Chapter 15 – The Swarm
There came a point when Ntairow's patience for Karo's speed—or rather his lack thereof—finally ran out. Without warning, she broke away from the party at a very fast run, ignoring the others' shouted pleas to let them catch up.
Syr might have been able to keep relatively close to Ntairow, but he wouldn't abandon Karo. Likewise, Syr wouldn't abandon the search for Esaax, but having lost sight of him, and now separated from Ntairow and her empathic connection to Esaax, Syr could really only hope he was still moving in the right direction.
It was by pure chance that he and Karo eventually managed to reunite with Ntairow, several minutes after she'd left them. She was standing with her back against the front doors of none other than the Hope Institute.
"Of course…" Syr rushed to Ntairow's side. "He's here?" he asked her.
"Yes," she answered.
"This is where it started," Syr said, his eyes wide with realization. "Esaax got sick right after he left from here…" The arbok shook his head in disbelief and shame. "I should've figured it out much sooner, but I'd already made scapegoats out of the poor staff at the Haven… Looks like Esaax knew, though. And now he's come back for answers."
"Or blood," Ntairow said grimly.
Syr immediately had to drive out a mental image of a massacre at Esaax's hands. "…So how long have you been waiting out here?" he asked Ntairow.
"Too long. All the doors are locked, and I couldn't force any of them open. Esaax opted to take a shortcut through one of the walls, but the hole's been covered over with ice. And not normal ice, either. I was able to chip away at it somewhat, but it immediately grew back, almost as if it were alive…"
Syr shuddered, feeling his throat go dry. "Living" ice needed no further explanation—he could already imagine the sort of creatures that could be responsible for such things, could all too easily picture their hellishly glowing eyes, their massive teeth…
Nonetheless, he tried to brace himself as well as he could for what he might have to face beyond those doors. You're doing this for Esaax, he reminded himself.
The arbok studied the doors for a moment. "I think I can help you get in," he said. He motioned Ntairow out of the way with a jerk of his head, then spat a dark spray of full-strength acid at the metal doors. The attack caused them to soften and deform slightly and give off harsh, stinking fumes, but the poison-type technique failed to burn all the way through.
"I'm sorry," Syr said, backing away from the doors once more. "It normally eats right through…"
"You've actually weakened it well," Ntairow said. "I could certainly tear it open now if it weren't for what the lingering acid would do to my hands in the process."
"The acid won't bother me." That was all the warning that Karo gave before plowing into the doors. His large nose punched right through the softened metal, and the rest of him followed.
The others entered after him, careful to avoid the sharp, torn, acid-coated edges of their makeshift entrance. Once they were all in, Ntairow managed an impressed smile at Syr and Karo. "Great job, both of you," she said. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," Syr and Karo said, almost in unison.
As the three of them entered the building, Karo turned back briefly to look at the hole that he and his nose had just created. "Wow, that's even bigger than the last one," he remarked. "Awesome."
- o -
Purposefully, Moriel made her way through the corridors of the Hope Institute. The glalie kept a mindfully quick pace as she moved; she had a fairly important task to carry out.
Their employer apparently wasn't quite the good guy that he'd made himself out to be. Solonn had told Moriel, as well as the rest of the glalie and the claydol and steelix among them, that DeLeo had tricked one of his clients into evolving, which was against the law in Convergence. As such, someone needed to go and alert the authorities, as well as contact the staff at the Haven so they could come to the victim's aid.
Moriel had readily volunteered to take care of this matter. Having once been in league with their enemies, she still wasn't entirely certain that she'd gained the full trust of the other glalie she now associated with, even after she'd fought alongside them. Any help she could provide for any of them was an opportunity she gladly seized.
As she navigated the winding halls of the building, she felt grateful that she'd been working there as long as she had. The Hope Institute's internal layout could be a bit confusing for newcomers, but by that point, Moriel had memorized it fairly well. It also helped that the building was closed at the moment; it was easier to focus on where she was supposed to be going since it was largely empty.
Then she rounded a corner into a rather large room and found that the Hope Institute wasn't as empty as she'd thought it was.
Moriel had stumbled upon Ntairow, Karo, and Syr. The former two looked upon her with largely unreadable expressions, but the arbok looked distinctly and increasingly afraid, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide.
"Whoa, hey!" Moriel exclaimed. "Who are you, and wh—"
She was cut off as first a terrified shout and then a spray of acid escaped the arbok in a moment's panic. Moriel shrieked in pain as the burning fluid struck her face, and she retaliated immediately and automatically: in an instant, the room was filled with a small army of illusory glalie, and at the same time, three loud cracks rang out in rapid succession.
All three of the sheer cold strikes hit their targets, but only Syr was affected. As he dropped to the floor, unconscious, the swarm of glalie began rushing around in circles around Ntairow and Syr—independently, at varying speeds, with some moving clockwise and others moving counterclockwise.
Then Moriel and her illusory copies all turned toward their targets just long enough to fire ice beams in unison, sending jagged, bright blue bolts of ice-type energy flying in a crisscrossing web around Ntairow, Karo, and the insensible arbok at their feet. Most of them passed inconsequentially through or around the nosepass and the kwazai, but one of them—the real one—struck Karo on the left side of the head, causing him to curse and stagger a bit.
A pale bluish-purple light filled Ntairow's eyes as she tapped into her psywave technique. The branches of her tail were already fanned out and moving around independently, their oculons trying to pick out the telltales that would distinguish the real, living glalie from the nonliving copies, but something about the glalie was confounding her psychic senses. Unable to pick out her target directly, Ntairow instead spun on one foot, firing a quick volley of psywaves in a circle around her—but succeeding only in causing three illusory glalie to vanish before a protect aura went up around the remaining copies and their maker, foiling the rest of her attacks.
The swarm fired another web of ice beams, hitting Karo once again—Ntairow scowled, wishing she'd been able to tell where the real ice beam had come from so she could have dived in front of it. Using the glalie's attacks to fuel mirror coat responses—and ultimately to fuel a devastating anguish attack once the kwazai had taken enough of them—seemed like the best hope for taking her out at this point. Psywaves were much slower, much easier to avoid than the instantaneous reactions that her retaliatory attacks were, and for all the help that Karo was providing in the fight, he might as well have been in the same state as Syr.
"Why aren't you doing anything?" Ntairow demanded of the nosepass.
"I'm trying!" Karo insisted, and he was indeed trying. The trouble was that he had a very limited selection of techniques to use against their adversary, the consequence of his trainer having decided to limit the number of attacks he could learn to a mere four out of a belief that it'd make Karo hone those four to a greater potency and learn to use them more creatively.
Karo might not have minded this so much at the moment if one of the moves he'd been left with had been a nice rock-type attack, preferably one that would simply drop rocks on all of the glalie at once and thus weaken the real one enough to put an end to her double team illusions. His zap cannon was terribly difficult to aim and terribly easy to dodge, and being unable to pick out his actual target in the first place meant he couldn't use lock-on to overcome those drawbacks.
The only hope he could see lay in his remaining two techniques, one of which he was trying to use not on the glalie but rather on Ntairow, Syr, and himself. Specifically, he was trying to impose a block field around the three of them. Blocking more than one target at the same time was never easy, and the current circumstances weren't helping matters.
But then he saw Ntairow go completely rigid with a look of alarm, halted right in the middle of unleashing another series of psywaves. Satisfied as he could be that the field was secure around its targets, Karo focused on intensifying it so that it would not only prevent anything from breaking out of it but also prevent anything from breaking in.
A third ice beam came Karo's way—only to dissipate harmlessly against the force field he'd summoned. Karo felt a spark of pride ignite within him—he'd succeeded. With a faint sense of relief, he let the block field withdraw from him, leaving it clinging to Ntairow and Syr as he unleashed the last of his four techniques.
All at once, the space was filled with blazing light and thunderous noise.
