A mountain of lime-colored, bubbling foam spotted with luminous dots of pale blue light all over its frame; that's what stood before Kurt, huge enough to cover the house whose lawn its was occupating from sight.
The thing made a sharp, sizzling sound, like a rattlesanke's or a soda can opening, and, as the bubbles popping from its frame began sizzling, it started to move forward.
"Fuck!" Kurt cursed through gritted teeth as he conjured his wand, which immediately exploded with crimson light. He shot a volley of seven fist-sized Fireballs at the thing's center. The superheated missiles coursed through the air like shooting stars in the night sky, and collided with the seltzery hide of the construct.
And then...they sank into it. It was like dropping an aspiring in a puddle: the liquid swalloed them, sizzled a bit more violently for a few seconds, the sections that had taken in the spells actually boiled a bit, and that was it. The thing hadn't even broken its snail-like crawl.
It was then that Kurt's suspitions were confirmed.
Huge, slow, and without anything vital to it that could be targeted for an easy kill. The thing was tailor-made for a battle of attrition. The masked bastard had sent an enemy Weaker than anything Kurt had faced in this quest his way, but one that was simply to big and unnatural in its composition for Kurt to dispose of with any kind of celerity.
And to make sure he didn't just bail, he had aimed it towards the innocent.
Feeling his anger rise even more, Kurt turned to the marked house. It was a thoroughly normal building, and Kurt had no problem picturing a small, happy family living in there. A mom, a dad, one or two children, maybe a couple pets...
Bile rose to his throat. And the skeletal remains of one Audrey Matthers flashed past his mind's eye.
Had Conrad told the masked bastard about that too? He had Kurt lament and mourn the poor woman's death. Did he relay even that to his partner in crime, who had then gone and used it as an inspiration for this?
He felt his emotions beginning to churn again within his chest, paining him beyond belief. He had to move. He...he couldn't let that happen again.
He blasted away from the crawling mountain, crossing the street in three strides. As soon as he felt his sneakers's soles dropping the houses's lawn, he dropped his weight forward and jumped, aiming for the big, drape-covered front window that overlooked the street.
He crashed past the glass without so much as slowing down. The shards rained down on his skin, only to be deflected by the sheer force contained withing his od-flaring flesh. Cycling some extra life force to his eyes, Kurt scanned his surroundings and, once again, felt crushed at how utterly, beautifully mundane it all was.
A TV nearly a decade old bolted to the wall to his right, facing a cozzy looking brown leather couch; Standing between them was a cofe table, its surface dominated by gossip magazines and a couple coloring books whose covers were scratched by crayons, as though their owner hadn't been able to wait until opening them before unleashing their artistic urges. Kurt had actually seen books like this, back at the order. They bought them for the younger kids.
These were the kind meant for ages six to eight.
Somewhere deeper within the house, a dog began barking, and from the hall to Kurt's left, light flared from behind a closed door.
He moved quick, his wand trailing with Glamour. From the room at the end of the hall, which had its door open and looked like the garage, a scruffy-looking mutt came dashing for him. The tag on his collar read CARL. Kurt easily side stepped the critter's clumsy lunge, and a flick of his wrist was enough to cover the little one's head in a thought-interrupting bubble of Glamour.
From the door to his right, the one leading to the lit room, he heard a amn and a woman whispering hurriedly.
They sounded very scared.
Swallowing his guilt, Kurt turned the knob and pushed the door open, charging into a room dominated by a double bed. There were to people in that room: in the bed, a thirty-something woman screaming her lungs out. Her hair was auburn and long, disheveled by her pillow, and her face was round with a healthy amount of fat. Standing besides her was a rotund man with a black mop of hair and a short beard. He didn't scream. Instead, after a fraction of a second of looking just as scared as his wife, he gritted his teeth and charged at Kurt, intent on tackling him down.
Whispering a mental apology, the boy flicked his wand, which exploded with green light, and conjured a mattres sized Air Cushion btween himself and the charging man, which he then moved to support with his shoulder.
A mild impact crashed against it, and the man was sent tumbling back. The back of his knees hit the edge of the mattres, and he fell back on the bed, the motion pulling his pajama shirt back enough for some of his beer belly to show.
The woman's screams intensified. She screamed a name, Marshall, and she moved to reach her stunned husband.
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Kurt waved his wand at the bed, leaving a thin trail of Glamour behind, and the woman fell limply on her face, just as the man slumped back. Bubbles of creamy-white mist covered their heads.
Kurt took a moment to read their screens: Marshall Darwin and Velma Darwin, they read. Kurt picked their unconscious bodies, carrying each one on one shoulder, and moved back to the hall. There he conjured another Air Cushion, this one as broad as the hall's width would allow, and placed them atop it. He hoped over the conjured cushion, walked to the hall's threshold, and picked Carl's little furry frame, quickly placing him atop Marshall's chest.
He opened the second door to the right, the last one before the garage. It was a bathroom. He closed it and turned to the door to his back, opened it, and entered a room that was very softly illuminated by a night light shaped like a baby chick. The paperwalls were patterned with nautical imagery: anchors, pirate ships, seahorses...all in blue and violet.
Besides the small bed, decked in orange jammies and all curled up and trembling, was a little boy. Like his mother, his hair was auburn, though lighter due to his young age, and like his mother, he looked terrified. His eyes rose from his knees, locking with Kurt's, and he screamed, fat tears pouring from his eyes. A flash of Glamour made him stop. Kurt moved to pick the boy up in his arms, and he was soon tucked besides his mother. A screen told Kurt his name was Maxell.
His boosted ears caught something from behind the last unopened door in the hall: a wooden door sliding open, then sliding back, alongside panicked little sobs.
Kurt entered that room.
What received him was the quintessential teenage girl bedroom: walls decorated with posters depicting one hot celebrity or the other and personal pictures depicting family and friends. A bed with just enough stuffed animals not to look childish to any potential peer who may come along, and a bookcase stuffed with fantasy, romance, and romantasy novels.
And, to his left, and in-built wardrobe with a slidding wodden door that Kurt quickly opened.
Inside, hudling alongside a bunch of her shoes, was a black-haired girl that couldn't have been a minute older than thirteen, and she too, was crying. She met Kurt's gaze, her bloodshot and brown eyes meeting his dark amber. He must have looked like a maniac to her, ready to rip her apart with the huge sword in his hand.
"M-Mom," she stammered, trying to crawl even further back. Her back hit the wall, drawing a mewling yelp from her lungs. "P-Please..."
Kurt waved his wand. The girl fell limp.
Soon, the entire family was lying atop their shared mattres. Kurt dragged it behind him until he reached the wall opposite to the main door, which was dominated by a wide, slidding glass door leading to the back yard. He opned it as far as it would go, just enough for the mattres to fit through, and proceeded to kick the Air Cushion like a football, sending it and its passengers skittering to the yard's back end, far beyond the construct's planned ddestination.
With that done, he moved to confront the thing. He crossed the house in two strides, hopped out the window he had first crashed through, and landed on the grass of the front yard. The alchemichal blob was now crossing the road, and its huge base covered the two lanes and some of the side walk.
Screaming something unintelligible at the thing, Kurt pointed his wand at it. The spiritual construct shone green, and a Jet Bullet the size of a beach ball shot from it, clashing against the mass's surface and punching a hole in it. But none of the seltzering slime even separated from the main body, and the 'wound' was soon filled up.
The thing kept moving.
Kurt screamed again, and shot another Jet Bullet. This time however, he followed it with a quick Fireball. The air evocation punched another hole into the mass, and the fire one punched into it just as it closed. This time, the entire thing shivered, and some slime seemed to melt of the top of its 'head'.
It seemed, Kurt realized, that the inner part of the mass acted like something of a skeleton for the whole. Not exactly an insta-kill weak point, but something Kurt could work with.
He released a barrage of wind and heat. First a Jet Bullet, then a Fireball. Jet Bullet. Fireball. And so on and on. With each succesful combo a little bit of the construct's mass sloughed off the whole, leaving just a little bit smaller. This startegy was working.
But it wasn't good enough.
Kurt saw his Ap bar void by moments. He barely had more than half of it, and the thing had barely shrunk at all. He would run out of energy long before killing it at this pace. This realization wrecked his nerves even more, and this caused him to misstep his casting, making him release two succesive Fireballs followed by a Jet Bullet.
And then, it happened.
The Fireball was sucked in by the Jet Bullet mid-flight, getting stuck at the air projectile's core. Then, the crimson and green of the two evocations seemed to clash against one another, merging into a dull garnet. The edge of the air sphere began trembling, then vibrating, and then...
Blast.
The entire thing popped like an overinflated ballon, right in front of the construct's 'face', and it did so with force. It was a shockwave, pure sound and pressure, and both at the level of a pipe bomb. It made Kurt's ears ring despite the distance, and its blast seemed seemed to penetrate the slime's body without a problem, piercing into it and hitting its 'skeleton' directly.
The mass trembled, far more than before, and it actually stopped its crawl. Slime positively cascaded from its frame. That one attack had taken as much out of it as all the previous ones combined.
"What?" Kurt gasped, barely hearing himself over his ringing ears.
He looked down at his wand, which was still shinning with the green of wind, and his head filled with questions. His evocations...his fire and wind...they had merged, fused, and turned into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Was that even possible? He had never heard about it, and he had been raisen by a sorcerer specializing in evocations. Even Galton hadn't mentioned it. Could it be that no one had tried before? In the thousands of years and millions of practitioner in the history of sorcery?
No, that...made absolutely no sense.
He...would have to investigate later. But for now...
He attuned his wand's aether to the element of Fire, making the effort of not dispelling its wind first. Again, red and green crashed, merging into garnet energy. Kurt felt the wand thrum violently, the vibrations traveling from his hand to his shoulder, making his joints ache with pain.
When he tried to feed any amount of power onto the garnet hue, it all slipped away before he could do anything with it, dispersing in the form of waves of distorted air. It was as like trying to pinch water: the power just slid away from his hold, and he could do nothing with it.
Of course this was happening. Kurt should have known better than to try an entirely new trick he didn't even understand the workings off in the middle of a fight. He really should have but, at the same timme, he knew he didn't have the option. Nothing else in his arsenal worked.
So he pointed the wand at the slime creature and, remembering his first lesson with Galton, the one about deflecting spells with loose streams of aether, he forced his will forward in the same way, letting a trickle of pure energy emanate from the wand's tip, creating a path between it and the creature. Then, using the weak hold he had on this power, he poured as much aether as he could on his wand, and made his best effort to direct it towards the trail of pure aether.
This worked. By God that it worked.
The street exploded with sound waves of all kinds: high and sharp like a bat's scream, low and mighty like an earthquake's tremors, all of them clashing in a cacophony of pure noise, all of them poised for the slime's body.
The bar of chaotic pressure clashed against the construct. Part of its energy washed over its frame like a waterfall dropping atop a boulder, but most of it pierced inside. The thing's frame trembled, vibrated, inflated, and it didn't take long for a mighty, vital splashing sound to emanate from its core.
The lights peppering its frame died out, nig bubbles broke out its skin, poking holes on it that didn't fill back up, and the lime foam that formed it lost all color and dried, collapsing in a pile of snow like flakes, revealing the path of scorched earth and bleached asphalt.
Kurt saw this while barely hearing it, for his ears still ringed.
Then, the screens appeared.
Wave Sorcery: Chaotic Howl (Rank D Spell)
An unrefined emanation of pure noise, mixing super-high and super-low frequencies without any order or reason.
Power increases with MND stat, Aetheric Attunement skill rank, Evocation skill rank and SP spent.
Evocation has gone up by a level.
