LSRO: Chapter 157 - Deliberate Steps (Patreon)

Tadaaa

It's summer here and my updates will come out on the days they're supposed to but unless I can get a handle on this crazy schedule, the time they come out will be up in the air. But they'll be here!

Love this one.

Bit of a cliffy

Enjoy!

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Chapter 157

Deliberate Steps

Adrito's tone of voice set off alarm bells in Quinn's head. For a split second, she wished she'd answered entirely differently. But then her curiosity and stubbornness got the better of her. She turned around to Adrito, trying her best not to insult the ruler of an entire species.

"It would have made what so much easier?" she asked. Okay, so maybe that wasn't trying her best. It was a small attempt though.

Adrito looked shocked for just a second, enough that Quinn knew he hadn't expected her to respond in any collected way whatsoever. She felt like she'd won that point, even though she wasn't sure what she was winning. What she did know was that fluctuations of power emanated from both Adrito and Latia. The energy emanating from both of them held no friendliness nor goodwill.

"Tell me, please, what would it make so much easier?" she asked, already starting to lose her patience. Not that that was a difficult thing to achieve. Her patience seemed to be in tatters lately.

Adrito gave a cocky smile and said, "It would have made what comes next much easier."

Quinn really didn't appreciate it when people refrained from answering very simple questions. Thus, she didn't even dignify that with an answer. Malakai began tapping his foot, and Quinn simply raised an eyebrow.

"Are you dense? Can you not read the room?" Adrito spat out, crossing his arms as he hovered in the air above his throne.

Quinn glanced around at what she now realized were full-sized guards. The armor covered their entire bodies, including hands and head, and they stood almost as tall as Malakai. She couldn't quite tell what was underneath. There were approximately two dozen guards in the large room now and they all stood directly behind the group. Quinn turned from side to side, taking it all in. Two rows of twelve guards behind them. 

That definitely didn't seem like a welcoming committee.

"Are you going to explain or am I just supposed to guess?" Quinn asked.

Adrito scowled. "You need to tell us how you removed Eugea from her prison."

Quinn paused, latching onto his wording. Prison? Did that mean they'd deliberately placed their people into a damaging mental stasis? Anger threatened to take control of her better judgment there for a second. She had to calm herself with a deep breath. They'd get to the bottom of that after whatever it was Adrito was cooking up for them. She shook her head and shrugged again, trying to let all the implications roll off for now. First things first. She had to deal with this prime minister. So, she chose to answer the question. "It was a healing spell. Eugea was sick." She tried to play it off, as if she'd simply done what any healer would be able to do. But she knew she wasn't going to get away with that. Adrito had already proven himself more shrewd than that.

"Stop the games, Librarian. We're fully aware that she is the only one who you healed," he practically spat that last word out with disdain.

"Sometimes, patients are more open to being healed." Which wasn't exactly a lie on Quinn's behalf, just sort of a half-truth. Eugea had certainly been receptive to being removed from the hell visage she was trapped in.

"Enough," Latia said, an air of power echoing around them. 

And Quinn realized suddenly that maybe Adrito wasn't the true ruler here.

Latia leaned in to Adrito, whispering, and Quinn pushed her hearing as far as she could. She caught words like, He will not be pleased, followed by, There's nothing we can do, and followed by, There's more than enough that we can do.

Quinn cringed. That wasn't the best conversation to overhear. Regardless of the true content, she'd heard enough to be even warier. Plus that whole gut feeling thing was trying to churn her from the inside out. She could feel from the minds of her friends around her that they were all ready for combat, regardless of the outcome of this whispered conversation between the Esposian rulers.

They just had to wait. They couldn't be the instigators, but they could end the conflict. And she was positive they would.

Quinn was still sort of hoping for a peaceful outcome when Adrito turned his attention back to them. She had to stop herself from laughing. Because he really was tiny. About two and a half feet tall, if he was standing on the ground, his wings took up about two feet of his height behind him, and they fluttered with beautiful iridescent light shining off the sickly greens and yellows of both him and Latia's coloring. She wondered what made it that tone. Otherwise, she preferred the ghostly see-through white that most Esposians seemed to favor.

"Are you even listening to me, Librarian?" He demanded, in his partially high pitched  voice. It wasn't very commanding. 

Quinn rolled her eyes. "Get on with it. What is it that I'm supposed to have told you?"

"How you healed Eugea."

Quinn sighed. "We've been over this. I healed her. I simply healed her. Nothing more, nothing less."

"Well, if you won't tell us, we're going to have to wrest it from you." He snarled. Sort of. Although the pointed teeth definitely helped.

Quinn almost bit out an "I'd like to see you try," but Malakai beat her to it.

"I'd like to see you try and take anything from my charge." Malakai on the other hand, managed to sound both regal and commanding.

Quinn had never heard his voice so deep or so angry. She felt quite protected. Not that she needed protecting, but it was nice to know someone cared. Especially if that someone was Malakai.

At that point in time, Nishpa sighed. "I'd really hoped it wouldn't come to this," she muttered.

"Come to what?" Latia frowned, her voice full of derision. "You presume so much simply because you're here on behalf of the Fae emperor."

Nishpa shrugged. "It is what it is. I can't deny that. You know it. I know it. I was here to come and see what you were up to. And I have to say, I am not the least impressed."

Somehow, her voice projected across in a more regal way. Quite majestic, actually. It made Quinn want to know exactly how Nishpa was related to the king and queen of the Fae kingdom. Furthermore. Didn't that mean Geneva was related too?

"And they're just titles," Nishpa bit out as an afterthought. "You know they don't like to be referred to as such."

"They are weak. They should be stronger," Latia mocked, "then we'd call them whatever they wanted."

"What? As strong as you?" Geneva bit out. "Strong enough that you won't even help your own people heal. That you'd sooner conspire to keep them hurting and injured? That you've been trying to stop myself and the people we brought with us from helping those who need us?"

Quinn glanced sideways. Geneva was positively glowing with gold. Her deep golden hair shimmered with a pearlescent overtone and red undertones. Her eyes flashed and she drew herself up to her full height, which, while flying, was actually quite tall.

"You will pay for the neglect you have shown your people. How dare you threaten your guests? The people who are attempting to help you? You spied on us. You have harmed your subjects for the last time."

Quinn stopped herself from giving a round of applause to her Librarian assistant. Geneva was handling it quite well on her own. Even Nishpa looked proud.

"Very well then," Adrito said. Quinn was quite sure his voice was shaking. "Let's end this and we will see who comes out on top."

Only something told Quinn, after Geneva's outburst, he wasn't quite as confident in his own abilities as he had been. But that was all the time she had to think of it. As the two rows of guards behind them launched into an attack on the six of them.

The guards moved with an oddly staccato beat. Their heavy armor looked unwieldy. Quinn found herself wondering if they were piloted armor systems, and if there were actually fae inside. They attacked with clumsy swings, their coordination lacking. Not that Quinn was in a position to critique when it came to hand to hand combat. Still, she had to use all of her wits to dodge them, as their numbers were overwhelming. Each of them had to fend off four of the damn guards, and that was only if she included Aradie as an opponent.

Being airbound gave the owl a distinct advantage.

Adrito and Latia also flung spells at their group. The guards, thankfully, only attacked them physically. Quinn could dodge physical attacks in her sleep after all the training she'd done with Malakai. He was like an elf from one of the movies she'd seen as a child. He leapt in the air, firing his bow, neatly taking out two of them directly in the visors and sending them plummeting onto their backs. But then the rest of them were too close to him, so he swapped out his bow for his sword, with which he was just as lethal. He swung it wide and she could see the way his muscles worked. 

Magic or no magic, it seemed swords still had weight to them and required muscle mass and not just magic to swing. This was probably one of the reasons she was so bad at wielding a sword herself.

Quinn loosed her ice balls, still her favorite form of attack, sending them straight into the faces and helmets and joints of any of the guards that approached her. They shot out shards of ice, deadly and mostly accurate. Aradie used her laser eyes, which Quinn still really needed to talk to the bird about. Her aim was exacting and she went for the eye slits. One after another, the guards fell over. They were oddly weak. Quinn raised an eyebrow as they'd gotten rid of a dozen of them already in the space of a couple of minutes.

"Is this what you're throwing at us? Did you really think that we'd be this weak?" Quinn was angrier than she thought she'd be. In fact, she was downright pissed off. How had they taken them so lightly? Why were they not giving her group the respect the strength of the Library was due? Did they not realize how far the Library had come in recovering since it found her? Could they play that to their advantage? She desperately wanted to reach for that off switch in her brain that would let her simply react, but she couldn't afford to do that right now. 

She might end up killing these two rulers. She wasn't ready for an intergalactic kerfuffle quite yet.

"These are just the beginning," Adrito snapped out as he hurled yet another what Quinn thought was supposed to be a hurricane toward her. She wasn't entirely sure. But it was easy just to bat it away with wind of her own. For somebody who was thousands of years old, he was less adept at wielding his powers than she would have thought.

Unless he was doing something else simultaneously...

"Don't get distracted," Nishpa said. "Esposians are crafty and cunning and they will lull you into a false sense of security. Whatever he has next for us is going to be bad."

Quinn nodded, chastising herself for getting ahead of herself, even as Geneva flitted around from armored guard to armored guard, speaking one word in a low and guttural voice that froze them. Not in an ice sort of way. It simply stopped them in their tracks, just like she'd done with the Esposians on the island.

Quinn glanced at Nishpa, who fought differently. She fought in a martial arts style, but with wind cutting through everything in front of her as an extension of her own body, almost like the air was a weapon of her own. But Geneva, Geneva made them stop, fall and crumple to the ground, as if she commanded them, just like she did back when they retrieved the book originally from the tree.

So many intricacies to go over after they'd finished.

Lynx led everything on a merry chase. She was surprised to see that he could teleport both away from the Library and in the Library. Fine, the way he teleported during the fight was over much shorter distances, but he was successfully running all of the guards into each other and leading quite a merry chase.

Quinn almost let herself get distracted watching the others when a sword came down a hair's breadth from her head and she only moved instinctively because her senses allowed her to do so.

"Quinn, watch out, I've got my own guards to fight," Malakai yelled from across the hall.

Quinn nodded, knowing full well that she needed to get her head in the game.

"Love to see what you've got up your sleeve," Quinn said. "I'm getting a little bored."

"Oh, don't taunt them, please don't taunt them," Nishpa muttered.

"Why not," Quinn said, "nothing else is fun." Although she was feeling a little bit strained. She had used her frozen ice balls quite liberally and she was feeling very hot, as if she was overheating. She allowed her hands to ice over and ice to form over her forehead, trying to keep the heat at bay. Were they doing something to her body temperature? Suddenly she felt quite out of breath and Aradie alighted to her shoulder with an inquiring coo.

"I'm fine girl, I'm fine," Quinn watched around them and suddenly she noticed the floor was shaking. Quinn glanced over at Adrito who is being protected by Latia. She was fighting with Malakai, holding her own quite admirably, while Quinn and the rest waylaid the last of the guards that were sent to them. Yet the vibrations continued as if something ever so large was taking slow and deliberate steps toward them. Quinn didn't like the sound of that either.

"It's okay Aradie, we've got this." But she wasn't sure they did. She kept her eye on them even when she popped one of her regenerative snacks into her mouth to chew so that her energy and mana replenished while they fought. The others did the same, keeping wary eyes on Adrito.

Quinn ran up the steps to assist Malakai, but stopped as she realized Latia and Adrito had a force field protecting them. She could probably pierce that with a lance of ice, or perhaps even stop the shield using a mind bolt. She'd never used that before, but she knew all the theory behind it.

But even as she had that thought, she turned toward the entrance because the whole floor under them practically buckled, including the stairs leading to the thrones.

It caused both Malakai and Latia to stumble, and Quinn fell to one knee.

She turned just in time to see a colossus emerge from outside. 

No, that wasn't quite right.

It actually broke through part of the palace door and sent the arched ceiling crumbling to the floor where mostly injured guards dove to get out of the way, screaming as they did so. 

That hadn't been expected. 

She watched as the 20-foot tall monster moved laboriously. It was made of a sandstone like stone, at least that's what appearances told her. And it was completely oblivious to the multiple guards it crushed under its feet as it walked toward them.

~~

This has been so much fun to write

Much love

KT