Chương 76: Chapter 73.5: Screamy, Terrified Teamwork

++The unique preservative methods of Ancient Estalian civilization did not do much for their people in life, but in death it resulted in remarkably powerful undead servitors. I found out that much in my journey deep into Orapathaqi's ruins. Agrian found it out in a much more amusingly uncontrolled way. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Agrian's running was really less of an action he was taking, and more just a thing that was happening to him at this point.

His legs were moving whether he wanted them to or not, and his lungs screaming for mercy did nothing to slow him down. Memories swirled up to him. The kidnappers, the dungeon of Winzorth. So many dangers in the world. Isabel had always been there with him to face them, but she wasn't now. What had father said; "adversity will make you strong"? Something like that. Well he'd been wrong, adversity had just made Agrian terrified of yet more adversity.

He felt like he was losing a month by the step, becoming more and more a terrified little boy with every stride. His heart couldn't beat any faster, surely. If it did the organ would just explode. He barely even noticed what he was running past. Sandstone walls flitting by, floors creeping past. Statues, were there statues? Agrian really should stop, he was just exhausting himself and ensuring that he drew the attention of anything with ears. What if he ran into a trap?

Estalian ruins were infamous for their traps, he'd read more accounts of explorers getting mutilated by some ancient savage's mechanisms than he could remember. As fast as he was, Agrian would sprint right into one and die before he could even register a hint of its presence. So he really, really ought to stop. Any moment now. Come on legs, stop. It wasn't him that ended up halting the run, in the end. Magic hit the air, and a spell matrix—a magic missile—tore past the space right in front of Agrian.

It hit a wall beside him, then exploded hard enough to fling him off his feet and send him rolling. When he finally stopped, head spinning and eyes bleary, he was looking up at an outstretched hand aimed towards his face and completely aglow with power. Agrian froze, not even daring to blink. Was this the end?

"Oh, it's you." Agrian heard the voice without quite registering it at first. Then the facts sunk in.

"Bagran?" he finally followed the arm with his eyes, gazing at the owner's face. Bagran did not look happy to see him.

"What are you doing, sprinting around here like an idiot?" the boy demanded as he stepped back, not offering Agrian a hand up but, at the very least, not preventing him from standing on his own either.

"I…was…" Agrian scrambled for a lie.

"Looking for Isabel," he finished at last. Perfect. Protecting your little sister was a suitably manly and cool thing to do that he'd not have to worry about embarrassment. Bagran nodded, uncharacteristically silent at that. It was only then that Agrian noticed how hard he was breathing too, and put two and two together about them being as deep as each other despite his sprinting right down.

".... You were running too?" Agrian realised. The other boy immediately got a lot more hostile at that, which just about confirmed the guess in Agrian's mind.

"I was searching for Isabel as well," he snapped. Agrian snorted.

"I was," Bagran growled.

"She's in danger, and if I'm going to make her my wife I need her to not die in some stupid hole. Where's the others anyway?" That wiped the smirk off Agrian's face. For a moment there he'd forgotten where they were, now it all came rushing back with the weight of a locomotive.

"I haven't seen them," he groaned. Bagran just cursed under his breath.

"Well we need to—" Agrian felt the magic a moment before Bagran did, and he was still barely quick enough to act against it. Aether flew up in-between the boy and his death, then flames exploded against the magical barrier. Agrian, standing at least ten feet back, felt his skin throb like the desert sun had returned with a vengeance, stumbling back as the waves of heat rolled out.

He realised after a moment that his damned clothes had caught fire, which quickly rearranged his list of priorities as he beat at them with a yelp. Bagran focused on himself, now shielding his own body from a second magic missile. This one just sent him flying on impact. The flames died on Agrian and he looked up, turning to the direction of their attacker and feeling the blood chill in his veins. It was an undead.

That was beyond question, Agrian could recognise the desiccation and withered limbs from a hundred portraits seen in a dozen textbooks. This one was different from the shambling monstrosities he'd read about only in its vibrant robes and long, silvery staff. That and, most important by far, its power. The mana radiating off it was more than just a common battlemage, more than Agrian himself. The undead turned to him, and in its eyes he saw death.

"FUCK YOU!" Agrian screamed, throwing both hands out and mustering all the mana he could channel. His magic missile was made as much out of instinct as deliberate science. Air trapped in aether, heated and pressurised into steam, into glowing steam, into some bizarre, electrically charged substance his professors called plasma that hurt his eyes to even look at. He turned away from the sight as he threw it out and shielded himself a moment before impact.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. Even Agrian could die, just from casting this one. And even behind the shield he felt a rolling wave of heat that reminded him of that fact. He looked back to see the room was orange and bright, stone either dripping from the ceiling in molten chunks or rippling on the floor. The undead walked through it all, still wreathed in a shield, but with wisps of smoke trailing off the flesh beneath.

Its staff came up before Agrian could examine it for more injuries. He'd bought himself only a few seconds, barely enough time to raise a primitive personal shield to hover just around his body as he fought. Lightning, a storm's worth of it thrown out all at once and condensed into just the tiny room around them.

Doctor Brown's insulation trick worked once as the forks of it fell away from Agrian's barrier, but the followup missile was more solid than that, punching through the vacuum at his shield's core to clip Agrian's arm as it ripped through the back. He went spinning and fell down hard. Agrian scrambled to his hands and knees and started moving, knowing he'd die if he was still a moment too long. Aether wrapped around him, then split apart as another magic missile punched past.

Luck alone saved him, the projectile struck stone just a few feet ahead and sent shards flying out in all directions. One of them caught his shoulder, maybe the size of a fingernail. It lodged in deep anyway and soaked fiery pain right down deep into the nerves. Then he was lifting up. The undead's eyes met Agrian's for a second time as it readied the spell that would kill him. Bagran's magic missile struck from off to one side, crashing against the barrier that came up just in time to meet it.

His was a cold magic, flooding the room with mist as water frosted in the air at its detonation. The undead's concentration broke, dropping Agrian down. He cushioned himself with magic, rolled up to his feet and was already preparing a new attack when the mist wafted clear with the wave of a hand and magic rose back up to tear the hall apart anew. Agrian was stronger than most battlemages, himself. As was Bagran. And now they were two against one.

"I'll go left!" Agrian called out.

"No, I'll go left, idiot," Bagran snarled, cutting into his path just as the magic started flying. Agrian saw a spray of liquid and decided instantly that he didn't want it touching him, throwing up an aether wall, then yelling as it seared right through. His mind blanked as the aetheric sludge rained down over him, eating through a quickly-made barrier and taking chunks out of his clothes, hurting the skin. He responded with fire, walls of it rolling up and thrashing out, turned into coiling whips and vipers.

The undead beat them back with hovering fists of force as Bagran hurled a bolt of lightning that struck deep into the spine. Their enemy staggered, but didn't go down. Currents of wind whipped up, throwing Agrian's next attack off-course. Bagran's slipped through, crumpling against a personal shield spreading over the undead's chest. Sand grains were slicing like bullets towards them and they both abandoned offence fast, throwing out magic missiles, failing to even slow the vortex.

It snatched Agrian and hurled him across the chamber, sent him bouncing off the wall. He landed, rolled back up with a roar and waved both hands to fill the air with searing light just in time to interrupt the undead's next attack as Bagran went down from the last. More magic missiles flitted between them, missing to take chunks of ancient stone out of walls, or hitting and breaking against shields. Agrian was fighting with everything he had, waiting for Bagran to rise. The other boy was staying down.

"Come on then!" Agrian snarled. Where the hell was this anger coming from? No time to process it, just to use it.

"Come now, cunt! I'm here!" He threw out a magic missile just a little too wide, letting his enemy shift to one side and dodge it. The aetherial rails it was following, near-invisibly thin, guided it back around to strike the base of his enemy's neck and jerk its head forward with the explosion. Before it righted itself another magic missile struck its chest, this one slower, exhausting to form and difficult to aim. A complex weave of mana that Agrian felt certain would fail right up until it hit.

But the magician-killer did just as Doctor Brown had promised, and Agrian watched it drill through his enemy's barrier to strike the bare chest beneath. Agrian followed it up with a second, then swore as his enemy opted to deflect the projectile rather than take it on the shields this time. More magic missiles shot back his way and Agrian's barrier was too slow in blocking them.

Bagran was just barely on his feet by the time Agrian took his turn in sliding back along the hall, thudding into a sandstone statue and feeling cracks run up along it. The aether was starting to crumble away from him now, like scales shed by a viper. He was so tired. Battered and injured, the pain creeping up. Agrian forced it all down, rolled onto his side and climbed back up. One thought of Isabel was all it took. Alone in the dark, maybe dead, maybe not.

He wasn't leaving his sister to run into whatever was controlling this undead, not like he'd left her the last time. Bagran flew over his head and landed at the exact moment a second magician-killer hit the undead, this one punching down into its left knee and ruining the joint. Undead didn't bleed or die from damaged organs, but they still needed their bones to support them. Agrian was annoyed he'd taken so long to remember that little tidbit.

Sand hovered up and melted into glowing sludge, then shot at Agrian as a thousand little drops of death. He didn't try to block them this time, just let up a wall of water and watched as the globules hissed and hardened tearing through it, flying wild and sizzling cool before they even reached him. He exchanged magic missiles and lightning, dodged acid and feinted with magician-killers, let out a veritable maelstrom of power. His enemy was dodging slower now, Agrian adjusting to the combat.

And this time, he was still standing once Bagran recovered. They attacked it like hunting hounds baiting a bear, one pressing its guard up while the other slipped magic around the defences to strike at its body. Twice more Agrian hit it with his magician-killer, and both times saw another chunk ripped from the undead. It was the second that finally threw it down onto the sandstone. Bagran did something odd and impressive, hands flailing up as magic gathered overhead.

Agrian didn't know what was happening until the giant lance of aether had already formed and dropped, falling with a speed far beyond gravity, landing with a weight that belied its construction. The skewer went right through their enemy and pinned it to the stone, where it squirmed for a few moments before the boy lit it on fire. Then it squirmed for a few moments more as the flames finally, slowly consumed it.

By the time it stopped moving there wasn't much left but a vaguely humanoid figure darkening the centre of the blaze.

"What…the fuck," Agrian gasped.

"I…don't…know…" Bagran wheezed. They both stood there forcing air into themselves and staring at the fire, apparently both paranoid about the damned undead surviving even that. Predictably, it did not.

"Isabel is down here with those things," Agrian groaned after a moment, starting ahead.

"What are you doing?" Bagran yelped.

"You're going deeper?!"

"Yes," Agrian growled.

"To save my sister." He paused.

"Do you want to hang back and explain later why you didn't ride down to rescue her?" Bagran was actually hurrying to overtake Agrian after that. It was amazing what a man would do to root someone he fancied. Ew, that was his sister he was thinking about.