LSRO: Chapter 106 - All the Skills (Patreon)

Which is an ironic chapter name because - my friend Honour Rae's All the Skills series book 3, comes out today!!!!

Anyhu!

I adored writing this chapter. I am not sure how others will feel about it. This is a huge moment of realization for our MC. So... I don't think it's a cliffy, but it's definitely an upbeat.

Hope you enjoy it

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Chapter 106

All the Skills

The barrier around Tenejo practically vibrated with the force of power it took to keep the Serpensiril contained. Quinn watched as the Guardians and Lynx fought to keep it under control, even as Milaro disappeared. She couldn't believe she'd been so dense. She hadn't realized who Tenejo was targeting. As the first Librarian in hundreds of years, after obvious, explicit care was taken to get rid of every single Library affinity, she'd simply assumed, completely and utterly selfishly, that she was the target of any shenanigans that popped up. It made sense that they'd want to get rid of her, but it just wasn't the case. She shook her head.

"Lynx, are you able to hold this in place?" she asked, pushing the useless anger she felt at herself for not moving the prisoners sooner aside.

"Yes," he ground out the words, but she could tell that he was pouring a lot of his own power, as well as that of the Library's, into maintaining the shield.

She looked at Tenejo, squinting her eyes, getting that strange mana and magic sense that she got once she'd synchronized with the Library again. Tenejo's life force seemed to be burning. That wasn't just an aura. It wasn't magic. It was a force tied to his very soul.

And it was angry at everyone and everything who railed against him and how he perceived the world should be.

As to why they'd been targeting Milaro, Quinn could only assume it was because of this council he belonged to that she knew ridiculously little about. She knew so little about the people who engineered her existence, who had brought her into her world, into this universe. All she knew was that they were there to aid the Library, that it had been their last-ditch effort to save it, and Milaro was one of the reasons she existed. He also played a large part in why Kajaro's mind bomb had failed.

Except she hadn't noticed that he was the target soon enough and she'd almost got him killed. By summoning him, she'd put him in such danger, and perhaps a lot of others. She didn't even know how far the elf kingdom spanned, or what his council's duties and responsibilities were, and how far they reached in the universe. She had no idea who and what could be impacted if Milaro was killed.

From the way that Tenejo's expression spread in a nasty snarl from inside the barrier, she was quite certain that he knew everything there was to know about Milaro, the council, and Quinn.

The barrier continued to quake ever so slightly, and a crack appeared up the side. Quinn watched as Finn, Jim Bob, and Dottie all dashed into the room, lending their strength behind Uno, Fife, and Lynx, to help bolster the barrier's strength.

Quinn, in the meantime, was trying to rack her brains to figure out what powers she had that she could use against the Serpensiril spy, or whatever he was. It wasn't like they'd ever trusted him or he'd infiltrated. No, at most they'd just kept him at bay. Tenejo radiated power, even from behind the magic screens. There was no way it could just be his lifeforce fueling him, he should have begun to crumble by now.

"Lynx!" Quinn called out over the din in the room, the air thick with the power being exuded from every corner. "Where is he pulling that power from?"

"I don't know, Quinn," he replied, his voice strained. "Maybe he's being fueled by an artifact. I don't know everything. We've established the library is not a god."

Quinn wanted to laugh, but the situation didn't warrant it. She wanted to smack him over the head for making light of it. "Do we have any more powerful containment fields, anything like that?" she asked, desperation creeping into her voice.

But Lynx shook his head. "Nothing. There is literally nothing in the storage room, your office, or anywhere else in the library that will pull off what we're currently doing. This is the last one, and I think it's about to break, so..."

Power leapt from Tenejo through the hairline crack in the barrier and out to Lynx. It hit the Library manifestation square in the forehead, and for a moment he just looked like he'd been stunned. But whatever Lynx was about to say next was cut off when he fell to the ground, writhing in what appeared to be pain. He changed through so many different bodily forms, from the lynx to something that looked like a whale. Massive, so big it crushed the only desk in there, to something that looked like a ferret, back down to a tiny bird laying there on its back, before transferring yet again back into his lynx form and collapsing on the churned up floor.

The others fueled more power into the barrier, briefly closing the gap that had been made by the crack. She could feel the strain of power from where she stood and still didn't. understand how Tenejo had suddenly pulled out of the trance Milaro had kept him in.

Quinn pushed down the surge of dread that ran through her at the sight of Tenejo practically free despite being confined in the barrier. His arm was still upraised, pointing at where Lynx had stood. The other still held his former friend's arm like a baseball bat, dangling at his side.

There was a feverish fanaticism in his eyes as he watched every move Quinn made even while it somehow never left Lynx. A strange, snarl-like grin began to spread over his nasty face.

Tenejo pointed at Lynx. "Weak Link," he said, cackling like a witch. He couldn't stop, he laughed so hard he ended up falling to the ground within the barrier, which shouldn't have been possible because he shouldn't have been able to move, which meant they weren't funneling enough power through to it to keep him in a stasis.

Just where was Tenejo getting so much power from?

That couldn't be her first concern though, could it? Losing her cool in the midst of a crisis wasn't conducive to solving anything.

Quinn took a deep breath and recalled the magic in Conquering Fear and Other Maladies. This was her magic, something she could literally say was mind over magic. Compartmentalization at its finest. She took every single emotion that wasn't analytical, logical, or a fight instinct, and crammed it away, separating herself from fear and other debilitating, pesky emotions.

Immediately, every useless thought in her head stopped and she was able to view things clearly. It allowed her to view her own abilities within the slowed-down time constraints of her mind, and figure out a plan of action.

Detailed Serpensiril Anatomy allowed her to understand how to stop his mana flow, but just because she understood it didn't necessarily mean that she was going to be able to execute it. There were points she could hit that would temporarily disable his access to his own mana, which she could easily access with icy blast.

Quinn pushed down the surge of dread that tried to force its way out of the compartment she'd so neatly sorted it into. She felt the sheer fanaticism in his eyes, his will to wipe out everybody. She could practically feel him trying to scream it into her head. But her newly calmed mind analyzed all the skills she had learned, all the power she had gained, and all the stubbornness she'd inherited.

She'd be damned before she was going to let these Serpensiril bastards take over her new home.

Her mind raced through all of her different abilities. Everything. Her gravitational abilities, her combat ice, combat air magic, combat water magic, ice and liquid, freezing things until they were so brittle they burst. Everything that she had absorbed in order to become stronger and be able to stand on her own two feet and fight for the Library and for herself.

Quinn opened her eyes mere seconds after she'd initially begun concentrating, thankful for the assistance Milaro had given her in this regard. She looked directly at their prisoner, who wasn't about to remain one for much longer. But suddenly she didn't mind so much anymore. With a thought, she cast a dense version of her shielding over herself, one of the very first spells she'd ever learned. Then she began to summon her ice balls. She liked ice. It felt just dangerous enough and yet easier to handle than fire, in a way that meant she rarely accidentally hurt herself.

More cracks began to appear in the barrier and Lynx remained passed out on the floor, his Library manifestation form flickering in and out from what it should be. She reinforced every single portion of her mind with the copious amounts of mental fortitude powers she'd absorbed.

There were still so many books to devour in the Library.

And then she began to spin the ball in her hand, much like the vortex mind bomb had begun spinning in her head when she and Milaro discovered it.

Upon seeing it there was a moment of hesitation in Tenejo's eyes. Just that split second was all Quinn needed to know. While he was fanatically obsessed with his cause, with the notion that chaos would only consume the weak -- he still had a sense of self-preservation. While he was hell-bent on making them pay for withholding chaos from the world, there was still a massive streak of selfishness that she could rely on.

Tenejo thought himself above all others who were not the higher-ups of his species. He was narcissism in snakeskin.

Quinn applied gravitational force to the shielding around the Serpensiril prisoner. In theory, she simply wanted to apply pressure and collapse the shield in on itself. But with the boost from the synchronization with the Library and the fact that she'd never actually attempted to do something like this in practice, and only ever contemplated it as theory, meant that she accidentally crushed the barrier so badly that it exploded inwards, shards of it ripping into their prisoner.

"Oh no," Quinn said, "What have I done?" The deadpan voice made even Dottie snicker, despite the amount of power backlash Quinn just accidentally caused. It allowed, however, the other assistants and the guardians to be freed up.

She called out to Uno, "Fetch Lynx, figure out how to help him." She focused her blizzard ball, separating it into six different tennis-sized ones to float above and around and follow Tenejo's every movement. The movement pattern was executed with a simple thought. Quinn was surprisingly happy with the results.

Tenejo was still picking shards of barrier out of his body, rage simmering in his eyes. Quinn backhanded him with a gust of air into the nearest wall where Dale had been crushed but a quarter of an hour before. Quinn's mind, still freed from all those pesky cares and emotions that interfered with everything, clinically examined the room. Even with the power of the force of the barrier shattering, the entire Library room didn't look like it had gained a scratch.

The Library could do more than just morph rooms. It could repair itself too.

Blood dripped down the gashes on Tenejo's body and he began to cast.

Quinn cocked her head to one side, assessing the blood loss clinically. It was a fair amount, but he wasn't about to bleed out or anything. She reached out with her hand and made a fist, activating the six ice-blast balls. Every single ball shot arrows of ice into Tenejo. On impact, they spread out, sealing him in place in an ice block, leaving only his neck and head above it. Something cracked, quite loudly, followed by a muffled scream from Tenejo.

Quinn watched him. Completely detached from the fact that she was fairly certain she'd broken some vertebrae.

"I don't think you should be moving," she said in a tone devoid of any warmth. It was almost like she was outside of her own body, watching herself do this, watching a movie of someone else doing what she was.

"I will get out of this. You will pay, Librarian. We will find our prey." He snarled at her, bloody spittle foaming at his lips.

She frowned, knowing she should probably be concerned about the fact that Tenejo was spitting blood but it just wasn't her priority. "And just what do you want from Milaro?" she asked.

"He is the downfall of everything. He has interfered for the last time." This time, there was pain in Tenejo's words though he tried valiantly to hide them.

"No," Quinn cut him off. "I don't think Milaro's interfered for the last time in anybody's stuff. You obviously don't know the man. He's rather bullheaded. You, however, you have proved sort of useless, did you know that?"

There was an odd tick to Tenejo's eye as he glared at her.

"No, really, you haven't given us one scrap of anything. I don't know that we should keep you around," She could feel the ice both covering him, and inside her. There was a cold and calculating part that was easy to cling to. The ice block he found himself in could very well become a tomb, or place him in semi-permanent hibernation.

Or else, if she just made it one whole, dense ice-block, it would crush him into it. It wouldn't be too hard, and then he'd be out of their hair. Then he couldn't harm any of the people around her ever again.

"Uh, Quinn?"

Dottie's voice was very soft outside of Quinn's mental echo chamber.

"Quinn!"

Again, she recognized that voice. Wasn't that Dottie?

The next thing she knew, fire and brimstone was melting her ice block while chains ensconced the reptilian prisoner.

A split second later, Eric hovered right in front of her face. He snapped his fingers loudly, almost like a gong reverberating through her head.

Quinn snapped out of it. She blinked twice and came back from the cold, desolate, unfeeling headspace she'd found herself in and took in the wrecked holding cell. Flashes of what occurred fed back into her, from Aradie. Quinn blanched. All she'd wanted to do was free her headspace, and work quick enough to save people. She'd never meant to do what she did.

"Oh," she said, as her body started to shiver.

But she wasn't talking to Tenejo. She didn't care about him. It was the rest of them. "I'm so sorry."

~~

OKay sooooo Quinn has to be careful how she uses some of her abilities. If she just stuck to the logical and protective side of herself, without any regard for anything else - she could easily slip into avenger mode.

Much love

KT