✦ ✦ ✦
The spidery leg shifted, taking aim again...
“Drop him!” On my order, Alaina shoved Gourry outside of the wind barrier! Instinctively, Alaina and I moved back slightly to counterbalance.
A blast of laser breath scorched the air between us and Gourry! He continued to plummet, landing atop one of the frozen half-formed golems. Then he took off running!
Meanwhile, I also let go of Alaina’s hand and landed on the second golem flanking Abomination. I ran toward the Spider portion, still chanting my spell.
Become mine, become part of me
Let us mete destruction as one
Smash even the souls of the gods...
Abomination looked like it was preparing to attack Gourry. Its tentacles writhed and its wings changed shape, turning to whips and blades that lashed out at the blond swordsman. And if that wasn’t challenge enough, the ground he was trying to cover was shaped like a giant mortar oven, a wannabe golem frozen in a randomized form. Traversing it had to be like running up an uncharted mountain face...
Despite that, Gourry darted toward Spider as easily as if he was bounding through an empty field! If he landed this blow, it would all be over! He sliced through the tentacle whips and wing spears, and then... a drone flying out from behind a cleaved wing charged at him!
“Geh!” He just barely cut through the drone on his backswing, but the forward momentum of its charge kept it going and—Crash!—its remains hit Gourry right in the breastplate! “Wuh?!”
Knocked backward on unstable footing, Gourry lost his balance and found himself falling off the oven-golem! While this was unfolding, Abomination turned its wings in my direction for another attack!
Darn it... I’d been hoping Lukoria would dismiss me as a mere human sorcerer or whatever, but apparently that was too much to ask for! While I was charging, obviously, I was also on my guard. I wasn’t sure I was agile enough to dodge the wings’ attacks on this unsteady terrain. Welp... Guess this is it!
“Ragna Blade!” I spoke the words of power, and a dark blade the length of a shortsword appeared in my hands. I’d managed to cast the spell, but I could tell it was draining my magic awfully fast.
The Ragna Blade spell borrowed power from the Lord of Nightmares, written of in the legendary Claire Bible. I was using the imperfect version at the moment. The real deal was much more powerful, but it didn’t increase the weapon’s reach at all and it ate up my magic and stamina that much faster. So since I was more about duration than strength right now, the imperfect version was a-okay with me!
With one swing of this weightless blade of darkness, I cut right through a transformed wing. But in doing so, I instantly earned Abomination’s full attention. More transformed wings and tentacles lashed out in my direction, and Spider’s free leg turned to take aim at me!
Not good!
But just then, Gourry flew in! It took me a second to realize that Alaina had caught the falling lunkhead with her high-speed flight spell and given him a lift. Abomination only hesitated for a moment, but that was all my man needed! Gourry’s right hand swept through the air!
Did Lukoria realize he’d thrown the sword at him? Whether he did or not, Zanaffar’s reflexes responded and the armor took a defensive stance with its legs, wings, and tentacles.
But none of that mattered. Alaina’s magic circle amplified all magic power within it, which in turn increased the Blast Sword’s sharpness...
Without a sound, the blade pierced legs, wings, and tentacles alike before plunging straight into Spider’s core, right down to the hilt.
Silently, so very silently, Abomination came to a halt. Spider’s legs drooped, then went limp, flopping to the ground. Lukoria was likely dead before he realized what had happened.
Gourry effortlessly retrieved the deeply buried sword. The armor’s legs trembled slightly. Was one of the Zanaffars still stirring?
Gourry and I prepared for the fight, but...
“Lukoria?” The voice came from Cyclops. Spider must have lost control of it, allowing Sagan to speak again. He didn’t quite seem aware of what had transpired.
“He’s gone now,” Gourry said.
After a brief silence... “I see,” Sagan whispered, seeming to intuit his meaning.
“You still want to fight?” Gourry asked lightly.
“No,” Sagan replied quietly. “We lost. We’ll surrender the Zanaffars.”
And so the fight came to an end.
The light had left Tessius’s eyes. He was alive, but he didn’t respond to any of our calls.
Following Sagan’s admission of defeat, we’d destroyed the Wings Zanaffar and shattered the frozen earth that held Abomination—rather, that held Cyclops and Horns. Once Cyclops was free, Sagan had removed his Zanaffar. It was my first time seeing him up close without his armor, and he appeared to be, in human terms, a good-looking thirtysomething of average height. Maybe even a little on the muscular side as elves went.
But Horns had lain perfectly still after we freed it from Abomination. Sagan called to Tessius within, but after getting no response, he somehow managed to free his comrade from his Zanaffar. Yet even after being released, Tessius remained unresponsive.
“Why?!” Sagan whispered.
I replied, “Tessius was casting spells in our fight just now. If the Zanaffar was forcing him to do that, it might have had some effect on his mind. Just speculation, of course, but...”
“Damnation.” Sagan cursed. “Why? How could this happen? We were just trying to protect the forest.”
“You know...” I said wearily before letting out a sigh. “You really don’t know how this happened? It’s because your way of going about it all was totally wrongheaded.”
“What?!”
“Protecting the forest? Noble goal. So to do it, you get these powerful weapons known as Zanaffars and attack a human settlement in the forest. Then, when the humans threaten to burn the forest in retaliation, you decide to keep fighting in the forest to kill them. Then one of you decides to sacrifice some of you so you can keep fighting in the forest. What the hell did you think you were protecting? It wasn’t the forest, and it certainly wasn’t your friends. In fact, I’d say you got every part of this wrong. What were you even protecting the forest for?”
Sagan spoke up haltingly in response. “Elves have a special connection to the woods—”
“And humans’ll never understand, right? Not what I mean. Living beings are fundamentally simple. Elf, human, or animal, we’re all just trying to find as much happiness as we can. From that point of view, your manifesto about protecting the forest amounts to ‘I’m not happy seeing people ruin the forest. I want to stop them so I can be happy again.’ In other words, this was all a means to an end. But what was the price? How far would you have to go to get what you wanted? And could you really do it? You didn’t think about any of that, so you ended up on the path to a future where there was no winning. Even if you’d defeated us, you wouldn’t have ended up happy. That’s what I think,” I declared.