noct
patreon
340. The Dust Settles
🕑 Added 2025-03-22 14:00:07 +0000 UTCIke and Wisp stepped toward the puppet. Dust still roiled all around it, bursting with blue aether here and there. The aether quieted. The dust settled. From the heart of Mag’s biggest spell stepped a largely unharmed puppet. It had a few small cracks where the spell had directly hit it, but no more damage. Its eyes gleamed with violence. Once more, it locked eyes with Ike, and this time, it charged directly at him.
Ike closed in as well. Behind it, Wisp shot spider thread at the puppet’s ankles. The threads caught it for a second, but it immediately kicked through them. She succeeded at slowing it, but not stopping it.
It would have to be enough. Ike sped to his top speed and pounded the puppet with the Hungry Sword. He pushed aether into the sword for the first time. The sword happily ate his aether and rushed even faster, blades churning so fast they could no longer be seen. The thousands of teeth chipped at the puppet’s surface, gnawing and scratching into the porcelain. Moreso than an ordinary blow, the blades tore up the surface of the puppet and sent dust into the air.
Insight flashed in Ike’s eyes. He activated his lightning palm technique and shot lightning through the dust. Purple light crackled, darting from dust particle to dust particle and setting it alight. The dust burned to ash. Ike scanned the area with his aether, and sensed exactly what he’d hoped: the parts of the dust that were still dust belonged to the puppet, sharing its mana signature, but the parts that had become ash no longer belonged to anything at all. He didn’t even need Lightning Caller. On a small scale, he could chip away at the puppet. It didn’t feel like a meaningful wound, but given that it was the only way he had to injure the puppet at present, if was far more worthwhile than anything else he could do.
The puppet attacked him, no more or less vicious than it had been before. It hadn’t realized he’d managed to destroy part of it. That was understandable, given how little of it he’d destroyed, but it was also good. Ike grinned to himself. It was slow. This was going to be one of the more drawn-out, brutal battles he’d ever been in. But he had a way. A route to victory. It wasn’t a good one. It wasn’t a fast one. But it was one, and that was better than no route at all.
Wisp raised her brows, seeing his expression change. She shot a spiderthread to his shoulder, transformed, and threw herself to his side. “What’s up? Figure something out?”
“Yeah. If you chip dust off him, then burn that dust, you permanently destroy that small part of him, and I don’t think he realizes that we can harm him that way.”
She paused for a moment. “That sucks. That’s going to take forever.”
“Better than it literally taking forever, because he can reform over and over again, and we’ll never be able to leave this place.”
Wisp snorted. “Fair. It is a plan, after all. I don’t have that.”
“It’s definitely not a good plan, no. If you come up with something better, don’t be afraid to speak up. But until then…”
“Yeah, I got it. Better to be working toward something, than be working toward nothing at all.” She shot a thread from his shoulder and darted away.
Thus began one of the longest battles of attrition Ike had been involved in thus far. Even against the giants, there hadn’t been a battle so monotonous, so repetitive. The two of them and Mag all ground at the puppet, scraping off bits of it, then burning those bits away. Slowly, the puppet grew smaller. Imperceptibly at first, so slowly Ike couldn’t be sure it happened at all, but as the days crept by, the puppet surely grew smaller and smaller. One millimeter at a time, its body scraped away by increments, by less than ounces, they destroyed it. Ike learned its moves inside and out, learned how it reacted to attacks and what stymied it, to the point that actual battle became automatic. If there was a number associated with health the same way there were numbers associated with skills, then he was killing this monster less than one health at a time.
The puppet didn’t seem to recognize it. The spark of intelligence it had shown early in battle had dimmed once more, ground away the same way they ground at its resilient body. If it had secrets, it kept them well—assuming it remembered it had secrets anymore. Ike almost found himself mourning the puppet. It had once been a person, as all the puppets had, but over the decades, no, centuries, the person had been ground away, until only the puppet remained. This thing supposedly held a mental skill, but it couldn’t even hold onto its own mind. It was empty. Hollow. Devoid of everything, devoid of goo, of memory, of self. The rare glimmer was all it had left, and even that was gone, now, repressed into the monotony of battle.
Ike’s aether ran down. One day of battle was nothing, even a few days was nothing, but this continuous, unending battle, even if it was monotonous, even if he memorized the puppet’s every move, it still wore at him. Mag was the first to break. The bird-boy winged off to rest and draw mana while Ike and Wisp alone fought the puppet.
Wisp was the next to run low. She tossed a salute to Ike and hoofed it, and Ike suddenly found himself the only ground combatant against the puppet. Mag did his best to cover from the air, but there was only so much he could do. The monotonous battle suddenly became a real fight again. Ike battered the puppet back, then desperately dodged as it closed in on him and unleashed a heavy barrage of blows at him. He used its strength against it, smashing his sword into its arms as it struck at him to knock twice as much dust free, but the mere fact of the heavy clashes meant that he took more damage in the reverb and backlash of the hits.
At last, Ike’s mana ran low. Wisp returned to battle, and he fell back. “Can you take it for a while?”
“Oh, sure,” Wisp said. She bared her fists, giving the puppet a grim look.
“No.”
Both Ike and Wisp stared at the puppet. For the first time in a long time, its mouth opened, and it spoke.
“No.”
And with that, a vast wave of mana welled up from within it, and it rushed at Ike more powerfully than it ever had before.
