Swordcraft Fanfic of Joy!
Summary: Completely original cast. A young Craftknight travels the world with his Guardian Beast in search of a mysterious weapon material. Contains violence and probably some language, but shouldn't be too traumatizing.
Author's Notes of Utter Joy!
This story may be updated sporadically, because I have no idea where I'm going with it. I will try to make it semi-cohesive, but if you see a glaring error or plothole, please let me know so I can create a needlessly convoluted way of explaining it and then go "HAHA I HAD THIS PLANNED THE WHOLE TIME ARENT I SO GREAT AT PLOT?".
I'm looking at you, David Anez.
I own Varrant, Lorelei, and any other characters I create in the future. The good folks at Flight Plan own everything else. While I doubt it is at all necessary for this to be here, everybody else puts disclaimers in, and I'm a conformist, so I will too.
This site seems to enjoy ignoring my line breaks, so when I have to change scenes in mid-chapter, I will just put a large, easily-noticeable "BREAK". Aren't you glad I told you this now, thus sparing you the 0.3 seconds it would have taken you to figure it out yourself?
Chapter to commence in 3, 2...
Chapter One - Escape
"Master, are you sure this is the way we came?"
The girl was speaking very loudly so as to be heard over the screeching alarms. She and her master darted along the metal corridors, each frantically searching for some way out of this mechanical labyrinth.
The girl was thin and had waist-lenth silvery hair that was streaming out behind her in her hurry to keep up with her master. She wore some old, tarnished metal armor that looked as though it had survived through thousands of battles, although it was not a complete suit - merely boots, gauntlets, a chestplate, and some protection for her shoulders. The rest of her costume was a tight red bodysuit with two holes cut in the back for her most distinguishing feature: a pair of small, angelic wings. She was not running like her master, instead using the wings to fly alongside of him.
Try as she might, the girl couldn't quite keep up with the boy she was following. His dark red overcoat, much like the girl's armor, looked to have gone through years and years of pure, undiluted neglect. The boy was heavily adorned in old jewelry that was maybe once very elegant, but then got buried in dirt for centuries. He had spiky, light brown hair and a bandana covered in strange tribal markings was tied around his forehead. Across his back was slung a long metal case with the hilt of a sword poking out from it. Both the boy and the girl appeared to be in their mid-teens.
"Truthfully? No," said the boy. "But we're getting away from the treasure room. Isn't that good enough?"
"No!" the girl replied. "Varrant, what if we run into a dead end, or guards, or--"
Varrant stopped in his tracks. "You had to say it, didn't you?"
Directly in front of them were two large machines that resembled four-legged robotic spiders. They were, for a reason known only to their creator, painted bright, festive shades of cobalt blue.
"Interceptors," said Varrant, placing one foot behind the other. "Lorelei, stay where you are. I'm not gonna need you for this."
"Way to make me feel wanted," the grumbled the angel-winged girl, crossing her arms and giving him a hurt look.
Varrant reached to the weapon on his back and pulled it out of its sheath, flicking a small switch on the gold-colored hilt. A very loud noise filled the hallway and drowned out the alarms: the roar of a chainsaw.
He had produced a wide-bladed sword that would otherwise be blunt and very nonthreatening if not for the fact that its edge was covered in fully-functional chainsaw teeth. He stepped forwards and slashed, easily splitting one of the robots in half.
The second one raised a small gatling gun located on its underside, but was too slow; Varrant quickly sliced off the entire top half of the machine. Ruined, it slumped uselessly to the floor.
With that accomplished, Varrant hopped over the wreckage. "Come on."
The girl followed after him and they continued their flight down the corridors - the term "flight" being either proverbial or literal, depending on who you looked at.
They would quickly discover that the Interceptor duo was just the beginning. Pouring down the hallways now were a wide variety of mechanical creatures. Small robotic tanks, crablike machines with glowing green eyes in the centers of their bodies, and more Interceptors, all charged at them like a swarm of hungry insects. They were all over the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling, with no thoughts other than a simple compulsion to make the intruder Craftknight dead.
Varrant's buzzsaw sword worked quickly, and sliced each machine as it came to him. The boy charged his way through the metal mob, leaving nothing but pieces of scrap behind. He might have stopped to pick up some of the fragments if he was not in such a hurry.
After hacking his way through one final Interceptor, Varrant and Lorelei came to the end of the corridor, meeting face to face with a big metal door. Oddly, unlike most of the other doors in this place, it did not open at his presence.
"I think you need a key to get past here, Master Varrant," said Lorelei, hovering next to him.
Varrant nodded, slashed his sword against the metal door four times, and then kicked it in its center. The door fell to pieces. "This way is faster," he replied, stepping through.
Lorelei followed her master into the next area, which was a rectangular room about the size of a small house. She first noticed that the walls were covered in burns, bullet holes, and long slash marks. Then she noticed something else; something that was quite a bit more threatening.
"Uh, Master Varrant?" she asked, pointing at something very large on the opposite side of the room. "I'm pretty sure this isn't the way we came. For one thing, we definitely never saw that when we came in."
Varrant, impressed at the sight, whistled and switched his buzzsaw sword on again. "Big sucker," he said.
On the other side of the room was a tremendous, vaguely humanoid, robot that was painted in a now-fading shade of yellow. Its body was distinctly rounded on its torso, legs, and hands. The robot was so large that it could barely even fit in the room. Two green eyes locked on to Varrant, and the machine produced several cannons that were built into its hands. Slowly, vivid purple bolts of electricity began to encircle the cannon barrels.
"Grappler," said the Craftknight. "Lorelei, hit the deck!"
The Grappler fired.
Varrant dodged to the left and Lorelei dodged to the right. The robot's pulse of electricity flew past them and struck the wall. It left a smoking, black burn on the metal. Varrant charged in on the Grappler and attempted to strike it in the leg, but was knocked away by the robot's large, flat hand.
The boy landed on his back, and his sword's point stuck into the metal floor. Not one to be deterred after one strike, Varrant jumped to his feet, grabbed the sword, and charged, only to discover that something was holding him back.
His sword had gotten stuck.
"Ugh, I hate it when this happens!" he complained, trying to no avail to get it out of the floor. "Lorelei! Give me some backup over here!"
Lorelei glided over and hovered in front of him protectively, sticking her arms out forward, palms towards the Grappler. While struggling to pull his sword out of the floor, Varrant briefly noticed the air heating up around him. It was quite a dramatic difference; it had been extremely cold in here a minute ago.
"Burst Flare!" shouted Lorelei, and then her entire body ignited in flames. Varrant moved quickly away from her, for the flames were coming dangerously close to singing his coat.
The massive fireball that was once Lorelei charged headlong into the Grappler. It caught the robot in the stomach hard enough to briefly propel it about a foot into the air. When the robot landed, it landed hard, with enough force to shake the ground. Conveniently, the vibrations allowed Varrant to free his sword from the floor.
Immediately after retrieving it, he charged across the room at the Grappler and succeeded in striking it twice across the chest before it knocked him to the ground again. He got up (briefly thanking the gods of fate that his weapon didn't get stuck again) and jumped away from his enemy.
"You okay?" a now non-combusted Lorelei flew down next to him. "Want me to heal you?"
Varrant shook his head. "No, I'm fine. One more hit to its body, and that should be it."
He took off into another full-blown charge at the Grappler. It stuck out its hand to swat him away again, but Varrant was quicker. He sidestepped and slashed at the hand, severing it from the robot's body. Jumping into the air, he kicked off the enemy's chest and slashed downwards into it in mid-jump. Varrant landed on one knee and looked up, waiting patiently.
At first, nothing changed. Then the Grappler broke in half, right down the center. Its halves exploded in flame, a blast so powerful it blew out the wall that it had been standing in front of. Beyond what had once been a metal barrier was a long, weaving pathway through a deep, dark forest.
Varrant switched his sword off and examined it. He scoffed. "Whoops. I busted the chain. I'll have to get it fixed somewhere." Then he turned to Lorelei and pointed to the forest path. "See? We can go out this way. I told you we weren't lost."
He hopped over the Grappler's smoking remains and went on down the forest path. Lorelei paused to give him a funny look, and then followed after him.
The Craftknight walked along the path and his Guardian Beast floated after him, the two leaving the abandoned machine factory behind. They went on for a few minutes before the girl spoke up. "All that," she sighed, "just for some little black crystal."
Varrant reached into one of the pockets of his beaten-up red overcoat, and produced a glimmering piece of black stone about the size of his fist. "One piece down," he said in an upbeat voice. "Now, wasn't there a town around here somewhere?"
