Chapter 69: Flight (Patreon)

"Pereo!" I repeated in desperation, but again, there came no response.

Actually, no response wasn't quite accurate. There was... something. A faint reverberation. The feeling of the magic trying to take hold, as at the very start of a spell, but then it slipped away. It was an experience I'd never had before, and I had no idea what to make of it.

Alas, standing a hundred yards away from the front line of a drooling horde ten thousand strong was not the best time to think about it.

"Pereo!" I tried, one last time, just as ineffectively as the first, and then the horde was upon me. "Maius Conflagratio!" I yelled, changing tack. "Maius Procella!"

A tornado of flame tore through the monstrous ranks, killing them by the dozen.

It wasn't enough. I needed to kill them by the thousand for my attacks to be anything more than a rounding error, but it did buy me a few more seconds to think. Why didn't Pereo work? There hadn't been anything special about my image the first time around. I'd been desperate to protect Wendy and Christine, but I was equally desperate now. Were I to fail, the horde would fall upon Wendy, Mary and Eve. Yes, they had a backup plan to escape, but I didn't trust it.

Did it matter that the people I wanted to protect had been in range? Was killing the people I wanted to protect a necessary part of the spell? Surely not; nothing like that had been in the myth. Bryax hadn't used it defensively, but punitively, so the thought of needing to use it to protect made no sense to start with.

"Pereo!" I shouted, to no avail. I didn't have time to experiment further. It was a lost cause.

Worse, without it, this whole fight was a lost cause. There was no way I could win. With powerful magic, I could keep the monsters off me, but my mana wasn't infinite. Nor could I effectively defend myself if I let myself get surrounded.

"Maius Conflagratio! Maius Conflagratio!" I repeated, blasting away the closest groups, and then I fled. Wendy's summoning circle was my only hope, as well as theirs. Perhaps my presence would increase the chances of them getting out successfully, but if Minoru ran on ahead, I couldn't do anything but pray for her.

One of the reptilian elephant beasts burst through my flames, apparently unscathed. Great; as well as being generally bigger and stronger, some of these monsters were flame proof. "Maius Procella!" I yelled, but the monster was too heavy for the magic to pick up, and the countless blades of wind, which had previously turned everything they encountered into paste, did little more than leave scratches on its thick hide.

The thing thundered after me, moving at a speed far above what should have been possible, given its bulk. And then it was joined by three more, bursting through the raging inferno with no noticeable damage. A barrage of fireballs shot through the fiery barriers and a rain of the yellow globs of acid arced over it, forcing me to dodge.

"Maius Terra Columna!" I yelled, a pillar of stone erupting from behind me. The giant monsters crashed straight through, barely slowing down. At the rate they were moving, coupled with my need to dodge ranged magic, they'd be on me in seconds.

Their resilience wasn't too surprising; had they been easily dispatchable by my magic, Wendy wouldn't have insisted on going around them. I didn't doubt I could kill one, but killing one while defending Mary and Eve would be dicey, and we'd have risked more being attracted by the commotion.

Killing a thousand of them was a complete non-starter.

I couldn't stop for the time needed to fight seriously: I'd be trampled in seconds. I could outrun them, if only I was able to run straight, but I couldn't do that, either. Body strengthening pushed my body beyond human limits, but they were doing exactly the same thing with miasma. What option did I have to escape?

... They were doing the same thing with miasma.

"Miraculum!"

Unlike Pereo, the magic worked perfectly, rolling away from me in a wave as vast as the horde, erasing the miasma as it went. It washed over the monsters themselves without effect, but I wasn't expecting it to harm them. The miasma that the monsters were drawing from the air to empower themselves was suddenly no longer there.

The monsters slowed.

"Maius Procella!" I shouted, launching one, two and then three of the deadly whirlwinds behind myself. This time, the blades sliced deeply into the reptilian monsters, filling the air with their black blood.

The magical attacks of the horde ceased as the fuel to power them vanished. The same trick that had left me at the dwarf's mercy was now working in my favour; the monsters seemed completely unable to make use of mana, and with the miasma gone, they were left powerless.

Well, maybe powerless wasn't the right word, I admitted as I dodged another ball of acid—apparently completely non-magical in nature—straight into the waiting tusk of one of the elephant monsters. Even without being empowered by miasma, the strike batted me away like a baseball, and it was only battle aura that prevented my intestines spilling out all over the ash.

"Maius Conflagratio!" I shouted again as I rolled across the ground, hoping that without miasma, they'd be a little less flame resistant. A pained roar from within the inferno suggested my hopes were fulfilled. "Maius Conflagratio! Maius Conflagratio!"

For a moment, I grinned; I was fighting evenly against a horde of monsters far stronger than the one that had threatened Ricousian. But it didn't last long; with the towering monsters, it was impossible to judge the size of the horde from ground level, but I knew from earlier scrying just how vast the swarm of monsters was. My mana would run out long before I killed them all. Even if I could handle them with body strengthening alone, it was still a constant drain on my capacity. It wouldn't last.

I once more turned and fled, this time easily outrunning my pursuers.

As I sprinted, the pounding of hooves, feet, and claws faded. The bursts of acid grew sparser. I even had the leeway to track them to their source; giant ants, taller than I was. Without needing to dodge, my lead extended, and I easily caught up with three of the four girls, all of whom showed mixed expressions upon seeing me.

"What happened?" asked Wendy.

"Pereo didn't work. It felt like it was working, but the spell just didn't happen. Did Minoru run on ahead?"

"Yes, but I don't think there's time for discussion. Let's get out of here."

The required magic circle was already inscribed on the floor, charged with mana.

"We have a few minutes. Miraculum slowed them down."

"I was wondering why you cast that, but in retrospect, I'm disappointed that I didn't think of the strategy myself. I suppose removing the miasma has never been an option before. But even so, the effect doesn't extend this far, and once they hit the edge, they'll pick up speed again. I told Minoru to produce a circle of her own the first chance she gets, and I'll leave a delayed spell to destroy this one, so hopefully you can get us to her, rather than coming back out here."

"Umm... Master?" called Mary. "Your hair... No, sorry. It can wait."

"Huh?"

"Circle, now!" demanded Eve. "Even if we have a few minutes, we'll need that time if it doesn't work as expected. Besides, Wendy said they have ranged attacks."

"Right..."

The four of us stepped into the circle, which flashed with a bright white light.

And then it faded, revealing our surroundings.

"Where are we?" asked Eve, looking around the room in which we'd found ourselves.

"I have no idea," I answered, looking around in turn. We hadn't teleported into any sort of prison cell, so it was already an improvement over our last teleportation experience, but we certainly weren't anywhere I was familiar with. Sun shone through a window, lighting up what was obviously someone's living room. A sofa, a small TV on a rickety stand.

"You did say Simon was supposed to be creating a new circle," said Wendy, pointing down, where the summoning circle had been painted onto a large wooden board. "That shouldn't even work. The pigment needs to be able to conduct mana, or else it's just a useless picture."

"Oh, so that's why you mixed in some blood when you drew yours," said Eve, wandering over to the window. "But no, this isn't Simon's house. I don't recognise it at all. Nor do I recognise the street. Thomas?"

"No, me neither."

"Does anyone see a message? A note of some sort?"

"No," I answered, glancing around. Wendy and Mary echoed my response.

"We should leave then, quickly and quietly. If we make the assumption that the reason we haven't returned so far was because Simon was prevented from drawing a circle of his own, then the two most likely possibilities are that he managed to draw one here, somewhere unrelated to him that wasn't under watch, or else this isn't him at all, and rather it was drawn by whoever was doing the preventing. Had Simon been responsible, he'd have left us some sort of message, even if it was coded. That there isn't one implies this isn't him, or else the area has been compromised. We need to consider this hostile territory. It might even be the home of a former summoned hero."

"Would meeting them actually be so bad?" I asked.

Eve blinked.

"I mean... They obviously saved the other world at some point. Time has moved on there since, so anyone they knew there has probably died of old age already. What are they going to do? It's not like this is some evil mastermind's secret volcano lair of doom. It's a terraced house on a perfectly normal town street. Some of those cars parked along the road have more rust than metal. The walls are painted beige, for goodness' sake. While it might be an evil colour, it's not psychopathic mass murder levels of evil."

Eve sighed a deep sigh of disappointment. "I know your niceness is one of the things I like the most about you, but it does result in these odd moments of naivety. Yes, people are a likely motivation, but so is power and wealth. Having been a successful hero in the other world then coming back to this, of course someone would want to return."

"Fine. At the least, we should talk to Simon first, although how to do that safely if he's under watch, I couldn't say. But the bigger problem is our clothes. People will assume we're on our way to a costume party or something, but they're sure as heck going to notice us. And with us coming out of this house, and walking around this area, whoever left this circle here will put two and two together in no time."

"True. The first time you returned, you got your original clothes back, but that useful little feature seems to have been lost along with the frozen time. Although even if we got our Earth clothing back, it wouldn't help Wendy or Mary. But I think we'll just need to risk it. We can do a quick check, but there are no photos or knick-knacks around, nothing on the walls... I'm reasonably sure this is a bachelor pad, so we won't be able to 'borrow' suitable clothing."

"Even if we did, that would make it pretty damn obvious that someone had been here."

"We could make it look like a regular break in, but... yeah, that's probably a bad idea. The best option would be to hide here until we're ready to return. How long do we need to give Minoru?"

"A couple of days, preferably," answered Wendy.

"Well, that's impossible, then, unless this place has an attic for us to hide in. Even then, we'd need food. I don't think we're getting out of this without someone realising we were here, and whatever we do is a risk. We need more information. I think I'm going to try calling Simon and see who answers."

"You have your phone?"

"No, but given the state of this house, I'll bet there's a landline somewhere," replied Eve, stepping out of the living room.

A little red light flashed on a motion detector stuck in the corner of the hallway's ceiling.

"Crap..." muttered Eve as the burglar alarm went off, the loud siren echoing throughout the street.