LSRO: Chapter 54 - Obstacles (Patreon)

So we should probably go and see what they're about to fight!

Can't make it too easy to get the books, right? (I mean we could, but that's no fun)

~~

Chapter 54

Obstacles

Quinn didn't need to be told twice to move. Being inside a building, even one as open to the elements as this one, felt too restrictive if they needed to maneuver.

They wasted no time exiting the room they'd entered, and running past the spot where Eric had initially left them. Aradie flew overhead, her wingspan spread out as she soared through the sky, a white beacon of hope.

"What can we expect?" Quinn asked, trying to get her nerves under control. Thinking about battling monsters had probably caused the monsters to... No, even Quinn knew that was nonsense. She wasn't manifesting thoughts out here...

"Centipedes," Eric said.

Quinn squinted at him. "What? We're running from little centipedes? We can just step on them."

"No, Quinn. These can step on you with one of their feet." Eric's tone held no sign of mocking her.

She gulped, and could practically feel the color draining from her face. "Oh no. Are they like the bookworms?"

"These are far worse than the bookworms," Eric said. "These are chaotic-fuelled centipede type creatures. I believe that's what you'd call them in your world. They have a much more complex name here."

"Doesn't everything." She muttered under her breath. Quinn attempted to scan the area. She tried to pull up her HUD, and while it came into view, it couldn't seem to focus on anything. She shuddered.

"Are you telling me we don't have access to our display here?" She hadn't even thought about that. She thought the system spread everywhere.

"You should have some access. It's just not the most reliable when chaotic energy is this thick. You have to remember your skills yourself and use them. That's why I drill them into you," Malachi said.

"Okay." Quinn refused to get upset. Instead, she used the mental training she'd absorbed to calm herself. Compartmentalization for the win. They just needed to get this fight done. She had to be in control.

"I'm ready," she said, and determination practically flooded her mind. She wanted to devour more mental fortitude books.

"Pop one of the food balls first," Malachi said, just in time. She'd barely shoved it in her mouth and bit down, extending the timer to three hours again from 17 minutes when the first centipede burst through the igneous rock about two meters to her right, causing the ground to shudder convulsively and make her stumble.

Quinn almost went down and only managed to save herself by crouching. The creature reared up, little legs dangling from each side of it as it towered above her, probably about 10 feet. The worst thing was that she dropped her light stick and it lay on the ground, casting ominous shadows over the creature as it flailed in the air.

It had pincers up where its little head would be and when she said little, she meant the body was approximately two feet wide and its tail was still stuck in the earth. She rolled back defensively, activated her hover dodge, and pushed herself away just in time to avoid the face as it came crashing down toward her.

The click of the pincers rung in her head like bells.

She breathed deeply, trying to catch her breath after the exertion, and pushed out ice, aiming it with her hand. She barely scratched the side of the creature as it twisted away from her. Malakai couldn't come and work with her on it. He was already dealing with his own.

Just as Quinn readied another ice blast, holding a hovering escape in her mind, Aradie swooped down toward it, letting out a screech that would have deafened Quinn if it had been aimed at her. The centipede rose up, this time thrashing, all of its legs aimed towards Aradie and that's when Quinn realized it was actually casting something at the bird.

Tiny tendrils of red laser light shot towards Aradie, who expertly maneuvered around them in the sky. Her sleek dark form darted and rolled to the forms, sometimes only visible by the sparks of color in her feathers illuminated by the dim light. She hovered briefly, shooting another sonic burst down at the creature. Quinn decided not to stand there gaping at her bird's capabilities, and shot a gust of wind to unsettle it followed by three icicles in quick succession.

She aimed at the segments of its body, three different ones, all the way down. Two of the icicles even appeared to stick in the joints. Finally, the creature squealed loud enough and pulled itself completely out of the hole in the ground. It must have been at least 20 feet long in total. Its body moved in segmented ways, adjusting and rushing over the rocks.

Quinn wished the light around her was a bit brighter, but didn't trust herself to use her light spell that she realized now, she'd never truly practiced. She dodged carefully around, focused only on the creature's movements, timing her own avoidance with its movements like a dance of cat and mouse.

She definitely didn't like being the mouse.

Behind her, she could hear Malachi's exertions as he and Eric fought the other one. She didn't dare look back, but she could smell burning. Eric's power was fire and brimstone. She guessed the centipede they were fighting was learning a lot about how to be cooked.

Cracking a small smile to keep herself mostly sane, the creature turned suddenly straight towards her completely deviating from its previous attack pattern. It dove almost on top of her in the blink of an eye. She pushed herself to the side in the nick of tme, but even so felt the razor-like sharpness of one of those tiny legs impact through her leather garments. It might only have been her left calf, but it stung so badly she thought she'd been stung by a million wasps all at once.

Quinn screamed out in pain and reached forward with her gloved hand, ripping the leg off the creature and out of her wound before rolling away in a desperate plea of not getting skewered again. She knew needed to hurry up and kill this thing so she could treat the wound before chaos got into her system. Logic helped her, the clarity of mind from books that she'd absorbed the energy explanations from, all allowed her to separate her mind from the rising panic inside her at the poison that just entered her system.

She stood up, leveraging herself to hover over another tail swipe that attempted to get her. That's what she hadn't been looking out for, the tail. "Damn it, rookie," she said to herself, lashing out with icicle after icicle. She expended them into each segment of the creature's body. She could feel the mana and energy as they left her own body and knew that while not infinite, she had a fair few shots in the tank and wasn't about to run out.

Not in this fight, anyway. She would definitely make it.

Aradie's screeches grew frantic. She attacked left and right, honing in on the head, exploding several of the legs off with a sonic blast. Quinn also began working on the legs, shoving ice at the creature, freezing it. Suddenly, she heard a massive crash behind her and a groan. She couldn't turn to look, but the next thing she knew, where she had frozen the creature, there was now an explosion of heat. The two temperatures collided so badly that the centipede began to lose whole chunks of its joints that she had previously frozen when Eric attacked it with the pure heat of his hellfire.

"Sorry to keep you waiting. I guess you were a bit of a centipede lunch just now," Eric said, a hint of humor in his voice.

"Don't try to wisecrack. You're not good at it," she retorted, flinging more ice at the centipede. Eric matched her strike for strike, hitting the same spots with his hellfire that she froze. The creature squealed, rising up again, curling in on itself before moving so fast Quinn's eyes could barely follow it to try and get away from them. With its partner dead, it had obviously decided that these people were not the easy lunch it had originally thought they'd be.

She breathed and summoned a massive ice block directly in its path. But because it had moved so fast, it ended up freezing the entire middle section of the creature inside of the ice block. Several legs were severed as the momentum it had impacted the sudden stop and she could hear it stretching to such an extent that flesh ripped before an agonized squeal began to let out.

She stumbled to the ground as both Aradie and Eric finished the creature off. Malakai stumbled to her side. He looked pale despite his usually darker skin. He flashed her a very weak smile.

"We did it. Encountered a centipede dolificus or whatever you were calling them," he said, slightly out of breath.

She raised an eyebrow. "Really, that's their name?"

He grinned at her. "No, and I can't remember it off the top of my head. I was just trying to make you laugh."

She glared at him a moment before shaking her head. "Yeah, I need to put salve on this," she said, reaching for the salve from her backpack. She grabbed a fingerful of it, immediately pushing it into the rip that had formed from where the centipede leg cut her in her armor, and made sure to spread it all around the wound and the skin inside. The stinging and pain began to recede.

"God, I hope I made it in time," she said.

"You did. The fight seemed a lot longer than it was." Malakai ate something from his pack.

"Yeah, it's the way, isn't it?" she said, still rubbing the salve in, making sure that any trace of the chaos was wiped out of her system. It began to ooze through the cut and she ripped the leather armor a little more to make sure that she didn't leave that lying against her skin. After doctoring up the wound, she noticed that Malachi had been doing the same to his hand. "What happened to you?"

"Yeah, I wasn't paying enough attention when it first came out. I'm fine," he said.

She raised an eyebrow but didn't comment any further.

"Okay," she said, looking at the healing salve. The skin had already knitted back together and it expelled a nasty black sludge. It reminded her of something; the sludge that had been on the cover of those tomes that were in Kajaro's inventory. Wow, he hadn't just been a proponent of allowing chaotic magic free reign, he had literally been partaking of it. She locked that thought away to address once they got back to the library.

Right now, they had more urgent things to attend to. She slapped some tape over the rip to seal it up and keep chaotic dust out, and she was good to go. "Okay, I'm good. Eric, wounds?"

"I'm impervious," he said, flashing her a grin. "Don't worry. I'll keep you safe."

She gave him a curt nod.

He took that as a sign to continue speaking. "It was good teamwork, really was. Ice works well with my hellfire/ You are alright. I think I'll keep you around," he said, flashing a little grin, showing a tiny hint of fang.

Quinn decided she really liked the little imp.

Aradie was still soaring. She was barely a blip in the distance before she began coming back. She sent safe pictures to Quinn as if saying, It's okay. I've made sure that there's nothing else that's going to attack you while we do what we came here to do.

Quinn heaved a big sigh of relief, but she wasn't stupid enough to think that this was the last possible fight they'd have while here.

This time, they moved as one. Eric, Malakai, and Quinn moved in triangular formation as they made their way back into the city. Even twenty feet outside of it felt so different, so devoid of anything. Once they crossed the threshold of the burnt-out building, however, an underlying melancholy seemed to pervade the air. It was as if remnants of a life that had been cut short when chaos interceded were frozen in time. The sight genuinely made Quinn's heart ache.

She steeled herself, focusing instead on finding the books.

"Can you feel them?" Malakai asked.

She shook her head.

"Seriously, just close your eyes. We're here to watch out for you. Aradie's still scouting. Just try and sense them." He used that soothing version of his tone

Quinn frowned, reached into her pocket, and pulled out the pebble. She shoved it into her glove. Now, just behind her eyes, she could feel the library's presence. "Wow, that stone really helps," she murmured. Her sense of relief surprised her. Just being able to feel it closer again, made her feel safer.

Suddenly, she opened her eyes and pointed off to the left where several buildings were more or less intact, certainly more so than the very open one they were currently in. They made their way over, jumping over remnants of furniture and what looked like a horse cart, although Quinn knew it must have been a hover vehicle or something similar. She got the feeling they hadn't ridden horses here.

They entered what looked like an old warehouse. The windows were blown out, and it was just like everything else—frozen in time. Just like Pompeii had been so many thousands of years ago. She could feel the pulsing of the book, as if it was telling her that it was there and needed to be retrieved.

They pushed through the rooms until they came to what must have been an office. Quinn found what looked like a safe and groaned. "Does anybody know how to crack a safe?" she asked.

Eric smirked at her, flew down until he was actually touching the ground, and then walked right up to it. The safe was just as tall as him. She thought maybe he was going to use a brimstone to burn through it or something, but instead, he took hold of the handle, pushed it down, and yanked the door open.

"Nothing is holding this together anymore," he said. "Like we said, everything chaos touches rots, and that includes internal door mechanisms."

She could tell he was trying not to smirk or be too sarcastic toward her. He was failing quite abysmally.

Quinn opened the safe and Eric stumbled back. She could feel the power emanating from the book, even from where she stood. That's when she remembered that imps had been freed by the library from their chaotic origins. It made Eric's accompanying them on this little mission so much braver than she'd realized.

She reached in and grabbed the book.

~~

I am not an insect fan. Must chop up the godzilla sized ones.

Yep.

Much love

KT