Chapter: 511 – Baba Yaga?

Tala slammed into the ground with enough force to embed herself a foot or two down into it.

She would have landed face first, but she managed to fight her way around in a tight roll, falling on her back instead.

A cloud of dirt exploded out away from her, even as the breath was driven from her lungs.

Her threefold sight showed Rane flattened on the ground nearby, having had enough control to diffuse his own impactful energy without taking the ground-shaking blow.

He had landed on his face, however, and he had been driven all the way down, unable to stop his own motion.

That didn’t bode well. That meant that whatever had affected them had imparted kinetic energy that he couldn’t steal or absorb for once.

The quagmire of power and authority roiling around them was cloying and suffocating at the same time even as she sucked in a gasping breath, more on reflex than out of necessity, which was good, because her armor prevented it from being more than a shallow inhale.

Still, she wasn’t going to be taken lightly. Tala shoved outward with her will even as she struggled to her feet in the vibration-loosened soil.

She looked up to see the chicken-legged house bearing down on them, the manic old woman practically frothing at the mouth from within the front window.

Tala didn’t hesitate. This wasn’t a time for half-measures or hesitation. Once she drove the moving house thing back, she could try talking with the clearly delusional old woman.

It was time to show the real state of things. It was time for the woman to realize that this interaction would happen on Tala’s—and Rane’s—terms, their first showing not withstanding.

A portal opened to the holding place within her sanctum and a flurry of siege-orbs shot out, each cracking the air as they targeted various potential weak points in the house and on the crazy old woman.

The aura that Tala had been trying to pin down suddenly solidified, becoming easy to distinguish… it was yellow, barely tinted toward green.

What? That can’t be right.

Even so, the color deepened—without changing tint—around each of her flying siege orbs, the area somehow seeming oversaturated with the sickly yellow hue.

As for her siege orbs?

With a small pop of something that was almost magic, each seemed to be transformed into a fleshy eye in less than a blink of time, even as they continued on their gravitationally empowered arcs.

Her authority over them was utterly shattered at the same time. The shift in what they were broke Tala’s workings too, but that hardly mattered. Their targets were set, for all the good it would do.

Even so, the eyes rotated in the air to regard Tala for the briefest moment, each shooting a scorching beam out to slam into her armored form.

The attacks were more physical than she’d expected, along with the energy brought along for the strikes.

While the heat forced Tala to bleed it off with her mastery over her iron and the white steel, the impacts tossed her backward, despite all that she did to remain in place. The strikes would never have breached her defenses even with far longer exposure, but that hadn’t seemed to be their aim.

They might have been able to hurt her if given enough time—though it would likely have taken long minutes—but less than a second later, the eyes splattered, each against its intended target.

As one slapped the old woman in the head—causing her to jerk back and curse—Tala felt grateful to have at least gained them a little bit of a distraction.

She decided that something odd was going on here, and it might be a good idea to try to solve things with words, or at least to see if they could.

“We aren’t here for you!” Rane’s voice boomed out before Tala could act on her choice.

I love how in sync we are sometimes.

The old woman’s voice came back, seemingly originating from everywhere at once, “Don’t care. Die, scourge!”

Well… that was rather definitive…

At the same time, as if accompanying her voice, the soup of authority and power came crashing back down on Tala once again.

She simply couldn’t keep it at bay, despite easily overpowering the contesting authority wherever she clashed with it directly.

It simply flowed around her efforts, encroaching wherever she wasn’t focused with a speed that would put a charging horse to shame.

Tala was a body-builder, trying to hold up the rain.

-Well, this is frustrating.- Alat conveyed grinding teeth that she didn’t have, as she tried to help Tala throw off the wet blanket of an aura that was continually pressing in.

Rane’s attempts to shoot himself forward kept being stifled by similarly flowing attacks against his authority. As such, he had quickly determined to take a different tact and simply charged forward with quick, powerful strides, Force already in hand.

Then, the house was upon them.

Rane and Force somehow passed through the house before a large bit of wood on the back side whipped out, smacking him on the back of the head and sending him tumbling once more.

How did that even connect? She grimaced internally. Did it? Or did his magic move him out of the way?

-I think it moved him? I don’t recall hearing an impact, but there is a lot of noise coming from that old house…-

Tala didn’t feel like having a house step on her, so she jumped to the side, lashing out with Flow even as the chicken-foot came down hard, making the ground shake all around her.

As it turned out, however, the chicken-foot that she hit was an illusion… an illusion that had been perfectly replicated all the way through so that it appeared real even to Tala’s threefold sight.

It had been real enough to shake the ground too, somehow…

Regardless, Flow went through without any resistance, and then Tala was stomped into the ground with the literal weight of a house on her back.

She hadn’t even seen the leg coming before it caught her.

Rust this.

She didn’t have the aura authority to flicker away, but she did have Kit.

A portal opened below her, and she dropped through. As soon as she was fully in her sanctum, the portal closed and another opened before her, spitting her out above the offending house.

She was done playing.

This crazy lady wanted to fight to the death? Tala would give her what she wanted.

Tala opened her mouth—and a new portal within it—and let out the last burst of compressed air from her sanctum lung.

Pointing down as it was, the line of power couldn’t extend as far as usual before igniting, so Tala specifically reduced the power that the containment scripts in her mouth imparted.

As such, the roaring explosion started directly above the house, showering over it, like a flood of flesh-eating insects crashing over a corpse.

The entire thing eroded in that single short breath.

It seemed like the brief, furious battle was over.

Except that Tala had been watching closely.

She opened a new portal across her back, sucking in more air as quickly as she was able, creating enough force that her descent slowed to an almost lazy drift downward.

As to what she’d seen?

-That old hag wasn’t real?-

Oh, she’s real, she just wasn’t there. Somehow. Any luck finding out what she is?

-How’d you know I was looking?-

Because I really wished I’d had time to go through Master Grediv’s books so we might understand what this is. It’s clearly taking two Paragons to engage it so…?

-Ahh, how nice it is to be us.-

Indeed. So?

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

-Baba Yaga. It is unknown if there is more than one or not, as none have ever been captured or killed. She is a Refined level threat from the Paragon book. Not human or arcane… not really, though she is closer to them than us. Immortal, but she seems to like to eat children. She is theorized to be the ancestor or creator of the bog hags.-

Tala felt her entire body flash cold before a raging heat bloomed up from within her soul. Eating children as a general rule was bad enough, but something else had struck closer to home. Bog hags…

Alat didn’t let Tala sidetrack her. -She is an absolute master of authority. Apparently a boon was used in the past—by a grieving parent—to wish her dead. The god-beast could not fulfill the request and the boon was used for something else.- Alat conveyed a poignant pause, even while not wasting the time to actually give such. -The god-beast was Anatalis.-

Rust again. But something within Tala didn’t care.

-She uses illusions and… Reality curses apparently? Some believe she is the origin of dasgannach, but Master Grediv recorded that he didn’t put much credence to the theory.-

Please keep the information to just what I need to know, Alat.

-Right, sorry. No gate, but she’ll have several enslaved to her will. That’s one of the reasons for her… tastes in eating. One theory is even that bog hags that successfully eat enough children become Baba Yaga, but that hasn’t ever been proven. Regardless, those souls are the source of her power, but she can draw from her environment as well. I’ve conveyed all this to Enar, and through him to Rane.-

Thank you.

There was a massive crash, drawing Tala’s attention.

Rane was fighting back and forth with an old woman wielding a large… pestle?

It looked like a massive grinding stick for processing herbs for use in alchemy and other recipes.

It was somehow turning Force aside, despite the obviously Paragon level magic behind each of Rane’s precise, powerful strikes.

-Last thing, There is a note: Kill if possible, but don’t trade lives. She is notorious for tricking her enemies into doing so, only for their friends to find that they’ve been slain killing an incredibly convincing illusion.-