Blood Shaper - Book 4: Chapter 55

Exhausted and terrified soldiers flocked in from the battlefield, and many of them looked spooked enough to keep running when they saw Kay looming above the camp, holding himself in the air with only his armor. Crusader General Eahn began ordering officers about from his sick bed with a level of confidence and force that surprised almost everyone. Commander Ravenhome began to approach several leaders who looked mutinous, and after a few quiet words in their ears, they suddenly became incredibly supportive of the orders they’d been given. Alice took command of the Shatterplate Order’s troops, a combination of personal magnetism, knowledge of what was going on, and a dash of nepotism rocketing her position in the chain of command upward while her father was busy wrangling half-hearted subordinates.

While they weren’t comfortable going from attacking Avalon to suddenly allying with Avalon to attack a monster, these were Torotian troops; dealing with a giant hazard in the form of a living being was half of their job under normal circumstances, and the hint of familiarity helped ground them and push back the doubts and confusion. It certainly didn’t hurt that Kay had claimed to be under orders from the System itself and that Eahn had accepted that. The nobles and generals who were driven by a desire for glory were even more motivated, the words “fate of the world” driving them forward in an inappropriate but useful way.

‘It’s just standing there.” Kay muttered, watching the leg.

Your summation of its nature is likely correct. It is displaying no behavior that marks it as purposefully hostile, yet its base nature makes it a danger to Torotia. It must be driven away to allow repairs of the dimensional barrier to begin in this region. Too many breaches occurred within a short time of one another, so the barrier must be repaired as quickly as possible to prevent further damage.

“Moving away from killing it?” Kay asked.

Scans of the intrusion reveal that killing it will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. The most prudent action would be to make it too uncomfortable for this limb to remain in this realm.

“How does having one leg in another dimension even work?”

Due to the eldritch nature of the being, even if that information was known by the System, you would be unable to comprehend it in any workable form.

Movement below him drew Kay’s eye, and he nodded at Alice, who was waving at him from the ground. A large percentage of the army below him was formed up, with the injured and those who would be useless against the limb left behind. Kay took off to join his own people who had formed up outside the wall as orders started being barked beneath him, and the army started moving. Kay floated as fast as he could safely go, landing next to Curcius among the officers of Avalon’s small army.

“Has anyone seen Eleniah?”

Curcius nodded, “She captured that hothead like you asked. We ended up tossing him in the cell once all of this started happening since he seemed like he’d just be a problem with getting them to cooperate with the current issue. I asked her to stay back by the gates to make sure no one tries anything. Getting near that thing seems like a bad idea, and she’s pretty limited when it comes to ranged attacks. Plus, the Nelamians are still huddled over there,” He nodded at what remained of the Nelamian army, who’d retreated after Glowl had run but been cut off by the appearance of the leg between them and the exit. They’d ended up with their backs to the valley wall partway between the leg and Avalon’s walls. “And some idiot might get it in his head to try and take the city while we’re occupied with this. If anything like that happens, Eleniah’ll set them straight.”

“Smart thinking. Anything else I need to know?”

“Cindy’s in the back with her people,” He waved behind him toward the back of the formation, “Said she saw something about being needed and I wasn’t going to argue with her. We left the cannons behind since it would be too difficult to move them, but she brought her best sharpshooters along.”

Kay glanced over his shoulder but couldn’t spot his fellow Outworlder through the mass of bodies. “I’m not going to try and argue for her to stay behind, as much as I’d like to. Keeping our second you-know-what back as a secret weapon is tempting, but if she says we’ll need her, I’m inclined to go along with it.” He turned back to look at the unnerving sight of the eldritch intruder, a single scaled leg that stretched into the sky, both two and three-dimensional at the same time and faintly wrong to the eyes. “Once we’re in range, we’re going to start bombarding it with everything we can. No one has any idea how it will react, so keep everyone on their toes.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Yes, my lord.”

Kay rose back up into the air, continuing to use his armor as a shell to pull himself into the sky with. Part of that choice was to continue being a visible deterrent against any one of the other army trying something, but also to clear his surroundings so he could start busting out the big guns. His Sublime Skill wouldn’t last forever, and this was the perfect opportunity to throw as much ordnance as possible at a valid target. Keeping pace with his army, he started gathering as much blood as he could into large projectiles that trailed behind him.

The two armies formed an arc as they pulled into position, and flags started waving while orders were shouted as everyone got ready to attack. When the last group of troops signaled their readiness, Kay kicked things off by accelerating his created weapons toward the limb at high speed. Half-a-doze sharpened wedges launched themselves, and thousands of other projectiles joined the volley as both armies let loose their own attacks. Spells, arrows, bolts, bullets, a few rare thrown weapons, and more flew together in an almost perfectly coordinated barrage, and Kay was reminded of the supposed quote from the war between Sparta and Persia about arrows blotting out the sun.

Kay’s projectiles began to shake and shudder like they were experiencing turbulence, and he had to tighten his control to keep them on target. Swathes of the massed volley began moving in the wrong direction, some headed straight at the ground, others making sudden turns to the side. More and more projectiles started becoming useless as the space around the limb, already a battleground between two warring realities became an inadvertent shield for the leg. Within moments, less than a third of the original volley was still in the air, with some portions of it completely vanishing into nothing.

The six wedges of blood managed to resist the effects thanks to Kay being able to manually keep them headed in the right direction, and he tightened his focus as they made it to the last few feet. With a burst of willpower and mana, Kay forced his attack over the last little bit and slammed the sharpened points home into the otherworldly intrusion, digging his creations deep inside it and letting the contents explode outward. His attack combined the elements of a sabot and a claymore, with hundreds of sharpened stakes erupting outward in a wave of destruction.

At least, that was what was supposed to happen. Between one second and the next, Kay’s attack wasn’t hitting the target, and the smaller blood projectiles launched themselves uselessly out into the open air. Kay stared at what had happened, his eyes wide in shock. Both his eyes and the magical sense he used to control his attack had said he was completely on target, but now the wedges he’d launched were in a completely different place, a few hundred feet lower than he’d been aiming and on the other side of the leg.

As he watched, the few lucky attacks that made it through the warped space also began appearing in areas completely different than where he expected them to go, not a single one of them hit. A few more people, including Kay, launched second and third attacks, trying to probe what was happening, with the same results. Silence fell over the two armies as they stared out at the leg, unsure what to do. That silence was broken by the sound of a single firearm discharging, and Kay’s gaze, along with everyone else’s, was drawn to a single redhead holding a rifle still pointed in the limb’s direction. Seeing who’d fired the shot, Kay whipped his head back around to see what happened. Barely managing to see the bullet before it hit with his tier-five vision, he watched as it actually hit, impacting one of the scales and bouncing off, leaving a faint crack in it.

The gray-green scale, shaped like a diamond and about the size of someone’s hand, began to shift in place and then detached, floating above the leg. The scales around it began to move as well, and soon, there was a swirling cloud of them rotating in place around the leg, making rustling sounds as they flew. They all sounded like someone was pawing through an empty grocery bag, and as more and more joined their fellows in flight, it started to grow deafeningly loud. It was also very uncomfortable to listen to.

After they flew around the leg for almost a full minute, the swarm stopped in place. They sat there silently, unmoving for a few more seconds before the swarm flew out in the direction of both armies. As they approached, it became easier to make them out, and they were just as unsettling to look at as the leg itself, which still looked exactly the same even after all the scales left it. Each scale had the same effect as the main limb, simultaneously two-dimensional at the same time as being three-dimensional objects, but they had an additional effect. Impossibly, Kay could see every inch of the scales as they rocketed toward him and the armies below him, even the portions that were physically impossible to make out. There was no way to see two physically opposite points when one of those points was in front of the other, but he still could. As unnerving as it was, it made it trivial to see how razor-sharp the scales were.

Kay threw up a wall in front of him as the bombardment came, and the bladed scales began slamming into it. Another portion of the swarm attacked the two armies, and soldiers started throwing up various magical and physical shields. Some held while others broke, and as each scale cut into someone, strange and unwelcome effects started occurring among the ranks. Some people had perfectly normal wounds inflicted on them with gashes cut into their armor and their flesh, but not everyone was that lucky. Kay made out one man who had a scale impact on his left arm, only for his right arm to suddenly vanish at the same point. Three scales hit a heavily armored person at once, and the armor disappeared, leaving a confused naked woman there for a brief second before a fourth scale caved her head in.

The wall of blood Kay held up in front of himself began to twist, and warp as he blocked a swathe of the flying swarm headed his way, and he started to fight back, striking the scales out of the sky as best he could as he pushed toward the source of them, step by step through the air.