Mage Tank-Chapter 275: Fight or Flight

As the hammerhead we were attached to pulled up faster than any organism of its size had any right to do, everyone in the cabin went from the weightless sensation of freefall, straight into an upward turn that easily exceeded ten Gs. From my kneeling position behind the pilot, this actually put a bit of strain on my posture, and I had to brace myself with a hand against the ground.

This also led me to consider the relationship between magic and these types of forces. I had an evolution called Bolt that allowed me to go from a complete standstill, to my maximum movement speed in an instant. Given that my maximum movement speed was several hundred miles per hour–in the right conditions–that was a hell of a lot of acceleration, which should result in a hell of a lot of g-forces. However, when I used that evo to move, my body wasn’t strained in the way it was here.

I had to assume the difference between those scenarios was that I wasn’t currently flexing my mana matrix to cause my sudden change in velocity. Bolt presumably protected me, or even outright negated the forces that my body would normally be under when doing zero to four hundred in a fraction of a second. When something external was responsible for that change, my body had to deal with the natural repercussions.

Because of this, I could likely use Therianthropy to ‘fly’ inside the cabin and keep from getting squashed if the downward pressure became too high, but that would have been overkill. My Strength and Fortitude were good enough to ignore the rough treatment, and my general inhuman physiology helped keep my blood where it needed to be. That wasn’t necessarily the case for everyone else. After the momentum weave had been deactivated, there was a split second as the bird pulled out of its dive, where everyone was hit with the full force of the turn.

Varrin barely noticed, and in fact the man stood rooted to one spot with the barest movement of his hips to keep his center of balance. Xim could also handle the swing, although she had a hand on a supporting strut, which deformed slightly in her grip. Nuralie’s knees buckled immediately, and Etja shot towards the ground and rear of the craft, but the mage was quick enough to catch them both with Siphon before any damage was done.

I went down a rabbit hole thinking about how her spell was negating the force. Siphon was a Dimensional spell, allowing Etja to use it to completely rework local space’s frame of reference for gravity and momentum. If she’d been generating a countervailing gravitational pull, that might have done more harm than good by compounding the pull from two directions. If she’d been reducing their mass, it would have fucked with all sorts of physiological processes. A heart suddenly pumping blood that was nearly massless would probably lead to some kind of internal explosion. Etja neatly side-stepped those issues by informing reality that both she and Nuralie were simply somewhere else, where these types of forces weren’t in play. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com

I let one chain of thought continue thinking about cute ways that skill could be further exploited while my main mind observed the Littans work.

Tavio took the turn with about as much reaction as Xim, bracing himself against the wall with little effort. The pilot’s seat was clearly designed for this kind of thing, although the lieutenant himself looked a little worse for wear. The Copper 3’s face drooped, and I could see the man’s core working furiously to force his blood to keep pumping to his brain. I didn’t think he was too close to passing out, but I also didn’t think the man was going to be working at peak performance while his body weight was in the four-figure range.

“Mind if Etja helps out Lieutenant Augustin?” I asked, breaking my silence. Tavio’s eyes darted back to the mage, then to the pilot, and he gave me a quick nod. Etja quickly spread Siphon to include the lieutenant, and the man nearly choked when he suddenly no longer had to fight against the elephant on his chest.

“This feels very strange,” he muttered as he blinked a few times and scanned his instruments.

The Swifts that had followed us down had no trouble following our maneuver, but a swath of souls was snuffed out behind us as another well of Dimensional mana from Baltae caught the swarm. Overhead, I saw a hundred threads of Spiritual mana spread out from one of the Swifts under the effects of Berserk, until the spell exploded out from the afflicted bird, latching onto all the rest. That section of the flock became a total free-for-all.

Above us, I could feel both Guar and Pio laying down skills to protect the hammerhead, although I couldn’t make out exactly what they were doing with Soul-Sight and my mana sense alone. Dozens of the Swifts had made it close enough for an assault, but they seemed to focus on Pio while Guar cleared them away with throws of his massive weapon.

Our hammerhead leveled out from its climb as Madel came back into view, sweeping through the birds ahead of us. She suddenly kicked up her speed to a level I could barely follow and stopped just ahead of us. She turned her head to look back towards Pio as the pair shared a psychic communication. Suddenly, all the nearby Swifts shifted to attack Guar. Then, a crackling blue energy covered Madel’s body and she shot back out into the feeding party.

Madel angled herself toward the thickest grouping of Swifts, drawing in a dozen to swoop towards her with their penetrating beaks. She disappeared, and arcs of azure lightning spread out from where she’d just been, striking and shattering most of the would-be attackers. Madel reappeared a hundred feet to the west, cutting down two more birds and luring more to their crackling deaths. She couldn’t avoid every attack, but the few Swifts that struck were rebuffed by a potent layer of Shielding.

It was an impressive display, made more impressive when she starting shooting out fucking lasers.

Madel hurled a throwing dagger between nearly every other attack that she made, the action so quick as to be nearly imperceptible. While these were normally single-target projectiles, I’d seen her throw a fan of illusory knives on occasion. Now, however, each dagger detonated into a beam of blue-white light the moment it left her grip. There was a concentrated flash that extended out two hundred feet, its full length appearing all at once and skewering through anything in its path.

The beam was narrow, and each attack only managed to shatter a couple of birds with direct hits. However, if the attack even grazed one of the Swifts, its transparent form lit up with a dense blue flame. I watched as a thick layer of frost formed on one of the flaming birds, sending it tumbling out of the sky for a few seconds before its entire body was reduced to a frigid mist, swept away into the wind.

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So, like, ice lasers?

Madel’s maelstrom of death continued, the shorter lasers occasionally punctuated by a beam that stretched for nearly a thousand feet when she pulled out a hand crossbow to unload. The woman was killing at least ten birds every second between her nonstop melee attacks, bursts of arctic light, and deadly blue lightning counterattacks. She was definitely showing off a lot of moves I hadn’t seen before, and I was pretty sure she hadn’t used any sort of fusion with her twin to make it happen. Madel just had a bag of new tricks. ṜÄ𐌽öBƐ𝐒

As for Cezil’s contribution, it wasn’t limited to sending a significant chunk of the feeding party into a berserker rage. There was an even more insidious effect that I’d seen her use in my Delve, but it was invisible to me here. However, it wasn’t invisible to Xim, who pointed it out over our psychic party chat.

With every spell that Cezil threw, she applied multiple stacks of Cursed, which weakened her targets across the board for just about everything, from attack to their ability to stay agile and dodge hits. These Cursed stacks then spread like Xim’s Ignite status, afflicting all the nearby Swifts, who went on to spread it again to any other bird they flew near. Given how the mass of Swifts was constantly churning on itself, Cursed was quickly infecting the entire horde of enemies.

The twins slaughtered and weakened the Swifts, keeping a winding path clear for us out front as Lieutenant Augustin directed the hammerhead in a series of evasive maneuvers. We pitched forcefully from side to side, moving in and out of dives and quick arcs. Baltae trapped any Swifts that swarmed from the back or flanks with Spatial attacks, while any bird that assaulted from above was corralled by Pio, who I assumed was spamming a wide-range taunt ability. Once she’d gathered more Swifts than she could handle, Madel would retreat from the front and blast by.

While Madel carved up a few of the birds harassing her captain, I noticed a sudden burst of Spiritual mana around Guar, and all of the Swifts would shift targets to their party’s main tank. Guar’s normal mode of drawing aggro wasn’t very effective in this fight, so Pio was gathering the birds close, and Cezil would drop a spell on Guar that drew all the attention over to him once enough had been collected. Shortly after that, all the birds would die as Guar hit them with a close-range AoE.

When I first saw how many enemies there were, I’d thought my group would need to get involved. However, in under a minute, a full third of the Swifts had been annihilated, and as far as I could tell, neither the hammerhead nor our vehicle had taken any damage at all. The Littans wove their abilities between one another like a well-choreographed dance, instantly adapting to changes in the fight with the ease of experienced professionals who knew each other intimately.

I was surprised that the fight was so clean, but not too surprised given what I’d seen from Team Pio in the past. What was more surprising was how the birds began to behave once a few hundred of them had been laid low.

They ran away.

“Feeding party is breaking,” said Lieutenant Augustin. The bird-handler let out a heavy breath, and some of the tension drained from his posture. “I’d have been monster food if we were flying with my normal batch of silvers.”

I looked at the souls around us, seeing the Swifts abandoning their assault to form smaller flocks and make a beeline directly away from our group. Madel followed behind the largest flight and continued to harass them.

“I will tell Captain Pio that her team’s drinks are on you when we get to Krimsim,” said Tavio, patting the man on the shoulder.

“I’ll need a raise before I can agree to that, sir,” said Augustin with half a grin. “The drinks are not cheap on the frontier.”

“I can put in a recommendation. You did a good job keeping your head.” That caused the lieutenant to relax even further, and the man refocused on his instruments.

I pointed out through the windshields at one of the escaping groups of birds. “I’ve never seen mana monsters run like that,” I said.

“That is because you have only seen them in Delves,” said Tavio. “Out here, the beasts will act more like any other wild animal. They can be quite aggressive, but if the battle is not in their favor, they will run to try for easier prey.” He scratched his jaw. “I am surprised they did not flee sooner, honestly.”

Varrin stepped up behind me and bent over to catch a glimpse out the front. “Will we be giving chase?” he asked.

“Madel will spend the day hunting,” said Tavio. “The Swifts can outrun our hammerhead, so she is the best choice. There are riders in Krimsim who can be sent out for cleanup. As soon as we are in range–”

Tavio paused when a visible ripple passed through the air, causing the cabin to rattle and vibrate.

“Sir,” said the lieutenant, “I do not know what that was, but the hammerhead did not like–”

Another pulse rumbled through us. The cabin shook as we lost some altitude. In every direction, the souls that had been scattering all suddenly oriented themselves southeast, their chaotic escape forgotten as they began migrating like they were of one mind.

“I have lost connection to the hammerhead,” said the lieutenant. He reached out and grabbed the slate, looking over a few rows of text that flickered by. Then he sat back and moved his hands through the air in front of him. Spirals of Spiritual mana rolled off his fingertips, snaking upward to the bird above, but they fell and wafted away after a moment like severed strands of spider silk.

“Are you being blocked?” asked Tavio. “Countermagic?”

“No, sir, the bird is refusing the connection.”

“What is this hammerhead’s nesting point?”

“Krimsim,” said the lieutenant. “It should take us straight there if the spell is severed, but its mind became very strange just before my skill failed.”

“Everything’s heading southeast,” I said. “The Swifts, and us as well.”

Tavio looked out the window at the Swifts, all of which had overtaken and passed us. “Hmm. Perhaps we are all heading to Krimsim.” He turned back to Lieutenant Augustin. “How long until we are in range for communication with the slate?”

“At least an hour, sir,” he replied. “Assuming the hammerhead continues pushing itself like this, and that it continues directly to the city.”

One edge of Tavio’s mouth turned down. “Then the Swifts may get there ahead of any warning we can give. I could send Madel ahead of us, but she can probably kill most of the remaining creatures if she continues to give chase.”

“I think I can help with that,” I said.

“Oh?” said Tavio. “How so?”

“Slate communication piggybacks on Delve tech,” I answered. “The System has reach to most places in Arzia, so I can have Grotto relay the signal on the main network.” I gestured out of the window. “Or my party can help finish off the birds.”

“Using this ‘main network’ raises some security concerns,” said Tavio. “Still, perhaps you should assist us with both. Before that, we can–”

Another pulse rippled through the air, and the hammerhead decided that it needed to start moving faster. Of course, the easiest way for it to do so was to drop weight.

Our birdplane lost its bird, and we went back into freefall.