The Hannapin sat lightly on the courtyard to Air Temple Island, still lashed to the ground by thick chains that clanked and rattled in the weeklong storm. The temple's leaking roofs had become swamped in the deluge until the kitchen's pan cupboards were emptied to catch leaks that splashed down in near every room of every building. Kei-Shek had relocated to the sturdier, warmer airship and was sat at one end of the planning table in the cargo hold.
"Must you give me that look?" Kei-Shek said as he looked up from his papers to see Seiko glowering at him on her way into the room with a cold gust that whipped the rainwater from her body. "They've been gone a week and a half." She continued to glare at him. "Besides, if I wasn't in here the men would be tripping over themselves to fly off and abandon their post."
"Perhaps, but I bet central heating and a solid roof help as well." Seiko answered wearily.
"This is Nehal." The Captain's voice came in crackling over the intercom. She yelled over the sound of fists knocking against a door. "I'm requesting an immediate evac, I repeat, immediate evac, same places as Hiro picked us up, wounded lots of them."
"I see you've finally put on the robe I gave you?" Xulin said, not taking her eyes off the many books she had open on a long round table by a stained glass window, overlooking the main hall, the silver throne she never sat on was glinting proudly through the coloured glass.
"Well your friends kept giving me weird looks in my old vestments." He answered evenly and technically it was also the truth. Not that Akir felt any more comfortable in his enemy's uniform.
"Have you made any headway with your former friends?" Xulin asked, finally turning around her heels.
"I feel like we're getting closer but nothing tangible." He answered, again technically true but the longer these meetings with Xulin went on the more it felt like he was digging through to his own grave. "I haven't seen them today though."
"Well, it's not like we have a deadline I suppose." She said with a casual shrug before she took a sip of steadily cooling sweet-hibiscus tea. "Still, I can only persuade them to spare your friends for so long." She said after a long, relaxed sip of the home-brewed tea.
"If you'll excuse me, I'll go to see them now." Akir said with a deferential bow.
Xulin's followers had just about come to recognise him as one of their own but he still caught a few too many odd looks from them as he crossed from their museum into the university proper. He braved the cafeteria around noon, and as usual most of the cultists were making surprisingly idle conversation over lunch. That all stopped when he entered the room. He kept his head down and avoided looking at anyone as a he route-marched to the kitchens. Some of the walk-in refrigerators behind the cafeteria had been converted to serve as prisons, or in Zhu-Rong's case they hadn't been altered at all. He peered through the frosted over window to see him huddled under his bedroll with a cloud of steam rising off his shivering back, the proud stranger forced to use his fearsome firebending just to keep himself warm. Nehal's freezer had been padded like a mental ward to contain her repeated attempts to blast through the sturdy metal box she found herself in. Narada's cell had actually been heated, kept too warm and too dry for him to gather much more water than his own urine that slipped through the metal-grate floor and boiled away on a heating element. Mari and Yana got off fairly lightly, just a small prison cell with an awful bed.
"What are you here for Akir." Hood, one of the 'guards' said, though it was hard to take a former member of their Collegiate Bending teams seriously considering they lost to the Fighting-Wolftails two years in a row.
"Yana." He said briskly, gesturing to the cell at the end.
"Oh yeah, real stimulating conversation that one." Said Sud, Hood's fellow player and now his fellow guard.
"She may not talk." He said, a dirty grin forming on his thin, dry lips. "But she's a real screamer." He whispered, far too close to Hood's face for comfort.
Hood tried not to wretch whilst Sud finally complied and opened the door. Akir unwrapped his robe and placed it over the freezer window.
Inside Yana was sat beside the bed on the harsh steel floor with her back to the door. She didn't have her scarf or her face mask on they had taken it from her, just a cascade of long bedraggled hair that trailed down her back. She peeked through the curtain of hair and quickly scrabbled into a corner. After that she still didn't turn around.
Akir slid the door to a close gently before he got on his knees behind Yana.
"I know you don't want to talk to me." He began hesitantly. "But you're the only one I can trust with this." his voice was soft and slow, he still felt the weight of his guilt pressing down on him like a heavy yoke across his shoulders. "I know that I must look like nothing but a traitor to you but there's more at stake than both of us, would you please just turn around."
Yana pulled in tighter upon herself, the sinewy muscles along her back pulled as hard as corded steel beneath her skin as she tensed herself into a an angry, insular ball. "Come on, let's be reasonable." Akir said as he pulled her around until she was face to face with him. Though in truth Yana no longer possessed a whole face. A pert, and pointed nose was lightly scarred at the tip and from there became worse, starting at a lopsided upper lip made up of stiff scarred tissue fused directly into her gums and which came to its wretched zenith at half a bottom jaw that stopped before her canines exposing an almost toothless mouth and a stump of a tongue and all of it covered in crumpled, pale burn marks and the small angular scars of surgical incisions. She forced a gasping breath and then struck out with a swift kick that knocked Akir back from her and onto the hard metal floor.
She was facing him now, with her hands perched over the bottom half of her face. Hot, furious eyes glared angrily at him as she scowled as mightily as she could manage. "I'm sorry." Akir said as he undid the blue silk string holding his patch on. Beneath it was a completely smooth drum of skin over an empty eye socket. "I was born without my eye so I won't pretend to know what it's like to be so wounded." He said, handing the curved metal patch over to Yana gently. She felt it in her hands, it had the soft heat of his body warmth on it and the wavy platinum was as smooth as wet glass. "But all my life I've hidden this from the world. But I don't think we have to hide from each other." He managed a small smile.
Yana put her hands to her side and nodded slowly, her ragged mouth bare and uncovered. .
So can we talk" Akir signed.
What aboutThe furrowed brow that always buried her bright eyes seemed to relent for a moment and she unwound her poised body into a comfortable slouch. Because I can tell you right now I'd rather die than join that woman.
Do you seriously think that I'm working with Xulin? Akir answered, stifling the urge to shout it back at her. I have given my life to the White Lotus, I won't give up on it just for one old friend.
How should I know? I knew you for half a day before we got thrown in prison.
Look. I'm working with her because the important artefacts are being kept in the University's vault.
Why don't you just metalbend it open?
This vault was meant to keep out anyone it's made of a hardened platinum isotope, not even Comandant Beifong could bend it and If I try to cut it open I'll probably trip one of about ten dozen alarms"
So what are you going to do?
The vault will open the next time a ritual is started, all I have to do is say I'm prepared to help in the next one and whilst it's out in the open we steal it and escape.
I've been trying to get out of here; it's not going to happen.
Akir unthreaded a few screws along the base of the old refrigerator and bent back some of the skirting to expose Narada's cell. Hot, dry and acrid air wafted out of it into the room. Not enough to get out of here but perhaps enough to give Narada a drink? Akir answered.
When do we go? She signed.
Noon, tomorrow. He answered before he picked up his eyepatch. Oh, and here. He said, pulling a long, thick silk sash from up his sleeve. For later.
He drew his robes back around him and opened the door with a quick application of metalbending.
"Well gentlemen." He said, making a show of adjusting his trousers. "I'll see you all later." He swaggered past them with the same strutting air he was used to putting on and disappeared out into the greater campus.
"Hiro!" Kei-Shek called into his radio. A minute later the lieutenant had ran up from the docks to meet them, he was red faced and panting, wheezing through smoker's lungs.
"Sir." He said, saluting loosely before he went back to panting with his hands on his knees.
"You can fly an airship, right?" Kei-Shek asked as he stood up from the table.
"Whatever Hasook said he's lying, I was totally not going to steal this thing." Hiro answered defensively between breaths.
Kei-Shek and Seiko exchanged looks for a minute. "No, Akir just radioed in he's requesting an immediate evac, you have ten minutes to get the ship airworthy. Kei-Shek explained rapid fire before he stood up and made for the cargo door. "I'll ready the troops."
Akir had destroyed the previous altar. Instead they assembled under the slumped tower of the hotel that had consumed it. The hotel was propped up by a sturdy scaffold. In the shade of this broken tower they had built a new altar and placed both the bronze dagger and its accompanying bowl. Six of the cult's waterbenders had formed a small choir at the rear of the altar. Assembled further back. The trained spirits coiled around the toppled building, slowly growing more restless as they waited for whatever the ritual provided.
Akir laid hands to the dagger and the bowl. It had a numbing cold despite the University's relative warmth. Each engraving stung and bit at his hands and the seemingly smooth bronze they were made of had the cut-glass texture of shark skin. Akir picked up the dagger, it was heavy in his hand. The longer he held it in his hands the more he wanted to loose hold of his lunch. His heart was pounding in his chest and adrenaline pulsed through his brain. Akir took a deep breath and with his left hand launched the bronze dagger into the heart of the nearest waterbender. In one fluid motion he drew his sword, whirled around and slashed open three throats. The last two watebenders launched their attacks, blade sharp ribbons of water lashed at him. In a graceful spiral movement he leapt off of his feet and found safe space, weaving between their attacks. A quartet of ball bearings shot out of Akir's sleeve and pulverised the skull of one cultist with a wet ragged crunch. The last of them he dispatched with an impromptu lobotomy from his white bone dagger, held in his off hand. He sheathed his weapons and grabbed both the bowl and the dagger.
A plume of firebending rocket towards him, evaded by the spool of cable he kept on his wrist which he fired at the nearest building and pulled himself towards, the fire flew past him, separated by such a thin margin that he could feel the intense heat of it cooking the air by his gut.
The already pensive spirits turned dark and rabid in proximity to so much killing and descended from the Atman building to ravage their semi-allied cultists.
"Contain them!" Xulin ordered. "Sud, Hood we're going for Akir."
He landed safely but as soon as he did he felt himself being dragged backwards at the waist. He slid and thrashed across the campus grounds. As he twisted to face his attacker he saw Xulin standing there pulling the star-metal in his sword and dragging him by it. He fought with the buckle of his sword belt and yanked it loose, drawing the belts towards her and leaving him behind. He quickly disposed of his cable spool and even abandoned the bowl and dagger, watching it clatter to the floor and slide back to Xulin.
"The Sword of the Si Wong Desert without his sword, and without his desert." Xulin observed. "Guess that makes you nothing." She said as the sword glided into her hands.
Rather than fight back or argue Akir took one look at his precious sword and ran, sliding along the ground on little earthen wedges. He evaded molecule thin water whips from Hood as well as bolts of lightning from Sud. All around him the spirits became rabid, attacking their masters or tearing into the campus facilities. Xulin saw her good work crumbling and contorting before her eyes as she coursed after Akir on a levitating rock.
Jagged earthen spikes sprung up from the ground as Akir sped towards the rear of the university. "You can run!" Xulin yelled as she cut an errant spirit down. "But you can't escape my sight."
A bolt of lightning at her feet knocked Xulin to the ground. "Perhaps he won't have to." Zhu-Rong said from the roof of the canteen.
Without a word Xulin bought the entire building down in one calm motion. As the building shook Zhu-Rong propelled himself and Mari off in one gust of flame whilst Narada used a tendril of water to swing himself and Yana off of the building. Nehal jetted off on a pillar of air, launching herself straight at Xulin. Her fist met the elder professor's face, hard, and knocked her back into the ground. Another blow and another rained onto her face before she could knock Nehal off with a shaft of rock to the flank.
Mari dodged Sud's fire blasts, twisting around the searing heat until she was right in his face. A single, massive fist to the throat crushed his trachea before she grabbed his jaw and the opposite side of his head. One fierce twist set it at an unnatural angle and he flopped screaming his last breath like a boneless squid on the ground as his paralyzed body died.
Zhu-Rong incinerated Hood with an uncharacteristically hot stream of flame that grew blue-hot and evaporated Hood's water barrier before engulfing him with a flame hotter than any other. There was a ragged agonising scream and the smell of cooking pork filled the air until his upper half was burnt down to a blackened skeleton.
Standing furiously, with soft grey hair in disarray Xulin ripped the girders from the collapsed cafeteria and attempted to squash, smash or splatter her attackers. One beam nearly made a red mess of Zhu-Rong before Narada cut it in half with a razor sharp water whip.
Yana, weaved around the earth spikes Xulin had erected in her defence and paralyzed her with a quick bout of chi-blocking punches. She snapped off a sharp stalagmite and levelled it over the crippled academic's head.
"No!" Akir yelled over the commotion, he crumbled the stalagmite into dust as she tried to bring it down. "Nehal, I want you to get the radio labs, southeast building, second floor room two-o-eight. Call for an evac then tell Nagant where to meet them" He ordered. "Yana, Mari your gear's probably in the main hall go there and get it." They both gave him a somewhat quizzical look. "This is my operation, now move!" He commanded, raising his voice above the spirits and cultists fighting at the far end of the campus. "Narada, Zhu-Rong, there's a ramp up to the surface in the parking lots to the west of the archives, I want you to get some escape vehicles there pronto. Whoever isn't there in twenty minutes has to find their own way out"
"And what about you?" Nehal asked as she made for the radio labs.
"I'm going to Xulin's office, I'm sure there's too much here to abandon." He explained between quick breaths. "And here." He said levitating his sword and it's scabbard as well as the bowl and its dagger towards Mari, and Zhu Rong respectively. "Just in case." He said with a quick nod. Mari passed the bone dagger off to Yana before they made their way to the back of the campus.
"You aren't going to kill me I noticed." Xulin observed, lying flat on her back, looking up at the starry night through the hole in the underground.
"You were my teacher." He said kneeling beside her. "You were my friend, I loved you like you were family, more than my family." He said, the hurt pouring out of his strained voice. "Why did you have to do this?"
"The minute you got here I could tell you were trying to keep something from me, the way your heart sped up whenever I asked you something, you always did that when you were nervous." She chuckled a moment, nostalgically. "But I loved you enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. So the question is why did you have to destroy everything I built here?" She said emptily. There was a long pained pause as she took a breath and then looked back at him. "You'd better go, I can feel my followers dropping like flies, the spirits will be here soon."
Akir turned his back and ran towards the archive, his tired empty legs carried the weary explorer as fast as they still could. What few cultists were there he dispatched quickly and efficiently. A metal pan to the head, one he impaled on a sharpened spike from the wall and another he crushed under a self-collapsed stairwell. He walked the deserted corridors, now akin to a hundred thousand other desolate halls that dotted the dark and hostile world.
He padded up the stairs until he was in Xulin's office. He quickly poured over esteemed tomes and ancient scrolls. The sight of a battered old file, singed in one corner but still emblazoned with classified stamps and a title that read 'Sundown' He gasped and immediately held it over the nearest candle before throwing the burning folder to the floor. The treasure trove of knowledge became a curse as he realised each book was so dense, so important that he could scarcely estimate which ones he could leave and which he had to take with him. He grabbed the fraction of texts that he hoped would be helpful and made for the exit. As he turned around a wall of rock launched him through the stained glass and out onto Kilik's war table.
Dazed and winded he coughed and spluttered on the massive skull table. Leaping out after him on a line from his own cable gauntlet Xulin descended, at last sitting on her metal throne, though in the ruined hall it seemed a sad sight, one last bastion of beauty in a ruined room.
"I don't want to do this Akir." She said, as she started deforming the throne, cannibalizing the glossy metal into razor sharp spikes. "But I can't let you upset the natural order of the cosmos." She was almost pleading. "Just put the books down and we can both go our separate ways."
"How did you get free." Akir asked, rather than answering Xulin's challenge.
She cracked a grin. Ever the student. She thought."I mastered my chi a long time ago; it will take more than a few pressure points to keep me down." Akir stood up and hopped off the table into a fighting pose. "You know how this fight is going to go." She said, forlornly.
"I do." He answered grimly. "And I don't care."
With one last deep breath Xulin flared the throne out into hundreds of metal spikes and launched the sleet of razor sharp steel at him. He skidded under the massive bone table, looking up at a jaw and a large hollow braincase he saw the metal spikes lodge in, none of them reaching him. He shot back out from under the table just as Xulin upended it with a pillar of earth meant to crush Akir flat. The spikes had shot their entire length into the ground leaving only holes from their passing. In retaliation he used another bit of rock to catapult the engraved skull straight at Xulin. She used the embedded razors to explode it into powdered bone dust and then launched the aforementioned spikes straight back at Akir.
"Whatever happened to your appreciation for the antiques?" Xulin teased as she launched the spikes with murderous intent. Dodging and deflecting in a series of rapid, spinning movements borrowed from Eastern Style airbending he evaded the metal shards and landed amidst them with a cat like poise.
"I appreciate you, don't I?" He retorted and punctuated it with a furious flurry of fouetté kicks that sent small, hard chunks of the floor at her. She blocked it with a straight, sturdy slab of earth that she propelled across the ground towards him. He pirouetted around the slab and then weaved through spikes coming out from the earth. She had him now, Akir was faster than her but he was stuck dodging and jinking around a constant barrage of spikes and jutting lumps of rock. With the barest movements she had him dancing on a string.
"How long are your friends going to wait for you?" She said mockingly. "If you hadn't gotten greedy you might have escaped by now." She said as she flicked another boulder the size of a man with the barest wave of her hand. As she moved her sleeve pulled back revealing his gauntlet on her wrist. He bent it, dragging her hand into her face as a powerful backhanded slap that bruised an imprint of his elegantly appointed cable gauntlet across her nose and cheek. Stars filled her vision and she staggered backwards. She tried to bend something, a lazy half formed motion that threw a shard of her shattered throne which Akir easily evaded. A lump of earth struck her in the chest winding her she tried to bend and he hit her again, repeating the process twice more until he launched a sharp jag of stone into her gut, propelling her into the back wall with a hard, bloody grunt.
"I'm sorry." Akir said as he ran up to her. The elegant older woman was now just as dishevelled as many a refugee with messy hair, painful wounds and blood staining her fine robes.
"I'm sorry too." She said, running a bloodied, trembling hand through his hair. "We could have done exceptional things together. Your project Sundown….truly inspired."
"Can't you just be the kindly professor you used to be?" He pleaded.
"Like I said, this was always me." She said between ragged breaths. "Now go. No sense both of us dying." She put out a weak arm, weighed down by the cable bracer. "And take this bloody thing with you." Her eyes closed and her breathing slowed as if in meditation.
Akir wandered over to the parking lot. Half the campus was collapsed, or on fire now and massive spirits were beginning to take interest, pouring into the sunken campus from above. He affixed his cable and then yanked himself up to the top floor.
"Get any good books." Nehal half jokes as she peaked up from the bonnet of a sporty red coupe satombile. Next to it was a blue convertible that used to belong to Dean Meruk and lastly a brushed silver roadster with chromed piping that had once been Xulin's.
"Tons, now let's get out of here." He said as he hopped into the driver's seat of Xulin's car. Nehal hopped in afterwards whilst Yana and Narada got into the low red coupe and Zhu-Rong and Mari sat in the blue one, the giant Kioshi Islander towered over the low profile windscreen.
The trio of sporty, well looked after engines thrummed mightily until they blitzed out of the sinkhole. "Everyone follow me, and try not to get stuck in traffic." Akir said with a little, slightly put on grin.
"Do you even know how to drive." Zhu-Rong whispered as Mari twisted the ignition with an air of unfamiliarity.
"I learnt how to drive a jeep, this is close enough." She answered as she crunched into first gear, ready to move off.
Akir pulled away first and immediately Yana moved to overtake the blue car.
"I am not losing to them." Zhu-Rong huffed, exhaling a petulant flame. They sped down bumpy, cobbled streets overran with vines and spirits, moving too fast for the shadowy beasts to keep up. They paced up the streets until they were by the familiar entrance to the subway.
A few blocks down Kei-Shek and his men were obviously clamouring with Nagant's people. Behind them the Hanapin's proud, beautiful bulk laid behind them, filling the street with its wide envelopes and its colossal engines.
"Stand down Captain, that's an order." Kei-Shek said, gripping the stock of his crossbow tighter.
"I'm done taking orders from fat officers behind a damn desk. Colonel" Nagant yelled slanting Kei-Shek's rank as insult. He put his hands to the grip of his sword. Kei-Shek's men readied their weapons and their bending, Nagant's men did the same.
"You self-righteous deserter!" Kei-Shek yelled, affronted. "If you think one moment watching my home be over run was easy then you are the stupidest little-"The sound of approaching engines put an end to the Colonel's tirade.
Akir stopped the car in front of them and leapt out. "Hey hey, we've got to move." Akir said as he pointed to the swelling cloud spirit that began to thunder and boom as it slowly poured downwards through the sky like dripping oil at the end of its descending tendril it began to manifest a mouth that glowed with a bright violet energy. "Okay, everyone into the airship, that's my order." He commanded. He flung Kei-Shek's metal command table out into the street and upended it as a barrier, and did the same with the metal crates he could move, stacking them into barricades as the first spirits began to attack.
"Sick and children first." Nagant ordered as his civilians staggered onto the airship desperately. All but one, Lang squirmed out of his mother's grasp and ran over to Yana who picked him up and touched her head to his.
Go with your mother I'll be right there. She signed to him. Lang nodded back.
Eventually everyone was packed tight into the cargo hold, the corridors the quarters, every room they could find. , its actual cargo disgorged into the street. They were packed so tight in fact that Nehal went to the cockpit door to enter. Hiro was there, dressed in his full uniform for a change.
"I kept the seat warm." He said with a little smile before he got out of the rouged leather throne.
"Oh I'm feeling hotter already." She answered with a little grin as she hopped into the chair and fired up the engines. She pushed them full throttle and tilted them to the ascent angle but the normally quick, light ship couldn't move. "Oh damn." She said, as she noticed a massive signature on her radar.
"We have a problem." Nehal's voice said hazily into the hushed, hot hold. "The ship's overweight, we can't take off." She lowered the hydraulic ramp again. "We'll keep trying to lift off, keep bailing stuff out until we can go."
"We already did." Akir yelled as the passengers began to chatter frightfully. "We had to, to fit everyone on."
Kei-Shek looked at his heavy metal flak jacket and his heavy webbing of supplies and ammo, then to his men. They were still at the entrance, guarding it against the onslaught that they could feel coming now, in the high screeches that echoed hungrily down the street.
"Akir." Kei-Shek whispered to the panicking Lotus. He turned around and looked at him, his one eye wide and focussed intently. "Do you believe your findings can help us take back the city."
"I-I do." Akir answered, picking up on the Colonel's dire tone.
Kei-Shek gulped heavily, his eyes were wide and on the verge of tears. "Then when this is all over…I don't know name a park bench after me or something." He said rapidly before he shuffled to the edge of the cargo ramp. He looked at his troops, frightened yet focussed as they watched the spirits drawing nearer. "Men." He yelled with a ragged weary voice as he drew his officer's sword. "Stand at arms." He said as he raised high into the air "Advance!" He charged off the airship, yelling in one powerful roar that grew to a fearsome chorus as his men surged out of the rear of the craft, their crossbow bolts exploding against the shadowy spirits. Gouts of fire, shards of earth and typhoons of air and water battered the opposing monstrosities.
"Whatever you did we've got lift, let's get out of here." Nehal said over the speakers. As the ramp closed they could see more spirits, large and deadly closing in on them in droves as huge arcs of lightning shot out of Kei-Shek's firebenders. The craft flew back to the island at half its regular speed with the cloud spirit in tow. All around its thunderhead small apertures festered and grey, erupting with small, inaccurate pulses of purple energy that Nehal managed to narrowly evade, throwing the passengers around as it twisted in the air.
"The ship's still too heavy, we'll never evade it!" Nehal yelled into the speaker. She momentarily eyed the parachute at the back of the cockpit before she turned back around. "We're not there yet." She muttered to herself.
"Open the ramp, we'll try to fight it off." Nagant commanded.
Cold wind rushed in as they stared down the colossal abomination. Almost immediately everyone armed or bending launched whatever they could at the creature, sticking in its shadowy body simply failing to do any notable damage. In retaliation it manifested a long chasm straight to this swirling sun like sphere of purple spiritual energy that erupted into a bright pillar of energy which lanced a few inches from the side of them as Nehal tilted the craft out of the way.
"Well, unless people are ready to jump off the edge I suppose we're screwed." Mari said as she looked over the edge.
"Actually….I've got an idea. Akir said as he disappeared back into the workshop. He reappeared a moment later, carrying a hard angular glass case full of his mercury. He shattered the glass with a quick application of glassbending and then levitated the ball of mercury above one of his hands. He wound his gauntlet around one of the hydraulic pistons by the entrance to the ramp and tugged on it to test the grip.
"What are you doing?" Zhu-Rong asked as he watched the metal bender handle it at the edge of the craft.
"I 'm going to jump down that thing's throat and hope for the best!" He yelled over the roar of the overtaxed engines. "I need you to electrocute my cable ten seconds after I jump."
"That might kill you." Zhu-Rong observed. After seeing his stony face long enough Akir could safely estimate that Zhu-Rong was somewhat unhappy about that prospect.
"Then make sure you kill me at the right time." Akir quipped before he had time to let his mortality sink in. The black umbral mist of its body began to recede as it presented its purple core which began to flash and pulse rapidly.
Akir yelled a curse and jumped out into the cold and dark, engulfed by the creature's shadowy mass. He fell slowly in the pitch black, the cold nipping at him and sucking his vital energy out until he felt ready to freeze over. He bent the mercury into a razor thin whip of metal that pierced into the amethyst star at the spirit's centre as it grew in size and fury, about to release a beam of murderous energy. As hard as he could feel the whirling energy try to expunge the mercury he managed to keep it intact right to the centre. A second later Zhu-Rong's lightning sped down the metal cable and arced through his body. Where he had been cold a white hot burning agony seared his every nerve and then jumped from his hand to the mercury which lanced into the creatures core. The lightning arced out through its cloudy body burning it up like wax paper under a fire until it was just tattered wisps of immaterial matter raining down into Yue Bay.
For a moment there was something like daylight where the colossal spirit had just been. The cargo deck erupted into celebration. "He's not moving!" Mari yelled as she began pulling his line in.
He was smouldering and twitching his fingers intermittently. His eye was rolled back in his socket and he was barely breathing.