“What do you have in mind?” asked Ket, suspicious of my sudden surge of enthusiasm.
“You’ll see.”
Emrys was leading the non-combatants who’d escaped the circle toward the shelter of Coll’s tent, out beyond the edges of the skynet. I zoomed ahead of them where, inside the tent itself, a pair of gnomes had already made themselves at home. Swift and Cheer had clearly been in there the entire time, and were happily rummaging through the humans’ belongings as though nothing was amiss outside.
Whenever I’d tried to command them in the past, they’d complied only reluctantly, and completed whatever task I’d set them with the barest minimum of interest. Now, though, matching grins split their faces when I selected an ability from their Augmentary menu and pointed them back in the direction of the main camp.
The two scavengers pushed their way outside, heedless of the line of denizens streaming in from the opposite direction. They headed straight for the nearest skynet support.
A shriek came from the fallen tent. Thatch erupted everywhere as the dire badger burst free, flinging poor Flea against the barricade and shaking itself off vigorously. Its cloudy eyes gleamed as it spotted Swift and Cheer moving toward the next support pole.
“We need to distract it!” Ket wrung her hands, sparks showering from her wings as she flitted from side to side in distress.
“Already on it,” I told her.
As Swift and Cheer continued to move around the outskirts of the camp, I focused on Binky.
Spit! I commanded.
The missile hit its mark. The dire badger shrieked in either pain or rage; as a species, they were internally resistant to most toxins, but that didn’t prevent its fur and skin from sizzling beneath the venom. It turned its full attention onto Binky, then charged the spider. Just as I’d hoped it would.
Run!
Binky scuttled away, leading the badger on a merry chase through the trees—and most importantly, away from Swift and Cheer. What I hadn’t realized was that the blond-haired child had attached herself to her eight-legged rescuer. She clung to Binky’s furry back as he scuttled ahead of the dire badger; her hair streamed wildly in the wind, and she screamed in what should have been terror but sounded suspiciously like delight.
There was a creak of wood, and the already crooked skynet lurched even further askew. Swift and Cheer were almost done.
All right, Binky, come back!
He hadn’t gone far; Binky might be growing more independent the more terrestrial he became, but he couldn’t yet leave the boundary of my SOI.
As the spider led the rogue dire badger back into the camp, Swift and Cheer sprung the trap.
The skynet dropped.
Unlike when the builders would dismantle it at the start of each day’s march, there was no careful folding of the webbing or retracting of the supports. Instead the entire structure came crashing down. The support posts toppled inward, some of them splintering against the wagon barricade as they fell. Luckily the slingers still standing on the wagons had been alerted by Cheer, who’d let out a victorious cry as she sabotaged the final post; they all managed to duck safely against their wagons’ outer edges.
No longer held taut by the supports, the sticky web that gave the skynet its name was now draped over the entire area, trapping everything beneath it. The instant it fell, I sent Binky in; the arachnid danced nimbly across the net, cutting free the warriors and acolytes at the center and ensuring the dire badgers were properly bound. He moved quickly, heedless of the wild-haired child perched calmly on his thorax like she’d been riding giant spiders her entire life.
The enemy dire badgers thrashed wildly against their bonds. How are they still fighting?! It was almost as though they didn’t feel the pain of their wounds. Two of them had venom burns from Binky’s Spit attack; all had suffered numerous nasty cuts and scrapes from either badger claws or gnomish weapons; and the one that had led the initial charge was still bleeding copiously from the shrapnel wounds in its face. Yet still they bit and clawed, snapped and snarled, even as their sticky bindings rubbed painfully against their fur and flesh.
Suddenly, all five of them fell quiet. Their struggles stilled. At the exact same moment I received a flash of emotion—relief, as well as triumph—from Ris’kin. The dire badger queen was finally defeated.
A soft whimper rose from the fallen skynet. The dire badger with the bloody face mewled pathetically, attempting to curl up into a ball but prevented from doing so by the sticky webbing. Gneil was already making his way toward it, wielding a cloth and a waterskin, but its fellows began a pained chorus of their own, all five of the wounded animals squirming and whining.
“Ket,” I murmured to my shell-shocked sprite, “what in all the hells just happened?”
Thirty-Eight
Not Crying
Benin
New ability acquired: Levitate
Levitate
(Evocation ability)
Balance the forces of air and fire, producing a ‘cushion’ of extreme thermal energy that allows the caster to levitate.
Cost: 10 mana per second
Benin found himself laughing uncontrollably as he fought for balance.
Who would’ve thought a pyromancer would be able to master levitation? They don’t teach that shit in the Guild.
He hovered almost a meter above the forest floor, the air beneath him shimmering with heat haze. The ground in the clearing below was blackened and smoking from all his previous failed attempts.
The air was a strange beast; it almost felt like trying to stand on a constantly tilting surface that was covered in ice. The concentration required to maintain it for more than a few seconds was—
“Argh!”
His arms windmilled as he lost his balance. Though momentary, the distraction made him lose his hold on his mana, cutting off the supply needed to maintain the spell. The treacherous ‘cushion’ that had kept him afloat dissipated, and Benin dropped to the ground, landing hard amid a pile of singed leaves.
Despite the slip-up, this only made him laugh harder. He couldn’t remember the last time
