“Heads up!” I shouted toward the Incarnates. “We got company!”
At the speed I was going, my voice probably sounded like rapid-fire nonsense. Truth be told, however, I probably could have saved my breath, as — moving almost in synchronized fashion — the Incarnates broke away from the circle they had formed. The image of Gamma immediately vanished, and then I had no more time to focus on anything other than fighting for my life.
The archer who had previously shot at me was drawing a bead on me with his second arrow. I phased, becoming insubstantial, just as the arrow came flying toward me. As expected, it passed harmlessly through my chest. A moment later, someone thrust a spear through my neck from behind, while two more arrows passed through my midsection.
I was still phased and thus managed to escape injury, but an unsettling fact quickly came to light: as each weapon/projectile passed through me, I noticed that I was starting to feel the contact, despite being insubstantial. With the first arrow, I hadn’t felt anything, but with the spear came the sensation of being lightly touched with a feather. The last two arrows had generated a sensation along the lines of someone lightly tracing a line on my skin with a fingernail.
I fought to stay calm as the horrible truth dawned on me: whatever was fueling these sculptures had not only granted them super speed, but was also giving them the power to affect me while phased.
Deciding to go on the offensive, I focused on the first archer I’d seen and teleported his head to a corner of the room. Much to my surprise, the archer’s body — instead of collapsing to the ground — calmly nocked another arrow.
Of course — these things weren’t actually alive. They were being animated by some force, directed by some other being’s will. They didn’t really have eyes, brains, and so on. Thus, merely removing its head was not enough to incapacitate it, as it would have done with a living creature.
Taking a different tack, I phased one of the archer’s legs; off-balance, it toppled over and smashed to pieces as it hit the floor. Now that it was gone, I noticed two of its fellows nearby also taking aim at me. Understanding that they were quite likely the source of the two arrows that had been aimed at my gut, I telekinetically grabbed them and smashed the two statues together like a wrecking ball slamming into the side of a building. They fractured and crumbled to bits almost immediately.
I watched for a moment, half-fearful that the shattered fragments would somehow reassemble themselves. Thankfully, they stayed where they’d fallen, appearing now to be nothing more than broken chunks of stone.
Feeling a little flush with victory, I was giving myself a mental pat on the back when another spear-thrust lanced me through the shoulder blades and sent the tip of the spear poking out through my chest. This time, the contact felt like someone tapping me on the shoulder to get my attention. This thing was getting real serious, real fast.
Spinning around, I found myself facing one of the armored squid-things; it was holding the weapon that, presumably, I’d just been run through with. Deciding not to waste time, I telekinetically grabbed it by the legs. Wielding it almost like a mace, I swung it around aggressively, slamming the squid creature into two others of its kind before forcefully smashing it to the floor in a maneuver that would shatter it completely.
Finding myself with a small reprieve, I quickly swept the room with a gaze and noted that an intense battle was going on all around me, with the statues rabidly attacking the Incarnates. That said, there was an incredibly eerie quality to the conflict, and it took me a second to figure out what it was: unlike in the movies, where people are always screaming battle cries during skirmishes, none of the combatants were making any noise.
The statues, of course, were…well, statues; it wasn’t surprising that they were rather muted. However, the Incarnates also battled in silence, saying nothing as they fought the stone figures. But, despite the lack of war cries, the fight was no less intense.
Mariner wielded a watery sword that, oddly enough, seemed to be bathed in flames. Whenever he touched an attacker with it, the statue would immediately be blasted apart as water violently erupted from a score of places along its frame. (It put me in mind of a balloon being rapidly filled with water until it bursts.)
Pinion didn’t have a weapon, but the gear that had previously circled the brim of his hat was now on the floor and had grown to a size I pegged at six feet in diameter. It rolled around the room with the force of a locomotive (and seemingly at Pinion’s direction), purposefully crushing and grinding anything in its path (which, thankfully, was limited to the attacking statues).
All of the other Incarnates were engaged in the fight as well, but before I could get a more specific idea of what they were doing, the entire room suddenly shook like an earthquake had struck as a fulminant and agonizingly shrill noise rang throughout the place. It was like nails on a chalkboard — if the nails were replaced with daggers and the chalkboard was your brain — magnified a million times over.
But it wasn’t just a physical sound that I heard; I also perceived it in my head — in a way that had nothing to do with my physical senses, making me realize that the sound was reverberating across all possible levels: mental, physical, metaphysical, and more.
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