092, 2/2

Kal’Duresh stood like a tiered wedding cake, atop rippling orange sands. Blue roofs adorned tall white towers and an uncountable number of white buildings, while a curving tree, larger than any tree had a right to be, snaked around the airy castle on top of the cake. It was not the idyllic landscape it appeared to be, for looking closer, it was obvious they were ready for war.

For atop every single blue roof, and hovering in much of the sky above the city, were mages.

They were not the most populous thing in the air, though. That award went to their enemy; a cloud of spiders that stretched for kilometers in every direction, like an invading cloud.

Pure white, long limbed, and covered in too many eyes, the spiders descended from the endless blue sky; an endless horde of chittering, egg-laden invaders. Long streamers of near-invisible threads fluttered from their backsides, buffeted by the heavy wind. Unintelligent spiders would have caught on to each other and tangled long before now, but these were not simple beasts; they were coordinated monsters. The largest of spiders in the horde had faint black lines running down their backs, from their eight eyes to their spinnerets. These coordinators, these mothers, each held together a loose assortment of their kind both in the physical, and in their arachnid minds, readying themselves for the feast arrayed before them in the city below.

The horde shifted.

Here and there, the largest spiders vanished from sight, invisible, taking with them whatever smaller spiders they controled. The descending cloud became a patchwork mess of unattended spiders who were already half dead, spent from the mating, but still ready to kill whatever enemy they could sink their fangs into. These visible spiders would draw the ire of the prey below, while the invisible mothers rapidly descended in controlled falls, avoiding bursts of wind from their prey designed to push them off course.

The first Ophiel to blip into the swarm was instantly set upon by hidden monsters.

The second Ophiel blipped closer to Kal’Duresh, into the sky just above the defenders of the city. A calm white orb formed around Ophiel, as thick air tore up from the ground like a sentient tsunami, like an ooze larger than the world had ever seen before, except for the last time this particular spell had been used. That ooze ripped into the descending horde, squeezing the life out of everything large enough to prove a major problem.

Black striped mothers curled, dried, and died. They dropped to the ground. The invisible turned visible, and died.

Another Ophiel popped into the space between the Ballooning Spiders and the incani city. And then another. A fourth Ophiel appeared. As one, they set about constructing their own floating platforms, then filling them with dense, Restful air. Once they were prepared, they took their position against the monsters, and called the Withering Slime to Veird.

Gently glowing white spheres radiated tsunamis of thick-air ooze into the sky, pulling down every monster they could. After a moment, the original Ophiel on the scene constructed his own Saturn-like construct of floating platform and dense air, and took the fight back to the monsters.

Ophiel did the heavy lifting, but they could not get the smaller spiders or the unattended egg sacs. Tiny white spiders were just as deadly as the large ones. But they couldn’t turn invisible. They had no coordination.

They were sitting ducks.

Mages cast fire and ice, wind and rock, poison and radiant power, out against the invaders.

But the horde kept coming. The spiders controlled vast stretches of air, funneling themselves toward the city below, toward their deaths, or to victory, whichever came was fine by them.

They did not care about dying. They had spent their lives well in advance of this day. They had even gathered the winds to them and chosen their target, knowing that a city was the harder, yet rewarding choice, as opposed to somewhere outside of this blighted desert. Those who survived and thrived against this culling would become stronger for it. They would become the next matriarchs of their horde in the Underworld.

Some of them always survived, and that was enough.

Those still high in the sky directed streams of winds hundreds of meters wide against the wind thrown at them from those on the ground. The horde won. The surviving mothers pushed their forces forward, into the city, hoping that they could find food and power. They thought they knew what they were doing, but they had never come up against [Withering] before.

And then the sky shifted, stealing from the horde the only power they truly had.

The shifting air was not the fury of nature directed by a mortal, but more like a pattern changing; a background turned to the right. An ocean of air deciding to alter course in a way it never had before.

The ocean carried the descending horde to the right. They were off course! They would hit the dreaded orange land! There was no coming back from that! The mothers panicked. They fought with all their might against the sky, controlling their kin to redirect the air, but the very sky had turned against them. They had lost the pattern. Fighting mages for control of the natural world was easy, but fighting the natural world? Impossible.

Maybe those who came after the front lines could do better. They usually did.

The horde fell to crystalline jaws.

 

– – – –

 

Erick left his Ophiel running for a while longer, but it probably wasn’t necessary. The Ballooning Spider Horde was falling onto the Crystal Forest. Mimics were already killing and eating white spiders for kilometers in every direction.

Erick, still in his armchair, holding his book of weather open, said to Poi, “I didn’t go fully against the normal background winds, but I did turn the wind from northerlies, to easterlies. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the effect is something of a circular, diffusive change, beginning around five kilometers north of Kal’Duresh, and extending in every direction. I tried to turn the winds around completely, but the base casting cost was not enough to achieve such a change. As it is right now, the spell should remain in place for a day, according to the minimum duration listed in the spell’s box. I will have to do more experiments to find out more of what I have done.” He said, “If the Baroness wants to know what happened, that was it. Don’t tell her the name of the spell or what it does, exactly. I’ll keep Ophiel around to help with the stragglers.”

Poi nodded, then looked to the air. After a moment, he said, “She thanks you for your assistance and says that these hordes descend for anywhere from a day to three. She wishes for you to do whatever you did, again, if it comes to that. If your Ophiel could remain for now, that would be most acceptable.”

Erick smiled. “I like that. ‘Most acceptable’. Tell her that Ophiel will stay as long as needed, but if Spur gets an attack, too, then I must focus on here, of course.”

Poi nodded. After a moment, he said, “The Baroness accepts your terms.” He added, “Silverite has caught wind of what you did, and wishes to employ the same spell in front of Spur.”

“… did you make a joke there, Poi?”

Poi stood straight. “Entirely unintentional.”

Erick smiled. Then he sent an Ophiel out to change the weather to the north of Spur. He said, “Done. I did something slightly different north of Spur. There is now a corridor of wind maybe three kilometers thick and something like ten kilometers wide, traveling from the east to west. If the spiders manage to navigate that, then I can change it up again.”

Poi nodded.

Erick asked, “Do you think the spiders will bother Frontier? They’d have to travel around Ar’Kendrithyst, first.”

“They might. Ballooning Spiders historically avoid Ar’Kendrithyst, but they can still hit Frontier.” He added, “Right now, they are literally all across the globe, mating in the skies. They can come down from literally anywhere.”

“Then when the spiders come for Frontier, I’ll do something for them, too.” He paused. He said, “Actually… Can you tell Silverite that she is free to negotiate prices for the same to be done for every city of the Crystal Forest? I’ll help anyone who wants help.”

“I’ll let her know.”

Erick went back to his book on weather patterns, thinking about the winds he had seen people cast from the roofs of Kal’Duresh, and the counter winds cast by the spiders. Nothing either side did was as powerful as the brief moment at that bar, so long ago, when he celebrated the creation of [Exalted Storm Aura], and Krakina painted the sunset sky with a brief [Nature’s Fury]. Her green winds briefly tore a tornado from above, before the Guard shut that down.

Erick smiled to himself, remembering Krakina’s cackling laugh. What would she think of him messing around with prevailing winds?

She’d probably get angry.

 

– – – –

 

Hours had passed, while Erick read.

It was a simple fact that magic used in a precise way, along established paths, cost less and did more. Nowhere was this fact more true, than in Erick’s own Particle Magic. This was why he wanted to find out more about the natural weather of the Crystal Forest. Small changes to vast systems would likely last longer, and cost less to change.

An object in motion can be deflected a heck of a lot easier than being shot right back to where it came from, right?

… But… Maybe that wasn’t entirely true. [Reflection Ward] was pretty cheap, after all.

Anyway! In the vast majority of cases, changing a system in small ways was easier. According to Erick’s reading, and his own experiences, the Crystal Forest had roughly three seasons. Water Season, which was basically Spring. Wyrm Season, Dry Season, Oh God Why Is It So Hot, and Summer, were all the same season. Dry Season lasted well over over into Autumn, and was almost as hot as Hot Season. Then came Sandstorm Season, which was Winter, and also not. The Crystal Forest did not truly experience Winter, except at night, when the normal chill of the loss of the sun became something much deeper. But there was certainly no snow.

Erick kinda missed snow.

The prevailing winds of the Crystal Forest were well known. In the east, the wind blew south. In the north, the wind blew south. In the south, but only near the coast, the wind changed it up a bit, blowing from land to the ocean at night, and from the ocean to the land, in other words, to the north, during the day. And in the west, it was back to northerlies.

A high-powered jet stream ran along the coast of the Crystal Forest, flowing from west to east, chasing the sun.

According to everything Erick read, he did not think his [Weather Control] would last very long. It might not even last a full day. Increasing the spell’s level, by casting it as much as he had, had done nothing to increase the duration of the magic. It was still ‘minimum: 1 day, maximum: 1 month.’

And since there was nothing natural about northerly winds suddenly shifting to easterlies, the spell was surely running out of power. Probably rather fast, too. Thankfully, Ballooning Spiders didn’t have [Dispel].

… How did [Dispel] work when the spell was spread out over ten kilometers?

Something to investigate, right there!

Erick checked on the state of Kal’Duresh, through the Ophiel still stationed there. The sky was still raining dead, dying, and tiny spiders, and they were definitely getting funneled off to the west, but some of them had regrouped, and changed tactics.

Deep in the winds, some of them were putting out more threads, to catch the air and divert their destination back into the sky, to rejoin the greater horde up above. Erick frowned. That was just leaving an enemy for another day, and that would not do. He recast his spell, but this time he put more thought into his magic.

Wind curled overhead, easterlies becoming northerlies once again, but cold, while a heavy and hot ocean of air, just above the ground, pushed upward. The combined effect took a moment, but it happened fast enough. Dust devils sprang from the ground, catching orange sands into tight funnels that reached upward into the sky. Spiders tumbled directly down from the above, their many threads tangling into one, uncontrollable mass.

Erick cast a [Withering] into the land below, but kept it above the actual ground; he wanted the mimics to take care of those who managed to make it through the storm, since they were the simple solution, here.

Tornadoes of dead spiders crashed into the ground, kilometers from Kal’Duresh. Mimics swarmed and began killing what Erick could not.

Eh. He didn’t really need the mimics, did he? No. Erick moved an Ophiel into the area. Ophiel supplied his [Domain of the Withering Slime], killing everything, while Erick tinkered with [Control Weather], aiming to pull down more spiders, faster and faster. He added [Shimmer]s on the ground, turning sand molten with heat, setting corpses on fire, providing more sources of upward wind.

 

 

He almost added [Wintry Sea]s to the sky, to create more falling, heavy air, but his short attempt at that proved to destabilize the whole system, as the errant blue spells went wild, and usually crashed to the ground, searching for targets to murder. He stuck with [Shimmer], and heat, for now.

At the height of his control, he had three tornadoes going at once.

Three, almost natural tornadoes!

Well. Not actual tornadoes. They were only maybe a dozen meters across, and all they did was rip up sand and rip down spiders, sending smoking corpses up and down on columns of hot air. They were more like dust devils, than true tornadoes. Erick probably needed to add [Call Lightning], to make a real storm, to make a tornado or three. There was just not enough moisture in the atmosphere of the Crystal Forest for the heat transfers necessary for tornadoes to properly form.

But his three dust devils became large enough to tear down the horde, anyway.

So that was cool.

Erick smiled as he cast another [Control Weather], shaping what was already there into a more perfect form. Three dust devils became four, and that was super cool.

And look, the spell had leveled to 10.

 

 

Still no change in the box, though.

Erick went back to the Ophiel overlooking the storm. The first dust devil had risen an hour ago, with subsequent mini-tornadoes rising soon after. By now, most of the sky was clear of spiders. Maybe it would stay that way? Had Erick pulled down the whole horde? He looked at his most recent notifications, and picked one of the tumbling blue boxes at random. It was much easier to count kills now that his listings weren’t in alphabet base 26.

 

 

Not all of them were worth that much experience; most were worth considerably less. But they were all called the same thing, and since they were all called the same thing, and since Ballooning Spider attacks were well documented, at 1-point-5 million kills, Erick knew he had gone through roughly 75% of the attack. Maybe more, maybe less. Horde sizes varied, but not by much. The kills were slowing down, of course, but Erick suspected the attack on Kal’Duresh would not even last into the night.

Erick renewed a few choice pockets of [Shimmer] on the ground. Dried spider bodies turned to broken flames as dust devils carried bright sparks and burning corpses into the air. That done, he went back to reading.

Weather was pretty interesting stuff! A lot of people had done a lot of magical experimentation on the subject before, but most of what his book talked about was conjecture, observational studies, and magical theory. Not many people, and certainly not the people who wrote this book, could just up and control the weather, proving their theories as true or false.

Maybe he should write some of these people letters, letting them know if they were on the right track, or not.

Ah! He almost forgot about the rads! Some of them had burned up, for sure, but the battlefield was absolutely littered with dried corpses, for kilometers in every direction.

Ophiels began summoning Jewels, while Erick did the same. Soon, the battlefield was littered with knife wielding crystals, chopped up corpses —some still burning—, and piles and piles of rads.

 

– – – –

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

 

Erick showed up at Al’s Sewerhouse just before sunset. The golden building was closed for the night, but the lights were on upstairs. A quick telepathic connection brought Al outside. He looked pretty great. He wore black, as usual, and a smile. Erick hadn’t dressed up much, himself, but he was ready for wherever the night took him. First, he wanted dinner, though.

Erick greeted Al, “Hey, Al! I’m hungry. Let’s eat. my treat. I’ve just killed Ballooning Spider number two million.” Erick smiled. “Definitely did not get that many rads out of them, though. But it’s a lot, so far.”

Al returned Erick’s smile, seeming to relax as his shoulders shook with a small laugh. “I could always eat. Have you ever been to The Regian’te?”

“Nope. Sounds fancy, though.” Erick pulled at his shirt. “Not sure if I’m dressed well enough.”

Al smirked. “This is Spur. We get all types, here. I’m sure they won’t care.”

“Then lead the way!”

Al led the way. They spoke of news and people they had recently met. Al spoke of rookies messing up the sewers, while Erick said he had still never been down there, ever. Erick spoke of magic, and auras, and Al opened up like a burst damn. He loved aura magic, and math, and it showed in his speech and his happy face.

They made it to the Regian’te. It was the top floor of a ten story building, situated near the Mage District. It was fancy. Expensive fabrics on the tables. Drinks in cut crystal glasses. Menus with only three items on them. Mood lighting, and mostly private booths. Erick must have been the least properly dressed person in sight, but no one cared about how he dressed, or that he did not have a reservation.