Title: Might and Magic
Rating: M
Warnings: Blood, Language, Violence, Gore(?), death
Matt hit the ground hard and let out a cry of pain. A split second later, and the cry rose to a shriek as their foe ground his foot against the swordsman's broken arm. Lance struggled to lift himself to his feet to aid Matt, but slumped back down with a groan of pain. Anna remained still and silent where she had been thrown, only the faint rise and fall of her chest showed she was still alive.
Natalie's head whipped up and around from where she worked on healing the gash on Anna's stomach; the scream Matt gave was unlike anything she'd ever heard before. The mage was the least injured, bearing only minimal scrapes from flying debris as their foes had mostly ignored her. Her eyes fell on where Matt was writhing on the ground, trying to get away from the warrior who continued to torture him.
Natalie's mouth opened in a silent cry as the man raised his sword and slammed it into Matt's stomach, pinning him to the ground. The swordsman gave a choked gasp and shuddered from pain before slumping still. Natalie stood up in a daze as she stared as blood began to pool around Matt. Her gaze flickered to where Lance lay, his eyes squeezed tightly shut from pain. Then, she looked at Anna who lay on the ground at her feet, unconscious, and with a massive tear in her armor from a sword slash. She saw their foe stand back with the rest of his team to eye the defeated blonde.
"Well, so much for your team having the strength to beat anyone an anything," the man taunted. His four followers snickered as they watched. "Come on, let's kill the mage and then we can loot their bodies." He put a contemptuous emphasis on Natalie's role as his eyes shifted to where she stood beside Anna.
Tears burned in Natalie's eyes as the five fighters turned to face her, stepping around Matt's fallen form. She had failed to keep her friends up during their battle, had been unable to heal them quickly enough. The only reason she remained standing was because their foes had deemed her as too weak to worry about yet, stating that magic was pointless if you could kill your enemies quickly enough. Her eyes drifted back to where Matt lay on the ground. His eyes had opened and he stared at her desperately as he raised one hand to the blade impaling him.
The fearful despair in Matt's eyes sent a shock through Natalie. And with that shock, came a rush of determination. Her eyes rose back to her foes as they came even closer with vicious smirks on their faces. Natalie's own face hardened and she raised her staff. A shift in her eyes caused them to falter in their advance: Natalie's eyes had begun to glow. These five bastards had made a mistake when they had chosen to leave her alive and unharmed.
Natalie stepped away from Anna's collapsed form with wisps of pure white light dancing around her. She walked towards her foes, but her eyes were fixed on Lance not three feet away from their enemies. She stopped beside him and a brilliant flash of light appeared around his body. In an instant, the gunner's wounds healed.
Lance's eyes shot wide open and he jolted upright upon sensing an insane amount of mana. He feared their enemies were preparing for something nasty, but what he discovered instead was almost more terrifying: Natalie's impassive face as she stepped around him, her body flickering with an aura and bending the light around her with power. Lance let out a shout of warning as she walked straight towards her foes. Natalie's specialty did not lay in close combat.
The five fighters snapped out of their shock as Natalie approached them. One man raised his heavy spear and leveled it for a thrust. Just as he began to attack, a blast of invisible power slammed into him and his team, scattering them several yards back. Natalie watched them with frigid eyes and a frozen expression.
"I'll murder you all in a second, so you can wait right there," Natalie promised them in an icy voice. As she spoke, ice formed around her foes arms and legs, pinning them to the ground. She ignored their exclamations of shock, turned her eyes away from them, and continued towards Matt.
Matt stared at Natalie as she approached him. He'd never seen the mage so furious, so cold, so murderous. Nor had he seen her display such power before. Every step she took caused the ground at her feet to be covered with frost before blackening as though from invisible flames. Matt's eyes were wide as he watched her raise her staff. A pulse of healing magic far greater than any he'd felt before rushed through his body. The sword stabbed in his flesh vanished and the wound sealed shut. His broken arm straightened and healed. All the other wounds on his body knit shut to leave smooth skin, and fresh energy filled him.
Natalie turned her head from Matt to her foes, yet she addressed the swordsman in the same icy tone she'd used before, "Get Anna and Lance out of here. You don't have to go far, but I want you out of the way. I need to show those corpses just how deadly magic really is, and I don't want you three caught up in the crossfire."
Matt scrambled to his feet without question and darted for where Lance was staggering to his feet. The two men had a brief exchange where Lance protested but Matt sharply shook his head. The gunner reluctantly turned and followed to scoop Anna up before they retreated back several hundred yards and turned back to watch. Lance began to load six bullets into his gunblade, but Matt place a palm on the weapon, pushing it down.
"Let her handle this," Matt murmured.
Lance shot the swordsman an incredulous look, "They just handed all of us our asses. She'll be murdered by them!"
Matt shook his head slightly, "No. I've never seen Natalie battle alone before, but I have little doubt she'll be okay."
Lance snorted, "Bad time to be making assumptions, I think."
"Don't you sense it?" Matt whispered, gesturing down at where Natalie was standing alone. "There's something powerful lurking here, and it's only under Natalie's control."
Lance hesitated and stared down at the lone mage. Now that Matt had mentioned it, he could sense an ominous force hanging in the air. It sent his skin prickling and caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise. The gunner shivered as he realized what the force was. Natalie's mana had suffused the air and ground and the aura only grew stronger each passing second. He's always had a sneaking suspicion that the mage was far stronger than he'd ever really seen, and now they were about to see just how strong.
The five fighters sensed an oppressive aura, but hadn't yet attributed it to Natalie; they were too busy attempting to break free of their icy shackles. Suddenly, the ice on one of them began to slowly spread. His breathing picked up with terror as it crept all the way to his neck and stopped. His eyes fitted to where Natalie approached and stopped just a foot away from him. Her eyes still glowed a chilling blue and were filled with absolutely no remorse.
"So many choices," Natalie told him softly. "Encase you in an icy tomb that will never melt? Slowly force spires through your body? Maybe I'll leave you as you are now to slowly starve and freeze."
The man swallowed, but said nothing. To his confusion, the ice receded on his body, freeing him, and by the mutters from his allies, they were free as well. The five fighters sprang up and away from Natalie. The mage watched them move, her eyes glittering with murderous intent and a small amount of amusement yet she remained motionless.
Suddenly, Natalie spoke again, her voice level and emotionless, "Magic is weak. Magic will never be as terrifying as a naked blade, nor is it as effective. Physical prowess will always conquer any mage, especially with more than one fighter. Let's see you back those claims up. Ready your weapons and send your prayers because I am your opponent now, and I am far more than any mage you've ever fought before. You will pay in blood, pain, and screams for what you did to my friends and team, and I won't even have to move from this spot to execute you."
As Natalie spoke, a storm of ice and lightning formed around her. The magic cloak crackled and hissed as ice formed in miniscule daggers to be carried on the wind, and lightning flickered along it. The ground trembled and cracked at their feet and fire erupted from the fissures that formed between spires of stone. At the end of her speech, Natalie raised her staff and twirled it, wisps of white light and black sparks trailing after the tip. Even after the display, her power continued to grow.
The five fighters drew their weapons, unimpressed at the stunning example of power and control. None of them grasped just how skilled a person had to be to control even two elements of magic at once, and Natalie skillfully and easily controlled seven at once: ice, wind, fire, earth, lightning, dark, and light. They had prodded the sleeping dragon, and now that dragon's fangs were bared at her witless prey.
Even if the five fighters didn't realize how dangerous their foe was, Matt and Lance did. They gaped at the display of magic, but their attentions were broken by a low groan from behind them. They twisted around to see Anna slowly sitting up. The ranger's eyes opened and she stiffened and immediately reached for her bow at the oppressive magic built in the air. Her head whipped around, searching for the source, but she only saw Matt and Lance watching her. The two men gestured her forwards to the edge of the rock they were crouched behind.
Anna frowned in confusion, but joined them and peered over the side. She jolted in shock at the sight below. Natalie was terraforming the landscape around her. A storm howled around her with her at the eye. The clouds flickered and flashed with multi-colored light and ripped the stone of the ground apart, but did not touch the mage that controlled it. The five fighters who had taken down the team before were lunging at Natalie, trying to get close enough to attack her.
Natalie watched the fighters as they tried to work their way around her geysers of flame and razor sharp spires of stone. One man loaded a string of bullets into his gun and fired. The shots melted into pools of lead mid-air and fell into a pool of slag three feet away from the mage. Natalie returned fire with three shards of ice. The spears slammed into the man, pinning him to the ground by the stomach and both shoulders. He howled in pain, but was silenced a second later as the air in his lungs was sucked out. He twitched for the briefest of moments before falling still forever, glazed eyes staring sightlessly at the sky, face fixed in an expression of terror.
The mage's eyes shifted to the spearman who let out a howl of rage. The man charged at Natalie, an aura granting him the defense needed to cut through the storm. And yet, the more he ran, the slower everything seemed to get. He felt as though he was running through a pool of mud, everything seemed heavy and sights around him traveled slowly. He stared ahead at the mage who stared back, eyes glowing. Suddenly, the man felt a crushing force and his body slammed into the ground, creating a crater. His bones popped, snapped, and crumpled as gravity was increased a hundredfold around him. He never saw as the area glowed briefly before detonating.
The resulting blast of Natalie's Supernova sent the remaining three fighters backwards and into a wall of stone that rose up behind them. The slumped to the ground in a pile, stunned. Natalie's head turned to follow them and she hissed, "Yes, see how their strength helped them against me? I control the air you breathe, the space you travel through. I control the ground you walk on, the water in your blood. With one thought, I could pop your body like a balloon."
And that was exactly what she did. One man simply burst and blood sprayed everywhere, splattering across his two horrified allies. Chunks of his body dropped to the ground with wet thuds alongside his two heavy daggers. The ax wielder on their team let out a whimper and lunged to his feet. He twisted to run but suddenly found his body unresponsive to his brain commands. His limbs stiffened and turned him back to face Natalie.
"Did you know your muscles run on electrical impulses?" Natalie asked in a hiss. "With a little focus, I can control every motion of your body. I could make you dance, I could turn you on your ally, I could make you kill yourself, or I could even simply stop your heart. You're a puppet and I am the master. So what shall we do with you?"
The man's eyes filled with tears as his arm drew his own weapon against his wishes. He raised the one-handed ax over his head and in a flash of motion and a cry of terror, the head came down in his gut. Natalie released her control over his body and left him to crumple to the ground, moaning and coughing as he bled out. The mage turned her eyes on the last person.
"Looks like you were wrong," Natalie breathed, somehow heard over the storm that still raged around her.
Sweat beaded on the mage's brow, but she should no signs of faltering. Her lips spread in a cold smile, one that sent the swordsman's terror even higher. One lone girl, shorter and frailer looking than any of his team had brutally slaughter four of them. They had killed hundreds of fighters both skilled and not in magic and weapons, but never had any of them fought something like Natalie. The mage that stood before him now was no human, but a force of nature in human form. As she had promised, their team had broken and fallen, and she had not moved one step.
Natalie saw the blind panic in the man's eyes grow and she felt a flash of satisfaction. She gestured with her staff and an orb of pure mana surrounded the man, lifting him in the air and bringing him closer to her. The man's face was white with fear as he met Natalie's eyes. From behind him, he heard the death rattle of his last ally as blood loss finally killed him.
"Should I torment you as you did Matt?" Natalie asked him. "Broken bones do hurt when you grind them together. I'd leave you to bleed out on the ground with something stabbed through you, but we wouldn't want to be boring now would we? I already killed one of your friends like that, and a different one from blood loss. So what should we do with you?"
The man whimpered, "Please let me go. I'm sorry for what I've done to you."
Natalie threw her head back and laughed a chilling laugh that carried no amusement. Her head fell forwards and she hissed, "You're sorry, huh? I'm sure others pleaded for mercy, but I know you didn't spare them." The magic orb she sustained around the man slowly began to shrink as she went on, "You nearly killed my friends, murdered hundreds of people who did nothing wrong, tormented each of your victims, and now you want me to forgive you? No. Your arrogance and actions earned you your execution, and the only mercy you will get from me is that I will leave you dead. Be glad that I don't think you are worth more than one death or I would bring you back over and over just to kill you again."
With that, Natalie let the orb of mana crush the man. Nothing remained when the magic finally dissipated. The mage let the storm howling around her fade. Her limbs shook from the strain of supporting her magic, but she turned at the sound of footsteps running up behind her. Natalie smiled tiredly at her stunned friends just before her eyes shut. She released her staff and collapsed.
Matt let out a shout and caught Natalie before she hit the ground. Gently, he lowered her to lie on her back and felt for her pulse. To his relief, the mage's pulse was steady and strong. She had merely exhausted herself from using too much magic at once. The swordsman looked up and nodded to a worried Lance and Anna with a smile.
"She's fine, just sleeping," Matt told them.
Anna blew out a sigh of relief and looked around the landscape and what remained of the five hunters, "Wow."
Lance nodded, "Wow is right. I never knew Natalie could be so destructive." He glanced at the sleeping mage and added with a wry smirk, "Or that she could be so murderous. I'm going to think twice before commenting on her chest."
Matt laughed as he gathered Natalie into his arms and stood up, "Probably a good idea. I'm glad she's on our side, and that she was here today. We would be dead without her."
Anna nodded and murmured, "I'm glad she's usually so laid back and more interested in healing than attacking. Imagine if someone with her kind of strength, but more aggressive." She shuddered and shook her head, "The world would burn I don't think anyone could stop them."
"Well Natz is on our side, and is mostly peaceful, and knows how dangerous she is. I doubt we have anything to worry about," Matt replied with a shrug. He glanced down at Natalie fondly as she shifted to rest her face against his chest with a small smile on her face. "So where so we take her to rest?"
"Goldenbrick is closest," Lance suggested. "We can get a couple of rooms there and tell people it's safe to go out again."
The other two nodded and turned for the seaside city.
A/N: This is an older one, and one of those combat-oriented fics I've mentioned in the past. I wanted to write about how deadly precise magic could be and different ways it could be used aside from a ball, and I wanted to be more descriptive with wounds and combat; oh, and expound on Natalie's fiercely protective nature when it comes to her friends and what she'd do if they were all pushed against a wall. The result was Natalie the Psychopath. (^_^;) This one is not expected to ever become a full story, even if it so obviously looks like the final battle for one; just a plot drabble I wrote a little over a year ago. Sadly, it has to go here rather than The Epic Tales due to content and rating.
***FOR FUTURE UPLOADS: Nothing is changing upload-wise here. BUT for my two remaining unfinished plots, Shadow of the Blight, and The Long Road Home, The Long Road Home is next on importance. My main focus for uploads will be there with drabbles and plot ideas being uploaded here and on The Epic Tales to keep you all entertained. SotB will probably get a chapter here and there, as you all have likely come to expect from me and my ADHD uploads, but TLRH is the focus for next story to be completed as it has been up for longer.
Responses to Guest reviewers:
Little Follower: I'll get a response in for your review on Retribution's final chapter here, too. Please forgive the incoming text walls.
For Retribution: Good to hear. I was always a little disappointed with my endings for An Epic Retelling and Mortals, Gods, and Demons, while Transformed always seemed like more of an extended drabble than anything else-amusing to write and read, but rushed as far as a story goes. And yeah, I doubt Anna is as eager to go adventuring again. Not yet, anyway. She'll probably continue to do it, but not until after a long period of relaxation and recovery. And my internal shipper likes to think she gets married to Lance, but I likely won't ever write that. :3 Thank you for the poem! It was an awesome sum-up for the entire plot. I wish I had the ability to rhyme that well; my poetry takes me about a half hour just to write a couple of couplets. :P As for the party, there is no order when a drunken Matt is involved; parties involved just have to weather the storm. XD After looking back at previous chapters (and egads, the typos), specifically chapter six, I realized there were actually hints at what had happened in the mines. Inside the sealing chamber were the remains of the army that had initially fought the Primordial, and outside may have been an excavation crew for the mines that was slaughtered by the protections on the door left to ward away anyone who was attempting exactly what the Grandmaster was doing. I wish I could say that was planned, but any planning was entirely subconscious.
For Another Epic Collection: Yeah... it's a mess. I finally went back and made those changes you mentioned. ^-^; It slipped my mind for whatever reason. I was probably out of the house when I read your review, and i can't edit the documents on my iPad. FanFiction won't reload the changes I save.
I like minimal description, for the most part, but sometimes I find my writing is lacking in painting the picture I want my readers to see. Something I've been realizing lately with my writing is that I don't do much description of scenery i.e. towns, caves, mountains, etc. Do you think spending a paragraph or two solely for description would be a benefit? Like what I did for the description of the elven city in Shadow of the Blight? Obviously I would only do that once per area, and only for large or important places.
As for the quarter staff techniques, I did try to find some actual video footage of real staff-play (is that even a term?), and looked up a number of articles and videos on how/when they were used, specific lengths, weights, material, etc. but I am far from an expert. And some of it I totally BS-ed, like the length for each person. I imagine I wasn't too far off from the truth, but I can't be sure. Sadly, there is a disparity of people really using them in a spar aside, just people wo participate in Ren Faires or are in medieval enthusiast clubs. The nearest thing I could find (which was linked in the side for me from a club video) was a clip of Oberyn from GoT, and he's using a spear, not a staff, which I doubt handles the same way. Still, I tried to do my homework on it. :P
The fish trap wasn't my idea. I have to admit that I got that one from a book called On the Banks of Plum Creek, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I never did any searching on the web for it to see it it was a legit trap design, but since the novel was a a biography of sorts, I figured the trap probably worked.
Anonymous: Yeah, I have a second part of No Mana that goes into a little more depth about the plot, but it was a significant time break from the first part that I didn't upload it. I'm still not sure how to handle uploading large breaks in a plot like that. Anyway, I hope to finish it someday, but, as always, we'll see. Spoiler alert, Lance loses a spar against her, and she clubs Matt on the head. XD As for what I think you think I'm implying: you may just be right in thinking that I'm thinking what you're thinking I'm implying. XD