The Hero's Sidekick

I was no stranger to terror. In my short time on this earth, I'd faced soldiers, demons, dragons, cultists, and monsters. In some of those cases I'd been only a few seconds away from soiling my britches. In the past few months, fear became a constant companion. But today, fear was my ally. It was one thing to face your fear, it was another to watch something fear-inducing take your side and approach your enemy with the intent to kill.

I will admit, it was quite satisfying to watch.

The line of Wolves backed up, the heads of the spears they were holding melting drops of grey onto the street as wave after wave of heat billowed off Deotra. The cultists didn't have that opportunity, packed as they were into the narrow opening the Talionis had made in the barricade. As Deotra stepped toward them, they shielded their eyes and dropped their weapons, screaming as their skin began to sizzle. The dragon did not move, and the Talionis rider on its back did nothing as its metal armor started smoking, filling the air with the disgusting smell of burnt meat.

As she walked, the twin balls of blue fire she'd conjured crackled hungrily, growing until they were like miniature suns. The ground beneath her bubbled as she liquified the stone itself. "Get away from her! Everyone fall back now!" I yelled out as loud as I could. Broken free of their trance by the command, the Wolves beat a hasty retreat.

For the most part, however, no one was running away. Every person out on the street, from Yuzuruha and her friends to the remaining Wolves to the bosses who were standing around the table were transfixed by the sight of what they believed was a celestial being wielding divine fury. Many of them had more wonder or amazement in their eyes than fear. Even the civilians who had yet to find shelter looked ready to break into prayer.

Swinging her left arm, Deotra hurled the first fireball into the crowd of cultists. It detonated a few feet in front of the Talionis, but unlike a typical fireball all of the force and fire was shunted solely in the direction of the enemy. Deotra's hand twisted as she drew her arm back, her delicate fingers curled like claws. I watched as they made a series of arcane gestures, all of them designed to angle the magic she was wielding away from the innocent bystanders behind her.

That's insane. To have that much fine control over such powerful elemancy like that is unheard of. For someone like me to even attempt it, I'd need decades of experience or a suitably powerful enough magic focus, and in the case of the latter there's still a good chance I'd kill myself in the process. Fox familiars aren't supposed to have that kind of raw power, so where is that all coming from?

If Deotra heard my idle thoughts, she didn't give any indication. Instead she swept her other arm around and launched her second fireball. The smoke from the first explosion hadn't even subsided before the detonation of the next fireball engulfed the entire southern entrance to the Gold-in-Hand District in sweltering destruction. I could barely hear the cultists screaming in agony over the crackling of the flames.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. The smoke swirled around the destroyed barricade, and eventually the remaining dying cultists choked out their final cries. Only after what felt like forever did the dragon step forward, coming out of the smoke like a nightmare come to life. Its rider was still intact, although its armor was now a fused piece of molten metal. The fact that the Talionis was still making its ungodly rasping sound through the slit in its helmet made my skin crawl.

Orange-red sparks ignited in the dragon's mouth, and before anyone could react it belched out a stream of yellow fire. Without flinching Deotra held out her right hand and planted her left foot back, and when the dragon's fire reached her it was stopped by a barrier of equally intense blue flame shaped into a concave lens. Rather than push the fire to the sides and risk allowing it to hurt anyone behind her, Deotra had created a bowl-like shield that reflected the fire back.

Gods. Any mage in her position would already be losing ground. She's not only fighting to stop that fire, she's also fighting the force of a high-pressure stream of dragonfire aimed directly at her. Where does all that power come from? How can she face that and not flinch at all?

I risked delving deeper into our shared bond, trying to find the source of her strength. I was not prepared for what I found. In the theater of her mind she stood on a stage shrouded in shadow, her whole being focused on what was ahead of her. I stood behind her as I did in the waking world, and I could only sense one sentiment, a thought that had become her whole being and infused her with resolve.

Protect. Protect. Protect. Must protect. Must not surrender. Must not falter. Give no ground. Protect. Protect. Protect.

It was more than just a mantra, though. Even as she expelled every ounce of her will forward to fight, more strength flooded into her, seemingly from nowhere. She was pulling that power from some wellspring that I couldn't perceive. Just as I was driving myself mad trying to make sense of it all, I saw her.

Standing behind Deotra, mimicking her stance, was the translucent form of Drache. The towering woman held her arm out in front of her, her other hand resting on Deotra's shoulder, both women bolstering the shield by feeding it a steady stream of magic even as the dragonfire battered it. Each time it looked like Deotra was about to be pushed back, Drache would firmly hold her in place, the fingers of her hand tightening as if to keep the fox upright.

What I saw wasn't the whole picture though. A connection in the form of a red string tied me to Deotra. The more I focused on the string, the more it became clear to me its purpose. It's her bond to me. It's what ties us together. Power flows back and forth through it evenly, as it should between mage and familiar. Right now there's more energy passing to Deotra than coming back, but I feel fine. So where is she drawing the extra power from?

I followed the string all the way back to where it disappeared into my chest, where my heart beat in time with each exchange between the two of us. Instead of pulling my own magic out of my body, she was instead drawing it from the Staff of Farewells. The embedded ruby head was glowing steadily, supplying Drache and Deotra with an unlimited well to pull from.

"So now you understand why we need each other," Drache's voice said. She hadn't turned around, so she was either speaking directly through the link or I couldn't see her mouth moving. "Tied as we are, we are weak alone but together we become unstoppable. The vixen is the anchor, the Staff is the well, you are the focus and I provide the knowledge. We will accomplish as one what neither could on their own. Each of us brings something unique and essential to the equation."

"Is this why you're so confident you can lure the Encroacher out of the city?" I asked.

"Yes. By myself he would find me no threat. But if we work together, we all have the means to enact the plan you came up with. So, now comes the million gold coin question." The smugness in her voice became so heavy and pronounced that it felt like she'd poured a pitcher of tar over it. "Do you still trust me?"

A reflexive chill ran up my spine. Nothing good ever happens when someone asks that question, not in my experience. But do I really have an alternative? If the only other choice is to let hundreds of people die, then there's no real choice at all. "Yes. Tell me what I have to do."

"You've already done it." The connection between Deotra and I became suffused with golden light, the color intertwining with the red to make a braid. "You are part of this connection now. Like with Deotra, you can speak to me anytime and call upon me as needed. You have trusted me." Satisfaction rang in her next words. "Now it is time for me to put my trust in you."

I was yanked back to the real world, my senses snapping back to the fore. Waving my arms outward, I flexed my new magical muscle. The air was supercharged with so much energy that it was child's play even before Drache's support for me to have manipulated it. With her backing me, I could take it further than I ever could.

Drawing the energy towards me, I pushed a spark of Deotra's fire outward from my body and ignited said energy, creating six fire-infused lightning bolts suspended in mid-air around me. The seething golden lightning bolts were suffused with roiling blue fire, the two elements coexisting rather than fighting each other. This is insane. In all my time as a mage I'd never thought of something so basic yet so intricate. The concept of combining two elements should've been simple, but because of Drache I can see that it can be so much more than that.

Several of the cultists finally realized that with Deotra's attention solely on the Talionis, they now had a clear path into the district. With a rallying cry uttered in their unholy tongue, they scrambled over the bodies of their fallen kindred like a swarm of cockroaches. A few of them raised their swords and went after her, and white hot anger flared in me as I witnessed their cowardly act. Raising my right hand, I flicked my finger and sent my bolts after them.

The first cultist to get within striking range of my familiar managed to lift his sword over his head for a two-handed swing when the first firebolt hit him square in the chest. It bored a massive hole straight through him before impacting the cultist behind him, at which point two things happened. First, the electricity in the spell arced to three other cultists, their bodies spasming as they were electrocuted. Second, the flame exploded, turning the initial and secondary targets into ash before setting all of the other three on fire.

The next two waves of cultists didn't do any better. The second group made the same mistake as their comrades, rushing at Deotra as if they hadn't seen what had happened to the last fools who had attempted it. Curving the trajectory of the firebolt around her, I avoided hitting her while spearing through her attacker, then detonating it behind him to take out his fellows.

The third wave decided to ignore Deotra and run past her, but that just made them easier for me to hit. I let them get a little closer before I sank the third firebolt into the ground in front of them, which threw stone shrapnel in their direction along with blue flame. All six of them went down, shredded by dozens of shards of superheated stone.

I didn't wait to see how the Divernian Swords would react to their comrades' deaths. I let the other firebolts go, throwing them past the Talionis to wreak havoc across his back line. The results were predictably grisly, with the tightly packed heretics suffering huge casualties from the explosions. Even as the smoke cleared, however, I could see hundreds more outside, still chanting their unholy war cry.

We can't keep this up forever. As powerful as we are, the Swords have numbers. Not to mention that pretty soon the Encroacher is gonna start rampaging around. At the moment, the amorphous blue slime had not moved from the top of the Repository, instead perching on it while it digested its recent meal. "Drache, why hasn't it moved yet?"

Her reply came back immediately. "He's been starving for centuries, trapped in that prison. The dragon will restore his strength, but not all of it. Fortunately for us, he'll be lethargic until he can start feeding on several sources of powerful magic." I could almost hear the despair in her voice. "Like the ones in the Repository. The very same artifacts that helped keep him under lock and key will allow him to continue his reign of terror."

"So how do we fight something like that?" I had to pull my head back to avoid a javelin as it sailed past me. With the same method drawn from Drache's techniques I wove six new firebolts into existence. "Can we even do that? How do you plan to lure it out of the city?" Her voice was irritated, but insistent.

"I have my ways. Burundus' form has near complete immunity to most types of magic, yet I know a way to get around that. But without the Hand of the Usurper, we cannot defeat him."

"Then what is the plan for now?" Another javelin passed me, and I didn't need to duck out of its way, thankfully. "Eliminate the Ishmarians, especially the Talionis," she said. "The Swords need the Ishmarians to direct them until the Encroacher calls to them, so without a firm command they can do no real damage."

Something about what she said caught in my brain. "What do you mean 'call to them'?"

The familiar sensation of needles pricking my skull flicked through my memory, but not the pain that normally came with it. "The Encroacher is a being twisted by the chaos of the infinite void. It drives men mad simply by being. When the mind is broken to the point where higher reasoning ceases to exist, he can replace it with his will. At that point, they are merely brainwashed puppets. They don't even realize they serve unwillingly, because their only desire is to serve. It is how the Five Kings pushed the entire world, and the worlds above our sky, to the brink of destruction."

The dragon launched another fiery assault, battering Deotra with its blazing breath. She wove the barrier into place again, her whole being concentrating on the singular task of holding back the fire. "Give her the command. Tell her to hunt, to kill. Let us take on the task of protecting these people. I will give her all the power I can spare, and we will have to hope it is enough." Even though I could only see her from behind, Deotra didn't budge an inch, her tiny frame in silhouette as fire flickered around her like the edge of an eclipse.

"Deotra!" I called out. Her ears perked straight up. "Go! Leave the civilians to me. I have faith in you. Drache and I have your back." There was an initial sense of doubt in Deotra's response.

"Are you sure?"

"Trust us. We trust you."

The doubt disappeared in a second. Replaced instantly by a surge of joy, resolve and determination and underscored by a rising tide of righteous wrath, she shoved her hands forward and sent a wave of force back and through the stream of dragonfire. The blast smacked into the dragon's head, stunning it long enough to break off its attack. In that split second, she rocketed forward, shattering the stone beneath her as she streaked towards the dragon like a shooting star.

Her initial attack moved so fast that the only reason I knew it had happened was my ability to sense her intent through our link. A flash of hostility became intention and then action, and the dragon's head snapped back as a flash of blue fire slashed across its face. Flecks of scale and a spray of blood accompanied it, and I could see smoke sizzling off of Deotra's hand, her fingernails now sharp and coated in the bubbling ichor she'd drawn.

She didn't stop there. Pivoting her upper body in the opposite direction she threw a wild left-handed haymaker at the dragon, clawing at its face again. This time she got more than just blood and scales; a few of the dragon's teeth and a chunk of its tongue flew loose, and she left a sizable gouge mark in its armored plating. Screaming a high pitched battle cry, she swung with her right arm again, battering the significantly larger creature back with no quarter.

The Talionis was having trouble staying in his saddle, but he wasn't going to sit idly by. Drawing his Ishmarian dragontooth sword, he placed his free hand on his bridle and tried to steady himself enough to aim his sword at the tiny fox in front of his bucking mount. I don't think so, pal. Just as I was about to bring up another firebolt, however, Drache chuckled in my mind.

"Don't worry about him. Reinforcements are here."

Before I could ask what she was on about, a barbed piece of metal lodged itself in the neck of the Talionis. Attached to the barb was a length of rope; following it back to its source, I spied a familiar face atop a building flanking the street, her arm outstretched.

Monaco the Swift grinned at me, her sharp canines on full display. "Thought I'd drop in and give you a lift." Somersaulting over an exposed beam, she hooked the rope of her grappling hook over it and then tumbled over the side in a calculated fall. Using the beam as a fulcrum, she plummeted down the front of the three story building until the tension of the rope snapped tight, yanking the Talionis up and out of his saddle.

The freakish monster hit the ground at an awkward angle, its neck snapping audibly as it landed. Monaco disengaged the hook on her gauntlet, releasing herself from the rope and then sauntering over to me with even more swagger than usual.

"I thought you'd be halfway to Margloom by now," I said with a slightly accusatory tone.

She smirked, but there was something forced about it. "Let's just say a little voice in my head told me I'd regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't do the right thing and leave it at that," she said, with a tone that suggested she was eager to change the subject. "For now, let's worry about that." She pointed at where the Talionis was already standing back up, his head ragdolling around before jerking upright as its vertebrae fused back into an intact spine. "Gods and stars above, that is horrifying," she said, recoiling back reflexively. "You got any ideas?"

"I thought you were here to save me. Don't you have any tricks up your sleeve?" I countered.

She shook her head. "I mean look at that thing. Conventional tricks aren't going to work on that." The Talionis bent down, picked up its sword and rasped at us, its desiccated mouth opening to reveal twin rows of blackened teeth. "Then we divide and conquer. Deotra and the mercs can handle the Swords. You and I are gonna figure out how to deal with the Talionis."

Through the telepathic link I projected a command to my familiar. "Deotra, if you keep tussling with that dragon in here somebody is gonna get hurt." I fed her a mental image I found amusing of her chucking a giant lizard over a wall. "Take it outside."

In a single bound, Deotra sprang forward and bent down, bending her knees before launching herself upwards. Catching the now riderless dragon off guard, she lifted it up by its belly before leaping up high into the air, taking the creature with her. She sailed out over the ruined barricade and landed in the midst of the cultists, who cried out in terror as several were flattened. As the sounds of battle resumed, a plan took shape in my head.

I looked back over my shoulder at where our audience was still gawking. "Yuzuruha! You gonna stand there all day or earn your keep?!" She stammered, then pulled out her spiked club. Letting out a howl, she ran forward. As she passed the Talionis she held her club out and clotheslined him, knocking him down as she ran to the opening. Still howling, she barreled into the front line of the cultists, many of whom were still craning their heads to see where Deotra had taken the dragon. Three of them went sailing through the air as she swung her club horizontally, her howling turning into mad laughter as she rode her momentum into the crowd.

Without missing a beat, Roland raised his gun and fired. A cultist standing off to Yuzuruha's right doubled over as his entire shoulder exploded, his arm dangling by a few bits of sinew. As he flicked open his long gun to slide a fresh round in, several Wolves charged forward with their spears, a wall of iron closing fast with the cultists. They hit them like a tidal wave, pushing through them effortlessly.

The turning of the tide broke the spell cast over the remaining mercenaries. All six of the bosses drew their weapons, six elegant single-bladed swords sliding free of their sheaths in unison with sleek precision. "With gold in hand, we go forth!" They cried, and with the vigor of men and women half their age they charged, iron armor clattering as they went.

As the combined forces of six mercenary guilds ran to push back the Swords, they gave the Talionis a wide berth. Almost as if the monster could intuit it, he sensed that Monaco and I were his opponents. He fixed his dead, sightless eyes on us, glaring through his ruined helm. Waves of necrotically-enhanced negative energy pulsed out of him, imperceptible without my magic senses. He took a first tentative step, which became a second, then a shamble towards us with his sword raised.

Monaco acted first. Drawing her weapon, she sprinted forward and twirled to the right in a counterclockwise spin, on the Talionis' left side, slicing at him with her shortsword where he could not counter fast enough. His lack of speed was her clear advantage over him, made all the more obvious by his rigor mortis. The shortsword flashed in the sun and severed his hand at the wrist, and it fell to the ground even as he tried to clumsily rotate his body to swing at her. By the time he did, she was already backing away and out of his reach.

As she circled him looking for her next opening, she reached into one of the half dozen pouches on her belt with her left hand and palmed something. It looked like a metal ball on the end of a black string, bigger than my eye but smaller than her fist. She twirled it in a circular motion, the ball swinging faster and faster before she leaped at him again. This time she intentionally went for his sword arm, and he tried to stab her with his longsword.

She makes it look so easy, I mused as she sidestepped with agility no human could ever hope to manage. As the blade flew past, she flicked her wrist and tangled her bola across his arm. The ball and string snarled around his forearm, and she slid behind the Talionis and yanked. His body bent up and backward as she played him like a puppet, and as he flailed about she took her shortsword and stabbed it deep into his back. She managed to stab him three times before she finally had to let go of the bola and back away again.

She might be wily but wily doesn't beat necromancy that easily, I'm afraid. Her attack would've absolutely worked on a living opponent, but the Talionis was barely fazed. The unsettling sounds of its ribs resetting back into place told me that it wasn't even close to giving up the ghost. How do you kill something that isn't alive and won't stay dead?

"Having trouble over there?" Drache's voice pierced through the sounds of battle, coming in as clear as day. "Whatever necromancy Guunzel used to create the Talionis is making it impossible to deal with," I responded. "Any ideas?"

The sound of her clucking tongue was not what I needed at that exact moment, but it was what I got. "Tsk tsk. Any magic that can be done can be undone, Kuro. The trick is figuring out exactly the method to unravel it. If your enemy can patch itself back together, then what would the solution be?"

"The only thing I can think of is to destroy every trace of it, to the point where not even ash remains. But I'm inside of a district with hundreds of civilians in it! It's not like I can drop a meteor on it or something." While Monaco ducked and weaved, trying to strike with her sword, the Talionis' severed hand crawled up its body and reattached itself to his arm while he was still fighting.

"Then contain the blast. You are still constrained by the limits of your training, hindered by the warnings of your teacher. You possess the Staff of Farewells. With it, you can surpass those limits." The image of her smug face appeared in my head. "Unlearn what you learned. Disavow yourself of your preconceptions. Ask yourself not what you shouldn't be doing, but how you can make the impossible possible."

"Now is not the time to be all mysterious!" I aimed the Staff at my enemy but the way Monaco kept darting in and out of my line of sight meant that I had just as much of a chance of hitting her as I did the Talionis. "We can go through the whole rigamarole later! Less philosophy and more practical solutions, please!"

Irritation bled into her voice when she spoke again. "Oh, very well. Hopefully you won't make a habit of demanding the answer from me, Kuro. It would make for a very boring partnership if you expect me to do all your thinking for you. But since we're under duress, I suppose I can give you the solution just this once in plain terms."

Through the power of my magical sight, I was granted a vision of the Talionis at the center of a vortex, a miniature tornado composed of magic fire. It concentrated the heat and destructive power inwards, preventing it from flowing out and towards the buildings full of civilians. It should work. I just need a catalyst for the centrifugal force and then everything should be easy after that. As luck would have it, Monaco can help with that.

"Monaco! Take one of your bolas and swing it over your head! Keep circling the Talionis, but keep your distance from him!" She made eye contact with me, but if she wanted to know what I was doing or if she thought I was crazy, she said nothing. Instead, she produced another bola from her hip pouch and did as I told her. Like a trained duelist, she took up a position about ten paces away from the Talionis and began prowling around him like a predatory beast, her sword held out in front of her in case she needed to parry an attack.

The next step was to create a firebolt, but instead of shaping both elements into a singular projectile, I had to create a curtain. The air ignited in front of me, electricity crackling as the Staff of Farewells made a tiny "bottle" of air to contain the fire. Once Monaco has sufficiently stirred the air around the Talionis, it's just a matter of attaching the firebolt to the current and then I'll have to apply the Staff's effect to a much larger area. Simple. Except not.

Okay, Kuro. If you screw up, a lot of people could die and you and Monaco will probably be the first ones. And the Talionis will probably survive it. So, no pressure. Drache's laughter lurked in the back of my consciousness. "You have a unique way of motivating yourself, boy. Then again, self-deprecation mixed with the threat of death does seem to work for you." Tuning her out, I fed more power into the firebolt as I watched Monaco.

Thankfully she didn't need to work too hard to stay ahead of her foe. He lashed out at her a few times, but his painfully slow swings didn't have a hope in hell of landing. She swatted his weapon aside, all the while still swinging the bola. I concentrated on the whistling of the metal ball, already plotting out how to attach my magic onto it. "Okay, when I tell you to, throw it at his neck and then get away!" She nodded, her eyes focused on him.

Overlaying the containment magic over the bola, I waited until the pressure inside the field was ready to burst. The magic inside was becoming rapidly unstable, like steam ready to shoot out of a teapot. When I felt the magic "attach" to the bola, I readied myself for what was to come next. "Now!" She whipped her arm around and then dove backward, curling her body into a controlled roll that allowed her to scramble back to her feet.

When the bola hit its mark, I had only a second to shift the parameters of my containment field to a much larger area. The ruby on the Staff gave off a flash of red light as a translucent wall shimmered into being, just as the bola exploded. The stored fire and lightning discharged outward but the field held, forcing it to expend all of its concentrated energy in the confined space now occupied by the Talionis. With a wave of my hand I closed the field like putting a lid on a stew pot, and the spell went to work.

Inside the tornado-like containment field, he writhed as the destructive elemancy melted his armor, incinerated his rotted flesh and blackened the bone once the skin had boiled away. Lightning strikes shattered his joints, sending bone fragments rattling around like dice in a cup. He withered under the onslaught, legs collapsing out from under him as he was reduced to dust. I held it together as long as I could, exhaustion mounting in my limbs as the strain of my spell took its toll on me. Finally, as the skull ground down into a pile of black dust, I created an opening on top of the containment field. A funnel of electrically charged flame gouted out like a miniature volcanic eruption, lasting a full ten seconds before it mercifully expired.

Letting the field drop, I sank to my knees. My chest felt tight, and I let out a choked wheeze as I forced myself to inhale. The acrid smell in the air made it hard at first, but the need for survival overrode that. As I took a minute to recuperate, Monaco came over and clapped her hand on my back, which didn't help me at all. "Damn, Kuro! That was incredible! I've never seen anything like it." She offered her hand, and I took it gratefully. She helped me back up to my feet, and together we surveyed the damage.

There was no longer a road to speak of. Instead, the ground was a series of craters and scorched earth. Miraculously the buildings behind us were still intact. Ahead of us, the mercenaries were assailing the Swords with a vengeance. The mercs had pushed the cultists well out of the Gold-in-Hand District, and just as I was about to make a comment about it something leaped out of the mess of battle and landed in front of me.

Deotra had made a thirty foot jump look utterly effortless, and she barely made a sound as she gently touched down not three feet away. She was much less careful about the dragon head she was carrying, which she dropped at her feet with a wet thud. Blood was pooling out of its severed neck, and based on what I could see, she'd apparently cut through not only the scale and bone but also the dragontooth armor plating that had been strapped to it too. Said plating had a still smoking cut in it that was flush with the one that had separated the head from the body. I shivered a little at the thought that my familiar had managed to literally kill a dragon with her bare hands.

Her clothes showed some minor signs of damage, mainly a few scorch marks on the white robe and a cut on her red pants that showed off her left leg, but thankfully no wounds. Somewhat more concerning were the copious amounts of bloodstains on her white robe, with a small red streak across her cheek that didn't belong to her. She ran up to me and nearly bowled me over as she wrapped her arms around me, and it was only by the grace of what remained of the adrenaline in my body that she didn't succeed.

"Ooof!" That was the best I could do as she knocked the wind right out of me. Her eyes were full of both worry and expectation.

"Did I do well? Are you alright? Should I have done more?" I raised my hand and scratched behind her ear. "You did very well. I'm proud of you." She buried her face in my chest, little joyous noises bubbling out of her. Still holding her, I looked at Monaco. "So? Gonna stick around? Job's only half-finished."

Quirking her eyebrow, she cast her gaze up at where the Encroacher was seated upon the ruin of the Repository. For the first time since it emerged, the hideous blob was stirring, parts of its shimmering body already pouring down the side of the spire. She let out a pained, exasperated sigh, then looked back at me.

"Aahhhh, what the hell. I'm all in."