Unruly Summon Chapter 39: Death (Patreon)

Big big big cliffhanger warning on this one.

"This isn't working," sighed Johanna.

"I'm starting to suspect that the trick is first-hand involvement in a highly emotional event," agreed Tony. "It's not enough to hear about how someone else triggered it. It requires someone to be there."

"Please don't say that out loud," I begged, shuddering at the thought of what the king would do if he thought emotional trauma was a required condition. If King George held a similar viewpoint to his parents about the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, these priests' children would be up for execution by teatime.

"It's a pity Minoru hasn't woken up, or we could ask her what she was thinking," said Jane.

"Yeah... Unfortunately, she's going to be out for a while," said Wendy, glancing at the carriage from which an interesting cross between purring and snoring was loudly emanating. "It's a pity I have no affinity for white magic whatsoever. I want to try."

"Well, what other myths are there, then? Any that involve spells of other colours?" I asked. "Perhaps there's a green equivalent for you."

Wendy peered at me thoughtfully, but before she had a chance to answer, Christine interrupted. "Everyone, stop moving and remain silent."

"Why? What's wrong?" asked Johanna, failing the 'remain silent' request instantly. Not that her quiet question was particularly noisy compared to Minoru's continued sleep-purring.

"Quiet!" demanded Christine, drawing her sword.

In the distance to the south, clouds of birds took off, spooked by something that wasn't me casting overly loud spells.

Getting the message that something was very wrong, the four clergy nervously edged towards the carriage. Wendy more calmly approached Christine. "How many?" she whispered.

"I don't know, but we're about to find out. Thomas, prepare to defend yourself."

I may have been armoured, but we weren't actually expecting an attack. I'd left my weapons in the carriage, so I had to run ahead of the priests to grab them. By the time I had my buckler strapped to my arm, my sheathed sword at my side and spear in hand, Christine had slain a few wolves that had burst out of the southern wheat fields and rushed towards us.

"Am I too late? Is it over?" I asked.

Christine was too focused on the southern horizon to respond, which was all the answer I needed. Sure enough, a few seconds later, another, larger group of wolves emerged from between the yellow stalks.

"Ventus Ferrum," declared Wendy, and half of them died, blood and limbs launched into the air as blades of wind tore the weak monsters apart. "What are the slayers doing, to let an entire wolf pack leave the corrupted lands?" she grumbled.

Christine and I finished the rest without issue. For my very first battle against monsters, it was somewhat anticlimactic, the wolf charging face-first into my spear. I hadn't needed to do anything but stand there and make sure the point was facing in the correct direction.

Christine continued to stare. "Thomas, get out of here," she ordered.

"What?"

"I said get out of here!" she hissed, doing that odd thing where she obviously wanted to yell but also didn't want to make any noise. Her voice was laced with panic, which was somewhat alarming. I'd never seen Christine panic, even during the whole staged assassination thing. "Get those priests into the carriage, then run! You can pull it faster than the horse."

"That bad, huh," said Wendy, who showed no signs of fleeing.

"You want me to abandon you?!" I hissed back.

"I want you to live long enough to save our kingdom!" snapped Christine. "Which you will not do if you delay here a second longer. This isn't a pack of wolves, it's a horde. I'll cover your retreat as best I can, but you need to run now!"

Wendy swore, and the noise to the south became audible even to me. A touch of body strengthening to enhance my hearing, and the sounds snapped into perfect clarity. Growling, roaring, chittering. Heavy footsteps, slithering, pounding. An uncountable number of sources, making a wide range of noises.

"Didn't you hear her? Run!" I yelled at the priests as I took position next to my two party members.

"Didn't you hear me?!" replied Christine.

"Yes, and I'm ignoring you," I replied, readying my spear. Best to conserve mana, if there was a whole horde to deal with, so I'd rely on weapons for as long as possible. "I'm not letting you sacrifice yourselves. We fight together."

This time, Christine didn't argue back, simply staring south with an increasingly disbelieving expression.

"What are you doing?!" asked a surprised Wendy. "Stop being an idiot, Thomas. This world needs you. It doesn't need us."

Johanna apparently didn't share my dislike of letting others sacrifice themselves to cover her escape, jumping into the driver's seat of the carriage and flicking the reins. The carriage took off as fast as the horse could pull it.

"Seriously! Get out of here!" yelled Wendy.

"There's no point," answered Christine. "Whether he runs or not makes no difference."

"Huh? You sound like you've already given up," I commented, just as the horde left the cover of the wheat field. "Oh..." I added as it kept on coming.

A wall of monsters, most species of which I didn't even recognise, stretched from east to west. No individual monster looked particularly threatening; the bulk of the monsters were rats or wolves, with only an occasional larger specimen mixed in, but what they lacked in individual power, they made up for in quantity. They climbed over each other as the wall surged forward in a singular mass, a vast tidal wave of meat.

"That's no simple horde..." commented Wendy, taking an involuntary step back as her face paled.

"Miasmic flood," agreed Christine. "The capital is lost, but I'm damn well going to make them pay for every inch of land they take."

This time, she didn't wait for the monsters to bring the fight to her, instead blurring forward. Crescent fangs—fired faster than I could track—shot forward, each one tearing through half a dozen monsters. But for each one that fell, a hundred more were waiting behind.

"Okay, Thomas, listen very carefully, because we don't have much time," said Wendy, who had drawn a knife. She slashed it across her wrist, a stream of blood trickling to the ground. "Parvus Terra," she chanted, and a reverse fountain of soil erupted upwards, mixing with the blood and falling back to the ground in a carefully controlled way.

"What the heck?! This is hardly the time for..."

"Shut up! Please, for the first time since we summoned you, just listen to me and do what I say. No questions. No arguing. No thinking. Just listen."

If Wendy had a plan, I was going to do my best to help, so rather than shutting up, I did what I could to buy her time. "Maius Procella! Maius Procella! Maius Procella!"

A trio of enormous whirlwinds shot up around us, monsters spiralling into the sky. Crops were torn out of the soil, and then the soil itself was ripped from the ground, twisting into the air. And then the blades of wind struck, and the whirlwinds turned a dirty red. Tornados of blood and dust, tearing through the monstrous horde.

And it wasn't enough.

The spells were overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of monsters. The whirlwinds were full, and could lift no more. Weighed down, the magic dissipated.

I fired off more magic, spending mana like water in an effort to buy Wendy a few more seconds to complete whatever runic circle she was working on.

"Done!" she yelled after what seemed like an eternity, despite probably only being a handful of seconds. "Thomas, get over here and stand in the centre."

I didn't move. I recognised the circle. I'd only seen it once before, and though that time it had been chalk white rather than blood red, the day was seared into my memory. I was hardly going to forget any detail of it. "You're trying to send me home," I accused.

"This is the only way you survive today," she said flatly. "Please. There's no way this flood hasn't been detected. The capital will be evacuating. Glenda knows your spell, and will assuredly be at the head of that evacuation, along with Mary. You've already done more for us than we could have hoped for. You've given us the means to save the continent. We can't ask you to die for us too."

"Maius Conflagratio!" I yelled, setting another swath of the horde alight before it could reach us. "You really expect me to just abandon you?"

"If you die, what will Mary think?" asked Wendy, launching a violent mental attack. "Not to mention that this horde is probably your fault. No way should this many monsters have been able to gather unnoticed. It's probably related to your dream. If this is what was coming for you, if you leave, they might all turn around and leave the rest of us alone."

"I... I..." I stuttered, taking a step towards the circle.

"You're fighting well, but you'll run out of mana long before the horde runs out of monsters," she continued, erasing my excuses one by one before I could even make them.

I took another step forward. Casting multiple high-tier offensive spells in succession was certainly straining my mana capacity. I could keep going for a while yet, but I had no idea how many monsters were in the horde. I certainly hadn't made a noticeable dent. It was almost certainly true that the monsters could keep going for longer.

Was this it, then? Was this how my adventure ended? By running away?

"At least let me use up the rest of my mana capacity," I argued. "Each monster I kill is one less to attack Odimere."

Now it was Wendy's turn to hesitate.

A scream from deep behind the wall of monsters suggested that Christine wasn't having everything go her way.

"... Fine," agreed Wendy.

"And remember my question about other myths? Now would be a great time to answer."

"... Pereo," replied Wendy after a moment's hesitation, staring at the circle she'd drawn in her own blood. "From a myth of Bryax, the god of death. In the myth, he used it to rip the life from an entire army of elves who had invaded his domain to recover their dead queen. A hundred thousand souls taken in an instant. Probably take even you a while to work out how to cast, though. In case I happen to get killed before you manage it, I'll fill this circle with mana. Just step into it within the next few minutes, and it'll take you straight home."

The god of death? The opposite of Anypha, the goddess of life, whose story gave us Miraculum. A pair of opposites. One spell for saving, and one for killing. But in this case, to save, I needed to kill.

As with Miraculum, there was no clue as to the image, but once again, I didn't care. I needed the monster horde to die. All of it. Every monster for miles around should simply drop dead. It was a simple enough request, was it not?

"Pereo!" I declared and within seconds there was silence, broken only by me coughing my lungs up. "Sanatio," I added, avoiding the enhanced version because Pereo had already almost sucked me dry.

All around me, monsters had fallen where they stood, thousands of corpses thudding into the ground. No blood, no wounds, they had all just simply died. There was no more noise, even to my enhanced hearing. I was fairly confident that the single spell had ended the entire flood.

A leaf drifted to the ground, fallen from one of the plants. Another followed it, then another. Before long, it was raining leaves.

I'd heard about dead monsters poisoning the land they fell on, but I knew full well that wasn't the problem here. I continued staring at the dead plants until they were all bare, simply because I knew what was behind me, and would rather stare at anything than that.

Wendy's corpse, lying next to the glowing circle that promised to send me home, wearing a victorious smile on its face.

The god of death came for all. He did not differentiate between ally or foe, and he did not stop at reaping the life from mere plants and monsters. Just like Miraculum had unexpectedly healed Toby, Pereo had ended Wendy. From her hesitation and the way she failed to look me in the eye, not to mention pre-charging the circle, she must have expected it.

Presumably Christine had met the same fate, if the monsters hadn't already killed her. What about the priests and Minoru? Had they got out of range? No chance...

"Idiot!" I yelled, breaking the silence. "Idiot, idiot, idiot! Wasn't there anything else you could have done?! Another spell you could have mentioned?! You... You... Mirac..."

My mana capacity already spent, there was no way I could squeeze out a cast of Miraculum. Would it have helped even if I could? How could one heal someone who was already dead? As my consciousness fled, I toppled over forward, straight towards the glowing circle.