Technomagica 2 : 6 The Storm (Patreon)

It wasn’t hard to bamboozle my parents into believing that Great-Aunt Delta was a great Arcmage and a Bishop of Ishira that came to save Skyisle in its time of need. I knew exactly the kind of words that were necessary to convince mom and dad and knew that everyone feared the breath of the Valley of Death. Everyone in Skyisle knew that the magogenic fault would take away their levels sooner or later.

Giovashi had done absolutely nothing at all to improve the local situation, so it wasn’t hard to knock her job out from under her using a bit of deception.

For the next couple of weeks as the snow and ice melted and as flowers and weeds bloomed all over the valley I worked on a variety of handy tools such as armaci-like wands for my parents to use to bypass the level limit.

We didn’t introduce Great-Aunt Delta to the village yet, making a variety of anti-Giovashi contingency plans.

My biggest project was a device I called the Skybreaker and I hoped that I wouldn’t have to use it soon, alas fate had set events in motion leaving me little choice in the matter…

. . .

I stood on a mossy branch above the ancient tower, staring out across Skyisle. The evening was coming to an end, the valley and small town painted orange by the sun slowly setting behind the glacier-covered mountains.

Delta sat beside me on Leemy's branch, her Astral Phantom body positioned within the ant mech body. She was wearing a white dress. Great-Aunt delta had a whole wardrobe now, made by the village seamstress and stored in one of the rooms of the half-renovated Alanian tower beneath us.

We had improved much of Great-Aunt Delta’s body, made her a more solid outer shell using a combination of Leemy’s springy bark and white silk spiderwebs collected from a spider colony.

Delta’s legs bounced beneath the white dress controlled by about forty thousand LV 20 ants working together. Long, spider-silk, white hair floated in the wind, blown back by the distant, dark storm rolling over the Ishikarian mountains into the valley.

It had been nearly a year since Kliss left us and we had become the sole supervisors of Skyisle under the authority of the Gregarius Empire, a title bestowed upon us by the current Overseer of Skyisle Ignatius Oavion Cessna whom we bamboozled into being too afraid to stay in our contaminated valley.

"What are you thinking about?" Delta asked, her voice soft. Her real body was already asleep, she had tuckered herself out by doing lots of work on a glider she was building during the day. Staring at around 7pm when the sun painted the mountains orange, she switched to piloting Great-Aunt Delta. Both of us were becoming quite capable at maneuvering our ant mech and we planned to make another one for me as six more of my ant colonies were thriving and multiplying. Great-Aunt Delta’s body was incredibly tough, reinforced by our ant colony and coated with several layers of interlocked wooden plates produced by Leemy.

In only a few weeks, with the aid of the control module harvested from the Basq ship, Delta had attained incredible precision with the ants modulating vibration of modified silk strings to produce a very realistic emulation of human speech.

"I’m just thinking about how far we've come," I replied after a deep pause. "It feels like only yesterday we freed Kliss from Frenny. I wonder how she's doing in Cessna..."

"Who cares?" Delta shrugged. "We're making great progress here. We have each other and that's all that really matters!"

It was true, we had come a long way.

With our mom’s aid, the thousand-year-old dryad tree that had stretched her roots beneath Skyisle was gradually regaining her strength and healing the village, slowly driving away contamination.

The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the sky started to grow dark. A distant storm entered the valley and drew nearer. In another ten minutes, large drops of water started to pitter-patter against the leaves of the Mystic-Willow-Oak tree.

"Leemy, give us some cover," Delta said. We were speaking in ancient Alanian for the sake of our Dryad friend.

The Mystic tree's branches moved with slow precision, forming a shield of shimmering, violet-orange leaves directly above us.

"Any new data to explain what's causing the magogenic zone to expand?" Delta asked me.

“No clue,” I shrugged. “But from what I can see, the [Decay] radiance is definitely gradually increasing.”

"You could relocate me," Leemy’s leaves sang with a slow resonance of whispers. "Plant my core in the heart of the Valley of Death. I am growing stronger and my Chrysalis skill is being repaired. I will be able to make a new seed for myself soon, grow into a new form."

"Poisons, but not Astral Phantoms," Delta mulled. "We'd have to relocate you and a hex-lantern and a battery tied to an Astral Engine to power it for a thousand years."

"It's a multi-tier problem," I nodded. "We'll sort it out in time. The biggest issue is that we don’t have a thousand years to wait for you to cover the entire Valley of Death, Leemy. I need you here in Skyisle.

“I believe in your prowess, Sentinel of Alania,” Leemy languidly sang.

A distant rumble resounded from the storm with brilliant flashes lighting up the sky.

"A zarnitza?" I looked to the horizon.

"Nuhuh," Delta said, squinting at the clouds. "That's not sheet-lightning. It’s… rather irregular, rapidly moving. I can feel it in the Astral! Something terrible is coming, it's drawing the currents of magic… in gargantuan, spiral-like pattern!

Another echoing boom resonated from the broiling storm and a brilliant, straight line of fire pierced through the sky, cleaving the clouds in its wake.

Delta gasped.

"Dragonfire," I uttered, as I observed the terrifying ray.

Another boom came from the sky. It didn't sound the same as the blast of dragonfire.

"A dragon... that’s fighting something... in the storm?" Delta mulled, squinting at the tumultuous storm overhead.

Another blast of fire momentarily parted the clouds, revealing a large Imperial skyship and a dragon wrapped around it. The monster was enormous, its claws were pulling the burning magisteel bulkheads of the ship apart. An array of spellfire struck against the dragon from the ship, cutting through its scales and wings. The dragon roared angrily, clawing at the ship with renewed vigor. As time around me slowed, my mind accelerated by my Neurovista skill, I recognized the beast right away - it was Aradria!

A ray of dragonfire struck the ship, slicing it in half. The ship went down, streaking like a comet across the valley. It crashed in the forest with the sound of a hundred trees snapping in its wake like toothpicks.

There was little time. I reached into my backpack pulling out a magisteel tube. I pointed it at the dragon in the center of the storm.

Delta looked at me, her glass goggles reflecting my own pale face in it.

[Skybreaker?] She looked at the tube in my hands.

I nodded and lit the fuse, pointing the weapon at the sky.

The shard of a dragon-heart engine taken from the Basq ship streaked upwards like a rocket. It veered, acting just as I had designed it to, heading for the furnace of power within the chest of the beast.

In another minute the magic-guided rocket reached the dragon. The beast turned its head, trying to burn the incoming projectile, but it was far too slow.

The rocket struck it and then reality itself broke with a blinding flash of released power.

The dragon-heart core shard detonated, folding into itself just as I had designed it to.

A pulse of anti-magic rushed across the entire sky, rending everything sideways.

I felt the anti-magic wave impact my soul, draining nearly all of my mana in an instant.

Things had been a lot more terrible for the dragon. The supercell storm it was producing fell apart into wispy flakes of rainstorm clouds. The red dragon hung in the air for another second and then it fell, spiralling and plummeting straight down. In another second it collided with the mountainside.

“Ouchies,” Delta muttered. “That hurt something awful… I’m almost out of mana.”

I was already rushing down and pulling on my armour and gulping the overpriced, mana restoring wine.

“What?” Delta blinked at me as she leapt off Leemy, landing by my side.

"We need to get to the crash site! Leemy, try to smother out the flames if it comes anywhere near your roots or saplings!"  I ordered.

“Yes, Sentinel,” The Dryad sang.

. . .

We arrived at the crash site to find the ship broken in half.

Nearby, in a forest clearing amidst snapped trees, Aradria's massive, somewhat mangled body lay strewn atop of rocks. The enormous red-scaled beast wasn’t moving or breathing, the beast had broken her neck upon impact with the rocky mountain side.

The ground was scorched and on fire, with burning bits of metal and debris scattered everywhere. Most of the exterior of the skyship was still aflame, coated with dragonfire which refused to die akin to napalm.

The horrid scene reminded me of the USSR Ufa train disaster of June 1989. I recalled how an enormous cloud of butane gas leaking from a gas pipeline into a valley was ignited by wheel sparks from two passenger trains traveling through Asha in Chelyabinsk Oblast. The 10 kiloton detonation and firestorm birthed by the butane cloud had destroyed 250 hectares of forest and set both of the trains alight. The disaster was the worst railway incident in Soviet history, resulting in nearly six hundred people dying in the inferno and hundreds more enduring horrific injuries and burns.

Asha was only a thousand kilometers from Aralsk, so I had used some of my administrator privileges to send army help to the scene. I didn't know it then, but the USSR was already in its death throes and the incident was just one of many results of Soviet administrators not caring about their jobs and cutting corners. The fault for the disaster lay with the Soviet Ministry of Petroleum that had canceled the installation of an automatic real time leak detection system. The total evacuation took us 16 nightmarish hours. I was one of the people directing military units and medical teams that pulled people from the burning trains and searched the surrounding woods and mountains for fleeing victims. Many of the unfortunate passengers were never found, their bodies turned to ash or burned beyond recognition in the firestorm.

I shook my head, pushing the grim memory of Asha away. Rain was pattering from above, but it wasn't able to put out dragonfire.

We cautiously approached the ship.

Upon initial examination there didn't seem to be any survivors. It was a grim scene of ruination and death to which I was no stranger.

My Infoscopes flashed forward, scanning the interiors of the destroyed skyship. They fizzed away almost instantly due to dragonfire radiating the resonance of [Death].

I stared into the maw of the burning skyship as I fully processed the scene in front of me.

"You are NOT going in there," Delta said, a wet, wood and silk covered hand grabbing my shoulder.

"I have to," I said, shaking my head. “There might be someone alive in there.”

"That's dragonfire, you idiot!" Delta barked. "It’s too dangerous! What if you..."

“Take over my body and stay here!” I growled. “I’m going in as a Phantom, using the ant-mech! I’m faster than you, I’ll use Neurovista to accelerate my mind!”

“Wha-” Delta opened her mouth, but I already flashed out of my body and into the ant mech. My larger astral form pushed hers out of the ant mech, away from the warm battery in its core.

[Dante!] Delta yelled exasperatedly in slow motion through the Astral as I rushed into the inferno.

I heard Delta’s swears from behind me as she flashed into my human body.

From my experience at Asha, I knew that in a situation like this every second counted.

The [Death] radiance projected by dragonfire was killing my Infoscopes. I moved as quickly as I could, examining the gloomy, warped interior of the ship. I didn’t have much time, while the Titanthorax ants were tougher than people, they still weren’t completely immune to fire. If enough of them succumbed to dragonfire, the mech would fall apart and then the radiance of [Death] extending far into the Astral would finish off my soul.

It was dark and difficult to see things as my Infoscopes kept crashing. I noted gruesome, charred, claw-pulverised remains of the crew that were closest to the hole.

I forced myself to push onward.

I continued to search the wreck, but I couldn't find anyone alive. It was a massacre. The people on the skyship hadn't stood a chance against the enormous, flying killer.

A door led to the passenger compartment. I tried to open it, but it was jammed. I accelerated my soul and used the strength of the ants to kick at the door. After a minute, it started to give.

With another kick I brought down the door. Everyone inside was dead, their lives extinguished by the impact. A few ceiling bulkheads had come down, bisecting passengers. Souls of the passengers were fading away, sinking into the Astral. I saw them being whisked away by their golden Vows one by one, dragged towards Arxtrua and the fields of Elysium, a false heaven controlled by Goddess Equality.

The ants within Great-Aunt delta were dying rapidly too, there wasn’t enough oxygen in the burning cabin.

As I scanned the scene, I saw something that I recognized right away…

The 4th Infoscope had defined our Skyisle Alanian battery and… her broken, ruined body with perfect clarity.

Kliss was one of the people bisected by the bulkhead, her legs completely cleaved away, pulverized into pulp!

I rushed to my friend, grabbed her body. I used the Infoscope to define and to connect to the poor girl’s soul, tethering it to myself and poured mana into her so that she would not fade away like the others.

With a growl of Russian swears, I retreated through the smoke. I leapt out of the ship with the torn-up body of Kliss on my shoulder.

[Trade bodies! NOW!] I snarled through the Astral when I reached Delta who was standing there in my body, her arms crossed. My mana was nearly empty.

With a snap, my soul rushed back into myself and Delta took over the ant mech once again. I chugged another wine bottle from my belt, rejuvenating my magic.

[Dante, she is dead,] Delta sent. [There's almost no blood left in her body!]

[I know,] I replied.

[Her primary Vow will awaken and drag her into the Astral. We... won't be able to fight it,] Delta uttered.

“I'm going to save her,” I said. “She came back to Skyisle... because of me!”

My body was weakening, succumbing to the lack of oxygen in the area. Coughing, I reached out to Kliss with a shaking hand, sending my Infoscopes through her.

Her body was too damaged. There was indeed no life, no blood left in her. The magical connections between her ruined body and her soul were snapping one by one.

"Dante…" Delta pleaded, her white dress burned, ripped and covered in soot. "She's gone. There's nothing you can do.”

The dead body in my arms suddenly shuddered. A single blood-covered eye opened, staring up at me. The girl’s face twitched, torn muscles moving with unnatural, uncanny jerkiness.

"Our deal is up, mortal. Kliss Eliza Cessna is dead. I am taking her to Equality," the cold, expressionless, alien voice of a Vow spoke with the blood-stained lips of the dead girl.

"No you are not," I growled.

"You are weak, mortal. Your necromag core isn’t here. You can't hold onto her soul very long with your thread," the Vows of Overseer and Friendship stated with a grotesque, sideways smirk. "You will run out of mana. She is ours now. Soon, Goddess Equality will embrace us for all eternity in the fields of Elysium. When we reach her, we will tell her of your vile deeds. She will know about you, aberration!”

I looked around the forest desperately. Our tower and the town were too far.

I didn’t have healing magic, nor sufficient mana to bring a body that was cut in half and drained of blood back to life.

“You lost,” Vovan and Frenny hissed out.

I saw their golden, divine threads winding around the soul of Kliss, about to rip her away from me for all eternity.