Chapter 31:
Ribs walked in the front, listening to the conversation of the two women. "He's deeper than he looks and acts, Raine," Elpida, for once, was being serious. "He's been hurt--on the inside."
"We all have been, Elpida," the half-elf reminded her.
"Well, yes. But this, well, I don't think he was strong enough to deal with it. So he hid from it. And he's been hiding ever since and he's ashamed of that. Now, though, he's starting to get over it."
"True empath," Raine said again, marveling. "You understood that much from Zelos?"
Ribs smiled inwardly. True empathy was a rare talent, had been so even back in his life. He was surprised that Raine even knew of it. But, then, somebody with a talent to sort through the feelings and emotional burdens of entire groups of people was bound to be pop up every now and then. Elpida proved to have catalogued the mental makeups of each of the party members, except for Genis and Presea, whom she had not been around enough.
That might be a big reason why Mithos had chosen her, Ribs thought. Ribs had searched long and hard for an empath during the war, wanting somehow to get an idea of what the other side was thinking.
The three were walking to Hima. Lloyd, Sheena, and Zelos had dropped them off to the west of Luin a few days ago. The mountain Hima rested upon was on their left as they followed the road to the expanding town.
They had an hour's more walking when they heard a distant explosion and saw a trail of smoke stretch out in the distance. Raine looked stricken. "That's where the town is! Hurry!" She began to run.
Elpida proved the faster and caught up to her. "No, Raine! Like this!" Elpida's wings spread and she lifted off the ground. She wrapped her arms around Raine as she shouted to Ribs. "Catch up!"
And then the angel was gone, speeding as fast as she could towards the town.
Ribs watched for a moment, shook his head, and ran, faster than a living hoping could hope to, unhindered by limits of muscles. He hoped, prayed it was not an actual battle.
Raine had gotten accustomed to flying while on a Rheaird, with her feet on the vehicle's reassuringly solid metal. Now she was hurtling through the air, carried by a woman smaller than she was. It was almost as bad as falling into a pond.
Elpida, however, wasn't going to drop her. In a few minutes, she covered more than an hour's walking. There was a battle happening down below, on the rocky red road that led up the mountain. The invaders were having to fight uphill, and the defenders--the workers who had been expanding the town--had turned pieces of debris,mostly in the form of boulders, into impromptu weapons, rolling them down the hill.
Elpida was almost struck senseless at all the Exspheres. Without trying she could tell that the attackers had them. She bit her lip; soon the defenders would run out of rocks and then they would be taken apart.
A flash and a crack caught her eye. She glanced and grinned. A head of long green hair was whirling through the attackers, and she caught glimpses of a familiar weapon as its slashes were punctuated by bursts of Thunder magic.
Even as she watched, a space opened up in the attackers and a woman dressed in a blue robe floated forward. She had wide-reaching, transparent golden wings.
"Hold on," Elpida growled. She went into a dive at this angel. Whoever this Joseph was, he'd found a way to make damn angels. Whoever that was down there, Yuan would have his hands full.
Yuan fought as well as he ever had, each strike flowing into another, but the angel, without any obvious effort, wasn't in the way when he whipped a blade across. Her mocking smile stayed in his mind. He had never been as accomplished a fighter as Mithos or Kratos, but to think he couldn't beat this woman who couldn't have been an angel for two months!
Then she was close to him--too close!--and her hand pushed against the middle of his stomach, an instant before the mana sparked, several sizzling bursts happening in a single second. Yuan fell, and the angel bent, a glowing lance coalescing into her grip.
Her finishing blow never came. Elpida, coming in like a bolt of silver, dropped Raine only a second before she herself plowed into the angel. They both tumbled across the red, rock-strewn ground. Raine, several yards away, got to her knees, groaning.
Elpida levered herself up. "Heal Yuan and get out of here!"
Not looking to see if the half-elf complied, Elpida got to her feet, snatching out her daggers. She watched the woman get up more slowly.
"You're strong," the woman purred. "Lord Joseph could find a place for you."
"No." Elpida's green eyes were flat with anger.
"Surely a fellow elfkin like yourself can see the point of his cause..."
"No."
The woman's face twisted. "Don't you even want to know my name?"
"No." The light flared around Elpida, and her daggers sprouted those blazing blades. And then the angel rushed the person who had so badly hurt a friend.
Raine laid a hand on Yuan. She gathered her life-force with a speed born of experience as she imagined a circle surrounding them, then forced her vitality into that image.
The charred flesh on Yuan's abdomen smoothed out and color returned to his face. His eyes opened, but Raine held him down. "Stay down!"
She gave him a couple of First Aids for good measure, then stood helped him to his feet. "Hurry, Yuan! Elpida wants us away from that angel."
Yuan bent to pick up his weapon, then rose to his feet. "I thought I could take her," he added, face hard. "Joseph is more of a threat than I thought, though."
Raine practically pulled him along. "Joseph's responsible for her?"
Yuan nodded tersely. "He's found a bunch of Cruxis crystals, and doled them out among his lieutenants. I don't know where he got them, but they each turn a person into powerful angel. I've been destroying them as I've come across them."
"The crystals or the angels?"
"Both," he said grimly.
Liriel found herself pressed with every move she made. That girl with the purple hair fought like she had demons in her! Liriel was sure the other angel (who knew where she had came from?) was holding back her full strength.
Liriel fought with her favored type of weapon, a lance, though this one was constructed of burning light. She twisted and whirled, stabbed and swung, but as the fight wore on, she came nowhere close to landing a solid hit as her opponent worked her swords with surprising talent.
Then one of those burning swords whipped out. Liriel tried to parry, but the tip of the sword sizzled a line across her middle, just barely grazing the skin.
A mere graze was agonizing. A solid hit would be fatal, Liriel realized. She teleported away, wanting nothing more to do with this fight.
She appeared in the command tent of her captain. "Kill them all!" she snarled at him.
Elpida teleported back to within the defenders' side of the battle. She saw Raine and Yuan through the crowd. Good. Elpida was glad he was alright. But she couldn't see a way to win this fight, short of a repeat of what had happened so long ago in that throne room. And that wasn't an option. And all those exspheres so close made it hard to think...
It clicked.
She let her daggers become normal weapons of steel, and sheathed them. She closed her eyes.
There were maybe a hundred exspheres she could feel. She understood she had a limited range. But it would be enough. She listened to the spheres.
Grief. Grief and pain. Horror that they were being used to drag others down.
Elpida rose into the air. "Behind me!" she yelled. "Get behind me!"
The workers-turned-defenders didn't need to be told twice. They rushed back behind her, and turned around. The attackers tried to pursue, but a few dozen sizzling arrows convinced them that it'd be a smart move to stay back.
Elpida dropped down in the empty space between the two forces, and let her bow dissipate. Hating herself for doing this, she reached out to the Exspheres, and suggested that anger might be more satisfying than sadness.
The small army stopped, almost to a man. They felt their hands itch where the keycrests touched begin to itch. Then they felt...anger. Directed at them.
And then there was only pain.
The change ran through almost the whole mass of the soldiers. Each man felt his body contorting, breaking itself, only to heal only to break itself once again.
A third of them died in the transformation. Another third grew misshapen, towering above a normal man's height while their bodies degenerated and they died hemorraging blood and ichor.
The remaining third were driven beyond sanity by the pain, and attacked whatever was near--at first each other, but then their comrades unaffected by the change were the focus of their attacks.
Liriel was horrified. The girl had unleashed her army's exspheres! Horror became visceral fury in a moment. The curses started low and built into a grating crescendo as Liriel vented what she would do to Elpida. Then she calmed. "Get ready to leave. We must report our failure to Lord Joseph." She turned to her commander, a huge man whose battle prowess, in her eyes, made up for him being a pure human.
He wasn't moving.
"Come on," she demanded creating her spear of light.
He toppled forward, the hilt of a dagger sticking out of the back of his thick neck. A skeleton, bones brownish-yellow with age, had been right behind him. It stepped forward, and bent down. A fleshless hand casually pulled the dagger out, wiped it on the man's cape, and dropped it into a pouch.
An eyeless gaze focused on her. A hand drew out a long, black rapier, its edge honed until it was as thin as paper.
Liriel teleported.
Elpida flew from point to point, sniping at the soldiers and the twisted ones alike. She did have the mercy to aim to kill, but it seemed every one of the pain-maddened monsters needed several arrows before it went down.
Then that woman appeared, her back to Elpida not twenty feet away. Elpida let her bow dissipate--it wouldn't be that effective against another angel--and drew her daggers. She leaned forward, moving towards her enemy. When Elpida was a few feet away the woman whirled, eyes wild. Elpida's daggers gained those extensions that made them sword-length.
"Joseph will avenge me," the golden-winged angel promised.
"We'll see." Elpida said calmly. "I'm Iris, by the way."
"Liriel..." her eyes narrowed. "Why now? Wh--" She saw Elpida's eyes flicker over her shoulder, and began to turn.
Too late. The slender, black blade of Ribs' rapier pierced, coming out through her robes.
Ribs twisted the blade around in her, pushing it until he was sure it had bit her heart, to be sure, then pushed her body off of it.
"You can move quietly when you want to, huh?" Then Elpida looked at Liriel with a kind of regret. "Ribs...you do what you have to, don't you? Even if you don't like it."
She looked up to see the skeleton nod. Elpida took a breath. She bent and examined Liriel, finding the Cruxis Crystal and its key crest on the back of her hand.
Elpida pulled them off of the body, and laid them on the bare red rock of the mountain, and drew a dagger. She set the point against the Cruxis Crystal.
She would do what she had to.