Unbound
Chapter Eight Hundred And Seventy Five – 875

Acid poured over her feet, and Heva pulled back as her boots started to sizzle. "More! Westin!”

“Y-yes ma’am!" The young Arclight summoned boulders from the earth, each one six strides across if they were a span, before screaming. He thrust his hand forward, the magic of Rocksling hurling the stones into the breach. Water exploded as they landed, but the massive waves were choked off.

"Rimewall!" Stellis planted her shield and gleaming ice crystals rushed away from her, rising into a fifteen-stride wall that was easily thirty across. The ice caught up the stones thrown by Westin, incorporating them into the frozen fortification just as the swell slammed past the malfunctioning breakwater.

It’s barely tall enough! Acid sprayed over the top, and Heva dashed aside. Foaming rivulets ran across the rutted ground as she fended off fallen trees and other debris in her attempt to peer past the wall. When she did, her heart clenched in her chest. The breakwater…it’s completely down.

While the Arclights back at the control node were still trying to fix it, she feared it was too late. The acid had slipped through the wards and was corroding the large chitinous structure, and it was falling apart. Pieces of it were already sizzling beneath the waves.

"Rocksling!"

More boulders shot forward, ripped from the earth to careen into an open section around the waves. Stellis’ ice crawled over them as well, adding to the pile. They’d managed to create a U-shape wall across the backside of the breakwater, but the Rimewall was already breaking. Acid spewed again over the top, forcing Heva to whip her hands about furiously.

"Scorching Hydra.” Whips of brilliant flame condensed and struck the falling water. The many heads of her fire whip weren't normally useful around Stellis' ice magic—the two elements interfered too much with each other—but Heva had spent a lot of time practicing her precision. Her magic burst from one tendril into dozens, each burning an incandescent orange as she wove them into a defensive net.

Vicious steam screamed upward, an immense hissing as if from a great beast, and not a drop of acid fell upon them.

“We can't hold for much longer!" she shouted back at Stellis and the young Westin. The defensive warrior nodded and ripped her tower shield from the ground, the spiked prongs of its bottom ringing against stone.

"Return to the breakwater control node.” Stellis was already moving. Heva followed, but Westin shoved his hands down toward the earth. Dusty-brown Mana swirled around his arms, and the veins in the boy’s neck stood out stark in the dimming light.

Heva grabbed his shoulder. “Boy! Keep moving—!”

"Rocksling!" Westin jerked his arms up, tossing Heva’s hand from his shoulder as he mustered his earthen talents. With a deep ripping noise, more boulders tore from the ground and Westin hurled his arms forward. Eight giant rocks, each ten strides across, slammed into a secondary line behind the ice wall.

"There," he panted, blood pouring from his nose. He gave Heva a proud grin. "That should give us more time."

"Good," Heva shouted, then grabbed the boy by his collar. "Now we run!"

They took off, fleeing as the black storm above them crashed with new thunder. To Heva, it felt as if the world were shaking apart. Though their improvised wall blocked a solid piece of the Bitter Sea’s fury, waves from the sea surged to either side of them, pouring through the low forest and filling the air with an acrid stink of burning vegetation. Heva thanked the Fiend for the Legion requirement of Physical Conditioning—it burned within her, bolstering her Stamina. Westin was blowing hard, but even he made it to the tree line, where the control node waited for them, just as the smallest pieces of waves started to wash against their feet.

Cade and Merk stood over the Arclights as they furiously inscribed the Domain core powering the node. It was clear to Heva, however, that the acid rain was washing away their efforts. The ward that had shielded them from it had deteriorated entirely, and the storm was in full swing; sheets of stinging rain struck at them sideways. As she drew closer, the sigaldry sparked, sending up a bloom of Mana vapor that tossed the lead Arclight back onto her rear end.

"I can't make it work like this!” She cursed in ways that made Heva's ears burn. No matter her time among the Legion, the grandmother would never get used to such coarse language. "The Glyphmaster himself couldn't make this work!”

“No point in trying, then!" Merk shouted shrilly. “Look at that!”

Fell winds propelled the rain even harder as the black clouds lit up with strange lightning. The storm worsened, and as Heva turned to peer into its fury, she saw enormous clouds boiling above the horizon.

A bolt of lightning surged from above, smashing into the shoreline like a hammer. Heva gasped. Crimson lightning?

A sharp retort echoed in the thunder’s wake—the sound of ice and stone shearing apart. A torrent of acid water shot forward, bearing with it huge, jagged shards of ice, and they were closing in on them fast.

"Get back," Cade warned. "Stellin!”

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“On it. Rimewall!" She slammed her shield into the soft earth and purple-white Mana flashed. Ice burst outward, once again forming into a wall to shield their position. But it wasn't enough. Shards of her previous work slammed into it, sending cracks careening across the barrier. The waves crested over the edge of her fortification, carrying with them more than simple ice, but dark silhouettes.

Monsters in the water.

Heva saw the flash of a claw and a wide-open maw as it came for them. A blush of virulent green met the first thing's strike. Merk’s sigils speared across the distance at the end of her inscription wand, searing into the dark shape and forcing it rigid.

“It’s paralyzed! Kill it! Kill it!” Merk yelled, backpedaling away.

Cade stepped in, lopping off the head of the vile monster, and sending its body flopping limply to the earth. It was slick and scaled like a fish with too many fins, and its head gaped at them with eyes the size of dinner plates, now dull in death as its black flesh boiled away.

“Black flesh,” Westin said in horror. “Slick like oil.”

"Snap out of it, kid,” Cade ordered before pointing at the other Arclights. “Get your man in order. We need to go, now!”

There were no complaints.

They ran, towing the Arclights with them. Heva burned at leaving their job unfinished, but there was no time to fix the breakwater anymore. The storm would hit them and Elderthrone within a half glass. All they could do now was warn the city and weather its might.

The pummeling rain made distances harder to judge, but Heva had come to know the area around her new home well. They had only traveled two leagues from the city, which meant that shelter was far off but not unattainable even in these conditions. The Bitterward sat between them and the city walls, but the giants would let them in. There was no question of that.

More waves rolled in behind them, petering out as they drove further inland, but not nearly as much as Heva had hoped. Five-foot swells still carried dark monstrosities upon their waves, and wriggling things were already snapping at their heels. Rimewalls from Stellis trapped some, while Paralysing sigils, elemental blasts, and Heva’s own Scorching Hydra did as much damage as they could manage while on the move. Even Westin's Rocksling pummeled their strange foes, but the young man was clever; each boulder he hurled helped to divert the waves, slowing down their advance significantly. Slowly, the Bitter Sea’s fury was stymied, until only a pace-high steam poured after them.

That was when the monsters began to run.

No longer bearing only fins, but leanly-muscled legs that charged beneath armored carapaces. The dark beasts ran after them, snapping and snarling as red light played across their dark hides.

“What are they?” an Arclight cried out, a Stormlance blasting through one of their hides. The creatures kept coming. “There’s no end to them!”

Merk shouted wordlessly as she did her part, her thin green arms pinwheeling wildly as she sent floating sigils backward. They flew like flags on the wind, but were more akin to hidden traps. Each sigil seared with a virulent green, spreading an intense but short pulse of paralysis across all those that touched them. Heva's fire and Cade's sword sliced through those that came too close, burning and dismembering the beasts wherever they charged.

Scorching Hydra is level 68!

Scorching Hydra is level 69!

Physical Conditioning is level 51!

The acid rain intensified once more as thunder shook the world. It felt as if Heva were being struck again and again by massive pillows. Not painful, but the pressure itself threw off her Perception. The forest loomed ahead.

"Blessed Eye!” she gasped. Only a half-league to go before they would reach the Bitterward. She squinted through the rain, above the treetops, and believed she could just make out the blue-white hump of the giants’ fortifications. They crossed the edge of the forest, and there the waters finally petered out, their rage no longer able to reach so far, and even the acid-slick monstrosities were left behind.

"We're almost there," Merk said, relief and exasperation fighting for dominance in her spirit. "I take it all back! Give me the old patrols I used to do, they're way better than this!"

Heva hadn't the presence of mind to laugh, though Stellis chuckled darkly. They kept running, but something didn't seem right. Fire bloomed across Heva's palms, lighting their way as they ran into the dark forest, made darker now by the black clouds that swept over Elderthrone. Her Perception still rang with every strobe of thunder, and her nose stung with the acrid stink of the Bitter Sea…

"Do you smell that?" she asked.

Cade turned, sniffing. She'd always had better senses than the rest of them. "It smells like rot.”

A tree before them fell. In an instant, the bark withered and desiccated before puffing into a rotten pile of soggy pulp. They’re party drew up short, weapons leveled into a defensive circle only moments before strange growths spread across the forest floor. Fungal limbs reached outward, fruiting with ridged caps and gilled bellies. Horrors rose from the earth, followed by liquid shadows that pooled across them.

“Slick shadowflesh and rot,” Westin said, terror clutching at him so hard he was shaking. “They’re here. Oh blind gods, they’re here!”

All at once, the creatures moved, charging toward them. Stellis bashed them all with her tower shield, an icy blast radiating outward around their group. It splattered all three of the strange Horrors across the forest floor. Shadow-drenched and fungal-bodied, they split apart, releasing flecks of dry pieces that burst outward across the undergrowth.

"What in damnation was that?" Merk asked.

"Look!" Cade pointed with her sword. The dry pieces of the monsters sank into the earth, and where they landed, they grew rapidly. They bowed out the ground with arms that reached up even as their bodies congealed from the fetid, fungal soup they created. Emaciated bodies of more horrors, all of them different-shaped, but all of them vile and dripping with dark secretions, rose up.

Heva seared them in half with her Scorching Hydra. The creatures died without a sound, their flesh burning. This time, their dry insides ignited into pyres.

"Brilliant, Heva! Burn them! Don't breathe in the spores!" Cade twisted her hands and her sword blazed with a cold light. "Merk, you're fastest! Run back! Sound the alarm!"

“What are they?” Merk asked again.

Another fungal monstrosity lurched for Cade, and she split it open. Its mushroom cap was filled with eyes and teeth and oozing pus as it screamed silently. It died, and Stella's ice coated over its body, freezing its terrible insides to the earth.

“God spawn,” Westin whispered.

"Now, Merk!" Cade ordered. "Elderthrone is under attack!"