Zagaroth
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348: Life of the Party
🕑 Added 2025-11-01 18:22:37 +0000 UTCAmrydor dashed out from the ice at the same time as everyone else, but a bare moment's consideration kept him from trying to pursue the wizard. He simply was not fast enough to keep up, and there was something else he could do while those with healing magic were occupied with the person that Amrydor assumed was their target, Dimitri.
He stopped by Mordecai's form as he dismissed his polearm and started mentally preparing himself for a somewhat gruesome task. A handaxe should do for most of the large, fast work; a dagger for most if not all of the rest.
Fuyuko almost immediately reappeared out of the shadows, asking, "Amry? What's wrong?"
That basic empathic link might be useful in the future, right now, he was wishing that he'd managed to keep the link suppressed. "Don't worry, I'm just getting ready to help your father. Go take care of Dimitri, and let others know that Mordecai is being looked after." Most of all, Amrydor did not want Fuyuko or Kazue here while he worked.
She glanced down, then quickly looked away, and he couldn't blame her. Amrydor didn't want to look either, and he could only imagine how much worse it was for her. "Right. Um, thank you." Then Fuyuko stepped into the shadows and was gone again.
With that taken care of, Amrydor carefully maneuvered Mordecai's body closer to the center of the corridor to make it easier to operate. Not that this was going to be a very neat job — he had the basic training to do minor surgery and even emergency amputations, but Mordecai's situation was different than most, and Amrydor had healing potions available to deal with bleeding, so he was going to be crude and fast, to get rid of the dead weight.
Literally.
A good portion of Mordecai's body was completely dead, and Amrydor's affinity let him know exactly which areas were dead and which were still alive.
The first thing he decided to do was to bring Mordecai down to four limbs; he'd clearly been shifting back to his normal form, but between his injuries slowing him down and the dead mass to deal with, it had left his shape rather distorted.
Amrydor had removed one of the most damaged limbs, which he was pretty certain was supposed to be a wing, when Xarlug came back. The orc shrugged at Amrydor's look and said, "I can't keep up either. I figured I might as well see if I could help here instead."
"Um, sure." The arrival of the older man threw Amrydor off for a moment as part of him expected Xarlug to take charge, but in this case, Amrydor was the one who knew more. Right. "If you could throw anything we cut off into the ice when there is an opening? I don't think we want a pile of body parts sitting here."
"Yeah, that makes sense. Ah, you said 'we'?"
Amrydor nodded. "I was able to cut this limb off at the joint, but I never even chipped the bone when I hit it. All of the four limbs we're leaving have some necrotic flesh, and two of them require either going up to the next higher joint to get rid of dead bone or cutting through the bone. Almost anyone else and we'd want to go for the joint anyway, but given the way Mordecai heals, I think we're better off just removing dead flesh and letting him regrow shattered bone. Assuming that you can cut through it."
"Alright," Xarlug said with a grimace, "I guess that makes sense. Show me where to cut."
It was grisly work, and the limbs were only the start of it. After that, Amrydor had to cut out other necrotic masses, with new ones appearing slowly. At first, he had been worried that there was something spreading through Mordecai, but then he realized that the dead flesh had been present in a different weird direction, sort of. The combination of clearing away dead tissue, healing potions, Mordecai's regeneration, and his shape shifting, allowed his body to slowly re-surface dead tissue that he had managed to shift away before he had been overwhelmed.
As Amrydor worked, he reflexively repeated the basic healing prayers that he'd been taught. The potency of each spell increased with the amount of time and energy spent on the prayer, though this was only theory to him currently. He had not been affirmed as a champion and priest yet, though having been granted the insight and power to intercept attacks was a hopeful sign.
Eventually, no more sections of dead flesh needed to be removed, and the corridor was cleared of any major bits. It still reeked of blood and dead flesh, but there was a chance for the scent to begin diluting away.
Now he allowed himself to pay attention to Fuyuko's emotional state. Tense, a little stressed, but no signs of distress. Good. Well, good in that it meant that no one had been badly hurt. Not so good in that it meant that the wizard was still alive and active.
After a moment of internal debate, he reached up to touch the earring he had won during his last delve in Azeria. The touch wasn't technically needed, but it helped focus his attention on activating it, and he didn't like having it always on, even for this delve. "I've removed all the dead flesh from Mordecai's avatar, with help from Xarlug. He is visibly healing on his own, but it seems slow for him. Er, you, I mean."
"Thank you for the information," Mordecai's core replied, and Amrydor was pretty certain that Mordecai sounded amused at his verbal fumble. It's not like Amrydor had much practice dealing with this multiple-selves thing. "It's probably best if the two of you remain there for now, just in case. We're dealing with the downside of having given a wizard this much time to prepare for an attack; he's been busy all this time making items and installing glyphs, so he has a lot of freedom to teleport about. It does look like my other self did draw most of Dimitri's deadliest spells, at least, those he'd stored in items, and it looks like he's being more conservative with his personal mana. I'm counting on the two of you to make sure my avatar has the chance to heal."
Well, if he were to guard, it seemed best to learn how to track the enemy by knowing his life signature. Amrydor rolled his neck to crack it and released a mental filter he had on all the noise of life.
Most of the time, he could reduce his awareness to just the people he was interacting with, plus a few people he found impossible to ignore if they were in range. The other information was there, just sort of being ignored, like filtering out all the noise in a crowded market so you could hear the seller you were talking to, but some voices always cut through the noise of the crowd.
He was not surprised to find Svetlana's life force pulsing through her territory was even more intense than what he saw in Azeria, though Azeria had double the layers, as it was the extended body of both Mordecai and Kazue. Amrydor had to start mapping that out so that he could filter it and begin looking past it.
Which reminded him of the surprise about Kuiccihan being a nexus. It wasn't until their party had started toward Artgoi that Amrydor had seen the world without the faint background hum of Kuiccihan's life, and it was only after their return that he'd been able to see her everywhere. It had taken a bit for him to filter
Fuyuko's life signature was still visible to him, but the others took a little more work to begin picking out. Eventually, he had identified everyone from the Azeria team, and a bright knot of Svetlana's life force that had to be her core. Which reminded him that he should probably let Azeria know that he could see their core this way. It was just a little uncomfortable to talk about.
That left only one unknown. At least, on this side. There were also some life forms out in the ice, but they were not approaching. He did not know why they hadn't attacked while the party was crossing, but Amrydor saw no reason to bother them as long as they did not bother him.
Once more, he activated the earring. "I can verify that there is only one other life that I can detect in the area, so I'm pretty certain you are fighting Dimitri and not some unknown cultist or such." Well, complex life; there was the normal faint haze of tiny life. That had been one of the more disturbing discoveries he'd made when he was first awakening this sense.
"Thank you," Kazue's core said, "it's good to know that. This guy is enough of a problem as it is."
"Unfortunately," Mordecai's core said, "we had to do one of those things you should avoid doing; you should never give an enemy the time and resources to prepare, especially a spellcaster. Giving a nexus time to prepare can be just as bad as with a mage, though in this case, we are fairly certain that Svetlana is only cooperating to the minimum. Even so, under Dimitri's direction to create lethal zones, these last two zones have been very problematic."
Amrydor was pretty certain that he didn't want to know how much worse these two zones could have been if someone like Mordecai had been enthusiastically in charge of them, yet he found his curiosity prompting him to ask, "What would you have done differently if you had been making basically the same sort of zones?"
"Hmm," Mordecai's core said, "Well, I probably wouldn't have pushed the blocks to be as cold as they were. Just cold enough to make sure they were solid would have been better; this would have created more liquid water and more issues with slush, a block could break apart suddenly under you, and over all it would make everything more treacherous and unpredictable while costing less energy. With that saved energy, the ice and water could have been turned acidic, which would be very troublesome to deal with, given how a delver would be wet all the time."
Yep, he shouldn't have asked. Amrydor wondered if Mordecai's descriptions were going to give him nightmares. Xarlug was silently laughing at Amrydor's expression while he listened in.
Thankfully, Mordecai's core had only just started to detail the ways that simply shaping the grains of sand precisely would have made them much more deadly when his avatar began to stir. "You should stop now," his avatar muttered, "the boy's expression is entertaining, but that might be a bit too much."
"Oh good, I'm awake. Er, and sorry if I got carried away there. Now, how quickly can you be ready? It sounds like they are wearing Dimitri down, but he's still being troublesome."
Mordecai began testing the movement of his body as he said, "Update me while I work on that; I am thinking fast enough for you to use the high-speed code." He then waved off Xarlug and Amrydor, who had both been ready to help him up. "Thank you, but no. I need to be able to get up and walk on my own. If I can't even do that, my presence will only hinder."
That made sense, but it still didn't feel right to just stand there while Mordecai slowly figured out how strong and mobile his body was before he unsteadily got to his feet. He walked in a circle a few times before he nodded. "Alright, I am functional enough, though not a lot in the way of physical reserves. Need to remember to thank Moriko's parents again, without those supplies, I would still be down, if this body had survived at all. Hmm. You two should be ready to guard me; I am going to be a bit slow and may be distracted."
Amrydor nodded. "Yes, Sir," he said, then summoned his war scythe at the same time that Xarlug summoned his naginata.
While Amrydor had been able to track everyone's movements, that didn't tell him a lot about the space that they had been fighting in. It turned out that a maze-like network of short tunnels had been created with curving corridors and oddly shaped intersections. Perfect for ambushes and well-suited to keep someone from being surrounded.
Mordecai took charge of leading them, silently pointing down corridors as he brought them close to the ever-moving fight. They were in the general vicinity when Mordecai paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. Then he winked at Amrydor and put his finger to his lips before... Amrydor blinked as he sorted out his senses, then nodded, keeping his mouth shut. It would be too easy to say the wrong thing. Then Mordecai motioned them forward again.
For all that Dimitri was teleporting to his premade sigils, the fight was not moving very fast; the mage was moving for better positioning, not to run away, so it was not hard to catch up. Mordecai glanced down a side corridor just before the mage teleported into that area, and Xarlug's reflexes were fast enough that he was charging down the corridor to attack before Amrydor had fully registered Dimitri's arrival.
Xarlug's attack forced Dimitri to dodge, meaning that his lightning bolt entirely missed the orc, but that had not been his target anyway.
Amrydor had simply thrown himself down a different side corridor, the opposite way from the direction Mordecai was moving, then he immediately jumped back and threw his war scythe as if it were a spear. Dimitri deflected it with a gesture that didn't even seem to be a spell, but a cut slashed across his arm despite the polearm missing him.
The mage swore as he fended off Xarlug at the same time. Amrydor was certain that Dimitri was about to teleport away again, but then a single word was whispered out of the shadows.
"Grow."
The word was a command echoed hundreds of times over; Amrydor couldn't see the magic, but he could see Svetlana's life force surging, slamming itself against invisible barriers as it eagerly responded to a command that rippled out from points beyond Amrydor's life sense. The nexus physically responded to the attempt to obey the command, shuddering and twisting in ways that should have been impossible without collapsing the entire thing.
Dimitri shouted in surprise as he, along with everyone else, was tossed to the floor, sliding as gravity itself seemed to shift in random directions.
Just as the surges started to die down, but before the mage could jump to a new location, he screamed in pain as a shadow briefly covered his left hand in a chomping motion.
For a brief moment, Amrydor saw Dimitri clutching the stump where his hand had been, but then reality flickered and shifted, and Dimitri was a few feet further away, his hand intact.
Mostly.
The mage was staring at his hand in shock when Mordecai stepped out of the shadows of an entirely different crossing corridor, holding the missing finger. The illusion that Amrydor and Xarlug had been following since Mordecai had winked faded out, finally. Amrydor had been starting to get a headache from ignoring Mordecai's real location and movement.
Svetlana's spasms, followed by that tiny temporal hitch, hadn't helped, though Dimitri's contingency had not gone beyond the limits of time magic laid down by Lord Zagaroth.
Panic flashed across Dimitri's face, and he was gone, much further away this time, just before everyone else started arriving.
Comments
Adam Borgeson
Update made to the ending section; I knew I was forgetting something. :)
Daniel Mountain
Suddenly, I hear boss music. And it's coming from Mordi.
