Chapter 29 Flaming Faces (Patreon)

Stella slid down the slope, coming to a stop between Nathan and Brox with a furious expression on her face. She snarled at the Questor, but then her eyes went to the conflagration growing in front of the Fortress of the Face. “Dragon’s breath, that's a lot of fire mana. It’s heading this way.”

The Questor rolled his eyes before pointing towards the dungeon. “A true and verified fire elemental. That’s an exciting prophecy of death.”

Nathan looked from the bundle of clothes he was holding to the flame speeding across the bare ground. He estimated speeds and sighed. Then he tossed the clothes back to Aarl. “We can’t escape. If this thing is made of magic, I can probably take it. Stella’s got outer shields, Khachi on inner. Brox, you got anything?”

The handsome man shrugged with an ambiguous grin. “I would hold that source of solace as a final measure.”

“Ok. Please protect the Heirs.” Nathan said distractedly. “Let’s see if I can handle this myself. Dealing with weird magic bullshit is kind of my thing.”

His Rage intensified, filling his muscles with strength and boosting his antimagic. Nathan was momentarily distracted by a faint haze in the air - but it faded away before he had time to focus on it, lost before the wall of roiling flame bearing down on them.

Brox and the Heirs clustered around Khachi. The wolfman started chanting under his breath, assembling a thick shield of divine mana that shone like a beacon in the night. Stella quickly threw up three domes of blue magical force.

I’d worry about that giving us away. But I’m pretty sure the giant self-aware firestorm is going to do that anyway. It’s also dangerous enough to justify pulling out all the stops - it’s like fighting a natural disaster.

The flame reached them a moment later, having crossed the pass faster than a speeding car. It grew from a distant blazing cloud to a hungry inferno that engulfed the entire area. Nathan’s aura tightened around him protectively, absorbing the devouring magic of the elemental.

Sure glad this is magical fire. It would have been very awkward to end up as ash if an elemental somehow had nonmagical fire.

But this wasn’t simply fire mana - there was intent and purpose in the magic that blazed around Nathan, seeming to take affront at his continued survival. The magical heat around him intensified once, then twice as the stones underfoot cracked from the sudden temperature change.

The Stamina overload jitters started, and Nathan closed his eyes and took deep breaths. He balanced between focus and Rage while his magical senses probed the magic raging around him. It had intent and purpose like divine mana, but the structure was deep and complex - more like the magical computers he’d run across in the crystal book and the dungeon control center.

The primary difference was that while those structures had flowed logic through rigid and discrete channels, this was a continuously shifting knotwork of power. It didn’t feel like something somebody would design, but instead something that had grown and evolved into intelligence and power.

{Magical Intuition 6 achieved!}

His aura spread out tentatively, absorbing more and more of the swirling inferno that surrounded Nathan as he gauged how far he could stretch while still protecting himself. The elemental didn’t like the increased drain at all, and the fire suddenly retracted from Nathan. It swirled around him in a tornado of vermillion flame.

A pressure grew on Nathan’s chest. His breaths were drawing in scorching hot air devoid of any oxygen. Intentionally or not - the firestorm was suffocating him. He focused on the burn in his chest and imagined the carbon dioxide in his blood converting back to oxygen with [Perfected Body]. The visualization took a second to snap into place, but when it did the pressure on his chest eased as his blood reoxygenated. It cost a lot of Stamina, but Nathan was still way over his cap from the initial blast of magic.

Now that his immediate concerns were addressed, Nathan stood in the eye of the storm. The raging flames spun around him at insane speeds, rippling with enough power to appear solid. But with his magical senses, he could sense the other things the elemental was occupied with while it contained him.

Just a bit behind Nathan, the fire magic pressed greedily against Stella’s shield. The intensity of the inferno around his friends increased a notch, but the shield held. It was clear that it couldn’t hold forever.

Their air won’t last forever either.

That wasn’t the only thing the elemental was doing - it devoured the lingering fire mana from the spells that had been thrown around. The mana bore down on the area where the elites had been immolated and siphoned the remaining fire mana into itself, gaining a barely perceptible increase in clarity and definition.

Nathan felt a more complex working at the edge of his perception, and stretched his senses to get more detail. With the amount of magic it was like trying to pick out details on a plane flying out of the sun - but Focus helped him get a sense of what was happening regardless.

{Magical Perception 8 achieved!}

Nathan walked across the ground towards where the Giantsrest mages had died. His bare feet stuck slightly to the partially melted sand, and it took a constant stream of Stamina to deal with the mundane heat from the ground below. The eye of the firestorm moved with him, though it tried to move diagonally away from his target - as if to guide him away from the deceased mages.

Now I’m definitely investigating.

Nathan had grown used to sensing the mana pools of the mages around him, and he’d noticed how their mana pools took a little while to diffuse after death. But he hadn’t been able to figure out how to interact with them. The mana seemed to exist on a different layer of reality - one where his antimagic didn’t reach.

It had been something he’d thought about working on in order to temporarily or permanently drain a mage’s mana pool - but he’d never gotten around to figuring out the trick.

This elemental knew how to do it. A complex swirling vortex of magic surrounded the location of each mage’s corpse, even if charred bone was all that remained of their corpses. The magical firestorm had drilled through some kind of barrier and was in the process of siphoning away what remained of their mana pools - slowly. Each of these mages had commanded a large amount of mana, though the war mages’ resource pools were several times larger than their peers’.

The swirling mana refused to retreat, and the firestorm bore down on Nathan once more as he approached. The flame formed a wall of almost incomprehensible heat in front of him, snapping and popping with plasma. Nathan just tightened his aura down and walked through it and into the center of the grouping of corpses.

He didn’t immediately disrupt the siphons, instead taking some time to understand exactly what was going on. Nathan spent Focus to help him map the mana flows with his senses. He closed his eyes once more, spending Focus to examine the complex constructs that slowly sucked out the otherwise inaccessible power. It was nothing like any of the codified spells he’d had so much practice disrupting - but there was still a logical effect going on here.

{Magical Intuition 7 achieved!}

The elemental calmed down when Nathan didn’t immediately interrupt its harvest of the dead mages’ mana. Even standing near the swirling vortexes of fire mana would have incinerated an unprotected person in seconds, but it wasn’t focusing enough power to kill a siegeboar a second onto him anymore.

I almost wonder if we could be friends - it just wants its mana. But it’s still trying to kill the Heirs, probably for all the juicy mana Stella has.

He reached out and shredded the siphon constructs, destroying their stability. The vortices destabilized and Nathan spread his aura wide to absorb the resulting surge of undirected mana. A furnace-crackling roar sounded across the pass, loud enough to burst eardrums.

Didn’t like that, did you?

The firestorm above him went wild, bearing down on Nathan like a ravening beast. He pulled his aura in tight, and boosted his antimagic by leaning into his Rage. It was a thrill to defy a calamitous power like this, and that rush made Nathan’s lips peel back in a snarl.

The saliva on his teeth evaporated. Nathan avoided taking a breath and stood still as the air around him flashed to plasma again. He was struck by waves of force and light - but all of the energy was magical. Only a tiny percentage of the flame around him was converted to ‘true’ nonmagical heat, it was still enough to start burning at Nathan’s skin. He spent Stamina to keep himself oxygenated, to heal himself and even to cool himself down. It cost nearly a thousand Stamina every five seconds.

But in the same interval he absorbed several times that much mana. The incredible concentration of magic and light and pressure blinded Nathan’s senses, and he had to use [Battle Meditation] to prevent panic from rising. He was immersed in the sun, falling into an endless abyss of heat and fire.

This is sustainable. I’m making more Stamina than I’m spending. Eventually this spell-creature will burn itself out against me. It’s spending thousands of mana a second against me.

The one point of stability was Nathan’s feet standing atop the burning rock - and when that surface started to soften Nathan extended antimagic down past his feet and into the rock to keep it from melting to lava.

The flame pulled back slightly, no longer dashing itself against the rock that was Nathan. The elemental raged in the sky above, its frustration making the rock bubble and hiss.

Glad I’m not breathing, that gas is pretty toxic.

Nathan stood at the center of a blast furnace, but it was no longer the core of the sun. While he’d been enmeshed the siphons of mana had been reestablished. The elemental seemed to care a lot about draining away the dead mage’s mana. Nathan extended his antimagic towards the siphons once more and the mass of fire mana above him lowered threateningly. It stopped right overhead.

Is it offering a truce? Don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you?

Nathan turned his attention towards the Heirs. The fire had smashed through one of Stella’s shields and hungrily licked at the second, causing it to crack and splinter. Inside that barrier was Khachi’s shield, but Nathan wasn’t comfortable with only a single layer protecting his friends. This inferno would kill them in seconds.

He frowned up at the intelligent firestorm, trying to figure out how to communicate with it - or at least let it know that his friends were off-limits. He tried yelling. “Leave us all alone, and you can have the mana!”

There was no indication the elemental heard him -  and the fire continued to assault Stella’s shield.

I’m worried it’ll figure out it has leverage on me with Stella and folks. It wants to consume mana from dead mages, and Stella’s gotta smell like a king’s feast. Time to decide - do I attempt to parley with a questionably-intelligent being made of mana, or do I try to kill it?

So far most of its reasoning was pretty animalistic. The firestorm wanted mana, and it was trying to take it. He wasn’t sure if it could even understand that Nathan wanted to trade safety for mana, but if it could, then it would understand it could pressure him by threatening the Heirs. But every moment he wasted was another moment that the Heirs' defenses grew weaker.

Could we use it against Giantsrest? Maybe if their army is coming up this pass. But Gemore has been dealing with dungeons for hundreds of years. They taught me that anything coming from a dungeon cannot be reasoned with, will try to kill me and will attempt to destroy civilization. I’ve seen nothing to contradict that, and I don’t think I’m smarter than hundreds of years of Adventurers. Maybe if I had some special communication Talent - but I don’t.

With that thought in mind, Nathan scythed his aura through the siphons, once more shattering the swirling magical effects. As the full fury of the storm descended once more he leapt for the largest remaining mana pool - which had belonged to the war mage Sarah had shot out of the sky.

He crouched over the physical location of the immaterial resource, denying the mana-creature access. Then he spun his antimagic in a spiral, trying to recreate the feel of the spell the elemental used to pierce through whatever barrier blocked off the power.

I need to deny it a reason to stay here, then make it too expensive to stick around. Then hopefully it leaves. If not, I can try to drain it away. But it’s so huge - there’s gotta be hundreds of thousands of mana up there.

He started spending Focus to help the process, homing in on the effect he’d observed from the elemental’s flaming vortices. Nathan could tell the moment when the elemental realized what he was doing. Another roar sounded across the night, though this time it was tinged with desperation.

He blocked out the pain of burns from the superheated environment and the sensation of furious mana, focusing entirely on the slowly dissipating mana pool he stood right on top of. His antimagic bored fruitlessly at the strangely immaterial mana for a second before seeming to gain traction. The new source of Stamina flooded into Nathan as he broke the barrier. He rushed to siphon out every bit of the mana. It was like sucking down an entire cup of tea through a boba straw. It happened very quickly, the nature of his antimagic making it trivial to siphon out every bit of power from the dead mage’s mana pool.

{Aura of Antimagic 7 achieved!}

The elemental flailed at him desperately, and Nathan became aware his entire body was covered in second-degree burns, and toxins from the burns and the molten rock were spreading through his blood. It had taken a while, but the ridiculous amount of magical fire had finally succeeded in heating the air enough that Nathan was burning from purely mundane heat transfer. His healing was keeping up - for now, but it was costing a bucketload of Stamina to do it. The problem was that the rate of damage was just going to keep ratcheting up as the air got hotter and hotter.

I need to convince it to flee - or run away myself. Let’s get rid of the rest of these stray mana pools and see if that does the trick.

He hopped over the ring of lava that encircled him, towards the spot where he’d killed the war mage and enslavement mage. He broke the elemental’s siphons, quickly establishing his own. At this point it was a race between Nathan’s ability to drain the mana pools of the dead mages and the elemental killing him with the tiny percentage of its power that translated to radiant heat.

Next was the artisan mage, who’d had the least mana - though the elemental was only half-done extracting it. Nathan was getting faster at the process, barely breaking stride to claw out the mana before sprinting towards the spot where the last mage had died.

Brox had killed the Nail a hundred feet away from where the rest of the Giantsrest party had fallen, and Nathan covered the space in seconds, desperate to deny the elemental its meal so it would leave the rest of them the hell alone.

That done, he turned back to the Heirs. They were the only remaining source of mana on the battlefield. Nathan had absorbed all of the Giantsrest mage’s mana pools - and the Elemental had devoured every scrap of environmental mana and every remaining enchantment from the bodies of the mages and the remnants of the golems.

The firestorm twisted up and away from Nathan, and he was buffeted by the winds blown up by its passage. The ground around him glowed faintly with heat as the elemental concentrated itself into a towering tornado of flame directly above the Heirs.

Uh oh.

The pillar of fire crashed down onto Stella’s third and final layer of shield, shattering through it and impacting Khachi’s dome of golden light. The two self-animated magics battled against each other as the fire elemental tried to crush the shell of magic to get to the juicy targets barely visible within.

Nathan arrived on the scene, happy to stand on the relatively cool stone that had been protected by Stella’s shield until a moment ago. He spread his aura out as far as he dared, cutting away at the fire elemental as it battered at Khachi’s shield.

The elemental drew back from him once more, darting back a few times to try and get at Nathan’s friends. He wielded his aura like a gigantic sword, the extra rank-ups giving him extra volume and control to work with as he cut at the probing tendrils of animated fire.

Khachi’s divine protection remained resolute, using the respite to replenish itself. There was a moment of stillness as the towering firestorm seemed to sit back and take the measure of the battlefield.

Come on. Go home. Nothing for you here. Just me, eager to take bites out of your very essence.

The attitude of the mana shifted in front of Nathan’s eyes. It went from an all-consuming inferno to a spitefully hissing blaze - and started skittering back across the pass to the fortress that was its home. It looked like a predator returning from a hunt, satisfied but mildly wounded.

{Implacable Antimage has leveled to 227! You have survived confronting a fire elemental!}

Nathan just stood there for a moment, watching it go. Then he opened his mouth and sucked in his first breath in several minutes. The air was still scalding and dusty, but at least it contained oxygen. Nathan coughed a few times and then spat up some black phlegm as the dome beside him shimmered and retracted into Khachi’s metal shield, which was braced on the ground.

The piece of metal glowed with heat, and Khachi’s teeth were gritted as smoke rose from burning fur. He cast the shield to the ground before golden light played over his arm, healing the injury.

Brox smiled around, looking at the partially molten landscape. “Now that was a blaze worthy of Quenfi.”

Aarl and Sarah heaved identical sighs of relief. Then they started coiling up a wide hoop of metal they’d been trying to lay out. It was the enormous dimensional container they’d gotten from the nest of ashblood cobras - the one that the matriarch had used as a spawning pool. It had been the water reservoir for an entire Sklian town, and contained an entire lake’s worth of water.

Contaminated water now, and probably full of a whole bunch of young ashblood cobras. We have no idea if those are still alive, or how long it’ll take them to starve. Still - opening that portal would have been a better idea than getting burned alive by a giant fire elemental.

Stella was on one knee, taking gasping breaths and clearly overwhelmed by the effort it had taken to hold off the fire elemental for several minutes. She looked up, standing and watching as the living firestorm finished retreating through the orifices of the fortress of the face.

She coughed in the hot and dusty air before summoning up a wide gust to sweep away the cloud of hot dusty air. “That was a prophecy of death. What a trial - and what incredible fire.” The mage’s grin was a little manic as her eyes shone with an inner flame.

“Thanks for the wind.” Nathan sighed as he spread his arms to catch as much of the breeze as he could. It was definitely nice to not stand around in oven-temperatures anymore. He was still overheated, but his inherent toughness, Rage and healing were keeping him functional as [Perfected Body] cooled him off.

His voice was cracked. “Can I get some water? I’m a little hot.”

Brox’s eyes scanned Nathan from top to bottom. “I’ll raise my sword to that.” He whipped out some kind of nozzle from a dimensional pouch and aimed it in Nathan’s direction before twisting a lever. A spray of cold water hit Nathan straight on.

He sighed with relief at the temperature, even as the water steamed and sizzled off the rock around him. “Thanks.”

The Questor kept the stream of water going as he laughed. “I’ve fought elementals before, but only with artifacts of Kalis. By Edes I’ve never seen somebody run into one naked as a newborn and come out the other side.” He cut off the stream of water and walked up to clap Nathan on the shoulder.

“I’ll tell that story to this Ending and beyond it.” His eyes danced with amusement, and Nathan almost found himself falling into their violet depths.

Then Brox gestured with his chin toward the dungeon. “So - you’ve seen down the dragon’s gullet. Time to conquer this dungeon?”

Nathan took a step away from the Questor and ensured he wasn’t under the effect of Brox’s social skills before he considered the suggestion.

I can probably challenge that elemental. It might be easier in an enclosed space like the dungeon - but the mundane heat in there is probably incredible. I don’t know if I could deal with that long enough to kill it. Or what it would do in desperation. Or what else is in there - what if there are multiple elementals, and I chase them out, and they go attack Halsmet?

Nathan stepped away from the Questor, rubbing his hand through his rapidly-regrowing hair.  “Maybe - but it would be a risk, one I don’t see why I would take. As it is, the dungeon’s a barrier between Halsmet and Giantsrest.”

“We may have awoken the dungeon.” Khachi said, his voice grave. “This must be reported, and we must watch it to see if the elemental is aggressive.”

Brox gestured to the wolfman, as if his point was proven. “So? Do we await an invitation from the divine?”

“From one fight directly into the next?” Sarah’s voice was dry as she surveyed the plain. “It’s late. Let us rest tonight, surveil the dungeon. Tomorrow we’ll decide what to do.”

The Questor frowned around. “Fine! You’ve triumphed over two mighty foes. Might as well sleep before killing an ancient being of magic.”

{Overall Status:

{Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Aura of Antimagic 7

Permanent Talent 2: Perfected Body 8

Talent 3: High-tier Slow Fall 10

Class: Implacable Antimage level 227

Deepened Stamina: 7110/7110

Antimage’s Impassivity

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Implacable Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Improved Antimagic

Strenuous Agility

Hand-to-hand Expertise

Class: Assassin of Gemore level 80

Regenerative Focus: 193/900

Catastrophic Blows

Stealthy Movement

Infiltration

Forgettable

Unsuspecting Strike

Utility skills:

Battle Meditation 9

Leadership 6

High-tier Sprinting 8

Magical Perception 8

High-tier Notice 10

Magical Intuition 7

High-tier Dodging Footwork 10

Mental Fortress 4

High-tier Lecturing 5

High-tier Tumbling 8

Mid-tier Noticeability 8

Low-tier Quiet Movement 4

Low-tier Disguise 4

Mid-tier Battle Cry 3}