Invasion: Chapter 29

Sneaking onto the ship itself was almost disappointingly easy. With the number of Tellask soldiers nearby, Dan kept expecting one of them to point up and sound the alarm. Instead, their numbers gave them a false sense of security. More importantly, the constant thrum of magic, some from the battlefront and some from the Tellask casting minor pre-battle spells and checking their gear, would hopefully hide Jennifer and his approach.

By and large, they were focused on either their own tasks and their preparations for the coming battle. Still, it seemed like at least someone should have looked up from their game of dice or cooking a stew to notice the pair of humans jumping from invisible platform to invisible platform across the sky.

Finally, they reached the side of the void ship where Jennifer latched on with her magnetism rune, giving Dan a bit of a breather. He was covered in sweat, and little of it was from the actual physical exertion. The combination of mana usage and overtaxing his focus hit him harder than any 10k he had ever run. With a deep breath, he accessed his status.

He still hadn’t finished off the fire aura spell, but the frequent use of force and gravity magic to stay airborne had paid dividends. Silently, Dan vowed to take some time to actually grind his skills out and develop new spells. Although the constant conflict did wonders for his spirit total, he hadn’t had a proper opportunity to sit down and actually work through the details of his magic in what felt like ages.

Together, Dan and Jennifer slipped down the side of the void ship above its open hold. Cranking gravitational easing to its maximum power, Dan touched down silently with barely a third of his normal weight. Jennifer dropped to the ground next to him, and they quickly slinked onto the ship, dodging teams of humans unloading gear from the ship’s interior.

Dan froze as they almost immediately rounded a corner and encountered a team of four humans carrying a wooden crate. Before he could do anything drastic, one of them simply nodded at him, and their team kept moving. Jennifer nudged him pointedly with her elbow.

“Act casual,” she whispered. “Everyone is going to assume that you belong here. There’s no reason for us to all go complete murder hobo just yet.”

“Murder hobo?” Dan turned back to her in confusion.

“If you give some people swords and magic,” she responded with a roll of her eyes, “they’ll try to solve every problem with them. Sometimes you just have to talk to the rebellious duke or help the runaway princess realize that returning home is her best choice, rather than setting everything on fire and sticking a sword in it.”

“It’s hard to get backstabbed by someone that’s on fire and has a sword in their chest.” Dan chuckled softly.

“I will admit that there’s a certain elegant simplicity to it.” Jennifer stepped past him and led the way into the bowels of the void ship. “Still, if your solution to everything is violence you end up being predictable. Like right now, we’re probably going to reach a point eventually where someone asks us to justify our presence. At that point, we will have plenty of chances to collect mana. Until then, I’d prefer to avoid having to fight our way through every Imperial on this ship as well as whatever they’ve just warped in.”

“Fair.” Dan wove his way through stacked boxes of food and enchanted weapons while following Jennifer. “I’ll do my best to look like I belong and less like a serial killer on vacation.”

They walked in silence for about fifty paces before Jennifer stopped and looked back to him, her face screwed up in embarrassment.

“Actually, would you mind taking the lead? I was trying to be proactive, but as we started walking through these hallways, I realized that I have absolutely no idea where I am. We can’t exactly ask anyone without giving up the game. I think our best bet is to rely on your memories of the captured void ship’s layout and hope they’re similar.”

Dan and Jennifer switched places. He tried his best to match her confident and purposeful stride through the void ship, but he couldn’t help but second-guess himself at every junction. Although he had done some work with the mana forges and the teleportation platform in Viceroy’s Pride, that had been years ago. He knew that it was located near the rear of the ship along the centerline, but he quickly realized that he didn’t have much of an idea where that was. The Viceroy was far too heavily-modified for him to use it as a model.

It was almost a relief when an elf approached him, confusion and impatience written across her face.

“You,” she pointed directly at Dan, a hint of water magic lingering around the attunement stone on the ring she wore. “Human, what unit are you with? We gave your centurions enough tasks to keep you busy. What are you doing out of position?”

“Uh,” Dan panicked. He had never been an extrovert, even with people he knew. On the spot like this, his mind clamped down, and he blurted out the first thing that popped into his head. “There was a mana forge leak; it took us some time to lock it down. Very dangerous.”

“Who are you?” She squinted at Dan, stepping forward and taking in his decided lack of uniform. “What’s your operating number?”

Dan’s Lightning Stroke took her in the chest before she could turn on a spellshield. Her body convulsed, as the electricity coursed through her. Dan didn’t give her a chance to recover, immediately drawing his sword and taking her head. Fighting her probably would have been a nightmare had she been prepared, but elves died just as easily as humans if they didn’t see it coming. An important lesson. As powerful as Dan was becoming, a single lapse of judgement and he could be just as dead as the headless corpse lying at his feet.

He stared at her body for a second before glancing at Jennifer and shrugging. “It was a boring conversation, anyway. Somebody probably felt that surge of mana; we’re going to have company.”

“You do realize that you’re the opposite of smooth, right?” Jennifer giggled as she quickly pulled the rings off of the dead elf. “You barely even tried to talk your way out of that. At the very minimum, you could have delivered a one-liner there.”

“Maybe I did, and you didn’t realize it?” Dan responded as Jennifer quickly pocketed the purloined jewelry. Any response was cut off by shouting from above them followed by the pounding of armored boots running.

Dan shrugged at Jennifer and took off running himself. After a series of blind turns, he was completely lost. As far as he could tell, he was moving toward the rear of the void ship, but the labyrinth of tunnels was more than his adrenaline and mana-addled mind could parse.

Really, it was more or less inevitable when he turned a corner and ran into a Lythal and a human. Pushing mana to his time dilation rune gave him the moment he needed to drop a Fireball on them. Taking advantage of the slowed time, Dan activated his spellshield before the first spell could detonate. The explosion took both of the Imperials more or less by surprise, tossing their burning bodies toward him.

More than the heat, in the enclosed space of the ship’s corridor, the pressure wave created by the fireball’s explosion was devastating. The sudden blast of force snapped the necks of both Imperials back, knocking them out almost immediately, to complement the third-degree burns covering their backs. Even the walls of the void ship were half melted and bowed outward.

Dan frowned for a second. The Tellask might need the hallways, but he had a magic sword and no real incentive to leave the ship intact. So long as he didn’t accidentally cut into a mana forge and fry himself, now that the alert was sounded, it was foolish of him to play by their rules.

With a thought, the familiar purple glow surrounded his sword. A single blow from the sword didn’t cut through the ship’s wall, but two did. Silently thanking Daeson, Dan went to work, hacking an impromptu passageway that he stepped through into what appeared to be a bedchamber. After ensuring that there weren’t any enemies in the room, Dan exited through the door into another hallway.

Vaguely, he could feel the resonance of spatial magic from either the engine or the teleportation pad. He took a moment to orient himself before hacking into a wall in the general direction of the spatial mana. Behind him, some excited shouts were followed quickly by the clash and thuds of conflict. After a couple more slashes, Dan put his shoulder into the damaged wall, knocking it over into a darkened chamber beyond.

Turning back to the hallway, he saw Jennifer fighting off a pair of Imperial soldiers. One was already down and clutching the stump of his right hand, while the other frantically retreated. Dan fired a fireball past her into a crowd of advancing soldiers, slowing them and giving her the opening she needed to take down another guard.

They needed to hurry. Jennifer would be able to take down most humans, but she still wasn’t able to take on even an average elf. It was only a matter of time before elves began arriving, and at that point, Dan would need to step in to help out. At that point, it was only a matter of time until they became bogged down. Even if he could bring down a couple of elves, they weren’t going to win a battle of attrition this deep behind enemy lines.

Stepping forward into the darkened chamber, Dan again repeated the process of cutting through the wall. Behind him, Jennifer positioned herself at the hole he had cut into the wall and held off the Imperial troops. Dan tuned out the fighting behind him as he continued stabbing the enchanted blade into the metallic walls.

Sweat poured off of his body as he stepped through into another hallway. Ahead of him, a pair of heavily-armored guards brandished halberds and stood in front of a reinforced metal door. They eyed him nervously, but Dan just shrugged and slammed one of them into the wall behind him with a Forcebolt. The other tried to charge him, but Dan abused his time dilation rune, and the exchange was over in a moment. His sword slapped the halberd just slightly to the side and carved out the guard’s throat.

The other guard tried to stand up, only for Dan to ram him into the floor with another forcebolt. Dan stabbed the man in the chest as Jennifer backed into the passage behind him, bleeding from a cut across her face as she tried to hold off a grinning elf. Dan slipped the sword into the crack between the wall and the armored door then sliced off the hinges. He wasn’t entirely sure if the reinforcements were just ornamental, but he hardly saw the point of designing defenses with such obvious weaknesses.

The door fell inward and Dan breathed a sigh of relief as he took in the familiar sight of a teleport pad and beacon. Unarmed humans ran away from him as he approached the beacon. His first sword blow simply cracked the crystal. Dan frowned and increased the performance of his strength rune before swinging again and again. Then, it shattered.

Almost immediately, the illumination level of the room dropped noticeably as the beacon’s soft glow dissipated. Dan stepped onto the platform just in time to see Jennifer get thrown against a wall. The elf she was fighting stepped into the hallway, the gleaming metal bo staff in his hands writhing as metal mana morphed its shape.

Dan frowned and launched a lightning stroke at the elf, only for it to grin at him as it planted its staff into the floor of the ship, grounding the bolt. Dan shrugged and pummeled the elf with a flurry of Forcebolts. The cocky alien stopped grinning as, even through his spellshield, each bolt knocked it back a step or two. Jennifer ran over to him, clutching her side and limping slightly as Dan launched a final fireball over her head.

The elf dove for cover, and Dan used the distraction to activate the teleportation pad. He was under half mana, making a long jump impossible. Three beacons flashed in his mind. One on Twilight, one that could only be in the Thoth foundation, and another somewhere nearby in space. Dan glanced at his injured companion. Both Thoth and Twilight came with the risk of being enslaved once again. Even if he was going to die today, it would be as a free man.

Dan poured spatial mana into the pad and focused on the unknown beacon. His last sight before he evaporated alongside Jennifer was a trio of elves, including the slightly scorched metal mage from earlier, storming into the room. He made sure to wave goodbye.