taxing his processing cycles to the limit.

I stood up to catch the tail end of the explosion. Whatever maneuver Mac had pulled had saved the walls at the cost of utterly destroying the area outside them. Not that there was much left to save. Everything beyond the Hearthwood’s protection was a barren wasteland. Now, the sand and ash had turned to glass from the flash of intense heat and pressure.

Ironically, we’d saved their lives by imprisoning the remaining portion of the Cult of the Unblinking Eye’s forces. If they were still in their tents besieging us, they would have been vaporized by that latest explosion. If that was his opening attack, Louis wasn’t pulling any punches. That meant neither could I.

“Argona, deploy the golems! Demigods, with me! We need to ground that ship. If we can knock it out of the sky, we can point its weapons away from the city!”

I yelled my orders, and behind me, my family and allies scrambled to action. Massive compartments around the walls opened up, revealing not just one but six massive Demigod-level Planetary Defense Golems. Mac and Argona would pilot them, but what we really needed them for was their weight.

[Argona wishes to know if she has permission to use the experimental nuclear weapons,] Mac asked.

"Granted!" I yelled in reply. If this was an item on par with The Wanderer, and Louis had spent the last few hundred years figuring it out and pushing it to its limits, then we'd need every advantage we could get.

Dean had proven he could lift The Wanderer, which hopefully meant that while The Challenger was heavy, it wouldn’t be impossibly so. As long as we could grab hold of it long enough to disable the engines, we could shift the fight into one on our terms.

I was the first in the air, but Elara soon joined me flying just off to my side. Sam and Dean took flight soon after, along with Lyanva, Tivana, Yeminel, Ariel, Lyssandra, and Melaris.

The ship started charging another energy beam. “Scatter!” I yelled. We didn’t want to make one big target.

The others flew to one side, but I continued straight and true. Spell Eater could absorb energy. Why not this energy? Anything would be better than letting another one of those beams hit the city. With no shield to protect us, I feared the kind of damage it would do.

I grabbed the gun, though up close, I realized it wasn’t a gun at all. It was more like a dome-covered depression on the side of the ship. I tried to peel the metal covering it away, only to find it utterly immune to my strength. Even the iron of the Primordial World had bent in my grip, but not this stuff.

I cocked back my arm, and just as the beam was about to fire skewered the gun with my spear. Something shattered like glass, and I felt a flood of energy pour through Spell Eater. I recognized it as the same kind of energy that flowed through the Mana Generator.

It was more powerful and potent than zeal, like maple syrup, compared to raw tree sap. If I had never experienced it before, I might have lost my hold on the potent substance. But I had experienced it before, so I gritted my teeth and pulled it through me. It seared the insides of my channels like liquid fire, and with anything short of the World Titan Fiendbody I might have died from this act alone.

But I did have the World Titan Fiendbody and the will to endure. The blast of energy dissipated within me until whatever was powering the gun was cut short.

“That’s all you’ve got?” I grunted, blood dripping from my nose. “Well then, my turn.”

I reversed the energy flow, dumping it back from myself into Spell Eater. A burst of crimson light lit up within the gun and shot into the ship itself. Tough as this stuff was, it wasn’t tougher than its own energy source. The beam of crimson light cut through the gun’s internal mechanism, ensuring it would never work without extensive repairs.

But my attack had only silenced one gun on the ship’s side. The other energy beam had fired freely and struck the walls with all the wrath of an angry god.

The futuristic energy weapon struck my walls, melting away the stone beneath it and cutting into the smooth metal produced by The Wanderer beneath. It cut a deep gouge into the metal, and some at the top of the wall jumped down into the city streets below as the section they were standing on turned too hot.

When the dust finally settled, it looked like the wall survived, though it wouldn’t last through another of those attacks. I would have to make sure another attack didn’t happen.

My allies landed atop The Challenger shortly after I did. They had even less success tearing away at the ship’s body than I did.

“I can’t get through!” Dean yelled as he hacked at the body of the ship.

“Yeminel, Dean, with me! You can throw sand in the turbines if you work together!” Sam called out.

The three jumped on top of one engine, and Yeminel started working her summer breeze magic. A bit of beach sand kicked up out of nowhere, and with Dean’s help, a lot of it got into something spinning within. From the horrible noise the engine was making, the engine would rip itself apart, given time.

The gun started firing up again, and I leaped from one side of The Challenger to the other. I plunged Spell Eater into the other crystal turret, absorbed its energy, and bounced it back into the device, causing it to explode.

One burst of strange, higher-level energy was hard on me, but two had blood dripping from my ears. Perhaps an Immortal Ascendant could wield this power to their own ends, but not me. Still, I had survived worse than this, and now that the guns were down and the engines on one side partially disabled, we had a chance at wrestling this thing out of the sky.

“Argona! Mac! Send in those big golems!” I yelled.

The six massive Demigod golems climbed over the walls. The two closest to us reached The Challenger first, and they each grabbed the body of The Challenger in one massive hand.

Even with the tremendous size of the Planetary Defense Golems, the ship was still bigger. It was like a few normal-sized people trying to wrestle down a whale. The rest of us were nothing more than ticks.

The Challenger gained altitude as Louis realized what we were doing. Soon, the Planetary Defense golems were dangling in their air, their weight not nearly enough to ground us.

“Switch targets to those engines! If we can bring those down, maybe we can bring the rest of the ship down too!” I yelled. My voice was probably indiscernible over the supernatural wind Yeminel was throwing, along with the roar of the engines and the sound of battle, but Mac must have relayed the orders.

The rest of the golems had to jump to grab hold of the engines. It wasn’t an easy leap, especially for something of their size. The square cube law meant that things that enormous would need a tremendous amount of energy to get airborn. And yet they managed them, anyway. Argona must have given them all another set of upgrades.

Two golems latched on to the one Yeminel, Sam, and Dean had weakened and, with their combined efforts, brought the engine all the way to the ground. As they yanked it free from the patch of air suspended beside The Challenger, something happened and the whole ship started wobbling, as if they had torn the engine free from an invisible wing.

A moment later, the upper engine flared brighter, while the two on the other side dimmed. The onboard computer compensated for losing an engine by making the remaining one work harder to keep the whole ship aloft.

That’s when it revealed it wasn’t nearly as helpless to this attack as it first let on.

Its reply to our attacks came in the form of intense heat. The entire hull of the ship flashed as bright as the sun. My clothes burned away in an instant, and the skin beneath blistered. My less durable companions were forced to jump off when the attack began.

This had to be a close-quarters defense feature meant to purge interstellar parasites through intense heat. And right now, my allies and I are parasites. But there was a weakness here. I could sense the metal turning soft beneath my feet. This attack was hot enough that the otherwise impenetrable hull had lost its strength. This was my opportunity if I had the strength to seize it.

So, I used my concept of Identity to turn the weakened hull into something even softer, like cheese. In its melted state, it was far swifter to cooperate. Then I thrust Spell Eater down and sliced clean through it. Soon, a thick plate of metal about twenty centimeters thick flaked off and fell to the ground. The resulting hole was barely wide enough to claw my way through.

Burned and bleeding from more than one place, I had finally done it. I was inside The Challenger. Now, I could do some real damage and bring this ship to the ground.