Siege State

Tom worried the entire time about Clairvine’s fortitude. Idealists had a stronger constitution, and it only got stronger with every Ideal they had, and every tier they achieved in them. Clairvine had a fall, but he had no idea what tier each of her Ideals were at. Still, he knew she mustn’t have much left to give. Not after the swarm, and using her surge skill. Her control skill probably didn’t use much mana, at least, but it would still be taxing her.

Tom noted that at least a few of the others had cottoned on to Clairvine’s use of a Heart skill to keep their spirits up. None of them said anything. Tom couldn’t say if that was also due to the skill or not. It was certainly not pleasant to know your emotions were being manipulated, but he could understand the necessity. They were still in dire straits.

They made good time through the morning. The soldier they’d found the day before all but clung to them as they moved. They hadn’t been able to get anything other than panicked nonsense from her about where she’d been or how she’d survived. Tom felt for her, but he was mostly just grateful she didn’t slow them down.

As the slanted sunbeams piercing the canopy began to stand up straight, they instinctively began searching for a place to break for their midday meal. Clairvine put her hand to a tree, as she had made a habit of doing every quarter hour or so, and nodded them slightly more northward.

“Little open space under some trees up ahead. Not long ‘til we reach it,” she told them. Their mood lifted a little, all on its own. These small breaks from their endless trek through the forest were the only thing they had to look forward to.

They’d been in the Green for a month now, as long as a regular Reaping lasted. All the other units would be staying out another two weeks. Theirs had ended early, even if it would probably take as long, or longer for them to reach home in their reduced state.

Tom was battered and dirty. His body ached almost as badly as it did after ‘training’ with his father. He hadn’t slept well in weeks. He was strangely content though. This was certainly the most catastrophic situation he had ever been in. He felt he had begun to grow a lot as a person in the preceding weeks. He would surely manifest. He could still feel his revelation sitting in the corner of his mind’s eye, waiting to ambush him. Their woeful state of affairs was also good in the sense that it kept him from prodding at it. Every time he did it flitted away, leaving him with a handful of smoke and a tantalising impression that he was close.

They made their way towards the clearing, looking forward to getting off their feet for an hour. A week of stress had left them all ragged. As they approached, the space between two trees began to shift and swirl. Leaves were drawn into the disturbance, sticks next, and then glowing motes of green light began to slowly brighten and dance in it too. More and more forest debris was sucked inwards. Bark was stripped from the nearby trees by the growing force. Chips and chunks of wood came too. Eventually, it formed a slender silhouette. It was humanoid, with glowing green eyes, but grossly elongated. It loomed over them, eight feet tall at least, with a garland crown of sticks embedded with dancing motes of light. The whole process took mere seconds.

“Wood sprite! Get back!” Clairvine yelled at them, before it managed to fully form.

As she charged straight at it, the group scattered - Gad probably further than was strictly necessary. Sprites were notoriously vicious creatures, cousins to the more robust golems. Particularly high mana concentrations could see The World give one element or another a limited sentience. Golems were more substance than mana though, where sprites were more mana than substance. Only Clairvine would be able to damage it given its mostly mana-based nature.

The fight ended up being brief. As Clairvine charged the creature she thrust her right hand at it, and tiny bright blue petals stormed from her hand. They lacerated the sprite, throwing off sparks as they contacted the energy holding its form together. Its barky outer surface rippled like a puddle in a rainstorm under the barrage.

She leaped at it, throwing her hands outwards and drawing them back together. As she did, wood flowed from nearby trees like water, pooling around her hands and then into a knot as she pressed her hands around it. Landing, she lunged forwards, and the knot burst from her palms and into the wood sprite’s chest, hurling it backwards.

She gave it no respite, charging it and knocking it down with another blast of blue petals. After that, she simply stood above it, firing more blasts of petals into it as it struggled to manoeuvre its ungainly, spindly form to stand. After a few minutes its form collapsed, and verdant light swirled into the air, dispersing, accompanied by an angry buzzing noise.

Clairvine staggered a little as the sprite energy diffused. Tom felt a spike of alarm.

How much energy did she just use? he thought.

Tom rushed to help her but she waved him off.

“I’m alright Cutter, just a little tired,” she said, removing his arm from around her. It was an understatement. Her eyes had deep blue rings under them, and she looked like she was standing through sheer force of will.

He looked at her levelly for a long moment, then shucked her arm around his shoulder again. This time she didn’t complain, and leaned some of her weight against him. It was telling that the proud woman accepted even that much help. Not that Tom could do much more for her. His anxiety began to rise. She would recover, given time, but if she had to spend herself like that many more times on their journey back to Wayrest, it would eventually wear her down to nothing. If they ran into another sprite the fight would go very differently with only spears to defend themselves.

The rest of the group formed up and they moved off on Clairvine’s bearing once more. They stopped in a spot she indicated, less of a clearing and more of a space where all the trees were relatively widely spaced. They began dragging some logs into a rough circle for them to sit, following routines ingrained after a month of travel.

They began to eat, sitting in relative silence, the odd comment made here and there. How they needed to find some more water soon, or how someone’s straps were wearing thin, or asking to borrow a whetstone for a chipped edge. Mundane things. Not quite complaints. Almost as if they all realised how close to the precipice they were, and didn’t want to lose even a finger hold on their precarious position.

They had been obscenely lucky since the swarm, and their first encounter with a truly dangerous creature had reminded them all exactly how delicate the situation was.

Tom realised that Clairvine must have stopped using her Heart skill on them. If the group’s falling spirits hadn’t tipped him off, the returned soldier woman had regressed from mute and pliable, to insane and intractable.

“Teeth and claws and blood and screams and teeth and claws…” she muttered to herself in an unending litany. No one paid her any attention, both assured of the fact that it wouldn’t make any difference, and afraid to provoke her into screaming like when they first found her.

Tom fished his whetstone from his pack for a soldier. As he was passing it to him, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

Was that movement? he wondered. He peered at the tree where he’d seen it, behind the soldier, on the other side of the group. It was a huge oak, fifteen or so feet away.

Nothing, he concluded. Now I'm seeing things. But as the soldier took the whetstone from him something in the tree rippled. Acting on pure instinct, Tom grabbed the soldier’s wrist and hauled him forwards, toppling them both over and pulling the soldier down on top of him.

Over the man’s shoulder, Tom saw something massive flick towards them. The soldier screamed directly into Tom’s ear, leaving it ringing. Shouts rang out from the rest of the group, and Tom could hear them scrambling, but couldn’t see them past the soldier on top of him.

The soldier rolled off him at the same time as Tom went to push him off. His vision clear, he saw the group variously on their backs, scrambling for weapons, or looking for the threat. Tom found his feet quickly, his eyes trained on the tree.

“That tree!” Tom shouted, pointing. “Something moved!”

He needn’t have bothered. No one was paying attention to him, and most of them seemed focused on the tree already. Tom snatched a glance at the soldier he’d grabbed. The man was now sitting on the ground trying to staunch a huge wound in his thigh, taking panicked breaths and screaming through clenched teeth. Gad was gawking at him stupidly.

Clairvine fired one of her bursts of blue petals at the tree. They impacted against a strange rippling in the air, alternately slicing against it and bursting into tiny clouds of blue embers. The rippling shifted about but Clairvine kept the burst trained on it. It was disorienting to watch. Tom had no idea how Clairvine managed the accuracy.

After a long few seconds, the rippling stopped. In its place, perched on the side of the tree, was an enormous mantis-like creature. Even without it using its active camouflage ability it was difficult to see, its skin a mottled patchwork of greens and browns.

It was facing towards them, gripping the tree with its rearmost sets of legs. It watched them with two huge, multifaceted eyes, its comparatively tiny mandibles twitching and clicking as it raised its two scythe-like arms to strike. The monstrous thing must have been almost fifteen feet long itself.

As its arms reached their apex Clairvine fired another burst. The mantis let out a shriek, a bizarre, high-pitched, cloth-tearing sort of sound. It skittered down the tree and towards them, far more quickly than anything of its size should be able to move. Tom could see cuts and pitting all over its front from Clairvine’s petals.

“Get inside its reach!” Clairvine yelled. “Charge the bastard!”

Tom surged forwards. The mantis swiped at him, preternaturally fast, and by some stroke of luck he stumbled at the right moment. He heard a small ping and felt a tiny pressure against his helmet as the massive arm struck against the very top of it by the smallest margin.

He had no time to thank Goddess he hadn’t lost his head. He pushed himself forward, drawing his leaf-bladed short sword. Several others had gotten inside its reach, but their spears and the mantis’ spindliness made the weapons awkward. Several more had flanked it to either side, jabbing at it where they could. Again, the mantis’ slim body and thin legs made hitting it difficult. Gad had no chance with his hammer. It didn’t have the reach, and was far too slow besides.

The giant insect turned back and forth, its scythe-arms striking out. It hit a few more people, and luckily their armour seemed to have taken most of the damage. One woman retreated from the fight, her arm no longer able to hold up her spear properly.

Tom slashed out with his sword at one of his legs. He expected it to be deceptively tough, as most mana-beasts were, but his sword not only bit deep but carried straight through the leg with barely more than a hitch.

The mantis shrieked again, louder. It tried to back up the tree to gain some distance from them, but Clairvine stymied it with more petals. It moved a little awkwardly now, the stump of the leg Tom had cut in half twitching erratically.

Tom took the opportunity to slash at the underside of its abdomen. His sword still cut into it, but the skin on its body proved tough enough to stop it doing any real damage. Switching tactics, he crouched, waiting, and then stabbed deep into the same spot when he saw the chance. This time, his sword sank over half its length into the insect.

Tom felt a grim sense of satisfaction as the oversized insect screamed its frustration into the air. His sword was yanked out of his grip as it scuttled away from him, unable to see what had caused the wound. As it moved blindly away from the source of the pain, it neared the soldiers on one side. One of them stepped forward and thrust and their spear tip pierced its thorax, just under one of its arms.

The soldier held onto their spear for dear life. The mantis, slowed by its wounds, and the spear constraining it, was finished quickly. More soldiers stepped in, sticking it with spears and holding it in place as it bled. Eventually, one of the students thrust up into its head, killing it. Tom breathed a sigh of relief as it slumped to the floor. Gad sidled up and crushed its head with his hammer.

After retrieving his sword and wiping the translucent goo from the blade, he turned to find Clairvine already ministering to the wounded. Only two of the soldiers had taken serious ones; the man who Tom had pulled, and the woman who’d taken a stab to the shoulder. Both appeared to be okay after Clairvine’s healing, although still in plenty of pain.

Better hurt than dead, thought Tom. He studied Clairvine. Her face had taken on an ashen tone. Her hands were shaking as she attended to their injuries. Her eyes were pinched as though she was battling a headache, or struggling to stay awake, or both. She had nothing left. He couldn’t help but feel that it would have been better if the two soldiers had been killed outright.

Tom approached her, “Sir, can I help at all? Can I…”

She cut him off with a weary wave, and laboured her way upright. “I don’t need babying, Cutter. Things aren’t that bad.”

The group had huddled around. A few people shared sceptical glances, but no one had enough energy left to contradict her. They stood in silence. Everyone’s brain spinning endlessly to no effect, like water wheels in a drought.

A long, wild, ululating howl broke the quiet, joined as it descended by a chorus of ragged barks and snarls. The group looked at each other with wide eyes. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like wolves.

Fuck, Tom thought, tiredly.

The rescued soldier continued her litany, “Screams and teeth and claws and blood…”