139, 1/2

The South Central Tribulation Mountains formed a barrier much larger than that of the Songli Highlands’ western flank. This land of relative peace only claimed about 3000 kilometers of the range. To the north of that claimed space, the mountains continued on for another 2000 kilometers, before the South Central Ridge joined the curving Eastern Ridge. To the south of the Songli Highlands’s staked-out land, the South Central Ridge continued on for another 4500 kilometers.

The South Central Ridge was nearly a thousand kilometers wide in some places, but it was mostly only 500 kilometers wide, on average. Near the Highlands, the Tribulation Mountains were, on average, 700 to 400 kilometers wide.

Some of those mountain peaks soared 20 kilometers into the sky. Some of those valleys plunged just as deep into the surface, where parts of the Underworld were exposed for all to see.

A man could get lost in those mountains.

Not Ezekiel, though. He knew right where he was:

In the middle of a battle of life and death.

He smashed his staff into the head of a charging Mist Stone Glutton, deflecting the multi-ton monster with a [Strike] made of pink fire that burned the beast and sent him scurrying, into the ground, leaving behind wisps of flame on the surface. No time to finish off that beast; another one was coming up from behind, directly at his head.

Without turning, or even acknowledging the new monster, he fired off a magenta [Firelight Beam] from the back of his head, right down the glutton’s throat. Pink fire erupted inside the monster and burst out of breaks in the rocks here and there, briefly filling the air with steam before more fire came forth. The beast roared in pain, and tried to bite down on the thing making it hurt. Instead, it bit down on a pink shield made of thorns and reflections. Stone teeth fractured.

Ezekiel turned his body, just in time to let the raking claws of the monster scratch along his edges instead of where they had been aiming, turning possible major injury into lesser damage to his renewable defenses.

Ah.

But.

The creature was still several tons of stone. And that stone was coming for Ezekiel with the inexorable force of weight with nowhere else to go but through. It was still on Firelight fire; Ezekiel’s beam was still trained on the monster, still damaging it for 4x Willpower per moment. It didn’t seem able to transform back into mist while it was on fire.

Good to know!

He was still going to get crush—

Odin, already in pink-lightform, grabbed Ezekiel and moved him out of the way in a moment of shifting light.

The glutton fell to the ground, phasing into the mountain, leaving behind glowing pink fire.

Ezekiel’s beam was still trained on that spot, which was helpful, because the first monster came back, transforming from mist to stone while it was still in the air on Ezekiel’s left. He trained the beam on that one as it lunged at him. Stone caught firelight. The beast burned.

Ezekiel stepped to the left, out of the monster’s attack vector and without Odin’s help this time. The glutton sailed past, unable to become mist while it was on fire, and unable to escape into the ground because it was a meter above the ground.

With another second to cast, Ezekiel purged the water from the on-fire glutton, which… Had the effect of instantly putting out the flames. But also hurting the monster! He did manage this much! He had not fucked up; he just didn’t think that the mundane water would put out the magical fires.

Yes. That was what he was going with.

Stop it! He’s learning.

And quickly, too.

The [Firelight Beam] was still going; it had five seconds left in its 10 second duration. It was still trained on the beast, who was now not-on-fire and not getting there any time soon. But something had changed after he purged the water.

The [Firelight Beam] carved through the beast’s forehead, then across the body, splitting the monster in half. Small droplets of burned sand scattered across the battlefield. A notification came. [Firelight Beam] ended on its own.

There had been a few fuckups on his part. Some non-ideal action. But he had taken care of his targets. Mostly. Where was the first one? Not here, not bothering anyone else…

He could have done better. There was just something about being actually in the fight that made it all so much more confusing and him all that much more clumsy.

But as his daughter had said: No way out but through!

He glanced his daughter’s way. Now she was good in a fight. Look at that giant hammer in her hands! Swinging it like it was nothing. And surrounded by monster corpses, too. It had only been twenty seconds since the start of the fight, and only ten minutes since they landed, and already Julia had taken out three gluttons, in this glutton-filled canyon.

Tiffany was surrounded by corpses, too, but hers were completely demolished. If he didn’t know any better, the scene would have made Ezekiel think that Tiffany was breaking rocks in a quarry for fun. She looked so happy.

Paul was easily avoiding the monsters and had even caused two of them to crash into each other, twice. Those gluttons apparently didn’t like getting in each other’s way. They had started tearing into each other right after that. Last Ezekiel saw, Paul’s opponents were rolling down the mountainside—

Whoops!

He lifted an arm and his shield caught the jaws of the other glutton he had been fighting. He brought around his staff for a Firelight [Strike], directly to the side of the beast’s head, experimenting to see if Firelight, or rather, Radiance, was particularly good against these guys. That last glutton went down rather easily, and this one had taken a good twenty seconds to get back in the fight.

The grey-blue stone cracked. The monster went limp. Ezekiel stepped to the side as the glutton fully fell out of the mist like a puppet with its strings cut. It landed with a heavy, burning thud. Had he somehow dazed it? But they were elementals? Could you do that to elementals, if you used the proper Element against them? That wasn’t true for many Elementals, and most people were cautioned against trying to rely on elemental weaknesses…

These were weird monsters. Maybe Radiance was good against mist—

… That made sense.

Oh. Well. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? A little bit of elemental weakness? Like how fire was weak to water, water was weak to ice, and ice was weak to fire… Mist might be weak to Radiance? Best practices on combating elementals was based upon the idea of transforming the base Element which composed the targeted elemental into something else, in order to kill that elemental.

So in that way, ‘burning’ away the mists of a mist stone glutton seemed to be right on track for best practices.

Anyway.

There was a monster, stunned, not frozen with a Stop-effect, at Ezekiel’s feet.

Julia was suddenly there with her giant hammer. That glutton became dead stone after a few heavy attacks.

The fight was over seconds before that, anyway.

The bodies of eight more Mist Stone Gluttons lay scattered across the mountainside.

Ezekiel stood tall, and scanned the land with his eyes and his mana sense, watching the gently curved mountainside for any more threats.

There were lots.

But they kept back, like prowling shadows, twenty meters away, thirty, thirty-five. Most were at the very edge of his own senses. He counted maybe seventy.

Tiffany, giddy, said, “I count a hundred twenty.”

Paul spoke softly. “This is a great area for rigorous combat training. I’m not denying this. But maybe we should pick a different valley. One less populous. While we can.”

The original target of the day had been a valley a bit south from this one. The four of them walked around there for a good half hour and only got three gluttons to give a probing strike. They killed one of those gluttons, but the other two retreated, oddly enough.

This valley, three valleys over from that first one, had some nice mostly-flat areas for easier fighting, and a lot more gluttons. The four of them had barely spent any time at all in one of those flat spaces before the gluttons began to come up for a bite. While the gluttons were weird monsters, this land was also pretty weird.

If Ezekiel would have had ten extra minutes of rest, he would have tried a [Witness] in the area, just to see if all these flat spots actually used to be foundations for houses; if this land used to be a mountainside village. It well and truly could have been. Except for the monsters, and the mists, and how deadly the Tribulation Mountains were, there was a nice river down in the valley, the sun could show whenever the clouds decided to play nice, and [Grow]ing food here would have been easy with the mists providing all the necessary water. This would have been a nice space for a little town.

You know… except for the monsters.

Always monsters. Everywhere.

Ezekiel held his staff in both hands, since he didn’t need to hold his shield, as he stared out into the gloom. “Firelight seems to work exceptionally well,” he said, as he walked to regroup with his party.

“It does. I started using [Radiance Strike], too.” Julia stared out into the mist, holding her hammer like she was ready to strike at anything, as she repositioned herself, too “Seems like a standard Elemental interaction.”

“Standard?” Ezekiel said, “There’s nothing standard about these guys.”

Tiffany punched a gauntlet into the other, eliciting fire from the air. “Plain fire does better.”

“Any sort of heat-based attack would work fine, for the dryer they are, the more damage you can do. That is what you are seeing.” Paul said, warily watching the world around him, as he stepped closer to everyone. “The problem is that they can wipe off the fire and purge the heat by diving into the stone.”

The gluttons circled in the mist, their blue eyes flickering like ghostly fireflies.

Ezekiel had a few thoughts.

He thought back to Kiri, and her [Firelight Defender]; the automated turret-like summon that spawned countless [Firelight Bolt]s at designated enemies. And then he considered something else.

Was Ezekiel a Fire and Light kinda guy? Wind and Mercy, yeah… But firelight?

Or rather, Radiance?

No no. Not Radiance. Firelight; that other term for the same thing. Yes. Erick would have spoken of Radiance, but Ezekiel?

Clan Phoenix was about Fire. Maybe a bit of Light. Ezekiel could be about Firelight, too, or at least some of his spells. He would have had a history of fire and light in his family, anyway, right?

Yeah. Sure.

And besides that, he recalled meeting a Riftcaster, once, who cast Rifts into the air to bolster certain elements and deny opposing elements. That man had a brother who had learned incantations from the Songstresses of the Songli Highlands in order to adjust his [Healing Beacon]-derived healing and harming spell into whichever was needed at that moment.

Ezekiel was getting off track.

Neither Ezekiel nor Erick had ever made a Rift, he decided. There was something of a need for an actual Rift, but Erick had already made the precursor to a Rift a while ago, and that would do, for now.

 

The difference between a Rift and a Shift was one of degree and intent. Rifts were better, by and large, and Ezekiel should probably make one out of this particular spell.

… Later.

He said, “This should help us.”

He cast, directly above them all.

A dot of intent unfurled like a blazing lotus, expanding and enveloping like a wash of pink plasma. For several meters in every direction, the land was not actually hot, but stone did appear to be on fire, and the air filled with the idea of heat and magenta light.

Mists vanished; pushed away by magic that was anathema to its existence.

A pink panic seemed to take hold in the blue eyes of the monsters in the mist. Gluttons screamed. They ran away; into the mountain, into the air, as fast and as far as they could get. But only the closest ones. The gluttons that were already a hundred meters away flinched under the pink false-fire surrounding the party, for sure, but they remained. They did not approach, but they did not leave, either.

“Clan spells, am I right?” Ezekiel smiled, saying, “Some phoenixes are just as much light as they are fire.”

“Yeah yeah. Wave to the [Witness], why don’t you.” Julia watched the eyes in the mist as she spoke, “What is that spell, anyway?”

Ezekiel handed her the spell. “Firelight.” He frowned. “I told you about this stuff?”

“Did you?” Julia asked, as she glanced at the box. She dismissed it, then focused on the mists beyond the flickering pink ‘fire’. “Is this one of those Rifts you mentioned months ago?”

“Oh. I remember what happened, now. We talked about Rifts and then… we just never talked of them again. But I did tell you about Domains not too long ago, right?”

“… Oh. Yeah. That.” Julia frowned a bit.

Ezekiel knew that Julia likely didn’t want to hear him talk of Domains and Rifts, and certainly not again and in this space, but maybe she would? Since she had learned gridwork from Tenebrae? There was a definite difference in how much his daughter was willing to talk of magic since she learned of gridwork…

Ezekiel plowed ahead, even though he likely shouldn’t have, saying, “[Prime Area] is the basis for both Rifts and Domains. You can make [Prime Area] through any combination of any two Force spells. The ones I used are [Force Bomb] and [Force Wave]. To make [Firelight Shift], I took [Prime Area] and Mana Altered it for Firelight. I have not made a Rift out of this. That was one of the options, and that option is most normally used to produce something which enhances the power of a specific element, and maybe even the growth of those specific types of Elemental Essence creatures. A variation on this idea is a spell which makes a Domain; an area that is under the control of the caster who makes such a spell, and is usually based around an element. The two ideas are similar, but different, in like how all bladed weapons have blades, but not all of them are swords.” He added, “Rifts are unaligned boosting and denial. Domains are controlled boosting and denial.”

Julia’s frown deepened. “… Yeah.”

Pink firelight continued to dance on the ground like waving neon grass.

Seventy meters away, gluttons prowled in the mist.

Ezekiel started, “Do you want me to help you make [Prime Area]? It’s the basis for a lot—”

“I can’t even see the damned monsters except their eyes,” Julia complained. “And only when they want them seen!”

“Yup. There’s five times as many gluttons out there than the eyes you can see.” Tiffany spoke up, “We should decide if we’re moving or staying—”

Paul rapidly spoke, “Fully scare them away, now, or we need to move. They’re preparing to swarm through this spell.”

Ezekiel didn’t even gesture. He just willed the magic to flow, targeting various clumps of gluttons.

With every passing second a new [Firelight Shift] blossomed on the mountainside, driving back the mists with large impressions of hot summer bonfires. Gluttons screamed as they raced to get away from the heat and the light, though this level of spellwork was not truly dangerous to those beasts. The spell wasn’t even hurting them. But it was greatly weakening water magics, which was apparently more than enough to disperse the horde.

With the passing of seconds upon seconds, the mountainside was soon awash in imaginary summer heat.

Mists dispersed. Gluttons raced away.

And the mountainside looked different under the light.

This area had to have been an abandoned mountain village. Ezekiel and his people were likely standing in what had once been a main square. The air smelled of summer bonfires, and it reminded him of roasting marshmallows by the fire, and having Julia burn hers and then toss the still-burning treat at the neighbor’s kid.

Ezekiel smiled at the memory.

Tiffany asked, “So [Prime Area] is just any two Force spells? Because this [Firelight Shift] looks damn effective against elementals. Or at least these elementals.” She gestured at the frightened gluttons, saying, “This is great crowd control.”

“The spell isn’t even hurting them; they’ll attack soon, I’m sure. Rifts are better and still I need to make this one.” Ezekiel said, “But yeah, Tiffany, I’ll help you make [Prime Area], too, if you want.”

Julia frowned at the world, her eyes firmly fixed on the mists that remained. “Did that chase them off?”

Tiffany said, “They’re out there. They’re staying far away, too.”

A wind blew from the northeast, flowing through the valley. The remaining mist kicked up into the sky, vanishing through the mountain passes in the south. There was still an ocean of mist out there, though. Ezekiel had only banished the barest bit.

And then Ezekiel eyed the north. He decided to have some fun.

An Odin fluttered into the northern passage into the valley, where mists flowed through a kilometer’s wide passage like it was a connection between two oceans. Ezekiel threw a few [Firelight Shift]s into the ‘mist-intake’, creating a dissipating blockage in the flow. Air came through, and so did mist, but a lot of it did not. As the wind kicked up, mist vanished into the south, uncovering more of the valley with each constant gust. Gluttons appeared out of the mist like dropped leaves, briefly piling up before they vanished down, into the mountains, or they raced with the mist toward the south, or they gathered near the river, so far down, where the mist never left.

Julia watched her dad throw out orbs of magenta heat.

When it was done, and the village foundation around them was clear, she asked, “What was that for?”

Tiffany put one hand on her hips and gestured across the valley with the other, saying, “For the view! Obviously.”

Ezekiel chuckled. “Yes! For the view.” He renewed several patches of pink fires on the nearby mountainside, and said, “And magic is fun! You know? What do you say? We could take some time and each try to make a Rift—”

A strange gorge appeared on the other side of the valley, nearly three kilometers away, as the mist peeled further out of the valley. The hole into the mountain looked man-made, in the way that it would look if someone had cast a great magic and carved a great furrow straight and deep into the stone; with chipped edges where the attack exited, or maybe entered the space beyond, breaking reality under the violence of the attack, but with defined edges in the center of the slice.

Ah. So.

He should have expected this? He should have expected something when he cleared the mist from the valley. So Ezekiel prepared several contingencies right now, that he hoped he would not have to use, which mainly involved having Odin buff himself, out of sight—

And, yup! There were people over there. Lights, too. They eyed Ezekiel, Julia, Tiffany, and Paul, from the edge of that break in the mountain. They did not look friendly.

Ezekiel waved, anyway.

One of the people, a man in red who held a sword the same color, waved back, with his sword.

Ezekiel said, “In my defense of not spotting them, they were covered by mists.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Julia said. “I can’t see five damn meters in that soup.” She looked to Tiffany. “What’s your excuse?” She turned to Paul, and with more enthusiasm, asked, “What’s your excuse?”

Tiffany waved at the likely-not-friendly people, saying, “Out of range.”

Paul did not wave. “Same, though I am now focusing…”

“So.” Julia sent, ‘I am now accepting bets on if its the lost alchemist’s kidnappers, or not. I think it is them and I am betting 10 gold.’

The red guy on the other side was joined by four others in variously colored [Conjure Armor]. He had stopped waving for thirty seconds, now.

The two parties stared at each other from across the valley.

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Paul sent, ‘No one is taking that bet. We are now in deadly territory. Our experiment with me not helping with fights is over, for now.’

‘Agreed.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘So no takers on my bet? You might make some easy money!’

Paul sent, ‘I’m picking up some heavy thoughts… One of them is thinking about killing a man named Tadashi in their camp.’

Ezekiel floundered for half a second, then scoffed, ‘No way. Too much of a coincidence. Maybe ‘Tadashi’ is the name of their lookout?’

Julia laughed.

Paul elaborated, ‘Nope.’

Julia asked, ‘Are we fighting, or are we—’

The air blipped red a hundred meters away. The red man and a few of his people appeared on the empty foundation of a former home. They all looked human.

“Hello!” the Red Man called, in a cheerful voice.

Ezekiel recognized in the man’s voice an undercurrent of joyful violence; that he was happy he had some new butterflies with fresh wings to pluck. Ezekiel didn’t know how he knew this, but he did, with every fibre of his being.

Ezekiel responded politely, anyway, “Hello? How can I help you? And pardon me for refreshing this spell I just put up.”

The first of the magenta [Firelight Shift]s had started to fall apart. Ezekiel recast one toward the north, Mana Shaping it into the absolute for another 500 mana, going the full distance through the actual pass, stretching his spell absolutely wide, and thin, like a curtain of magenta fire. It would block out all that was opposed, which would be the mist and thus the gluttons, and—

A blue box appeared.

Ezekiel was surprised at the new spell, but he tried not to betray that surprise. He said to the people around him, “That one should last an hour. So! Hello. Who are you? Are we intruding?” As he also sent to his people, ‘We’re doing this, and Odins will arrive with your shields when this goes south, but I’m going to try to talk them out of it, first.’

‘Yes, sir.’ ‘You got it, Boss.’ ‘Ready.’

For a nice, calm moment, Ezekiel felt great about his people. He was delighted that they chose to follow him halfway across the world, even if they ended up in situations like this.

The Red Man lifted his eyes toward the spell in the distance. “Soon our valley will be fully without mist and our protector gluttons do not like that. Could you cancel that spell?”

“I would rather not.”

The Red Man innocently asked, “Why?”

“Because,” Ezekiel said, “It appears you have a captured Tadashi Diligent Scribe in your hideout back there, and I would like him back.”

The Red Man went stock still. His people froze. Cheer vanished, and calculation came forward. The Red Man nodded, once, then asked, “Tell me: Did you make that spell over there at this very moment?”