Chapter Ten: Bane of Existence
Dew watched the man impassively. By careful manipulation and through the considerable advantage of not caring what sorts of obstacles her passenger met with on the way down, Waft had managed to get one of the blastbow snipers to ground level, and had brought the weapon, too. Flower and Granite were looking it over right now, and Dew was met with an odd decision. She'd never had to deal with prisoners before.
"I never knew, I swear it, I never would have shot Ian," said the man.
"Bit strange that a pacifist would be part of something so elite as to be trusted with weapons like these," Dew remarked coldly. She could do cold easily, and it was easy cover for her uncertainty.
"I'm a good shot, that's all. They told us we were just going to keep people out. If I had known I would have shot Harren first, never-"
"Never say never again," Dew ordered him.
"I ne… I didn't mean for it to happen!"
"And you think that's enough for mercy, do you?" asked Dew, evenly.
"W-what are you going to do to me?" he stammered.
"Well, there's a bit of disagreement on that, but I can guarantee it won't be pleasant. I was thinking start with the noose principle, but instead around your feet. We'd anchor it at the top of the wall, throw you over and let you aim for a window, maybe," Fury suggested.
"But… but…"
"What do you think, Dew?" asked Serac. "Get rid of him now? He won't be the only one not to survive this day, I'd bet. …Plus Ian, of course."
Dew stared the prisoner down- not that it was hard, since he was crouched already. The sniper looked up at her, and she was almost surprised by the very real terror in his face. "Ian was like a grandfather to me..."
Grandfather? Dew looked closer, at the features hidden under a helmet, and realised that 'man' was pushing the definition. This soldier was young, practically a kid. All humans, short-lived as they were, might as well have been kids compared to Djinn, but it still came as a surprise.
Kid or not, Ian wouldn't have wanted anyone to die for him. Even the one who had fired the shot, this Harren person. Dew looked at the wound on the sniper's shoulder. "That's a nasty gash."
"Crenulations will do that to a person," Waft agreed, and perhaps she had noticed the change in Dew's attitude, because she sounded a bit ashamed.
"Right," said Dew. "Get this man to the sanctum, patch up his arm, and then get him working on a plan to remove all pointy parts of the fortress. The thing looks like a cross between a wedding cake and a sea urchin, for Mercury's sake."
"…Aye, cap'n," said Tonic, after only a moment's pause. "Oi, you two."
He was looking at a couple of people at the edge of the villager crowd, most of whom were rather confused at this point. They had walked all of a couple hundred feet, lain siege to their own castle, and then not moved for a few hours. Things had been happening, and when Ian was shot there had been some excitement, but mostly they had been told to sit tight and wait for the little blue frog-crab creature to tell them to charge. It was like the kind of dream that results from pineapple chili.
"…Us?" a woman repeated.
"No, just a couple of people who look like you. Yes, you, get this kid here bandaged, and then get back quick. It's time to do something, I'm sure," said Tonic, glancing back at Dew.
"I hope so," she agreed. "Once that gate-"
Clongk!
It was a sound that Dew had been waiting to hear for too long in her opinion. Flint's stone-cutter attack hacked through the last of the locks and hinges and whatever else the Lunpan soldiers were using to seal themselves inside the fortress, safe from most attacks.
"At last those bars are gone. Things are near-inflammable," Char grumbled, leaning against the charred stone.
"Inflammable means you can set it on fire," Fugue pointed out croakily, her throat sore after her singing performance. She hardly noticed the broken gate; her thoughts were still more on whatever Djinn had needed that music, and hoping that they were all right.
"Flammable, then," Char amended.
"Also means you can set it on fire," Fury remarked cheerfully.
"The bloody things won't burn, all right?!" Char snapped, but breathed out a sparky sigh and calmed back down. "Now what, Dew? We've been waiting long enough, are we going to go in fighting and rip the place apart, or what?"
The realisation was still washing over Dew that if she really was leading in Ian's place, she should try to follow his ideals, too. Even when Adavir took over, Ian had been content to slide into the anonymity of the village and take care of the people. They were really what this was all about.
"No," Dew decided. "It's important that they're here, to do what they have to do, but they don't have to do this. We can do it instead, and probably save lives while we're at it. Theirs and the soldiers, because the soldiers are them too, just the ones that were picked out of the crowd and put in armor and told that they could only trust themselves."
"Oh, no," said Tonic. "Dew! Dew, snap out of it, you're going like Bane and Luff and Crystal and Spring. No more philosophy today or you're going to end up a leader and you might never shake it off."
She laughed and looked over at him. "Right. It was just a phase anyway. Let's kick the hell out of some bad-guy-Adept tail, guys. …Softly." Dew grinned, though with Djinn it's hard to tell. "But not too softly."
"Bloody hellfire," Tinder sputtered, and ducked back around the corner. The wall opposite the Djinn seemed to burst like parts of it had been made from popcorn, and stone dust floated down to the floor.
"What in Jupiter's name was that?" demanded Gale.
"Looks like those guys we helped deal with outside weren't the only ones with blastbows," Tinder reported.
"Oh, great," Steam muttered. "Look, the part about letting you Jupiter Djinn fly us up through the windows, that I got, and how we were going to come at the throne room and hit that Adavir guy from an unexpected angle, that make good tactical sense, but where does getting repeatedly ventilated come into this?"
"I didn't plan for more of these things. Dew's buddy back there, Ian, he didn't even know about the snipers, so I figured there couldn't be too many of them or someone would have found out," Gale replied. He glared at Steam, who wasn't impressed. "It was sound reasoning!"
"Sounds deafening, actually," Ground said. "Look, last stands aren't bad, but this is just a boring old corner. Can't we get them to meet us in the great hall or something?"
"Why would we go to meet them somewhere else?!" asked Gale, baffled.
"We wouldn't. I just meant we'd get them to go," she replied.
"Most people don't have your sense of drama, Ground," said Reflux. "Because they're sane."
"Plan," Fever stated, waving his tail to catch their attention.
"We know, Fever, we know. 'Run up and burn them.' Usually it doesn't work, and especially not right now, unless you want to go under the planet and come around from the other side," said Gale.
"No, I mean a good plan. One that involves no one dying. Probably not even them." The other Djinn were silent. Fever was speaking in complete sentences that didn't involve random obliteration. There were only two explanations. Either he had completely worked out all of his fighting desires in the previous battles, or combat had driven him completely insane, and since the starting Djinni had been Fever, insanity looked like 'normal'.
Adavir's secondary sniper team was better-disciplined than the ones he had dispatched to break the siege, and less likely to fail miserably, too, but even they were starting to wonder. After the first wave of shots sent the little red thing into hiding, they had just been listening to frantic whispering. A moment ago, something red-brown had oozed around the corner following a sort of sparkling sound- sound couldn't sparkle, they knew, but it had.
"This is absolutely degrading," one voice declared, and a… thing walked around the corner, into firing range. It seemed to be a wavering mud creature, or what would be left if you splashed something with mud and then took away the thing that had been splashed. It was also glowing red.
"Sir?" asked one sniper, uncertainly.
"I'm sure as hell not taking any chances!"
"It's good to know someone isn't. I bet this hurts," said the mud.
"Fire!" the captain shouted, and a chorus of explosions rang out. Every single bullet hit its mark, splattering red-brown mud in all directions.
Underneath the earthy veil, which was just there to show the soldiers where Reflux was after Haze's protection was put on her, the bullets struck, bounced harmlessly away, and the Mars Djinni's power reacted. Red light swirled around her, and a counterattacking wave of energy bolts filled the hall. The ones who weren't taken down by the first wave were dropped when they tried firing again.
"Okay, so it worked," said Reflux. "That doesn't make it any less digusting."
"C'mere," Sleet offered. "I'll wash you off."
"Agh! Not Mercury too! The others were bad enough -no ice, no water, not even high humidity!"
"Stop whining," said Gale, who was secretly very, very happy that Reflux was the counterattacker, not her. "We've just earned ourselves a shortcut. Can't you burn that off, or something?"
"Mud doesn't burn," said Mud.
"…It doesn't?" asked Reflux. "Oh. Well, then, I think I'm ceramic." The others turned to see the Mars Djinni, who was now plated in a warmly-coloured terra cotta clay.
"Think of it as armor," Steam suggested.
"Or penance," Sap added.
"I'm looking forward to not having to have a body all the time," Reflux grumbled, following the others past the unconscious snipers. She kicked a few as she passed, and tried to break up some of the more awkward chunks, but it didn't really help. "Grind, that's what I need."
"Or Burst," said Spritz, helpfully. "Force, if it comes to it. Maybe Pound, too. Oh, wait!"
"All at once?" Reflux predicted.
"…How'd you know?"
"Or just ask Fever. He'll probably get it all off in three seconds with a foot of twine and a milk jug," Sap remarked. "Maybe we've just never given him the right sorts of questions before."
"You mean… how to take out a hallwayful of snipers with three non-directly-attacking Djinn?" said Sleet.
"Yeah. Maybe we should have him work on getting Garet's room clean when we get back to Vale," mused the Venus Djinni.
"What would he have to work with?"
"Garet."
"Oh, come on. You can't stack everything against him."
Gale was ignoring all outside distractions, leading the way through crossing and turning corridors that all looked exactly the same. Either it was intentional, to throw off intruders, or someone had found the world's most boring architect to design this fortress. But then she turned a corner and some very welcome features appeared.
"It almost looks like art," said Mold.
"Arr, if it are not worth stealin' an' linin' the hulls wi' fer buryin' or sinkin' elsewhere, ye canna in'trest a pirate," Hail replied.
"Well, there is some valuable art in the world," said Fizz. "But I'd have to say that piles of disjointed armor plates were more modern than old pirate-style treasure."
"Avast! Ye're wastin' me time wi' metal when there are a villain ter explain the 'cut' half o' 'cutlass' to, over an' o'er again!" Hail roared.
"I'm not going to rush in without some reinforcements- Gale! Just in time!" Luff called, happy to see a fellow senior-Jupiter-Djinni. You would be too, if there were fewer than a half dozen of your kind on the planet.
"Just in time to be the reinforcements to the doomed warriors, you mean?" asked Gale.
"Precisely," Geode agreed.
"You see…" Mold explained, "that's the throne room down there." All two dozen Djinn pivoted to see the large wooden doors. They weren't ornamented or even very imposing, but something had been done with them, very carefully, to suggest that the last person who decided to open something similar to these doors was named Pandora, and she had made the wrong choice.
"Adavir," Kite snarled.
"Who?" asked Forge.
"The Mars Adept who started this whole business," Haze explained.
"Oh. Yeah, like Hail said. The bad guy," Forge agreed.
"Adept?" Luff repeated.
"Adept?" Rime perked up. They looked at each other.
"Two in one day!" the Psynergy-sealing Djinn shouted triumphantly.
"About bloody time we were done here," said Spark.
"Geode!" called Luff.
"Here," Geode answered, saluting with his tail.
"Knock and see who's home."
"This has been the longest day of my life," Felix decided as the Adepts finally reached ground level. The tunnels didn't look much better, but there were windows with orange sunlight shining through in dusty shafts. "Very, very, very long. Remember Air's Rock?"
Jenna shuddered. "Oh yes."
"That was about fifteen minutes relative to today," the Venus Adept explained.
"At least you didn't lose the power to read minds," Ivan grumbled. "It's worse than going blind."
"I didn't start with it," Felix protested.
"Exactly my point," Ivan countered.
"…That's not even logic. I'm not sure it's human."
"I take offence," said Bane.
"Take all the fence you want, I'd settle for just knowing where our weapons are," said Isaac.
"I'm looking for them. Somewhere in this infernal castle, Spring's group should have been looking for the treasury and found your weapons by now. But if they're looking for us and we're looking for them, it could be morning before you're armed again," Bane explained.
Everyone looked at Isaac, who was faced with yet another tough decision. They would be in serious trouble if they tried to do anything without weapons or Psynergy, but if they waited to find Spring and their gear, it could be too late to make a difference.
"Know where you are?" he asked Ryan.
"Yes," the soldier replied.
"Take us to Adavir," Isaac commanded. The others nodded, just slightly, just enough to take some of the burden off Isaac's shoulders. This would not be a good fight.
"No, I- hold on, it's around here somewhere - you really shouldn't do that if you're going to try going up those - watch that edge there, it's - run for it!"
When the clattering of metal had ended and all Djinn had been accounted for as a dozen intact creatures, Torch led them out from hiding around the corner. "Right. I think we're going to want a plan if we're going to try carrying broadswords up stairs. And no more shield-surfing."
Dew led her team of Djinn through surprisingly empty halls, past abandoned rooms, and a kitchen that appeared to have been the decisive battleground for at least four major wars in the last week. Occasionally they saw a Lunpan soldier in the distance, but not for long- they were running, and not at all interested in fending off intruders. At one point, they found a hallway that might have once been lined with suits of armor, but now looked like blacksmith's back yard.
"No marks anywhere," Flower observed. "This wasn't a battleground."
"And this thing," said Serac, picking something like an unburnt torch out from between a few plates with his tail. "There's a Psynergy crystal wrapped up in that fabric at the top, and it's danged hot, too."
"Adavir's playing with Psynergy, blocking it off and projecting it and who knows what else," Breath realised. "…And among the Djinn closest to facing him are Fever, Squall, Hail, and Geode…"
"So no one in those groups will have much time for rational thought in the near future," Waft continued. "Whereas anyone who can invent torches that project bubbles of Psynergy inside space where they've already blocked Psynergy is going to be somewhere in the insane genius category."
"I think we should be moving faster," Serac told Dew.
Several loud chopping sounds echoed off the walls as dust floated down from the ceiling. The Djinn turned in time to see Flint jump, bounce off the wall, and hack at the ceiling several more times, cutting out a few larger chunks. "I think we should be moving in a straight line," he explained.
"Aren't you guys kinda overreacting?" asked Char.
"You're young," Granite remarked, "so I suppose it's understandable that you don't know everything." Her tone made it clear that while it was understandable, she certainly didn't approve of a Djinni not knowing everything. "But in any case when Fever's leading the charge, it's important to get there and throw a bucket of water over him. Sometimes metaphorically, sometimes not."
Gravel rained around and occasionally onto Char as she considered this. "How do you know Fever's leading the charge?"
Granite looked surprised. "He's in the room and conscious. What else do you need to know?"
Flint carved through several ceilings, aided by Char when they were sure of not blasting the floor above with red-hot stone shrapnel, until the Djinn finally reached the proper floor.
"Never want to do that again," said Flint, chopping away one last time. They got through just in time to see the world fall on their heads.
A short time before this, Geode finished knocking on the door, and two dozen elemental creatures stampeded into Adavir's throne room. The chamber was sparsely decorated, but managed to look twice as ornamental as most parts of the Elemental Lighthouses. A high arched ceiling curved down to either side of a long hall that rose up a low line of stairs at the end. In the middle of the raised portion was a throne, tall, cushioned in Mars-Djinni-red and edged in gold.
The Djinn noticed all of this, in a roundabout way, but mostly they noticed the man standing in front of the throne, looking like any normal person kept waiting at an agreed-upon meeting spot.
"You're here," Adavir stated, and seemed to think this summed everything up. He was much younger than Luff had expected, but just old enough to command respect, and projected the aura of confidence that the Jupiter Djinni had seen in all major combatants in the conflict of good and evil. "I hadn't expected you, I confess. The result that seemed most likely to me was that you would simply be eradicated when your Adepts entered the null space. That would have been quite a neat disposal, too."
Well, that settled which side he was on in said eternal conflict of the absolutes.
"Speaking of the Adepts, where have you got them?" Squall demanded.
"Did I do something to indicate that I was one of those people who answers all of their opponent's questions for no obvious reason? I don't care much for gloating, really," he replied evenly.
"None of the modern villains hold onto the old ways anymore," Luff muttered. "A few millennia ago, villains practically read you their plan just to make you feel more at home in their fortress of terror."
"Hold on," said Tinder, "if you don't care for gloating, but you're bragging about caring about gloating, shouldn't you vanish in a puff of impossibility?"
Adavir clapped twice, and the Djinn were suddenly very aware of rows of archer windows snapping open along the walls. The chorus of clicks was followed by a short flurry of activity, and the ends of metal tubes were pushed up against the spaces, like scorpions lying in wait.
"How many of those blastbows did you make?" Gale asked, exasperated. "I thought we had dealt with them all already!"
"Hmm… 'blastbows'… a good name for them. Thank you, I had been having trouble there." The Djinn waited for a tense moment, but nothing more happened.
"I think he was serious about not telling us anything," Sleet remarked.
"Just wait, he'll crack," Fizz assured him.
Adavir flexed his fingers and torches lit around the room in various colours, though mostly the usual red-gold of pure flame. "However, since more of your tiny upstart brethren are approaching…" He frowned, as though surprised by something. "I shouldn't have said that. Perhaps it's a side-effect of being the one with all the power."
"And having an ego that could sink ships," Rime added.
"Now you're trying to goad me. To Mercury with that," Adavir decided, and clapped twice. A flurry of blastbow fire spread from the walls, bouncing off of Iron and Steam's quickly placed shields. "Oh, yes, your Djinni powers. Truly bizarre, that. Nevertheless…" The Mars Adept reached out like a conductor beginning a symphony, and in brackets along the walls more flames rose up. The throne room felt like an oven, and with some surprise, Iron and Steam's powers failed as soon as the torches lit.
"Brilliant!" said Luff, grinning at the two younger Djinn, as the entire horde of them released their newly-available Psynergy on the walls. Lightning blasts, raging fires, and savage ice storms lashed at the archer slots while the walls themselves began to crack and crumble.
Adavir had the luck (whether it was good or bad was debateable) to have an incredibly expressive face. His eyebrows alone were currently projecting the sort of sentiment it would take a shipful of drunken sailors an hour to accomplish. He selected a pair of torches, extinguished all the others that were affecting Psynergy, and rolled his hands swiftly through the air, manipulating the forces in the room as quickly as he could cast his own unusual Psynergy.
The blastbow archers weren't likely to be able to fire through the debris now piled against either wall, but the Psynergy in the room switching on and off in chaotic waves was having the same effect on the minds of the Djinn as a rhinoceros does on wet clay. Unfortunately, clay can only really be stomped once, and then there's not much left to do to it. This happened over and over again.
"You can't… keep this up… forever…" Gasp gasped, trying fruitlessly to use any of his powers. "And when… you slip… you're mine…"
"Spark!" shouted Rime as the Mars Djinni yelped and collapsed, hopefully only unconscious.
"I don't have to keep it up forever," said Adavir, flailing madly as he spread the switching tactics to another pair of torches. The Djinn were practically blurring, so great was the strain. "Just too long for you to survive."
"Really? That's great," said a voice, the only one in the room that sounded totally unconcerned. Adavir turned his head slightly, and saw Fever sitting on the top of the throne. "What's your backup plan?" The Mars Djinni, to whom absolute chaos was simply a way of life, sprung like a cat and kicked like a Xianese master.
Adavir shouted in fury as the small foot connected. Fever wasn't all that massive, but Djinn don't obey the same laws of physics as regular people, and it wasn't as similar to a foot as it was to a firebrand. As he hit the floor, Adavir slapped one hand down and sent flames rolling in at the main cluster of Djinn like the surf rolling in.
"Eventually," he growled, picking Fever up by the neck, "you're going to have to realise that I will not play your games the way regular opponents do. I think. I've created weapons that let a regular person slay an Adept from a hundred feet away. I seal your powers more thoroughly than any force you've ever met before. I cannot be defeated by ordinary means."
Realising that he had forgotten something, Adavir turned his glare from the struggling Djinni, whose fiery nature couldn't harm a Mars Adept, to the wider part of the room. It was a swirling mass of water, the result of Tornado and Drench Psynergies temporarily putting aside their differences for the common good of looking really cool. It was fighting the firewash, too, and winning.
"You idiot, we don't use ordinary means," Fever explained scathingly.
Adavir growled again, hurled Fever with concussive force into the floor, and projected an aura wall much like Flash's Djinni power. The difference, in this case, was that he extended it from one wall to the other, between himself and the throne room door, and pushed. A moment later, it was a few inches from the far wall, and only that far because there were Djinn in the way. The Adept focused his power on one of the extinguished torches, which ignited again. There was enough power in it to keep the wall solid for an hour at least, letting Adavir focus on other matters.
"This is not exactly what I was hoping for," Gale muttered, peeking out from behind a ruined pillar that had shielded her from the oncoming wall. Across the room, she saw that Geode had managed the same thing, but unlike her, he saw it as an opportunity for heroism. Young elemental creatures these days.
"Wait until he turns his back," Gale hissed to Geode.
"Prepare for your reckoning, dastard!"
"Bloody Venus Djinn don't have any sense!" she muttered, dashing out to back him up. Adavir noticed them instantly -people in comas noticed Geode in full charge in less than ten seconds- and moved quickly. He was deceptively fast, slipping between Geode's Spire attack and Gale's Flash Bolt, then turned as he passed them, hit them with a disorienting wave of null Psynergy, and followed it with a pair of Fireballs.
"Why you…" Geode snarled, but his attempt at Mother Gaia was disrupted by another flaring torch. Not easily dissuaded, Geode harnessed his Djinni power. Every surface in the room glowed, and then the light peeled away and pulled together into a glowing sphere, as though space had been wrapped around a tiny world.
"Never want to do that again," said Flint, emerging from a newly-cut hole in the floor. Adavir heard the voice, sidestepped, and Geode's earth-orb crashed down on the rising reinforcements.
"What in blazes?!" Dew shouted, which is fairly severe for a Mercury Djinni.
"Adavir's turned the other Djinn against us!" Char yelped.
"No, just bad aim!" Gale called back, taking flight to avoid a fireball. The Mars Adept was slicing the room with the anti-Psynergy fields from his torches, keeping power around himself while limiting the Djinn to their natural abilities. It had to be taking incredible concentration, but before she could think of a way to manipulate that toward victory, a Nova rocked her back down to the floor.
"Fugue, up here!" Dew ordered when she managed to get through the hole. "One more target for a good aria and that'll be the day's work."
"Fugue…" Adavir muttered, bringing up a mental list of Mars Djinn and recalling what he knew about that one. The ruler of Lunpa smiled as a new plan unfolded before him. The universe did seem to follow some conventions, he had found, and one of them was that there's always another trick to be played.
Breath carried Fugue up from the floor below and then dove back down again, content to leave this to more suitable Djinn until the room was less like the inside of a volcano. Fugue tried to ignore the raging inferno of Psynergy and the slightly crazed look on Adavir's face while she summoned her innate power one more time.
A mighty chord echoed in the high-arched hall, crimson notes flowed toward Adavir like well-organised lava… and reflected off a shining firewall at the same time four more torches erupted, pushing the active-Psynergy bubble to encompass the entire throne room. The natural powers of the Djinn were sealed away just in time for Fugue's blast to drain their Psynergy reserves as well.
"Does anyone else think this is just disgusting?" asked Flint. "I think it's disgusting."
"There," Adavir wheezed. "It's about time. Now, can you all just be good little Djinn and burn little you're supposed to?"
"That depends," said Dew, still defiant and searching madly for a plan. "Can you raise the temperature of this fortress to something like the core of a star?"
Adavir's eyes flashed. The Djinn might have been driving him to insanity, or it had been there all along and they were just good at digging out people's deeper personalities. "I can try," he replied, grinning. "Supernova!"