Fabrisse jabbed at the rune; jabbed at it; jabbed at it once more. The rune refused to budge. “Co on! Co on!” He clenched his teeth, grabbed, twisted, pushed, but the rune just kept spinning gently in the current. Another surge of wind slamd against his back, shoving him sideways. Fabrisse nearly lost his footing, and when he stabilized himself, there were only five seconds left.
“Next surge incoming!” Tommaso shouted as he fired a column of fire at the creature, only to be blown apart, shredded and dissipated by the sheer force of the gale.
The mantis humanoid ceased the tar release and swung back. The updraft beneath it began to gather, and the creature was clearly readying its next attack.
One last chance. There were no do-overs. If he failed now, the next Wind Surge would smash through Severa’s ward, and the mantis would be free to tear the corridor apart.
Maybe . . . I can only interact with it at the exact mont of release.
If that was correct, his timing must be precise.
His fingers hovered just shy of the rune’s center of rotation, and he waited. And waited. And waited.
Now.
Fabrisse slid his fingers along the rune’s invisible arc and closed around it at the exact apex of its pulse. A vibration ran through his hand, and the updraft stretched in a way Fabrisse hadn’t expected. It no longer surged straight down the corridor. Instead, it began spiraling along the walls, curling in a circular current that wrapped around the mantis humanoid. Its wings beat frantically, trying to resist, but the spiral pulled at every limb, forcing it to follow the path of the gale.
Fabrisse’s fingers trembled over the Feather rune. The updraft spiraled tightly around the mantis, pulling it along, but there was sothing else. A thought, a twitch of instinct: what if he guided it, not just let it follow?
Tentatively, he traced a small circle with his fingertip across the rune’s surface. The mantis’s orbit tightened, adjusting to the curve of the gale exactly as he moved. His eyes widened.
I can control it, but if I stop, the rune might stop reacting.
He shouted, “Montreal! I—I can make it follow a path! But I can’t hold it perfectly in place!”
Severa’s voice ca imdiately, “Then keep it in the smallest orbit possible! Now—work my spell!” She’d already cancelled her ward, and was now nurturing a ball of fire in her hands.
Tommaso surged beside her, flas coiling in his palms, ready to et her incantation. “I’m with you. Let’s push!”
In unison, they chanted:
“Fla arise, wrath unbound,
Crush the dark and burn the ground!”
[Spell Cast: Infernal Cataclysm]
They both released a roaring torrent of fire with trails of purple, bright and hot enough to rival the sun. The two streams t, interlacing into a single, massive conflagration, spiraling in tandem with the wind. The mantis imdiately summoned scores of insectoids materializing from its black tar aura to block the attack. The fire struck them head-on, immolating the swarm in a cascade of screeches and fraying chitin.
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Fabrisse kept his hand steady, rotating minutely to maintain the mantis’s orbit, guiding it like a ball on a string.
Keep it in place . . . That’s all you have to do . . .
Severa and Tommaso pushed a step forward, then another, then another. Then, their fire shredded the insect swarm into streaks of glowing debris.
The corridor glowed in bursts of purple, gold, and white. Every hue of fla synchronized with his fingertip tracing the Feather rune as the twin torrents of fla struck the mantis full on. The creature shrieked, and that was the last Fabrisse could see of it under the brilliant light. Too bright! He snapped his eyes shut.
The fire held for a few eternal seconds, before Severa and Tommaso finally released it. Fabrisse finally let go of the Feather rune.
And the corridor was finally silent. The Swift streams stopped moving. The gale died.
The storm had been tad.
[QUEST COMPLETED: Break the Gale Circuit]
Reward: 125 EXP
1 Aetheric Loot Chest (Rare)
Severa stepped forward, keeping herself low enough to qualify as a crouch. The last remnants of fla died away, and Fabrisse could see the second humanoid sprawling on the floor, near the unmoving corpse of the first one. It was still twitching, possibly alive, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
They’d had it.
Severa’s eyes narrowed. Fire gathered at her fingertips again, a pale heat this ti, steadier, controlled. She clasped her hands together over the twitching heap. For a mont, it seed she was about to obliterate it completely, smashing it into ash. But then her hand shook.
She just stared at it for a second without doing anything.
Why is she hesitating? he thought. Maybe she was scared of physically touching the insect.
From the other side of the corridor, light struck the creature, dissolving it from the inside out. Its chitin seed to unravel into green-gold motes, disintegrating completely without a single scream.
W-what was that?
He had seen elental magic, pyromancy, concoction brewing, and just now, the strange Feather rune’s control—but this . . . this was sothing else entirely.
Sothing else had arrived.
They looked up.
A middle-aged man stood at the far end of the corridor. Fabrisse froze, stunned . . . by his bizarre presence. His robe was long and flowing in the color of dark ink streaked with clouds of jade and gold. His hair was straight, black as a raven’s wing, tied high atop his head in a topknot. His face was narrow, and his eyes glinted like tar underneath the scorching sun. He had only ever seen a person with facial features anywhere close to this man, and that was—
“Fabrisse? Is that you?” ca a woman’s voice.
And that was the young woman behind the strange man.
“Zan?” He said, too quietly for anyone to hear. Raven hair, round face, soft cheekbones, and rose-bud lips; that was Zan Ruan alright. She was even keeping the sa straight-cut bangs she’d had back when they were dating, though her attire was different now: a flowing jade-and-indigo robe embroidered with leaf patterns and cinched with a sash holding charms similar to those she’d brought to the Synod back when she was an exchange student.
Tommaso whistled. “Beautiful day. One surprise after another.”
But how is she here? She’s supposed to be in the Jade Kingdom.
He’d thought having two near-death experiences in a day was extre enough, but then he t his ex.
Both Fabrisse and Zan said, in unison, “How are you here?”
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