Indeed, my threat sent a palpable chill through their group.
But suddenly, Gourry leaped forward! He pushed Alaina to the ground, tumbling with her, just as a laser tore through where she’d been standing. I turned and saw a gray silhouette suspended in a tree—the Spider Zanaffar!
“Don’t falter!” Lukoria, the guy in the arachnid armor, shouted. “Trust in my Zanaffars! They may have a way to cut through the armor, but I’ll bet that’s all they have! Their spells still won’t work on us!”
Tch! He saw through the bluff! Still, the fact that this Lukoria guy called the armors his Zanaffars suggested he was the one who’d made them!
“But...” Lucida of the winged Zanaffar landed next to Spider.
She must have seen the others gathering here and come to rendezvous. That made six of them, which, based on what Zel had told us, meant this was all of the Forest Hounds. I sure hoped it was all of the Zanaffars too.
“They’ve already defeated Cashdial! Our Cashdial!” Wings rambled on in panic.
“Remain calm and fight!” Spider bellowed, trying to shout her down. “Just line up and fire a solid wall of laser breath, and we’ll kill them easily!”
Crap! That would be pretty tough to dodge!
“But the trees!” Heavy Armor argued.
Spider brushed him off. “Which would you rather do, damage part of the forest now or turn it over to the humans and watch them abuse it?!”
“...”
“We’re doing this!” Spider ordered.
“Dil Brand!” I incanted the second those words left his mouth! This spell caused the ground between our two parties to swell and rupture! I used the dust cloud it created to... “Run!”
With that, our group made a break for it.
“Don’t let them get away!” Spider shouted after us. I felt an inescapable malice swell up behind me—a whole barrage of laser breath! Using my Dil Brand to set up a smoke screen before they could form ranks prevented them from aiming precisely, but they were bound to hit us sooner or later at this rate.
“Dark Mist!” Zel summoned a black haze behind us to obscure their vision further. It had the power to cancel out even magic light, though I doubted it would stop laser breath.
Just then... a figure in white appeared in the fog ahead of us!
“Aqua Kaleido!” As the new arrival incanted a spell, the scenery around us briefly warped, then returned to normal. A scream rose up behind us.
Part of me wanted to see exactly what had happened, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the sight in front of me. “You’re here?!”
“I made it!” Amelia Wil Tesla Saillune pronounced with a dashing pose and grin.
In that moment, I saw it.
The city of Atessa, awash with the sounds of battle from outside its walls. Its people, holed up inside their homes, trembling in fear. Knowing we’re out there fighting for them, the soldiers on the guesthouse terrace stare fixedly toward the unseen skirmish. A maid comes running up to them and says... “Princess Amelia has gone missing again!” Then the whole crew faceplants.
I couldn’t help feeling like something along those lines was happening right about now.
After dwelling on that vision for a moment, I pulled myself back to reality. I’d gotten a few inklings so far about how much the princess of Saillune had matured since we’d last traveled together, but it seemed she was still the same old Amelia at heart. I wanted to lecture her about responsibility, except this really wasn’t the time.
I turned around to see what had happened behind us. Scattered through the air over a fairly wide area were endlessly shifting fragments of blue, green, white, and brown. The best way I could describe it would be a kaleidoscope.
The reason the scenery had seemed to warp around us momentarily before was probably because we’d run right through the effect. I just hadn’t had time to work that out before all returned to normal. But now I could see what had been wrought on the other side...
The enemy’s laser breath had punctured Zel’s Dark Mist, dispersing its darkness. And beyond that, the Forest Hounds all stood around, staring... at the Heavy Armor Zanaffar with a giant hole in its stomach.
“H-How...?” whispered Wings in a daze.
And as if triggered by her words... Thunk. Heavy Armor fell to its knees and then collapsed.
“Londium!”
“Hey! Wake up!”
The other Hounds all called out to their comrade. Parts of Wings’s armor briefly opened up and folded back, becoming a lighter set of mail. Its wearer, Lucida, ran up to Heavy Armor and began chanting a spell. Healing magic wouldn’t normally work on someone completely enveloped in a Zanaffar, but given the hole in Heavy Armor’s abdomen...
“What are you doing, Lucida?! Don’t take off your armor!” Spider scolded her.
“We have to withdraw,” Cyclops whispered, his eyes cautiously fixed on us.
“Don’t be a coward!” Spider barked back.
“They just reflected our laser breath!” Cyclops rebuked him.
Wait... “You reflected the laser breath?!” I whispered in disbelief, casting a glance back at Amelia.
“More like I refracted and diffused it!” she proclaimed, still staring down the Forest Hounds.
“Amelia... you can use a spell like that?” I was stunned.
“When we beat that Zanaffar before, I thought about the potential risk of the creation method getting out! Then, after I returned to Saillune, I collaborated with the sorcerers’ council to work out a spell to counter it just in case! It’s an adaptation of a spell that controls wind to create illusions, to which I added in a little water magic to create something capable of refracting and diffusing laser breath!”
She worked out a spell like that?! I couldn’t help being impressed. But then something occurred to me. “Wait a minute, Amelia. How’d you know we were fighting Zanaffars? We didn’t tell anyone in town...”
“You said they fired lasers and were immune to attack spells! What else could they be but Zanaffars?!”
Well, girl had a point! Amelia had already fought one Zanaffar with us, so it only stood to reason she’d be able to peg it from that description.
“And since I have a spell that can fight laser breath, I knew I had to help! I wasn’t trying to reflect it back on them, but it looks like I got lucky with the refraction and diffusion!”
Another bit of dumb luck. Still, for the Forest Hounds, the fact that we’d just taken out two of their Zanaffars so offhandedly must have been a massive blow to morale. I saw no sign of more reinforcements showing up as we squared off either, which told me this was really all of them.
“We have to withdraw, Tessius!” Cyclops urged him again. “We acted too soon! We’re just going to see more damage at this rate!”
Selfish as usual, I found myself thinking in disgust. You get your little Zanaffar toys and get all riled up to attack a city. Then when one of your own gets wounded, suddenly it’s gone too far and you want to stop? What are you, a child?! I would’ve loved to have given them a piece of my mind, but it wasn’t like I wanted them to knuckle down and keep fighting, so I decided to keep my mouth shut.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Spider howled. “After all this, you expect me to back off because it’s too risky?! They burned my face! They violated the forest! They took out Cashdial and Londium! And you want me to just back down? We can do this! And we will! We just need the Zanaffars I created!”
“Even without the laser breath?” Cyclops whispered bitterly.
“Lukoria,” Tessius said firmly. “It’s time to retreat.”
“Fine,” Spider responded, just as firmly. And then...
Heavy Armor sat up!
“What?!” A shiver ran through Cyclops.
“What the— What?!” Tessius exclaimed in panic.
Lucida, who’d been sitting by Heavy Armor and casting healing spells, suddenly saw her light armor transform, spread its wings, and envelop her. Then as she yelped in surprise, it spat her out onto the ground. She turned back in shock and saw the armor, now masterless, take the form of the winged Zanaffar.
What was that?!
“So be it. I’ll fight on my own,” Spider declared.
It was then that I put it all together. Although somewhat dissipated now, the white mist was still hanging in the area around us. I hadn’t realized it at first because of that, but I could now see that the countless tentacles extending from Spider—which had looked like a web while it was in the trees—had lashed out to grab Heavy Armor, Cyclops, Horns, and Wings.
“What... in the world...?” Lucida spoke tremblingly.
We all watched as the Zanaffars came together, pulled by Spider’s tentacles. Only Heavy Armor was released, falling to the ground. Parts of the other four armors opened, allowing them to attach together and merge into a single giant mass. The change happened so suddenly that Tessius and Sagan could do little but cry out in surprise.
Once the amalgamation was complete, the final form... didn’t resemble anything in particular. It was about the height of a two-story house. Horns and Cyclops were back to back, with Spider standing atop them forming a twisted sort of head. Some of Spider’s legs were clamped down on the Zanaffars below, while others waved wildly in the air. Wings had been split up into several pieces to plant wings of various sizes here and there across the mass.