noct
patreon
317. Returning For a Skill
🕑 Added 2025-02-27 15:00:04 +0000 UTCUp toward the exit hatch. For the majority of their ascent, no one tried to stop them. They were hardly the only mages on brooms. There were the teachers and students, and a few other mages who floated around, enjoying their rare moment of wakefulness by zipping about on brooms. When they closed in on the hatch, though, that all changed. In a split second, they went from no one, to the center of all attention. All the puppets’ eyes locked on them, and a thousand different mana-senses scanned over their bodies.
“Uh oh,” Wisp muttered.
Ike blinked. Huh? Something about this scenario was wrong. If they were this aggressive toward someone approaching the hatch, then why had no one commented on them arriving? In fact, the man who’d caught them had seemed to be rounding up some rowdy teenagers, not excising a foreign threat. But if that was the case, then they should have been able to approach the exit hatch without much problem. Instead, as they drew near, it was as if they’d drawn the ire of every single puppet.
What’s going on? Is this because we killed this guy? Or was letting us in the strange part?
Even as he thought it, his heart sunk. This was a trap, wasn’t it? Like a crab trap. Easy to enter, with a nice tunnel pointing inward, but hard to exit, with sharp spikes and even the shape of the trap designed to keep its captives inside. They were the stupid crabs, swimming blithely in to nibble some chicken bones, but now the trap was closing around them.
“They’re coming,” Wisp muttered darkly.
“Get to the exit, fast as possible. We need to get out of here,” Ike said tersely. Between Brightbriar, his guest, and the thousands of puppets in here, not to mention the chokehold that was the exit, he’d be lucky to escape alive. The only way to survive this, was to make it to the exit before the trap fully closed.
Wisp flew close to him. She vanished, her broom sweeping into her storage ring, and Ike felt a tiny weight on his shoulder. “You’re the speed demon. Get us out of here.”
Ike nodded. He swooped to the side and snatched up Mag, who immediately started struggling. Without the strand of mana to activate the battery, Mag’s broom fell away. Ignoring the bird boy’s resistance, he poured his aether into the broom and zipped toward the exit.
The flight teachers and their broom-riding students all whipped about in midair at the same instant and hurtled after him in a neat formation that wasn’t at all like the messy flying they’d been doing a moment ago. They went from a wild pack of giggling kids to a silent charge of deadly flyers in the space of a heartbeat.
“Wisp, can you do something about that?”
“On it.” She whipped around on his shoulder and stood up, facing the charging fliers. The teachers stared at her, their eyes blank and faces expressionless. Behind them, the kids zipped along. They raised their hands and fired beams of light at Ike. Unlike the kids’ low Rank, the light from their hands surged with unnatural power. Instinctively, Ike felt that those beams could hurt him, and not just that, but seriously injure him.
He dashed to the side. The light seared past him and slammed into the ceiling. The stone melted, dripping down red hot from the sky.
“Holy shit,” Ike muttered.
“Here I go. Catch me.”
“Huh?”
Wisp spat something from his shoulder. A strand of spider silk struck the leading teacher on the shoulder. She jumped off Ike’s shoulder and swung around the group of flyers. The students shot at her, but as a tiny spider, she was too small of a target for them to hit. Her strand of spider silk wound around all the flyers and pulled them all together, yanking them off their brooms. One or two clung on, but as all the other flyers were yanked toward them, their brooms started to fail, and they drifted downward. Wisp swung around them a few more times, until they were tied up tight, then swung out far from the group of slowly sinking fliers. She dropped way down low, then flew up high, cutting herself from her spider thread as she swung toward Ike.
“Now! Catch me!”
Ike whirled around. He swooped toward her, reaching out. She shot a spider thread onto Ike’s chest and yanked herself toward him. He caught her out of the air, and she swiftly clambered back up onto his shoulder.
“Go, go, go!” Wisp shouted.
Ike nodded. He pressed his foot against the gemstone and poured aether into it. The wild aether leaped into the broom, and it rushed ahead. Lines through the wood glowed as the mana veins through the broom heated up. Smoke began to rise from the shaft, and the wood creaked.
“Whee!” Wisp shouted, gripping tight to his shoulder.
The flying students and their teachers fell out of the sky. More mages rose up from the city, surging up from the streets on their brooms. Ike didn’t look back. He hurtled toward the exit. At the top of the staircase, he threw himself over the railing, abandoning the broom.
Wisp turned back. She shot a spider thread and caught the broom, tucking it away in her storage ring with a swift motion.
“Be ready to fight,” Ike warned.
“I know,” Wisp replied.
“Let me go!” Mag grunted, still struggling in his grasp.
Ike punched the hatch open and leaped up into the automaton room. A wall of the generic dark-haired, masked puppets stared at them. They raised their hands, brandishing everything from rolling pins to darning needles at them.
Ike set Mag down. Wisp hopped down from his other shoulder, resuming her human form.
For a split second, the two groups stared one another down. No one said anything. No one moved a finger.
“We get out of here. That’s our only goal. Smash our way through and get out,” Ike said quietly.
“You got it, boss,” Wisp replied.
“Sky,” Mag requested, hopping in place.
The puppets charged. Lightning flickered over Ike, and he rushed in, meeting their attack.
Comments
PoeticSaint
Tftc
PoeticSaint
Yessir! I was waiting for the other foot to drop! Please be swift!
